I barely know what to write here.
You might be able to infer this from the fact that I named myself after the man, but I've been obsessed with Van Madoy for a long time. If you could reach directly into my brain and extract "the story most narrowly and specifically targeted at me", you would just find Revoir. I started this translation site with the ultimate, specific purpose of sharing this series with the world. And as I did, I saw everything I wanted. A believable yet extravagant cast. Morally complex characters. Brilliant twists. Long-term storytelling. And I also saw dangling plot threads, loose ends that were obviously set up but never paid off as well as details that seemed a bit underexplained. The reason for that is because they were foreshadowing for Madoy's next work, The Adventures of King Leo.
So I figured, you know what? As long as I'm in the area, I might as well hit that, too.
But as I made my way through King Leo, I began to notice things...
First of all, the series was just worse than Revoir. Like, it wasn't even a comparison. Flatter characters, mysteries that were both less clever and less fair, damn near zero thematic consistency. But even more than that...
The series was filled with things I don't like. Not in the "this doesn't appeal to me" sense, but things I object to on moral grounds. A main character spends his life savings on cryptocurrency. Van Madoy, despite writing a year before the public release of ChatGPT (believe me, I checked), demonstrates more interest in machine learning and language model training than a liberal arts major has any reason to. A major character starts dating an explicitly underage girl.
I did some digging, and I found, well...
Van Madoy has written multiple books about "using AI as a professional novelist".
Van Madoy has published stories openly tagged "AI used".
Van Madoy has a paid subscription to Google Gemini, which, as we all know, is the most pathetic thing a man can do.
I was disappointed. I was furious. I wanted the past few years of my life back. I still do.
But the work's already done, so fuck it. You read these, he doesn't get paid. Nobody wins. The story of the modern age.
I'm not going to the effort of transcribing all seven and a half books I got through before learning the truth into HTML, so I hope you know how to download a file. I haven't edited any of these since learning about Madoy's AI usage. I got a few editing passes through Revoir before then, and despite everything, it's still some of the work I'm proudest of. And King Leo is there, too, I guess.
I will not be finishing The Return of King Leo. If you read it and that still disappoints you... honestly, even all the bullshit aside, I think we just have incompatible tastes in literature.
I've said it once already, but I'm going to re-emphasize here, all of these books were written and published before the public release of ChatGPT and, as far as I am aware after extensive searching, do not contain any AI usage whatsoever. I would not have permitted them to exist if they did.
For a final note, these are two series of continuous narratives. I would strongly advise against going out of order.