In the Ravenous Dark

Overview

In the walled city of Thanopolis, magical ability comes with a price: anyone found to carry it is bound for life to an undead spirit meant to keep them in check. Rovan has spent years concealing her own gift, ever since watching her father die trying to shield her from that fate. When her power finally surfaces in public, she loses the choice entirely and finds herself tethered to a spirit named Ivrilos, pulled into a court built on secrecy and control.

AdriAnne Strickland (writing as A.M. Strickland) frames Rovan's predicament as both political and deeply personal. Trapped inside the palace, she becomes entangled with Lydea, a princess chafing against her own gilded confinement, and with Ivrilos himself, whose bond to Rovan grants him unsettling power over her body and will. The novel treats both relationships as genuine and unresolved rather than a simple choice between two suitors.

As Rovan pieces together the truth behind the spirit-binding system, she realizes that freeing herself means dismantling a structure that spans two worlds. The back half of the book turns her personal escape into a wider uprising, one that pulls the living and the dead into the same fight.

A Bond That Cuts Both Ways

The novel's central image, a living person permanently yoked to a dead one for the sake of public safety, gives Strickland a way to write about surveillance and consent without stepping outside the fantasy frame. Magic itself is not the danger in Thanopolis; the danger is who gets to decide how it is used and who is trusted to hold it unsupervised. Rovan's arc turns that question personal, since the spirit assigned to guard her can, in theory, override her entirely.

That premise also shapes the book's approach to romance. Rather than treating Rovan's attraction to both Lydea and Ivrilos as a problem to be resolved by picking one, the story lets her orientation and her divided loyalties sit alongside each other, tied openly to her identity as a pansexual protagonist. Reviewers and readers have generally placed the book within a small but growing shelf of YA fantasy willing to let a bisexual or pansexual lead's relationships stay genuinely open-ended rather than functioning as a twist. Strickland's earlier novel, Beyond the Black Door, drew similar attention for centering queer, asexual-spectrum experience inside a fantasy plot, and In the Ravenous Dark extends that interest into a story about inherited trauma, bodily control, and rebellion against inherited systems.

Why In the Ravenous Dark Has Been Challenged

A recurring complaint raised against the novel is that its romantic plot lines are too explicit for a school library shelf, with objectors pointing to physical intimacy between Rovan and her love interests as evidence the book belongs in an adult, not a young-adult, collection. Some of the same complaints single out the fact that Rovan is drawn to both a woman and a male-presenting spirit, arguing that a queer protagonist's romantic life should not be given equal narrative weight to a heterosexual one in books available to teenagers. Others have taken issue with the book's premise on different grounds entirely, describing the undead spirits and blood magic at its center as glorifying occult practice rather than treating it as invented world-building. The book has been the subject of challenges in 1 state and 1 school district tracked in this catalog, most often argued as a shelving or age-appropriateness dispute rather than a request to alter the text itself.