Atomic Nerds

So, by now most of you who are regular readers of any stripe are probably also regular readers of two or three other bloggers who have already reviewed (and raved) MHI, if not actually a regular reader of the author himself. This is not necessarily for you, although if yet another such review will induce someone who is only about 50% convinced he should give it a shot to do so, then hey jollies. This is for people who stumble by on search terms, or who for some reason has absolutely no overlap with the rest of the incestuous little blogging circle.

First off, a confession: I didn’t think I was going to like this book. Not because the genre isn’t my cup of tea, but because it really, really IS, and I was just about certain that a first novel from an author I’d never heard of who had to self-publish was going to be mediocre at best and a reason to question the taste of dozens of people I consider friends at worst. I love the concept and the overall universe tropes of “urban fantasy”, but the execution is often lacking at best and nauseating at worst. There wasn’t a single author writing one of these series, which are about as common as milkweed pollen by now, that hadn’t either severely disappointed me (Laurell K. Hamilton) or managed to have me for more than about a week’s worth of light entertainment (Jim Butcher and Patricia Briggs). I didn’t order it when Larry self-published- Stingray did. And I let him read it first before I’d deign to rest my eyeballs on it. Yeah, at that point I was being more than a bit of a snotty contrarian bitch about it.

As it turned out, I was wrong and everyone else was right. I wound up devouring it- not a stay up all night to read it, but that was because I was trying to stretch it out a bit so I had more time with the book, not because I was unengaged in the story. I’m going to mention first what everyone else has already talked about, which is that the action is fast-paced and extremely well done, that neither people familiar with personal combat nor people familiar with firearms will have a single thing to complain about, and the whole books is above and beyond just an incredibly *fun* read. It is a first novel and occasionally you can detect a few rough edges or stitches where the author maybe wasn’t so practiced at the pacing or at transitions, but compared to Guilty Pleasures (Hamilton’s first) or especially Storm Front (Butcher’s first), it’s fucking Shakespeare. It’s only an issue if you’re actively hunting for flaws- there’ll be a fabulously entertaining action sequence in a minute or two to take your mind completely off it. It’s what a book inspired by guns, B movies, and asskicking should be- fun above all. The only problem with it as a source of entertainment is that eating buttered popcorn while reading it would get the pages all greasy.

But that’s not really what won me over to the degree it did; otherwise MHI would be in my same stack as all my other throwaway road-trip fiction that I bought to give my brain a few hours of the literary equivalent of chewing gum. Lots of authors play with tropes or twist them to whatever angle they please, but for the most part they’re not nearly as original at it as they like to think they’re being. Lookie here folks! In my universe one token vampire is a nerd instead of being terribly sexy and dangerous at once like all the rest of them are! In my universe the werewolves have a complicated political structure as well as being tragic and Native American! Oh look, MY werewolves have a conflict between the cool mystical Native American werewolves and the brutish psychotic European ones!

I’m not going to sit here and claim that MHI is the most fabulously original thing to happen to urban fantasy ever, but its sets of twists were a lot more enjoyable for me than most, especially the ones that weren’t so much tired non-twists as they were stuff played so traditional it’s simply rarely done anymore. His vampires are fucking dead and they’re fucking evil and they’re coming to fucking get you, they’re not going to take you to your high school prom before granting you an eternal existence as a self-absorbed teenager. The monsters are monsters, the good guys are good (though not always who you expect them to be), and the bad guys are really, really bad. The heroes are heroic, but they come off as people; the problem with about half of these protagonists is that they’re either legendarily perfect with some sort of token non-flaw, like being too proud to turn down a challenge no matter how insane (which they then win anyway), or being so endlesssly awesome that every single evil being in the universe is competing over their attentions. The problem with the other half is that the author overcompensated in the other direction, and the hero is capable of being shut down in a worthless ball of angst based on their Tragic Past. (Cue the fridge!)

Owen is by no means meant to be anything other than a straight-up heroic male lead- certainly no antihero, and he enters the world he does specifically by choice rather than just being some calf-eyed everydude dropped into the situation to find his Destiny. He’s mostly what you’d expect real-life people who excel at dangerous occupations to be- tough and stubborn with a skill set that’s much better for blowing shit up and walking away than it is for negotiating business deals. He doesn’t get to charge in and rescue the damsel because there aren’t really any damsels in this book; some attractive women for sure, but that’s not their most relevant characteristic- that would be being dangerous. His female cast is neither a stable of objects to be rescued nor a team of sexy martial arts waifs with +20 leather clothes of monster slaying; like everyone else, they get by on training, gear, and sheer mad determination. In this universe, if you get landed on by a metric fuckton of evil, you’re in the hospital having your bones repaired- you don’t shake it off and lift your chin and confront the evil with your sheer spunkiness.

Oh. And I really like what he did with the elves. Read it if only because you have a thing against elves.

Amazon: Monster Hunter International

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