Not a Black Library novel? Who am I?

I branched out  and grabbed a non- Black Library novel. I figured it was time to try something else. The question was what to try. I wandered through the bookstore and this caught my eye.

An every man who discovers the world around him is full of monsters and magic. He then is recruited to fight it, and then cool stuff is bound to happen. Well it sounds interesting enough. I’ll bite.

What I expected was  Hellboy light, and that is pretty much what I received, just not as good or fun.

Owen Pitt is our hero and is some lower spectrum accountant. I am thinking this……

What I got was more like this……

Owen Pitt is paramilitary trained, is 6’ something,  300 pounds of pure muscle, an ex-bouncer turned fight clubber, has all sorts of punching ability and power, is a gun nut, and a crazy fast shot as well. I can suspend disbelief about the monster aspect, but the main character is too much of a stretch. Yes, I can overlook the monsters but not the quasi-meta human turned accountant.

See, monsters are real and the government know all about it. They have their own monster division, but also allow for freelancers to hunt for profit. Owen joins the hunters and the story is off and running. We get the usual rookie training bit which would make for an excellent 80’s montage before the first mission. Then we learn that there is a world ending event is coming, thanks to a some elder god/ eldritch horror, and the gang at Monster Hunter International has to stop it.

Along the way Owen becomes a huge Mary Sue. A Mary Sue is, in general, a character who is written unrealistically, is poorly written and appears to have little or no flaws, rarely sees rational consequences, tends to be universally liked or universally disliked and can never make a bad choice, and if they do, it always happens to work out well for everyone. What makes him a Mary Sue?  He cheats death way too many times to count.  He goes from rookie to world class hero very quickly. He faces evil, gains quasi-psychic ability, is ties to an ancient prophecy, finds and gets the girl, survives everything and takes enough physical damage to kill him more than a few times. Yet, he still seems to survive and of course save the day. If this spoils the book ,then oh well. It was predictable from the second chapter that this is where the book was leading. His character was just the first issue with this book.

The second annoyance was the amount of description. There was just so much of it. There is a time and place to give intricate details. That time is not all the time. I could care less about every nook and cranny in a house. I was not interested about every detail of the body armor worn. The description of every weapon and all the associated accouterments was just annoying. Was there a need to describe every feature on everything? No.  Even the action sequences were drawn out with description. There is a delicate balance when it comes to description for  me. This book was way too heavy on the detail for me, like 200 descriptive pages too heavy.

Speaking of guns, this writer is a fanatic. I have a moderate knowledge of firearms (thanks to my dad, Boy Scouts and video games); but there were too many times where his gun descriptions were just a line of gibberish.  I quickly learned to skip over his detailed gun descriptions and just go with shotgun, pistol, big pistol, rifle, machine gun etc. There was also the amount of crap that was attached to and associated with each gun. It seems he had to describe every type of ammo and accessory that came with every gun in the book. By the gods this was tedious and unnecessary detail!

The story itself was just felt like a rehash of a few Hellboy comics, John Carpenter’s Vampires, some strange gun porn, an unfinished Lovecraft story, some bad high school drama and some RPG stuff from White Wolf.  There are elements that were descent; like how Tolkien and Lovecraft both knew about the monsters/magic in the world, the location and state of the elves, orcs, wargs and the character Earl Harbinger. The rest of the material was just weak and pretty derivative to me. Where was the fun I was promised? Stupid book review!

Then after finishing the story, I read the bit about the author. It seems he is a gun enthusiast (gee ya think?) and an accountant. Hmmm….well it seems he wrote a book starring his imagined self. The book just got worse. I know “they” say write what you know, but damn. I guess Owen Pitt is the writer as he imagines himself. He lives out his dreams via this character and anyone can read about them. After reading that I the story went from meh to bleh.

Why did I read this then? Why didn’t I walk away after 100 pages? Well I wanted to try something outside of the Black Library stuff that has had me enthralled for months. I thought I would try some new author. It sounded right up my alley too. I also never seem to walk away from a book once I start it. I’ll finish it hoping that it will get better (they usually don’t).

The wyrd thing is that there are at least two more Monster Hunter Books, so people must be enjoying them. That or this was a multi-book deal and it is easier to churn them out than break a contract. I would not recommend this to people and instead point them toward the collected Hellboy comics. It is along the same lines, but is much better material.