Assassins Anonymous, by Rob Hart
My grade three teacher once told me it’s good to try new things, so I recently read ASSASSINS ANONYMOUS, a 2024 release by Rob Hart.
The very first page bugged me. “For most people, when pain is screaming for attention like a starving toddler, everything is a senseless jumble of limbs and grunts.”
The narrator is a trained assassin, supposedly an expert on the subject of “pain,” but that first-page description struck me as incredibly silly. Pain isn’t monolithic, there are at least two types: chronic and acute. Chronic pain might cause one to crawl for the morphine vial, (and that’s sort of like appeasing a screaming toddler) but then, one wouldn’t be a senseless jumble of limbs and grunts, there would be a measure of bodily control. On the other hand, a spasm of acute pain might turn you into that senseless jumble, but there would be no screaming toddler, just utter incapacitation or loss of consciousness.
And how would the narrator know how “most people” feel? Logically, people can only be certain of their own thoughts. Empaths might hazard a guess, but are hired killers really sensitive to other people’s feelings?
A couple of pages later, there’s a huge improvement: “The adrenaline is doing its job. The pain is outside knocking at the door, but the disorientation is inside pouring a cup of tea.” Here “pain” is a more complex mixture of dread and confusion, and the self-deprecating tough-guy patter is entertaining.
But the quality is random. The first chapter ends with a bit of nonsense that would have embarrassed Mickey Spillane: “Hot blood gushes between my fingers. This wasn’t what I expected from the day.”
ASSASSINS ANONYMOUS is about the world’s most prolific hired killer, “The Pale Horse,” someone who has wasted so many triad gang members, Hezbollah terrorists and Russian thugs that it is impossible to speculate about a total body count. He is a decommissioned navy seal who was recruited by a mysterious agency with a mysterious mandate to exterminate bad guys to “keep the world running.”
It’s real junior high stuff.
The premise of the novel is that Mark, The Pale Horse, doesn’t want to keep killing people (even though he’s incredibly good at it) so he joins a twelve-step program for prolific murderers. The members meet in a church basement, talk about resisting the latest impulse to slide another head in the crisper, and eat doughnuts. It has the potential to be a biting satire (the world’s best assassin is lactose intolerant) but it isn’t.
Mark says his membership in the group is “another small step on the path leading to the kind of life I want to build. The kind where normal things happen.” But that’s a silly, transparent lie. If “normal” was so worthwhile, the author would write a book about ordinary people rather than these characters. In ASSASSINS ANONYMOUS, “normal” people are pathetic buffoons, “tourists gazing like zoo animals at the sights.”
Super-Hero-Mark doesn’t want to hang out with normal people, he wants to be the center of attention in a small group of cool kids: bartenders who are ex-punk-bouncers, beautiful doctors who stitch up wounded assassins, print shop owners with secret labs for producing phony passports.
I think my problem with ASSASSINS ANONYMOUS is that it wants to have hipster self-awareness and genre street cred at the same time. It wants to be like THE PROFESSIONAL but ends up being a lot more like SCOOBY DOO! AND THE SAMURAI SWORD.
I’m guessing THE PROFESSIONAL was an exemplar for Hart because he uses a snippet of dialogue from the movie to introduce chapter two. But Léon, the hitman protagonist in that wonderful film, is poor, ugly, and stupid. That movie really does make a hired killer’s life seem dirty, petty, and pointless. No one in their right mind would want to be a Léon, someone who is easily manipulated by his mob boss, by Mathilda, his twelve-year-old co-star, and even by his houseplant.
Mark doesn’t want to be a Léon either. He wants to be Keanu Reeves in the John Wick series, reveling in the adrenalin rush as he kicks people across hotel rooms, separates neck vertebrae, and slices carotid arteries—all the while protesting that he’s thoughtful and sensitive, and wants to be “normal.”
Gawd.
Classic action/thrillers can be silly as hell, too. As a kid, I read Alistair MacLean’s PUPPET ON A CHAIN and burst out laughing when a group of Dutch peasants circled a deep-cover agent and rhythmically pitchforked her to death, like it was a folk dance. But there is an earnestness to MacLean’s writing that makes it compelling, his characters aren’t trying to BE John Wick and make fun of John Wick at the same time.
Mark pretends to be a sociopath who genuinely likes hurting people, but that’s impossible to take seriously. This legendary killer “The Pale Horse,” is too embarrassed to confess that “It’s a Wonderful Life” is his favorite movie but offers up “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” as a plausible replacement. He buys thoughtful presents for friends, is polite to the elderly, and owns a cat with a precious name: P Kitty. He likes his French fries “thin cut, crunchy on the outside, pillowy on the inside.” He feels bad for assuming the Mexican member of their support group works for the cartels. “Sorry. . .I was stereotyping.”
If Walt Disney Studios wanted to make a cartoon about a politically correct, lovable hitman, they could call it “The Pale Pony” and lift most of the dialogue directly from this book. If you want a REAL psycho, read the Leslie Charteris Simon Templar books, or Ian Fleming’s James Bond series. In CASINO ROYALE, 007 muses that a recent sexual escapade had “the sweet tang of rape.”
By comparison, Mark is a whiny privileged tween. He suspects that his love interest, Astrid, can’t appreciate the enormity of his life as a hired assassin. She thinks “this is a game. It’s not. It’s a terrible stupid thing and I hate this and I hate myself and I hate everything.” Wow. I wonder how he’d react if he got a pimple?
Obviously, there’s a strong market for this type of literature, and I’m a grumpy old person who doesn’t appreciate what’s currently cool.
If your interested, the biggest meanie in the book is a dorky Assassins Anonymous member named Stuart. He gets a knife in the eye and the surviving members meet at a bakery for red velvet cupcakes.
Seriously.
Red velvet cupcakes.
The very first page bugged me. “For most people, when pain is screaming for attention like a starving toddler, everything is a senseless jumble of limbs and grunts.”
The narrator is a trained assassin, supposedly an expert on the subject of “pain,” but that first-page description struck me as incredibly silly. Pain isn’t monolithic, there are at least two types: chronic and acute. Chronic pain might cause one to crawl for the morphine vial, (and that’s sort of like appeasing a screaming toddler) but then, one wouldn’t be a senseless jumble of limbs and grunts, there would be a measure of bodily control. On the other hand, a spasm of acute pain might turn you into that senseless jumble, but there would be no screaming toddler, just utter incapacitation or loss of consciousness.
And how would the narrator know how “most people” feel? Logically, people can only be certain of their own thoughts. Empaths might hazard a guess, but are hired killers really sensitive to other people’s feelings?
A couple of pages later, there’s a huge improvement: “The adrenaline is doing its job. The pain is outside knocking at the door, but the disorientation is inside pouring a cup of tea.” Here “pain” is a more complex mixture of dread and confusion, and the self-deprecating tough-guy patter is entertaining.
But the quality is random. The first chapter ends with a bit of nonsense that would have embarrassed Mickey Spillane: “Hot blood gushes between my fingers. This wasn’t what I expected from the day.”
ASSASSINS ANONYMOUS is about the world’s most prolific hired killer, “The Pale Horse,” someone who has wasted so many triad gang members, Hezbollah terrorists and Russian thugs that it is impossible to speculate about a total body count. He is a decommissioned navy seal who was recruited by a mysterious agency with a mysterious mandate to exterminate bad guys to “keep the world running.”
It’s real junior high stuff.
The premise of the novel is that Mark, The Pale Horse, doesn’t want to keep killing people (even though he’s incredibly good at it) so he joins a twelve-step program for prolific murderers. The members meet in a church basement, talk about resisting the latest impulse to slide another head in the crisper, and eat doughnuts. It has the potential to be a biting satire (the world’s best assassin is lactose intolerant) but it isn’t.
Mark says his membership in the group is “another small step on the path leading to the kind of life I want to build. The kind where normal things happen.” But that’s a silly, transparent lie. If “normal” was so worthwhile, the author would write a book about ordinary people rather than these characters. In ASSASSINS ANONYMOUS, “normal” people are pathetic buffoons, “tourists gazing like zoo animals at the sights.”
Super-Hero-Mark doesn’t want to hang out with normal people, he wants to be the center of attention in a small group of cool kids: bartenders who are ex-punk-bouncers, beautiful doctors who stitch up wounded assassins, print shop owners with secret labs for producing phony passports.
I think my problem with ASSASSINS ANONYMOUS is that it wants to have hipster self-awareness and genre street cred at the same time. It wants to be like THE PROFESSIONAL but ends up being a lot more like SCOOBY DOO! AND THE SAMURAI SWORD.
I’m guessing THE PROFESSIONAL was an exemplar for Hart because he uses a snippet of dialogue from the movie to introduce chapter two. But Léon, the hitman protagonist in that wonderful film, is poor, ugly, and stupid. That movie really does make a hired killer’s life seem dirty, petty, and pointless. No one in their right mind would want to be a Léon, someone who is easily manipulated by his mob boss, by Mathilda, his twelve-year-old co-star, and even by his houseplant.
Mark doesn’t want to be a Léon either. He wants to be Keanu Reeves in the John Wick series, reveling in the adrenalin rush as he kicks people across hotel rooms, separates neck vertebrae, and slices carotid arteries—all the while protesting that he’s thoughtful and sensitive, and wants to be “normal.”
Gawd.
Classic action/thrillers can be silly as hell, too. As a kid, I read Alistair MacLean’s PUPPET ON A CHAIN and burst out laughing when a group of Dutch peasants circled a deep-cover agent and rhythmically pitchforked her to death, like it was a folk dance. But there is an earnestness to MacLean’s writing that makes it compelling, his characters aren’t trying to BE John Wick and make fun of John Wick at the same time.
Mark pretends to be a sociopath who genuinely likes hurting people, but that’s impossible to take seriously. This legendary killer “The Pale Horse,” is too embarrassed to confess that “It’s a Wonderful Life” is his favorite movie but offers up “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” as a plausible replacement. He buys thoughtful presents for friends, is polite to the elderly, and owns a cat with a precious name: P Kitty. He likes his French fries “thin cut, crunchy on the outside, pillowy on the inside.” He feels bad for assuming the Mexican member of their support group works for the cartels. “Sorry. . .I was stereotyping.”
If Walt Disney Studios wanted to make a cartoon about a politically correct, lovable hitman, they could call it “The Pale Pony” and lift most of the dialogue directly from this book. If you want a REAL psycho, read the Leslie Charteris Simon Templar books, or Ian Fleming’s James Bond series. In CASINO ROYALE, 007 muses that a recent sexual escapade had “the sweet tang of rape.”
By comparison, Mark is a whiny privileged tween. He suspects that his love interest, Astrid, can’t appreciate the enormity of his life as a hired assassin. She thinks “this is a game. It’s not. It’s a terrible stupid thing and I hate this and I hate myself and I hate everything.” Wow. I wonder how he’d react if he got a pimple?
Obviously, there’s a strong market for this type of literature, and I’m a grumpy old person who doesn’t appreciate what’s currently cool.
If your interested, the biggest meanie in the book is a dorky Assassins Anonymous member named Stuart. He gets a knife in the eye and the surviving members meet at a bakery for red velvet cupcakes.
Seriously.
Red velvet cupcakes.
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