When is a monster not a monster?

Monster Hunter Nemesis by Larry Correia

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Most critics of Larry Correia's books see the intense violence and the old fashioned libertarian bent of his politics and fail to go any deeper.

There is an overwhelming trend in current fiction for character driven stories rather than plot driven ones, and this is to me a bad thing since I am a fan of the latter. Classic SF was all about the IDEA, and not so much the individuals who existed to flesh out the action. The same applies to the Monster Hunter series.

At first glance, the series is all about, yes there are monsters, and therefore people (male and female) go out with big guns and kill them. Simple. Well, no.

The primary question being tackled is, if there are monsters, then how do we deal with them? The obvious bureaucratic solution is to try to regulate them. Create an incentive to submit to government control - the MCB, the PUFF list, and bounty hunters. Then force the monsters to work for the government and earn the right to live in society. There will be abuses of the system as well as good honest people on both sides who try to make it work. Much of this particular book is about that system. Franks is a monster, but he is also a respected senior officer in the MCB with many normal human agents who trust him because of what he had done in the past.

So the series is not a blind attack on government. It is much more nuanced than that.

And then there are the bounty hunters such as MHI, who are the main protagonists of the series. But what is most interesting is that MHI is lead BY A MONSTER and his daughter. They kill monsters for a living, and yet they also try to help and protect those "monsters" who are simply different, and not evil such as a tribe of Orcs.

Nothing is simple or black and white in the world of the MHI series. There is layer upon layer of complexity. Characters who appear to be evil are often not moustache twirling villains, but people (or monsters) with agendas of their own and hopes and desires of their own. Some do terrible things, but perhaps they see a threat that is worse than what they do. Others may simply be very humanly frail.

In this novel, an interesting point about the Frankenstein Monster is raised. If humans are who they are because of their soul, and the soul leaves the body for Heaven or Hell when they die (or the soul is eaten by a Great Old One), then when Frankenstein (or Dippel) stitched the body parts together and brought the result to life, what actually animated the Monster in the absence of a soul?

Agent Franks is incredibly violent and ruthless, but when his background is explained, we understand him a bit more and realise that he is in fact behaving with extraordinary restraint and goodness in his own eyes.

And then after all the fighting and killing and seeing the bad guy get his come uppance, the very end of the book turns the reader's perspective upside down once again.

Larry Correia's works are amongst my favourites of the new crop of authors that have risen to the top in recent years, and I hope he goes on to write many more books.

As for Nemesis, I can't recommend it highly enough for a reader looking for well researched action (no thousand shot six-shooters to be seen) backed up by a thoughtful and many layered story that constantly forces the reader to look at things from just one more different view.



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