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Nowak Brothers #2
Jabberwock Jack
Mikkel and Szandor are back! Everyone's favorite monster hunters return for a new adventure, and this time it's a monster that's bigger than they have ever dealt with before! While on a routine job in the city's underground tunnels, they stumble on a creature thought lost for years. They are then invited to join a hastily assembled team of hunters going underground to try to kill the enormous serpent. Delving deeper into the dark tunnels than they have ever gone before, Mikkel and Szandor find themselves searching for this massive beast in dark overflow tunnels and the endless labyrinth under New Avalon. But creatures beneath the city are not their only problem. Soon tensions begin running high among the assembled hunters, threatening to derail the mission and put them all in danger. Will they succeed, or will they fall prey to the gigantic monster known as Jabberwock Jack?
230 pages, Paperback
First published November 11, 2015
16 people are currently reading
290 people want to read
About the author
Dennis Liggio
29 books76 followersDennis Liggio is the author of sixteen books, including I KILL MONSTERS, the DAMNED LIES series, THE LOST AND THE DAMNED, and the books set in the city of New Avalon. He is a veteran of the game industry, enjoys long walks on the beach while thumbing through tomes of unspeakable evil, and rumor has it that if you say his name three times in front of a mirror at midnight he will appear and give you Hostess Fruit Pies. He writes primarily in the genres of geeky absurdist humor, horror, and urban fantasy. He lives in Pflugerville, Texas with his amazing wife, awesome daughter, and four cats that act like wieners..
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
April 15, 2022
Jabberwock Jack
(Nowak Brothers #2)
by Dennis Liggio
I read the first book and enjoyed it and finally got around to buying the other books. Fun monster hunting with two brothers. Great characters that really are fun to follow. The monster hunting is plenty epic too!
Really enjoyed this. Will move quickly on to the next in series!
(Nowak Brothers #2)
by Dennis Liggio
I read the first book and enjoyed it and finally got around to buying the other books. Fun monster hunting with two brothers. Great characters that really are fun to follow. The monster hunting is plenty epic too!
Really enjoyed this. Will move quickly on to the next in series!
March 26, 2021
Preamble
I picked up Jabberwock Jack soon after I read I Kill Monsters. It’s been a long time coming, given some personal life stuff, but I am into Dennis Liggio’s Nowak Brothers series and will get through it eventually, my reading patterns being sporadic at best. Not that it’s a slog, mind you – just the opposite. These books are pretty much pure action movie / character development sauce.
A note about my reviews: I consider myself an appreciator, not a critic. I know first-hand what goes into the creation of art – the blood, the sweat, the tears, the risk. I also know that art appreciation is subjective and lernt good what mama tell’t me – if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. I’m not a school marm grading a spelling test – I’m a reader who enjoys reading. If a book is entertaining, well-written, and I get absorbed into it, five out of five. I have gone as low as three stars – anything less than that and I will not review a book (chances are I DNFed anyway). Regardless, I wouldn’t even put a star rating system on my reviews but for the reality of storefronts like Amazon.
Take from that what you will.
Review – 5/5
If I had to describe Jabberwock Jack, I would call it something like Jaws or Anaconda, except with a lot more angsty young adult shit. Less glibly, the in-novel references to Moby Dick and Captain Ahab when describing a certain big monster revenge obsessed character aren’t the worst comparisons to make. What sets it apart from the first novel in the Nowak Brothers series, I Kill Monsters, are two things: the point of view and the scope.
First, Mikkel Nowak is your dear ‘I’ in the first-person narrative of the book, not Szandor, the younger and more self-destructive one who narrated I Kill Monsters. Mikkel is a bit more level-headed, though it’s only a smidge, really. With his brother Szandor, he hunts the various supernatural beasties of New Avalon, though his weapon of choice is a katana rather than a lead pipe.
Second, the scope is much more limited than the first book. It almost feels cramped, which is appropriate, given that most of the story takes place in the sewers beneath the city. Claustrophobic, dank, and water drippy are the adjectives of the day.
I’ve decided that I’ve come up with a style description for Liggio, another adjective that might sound like a term of abuse, but is just the opposite: explicatory. There’s an old adage when it comes to writing: show, don’t tell. It’s clear that Liggio has learned the rules and in some ways thrown those scriptures to the wayside, almost in the same way that John Carpenter did with B action movies in Big Trouble In Little China. This is an appropriate reference, given Mikkel’s obsession with these kinds of fillums – he even calls his black-hued pedophile van that serves as the pair’s mobile base of operations the ‘Pork Chop Express’. There are explanations for most of what happens in Jabberwock Jack, but it’s definitely not some amateurish mish-mash of exposition. Liggio expertly weaves the story’s flow together and takes the pressure off the reader so you can really get engaged in the action. The prose is taut and sharp.
And there is action. Big monster in the sewers action, even featuring shamanistic little ghouls that worship the thing and lull it into weird cobra-like trances (nice). Jabberwock Jack, titular monster extraordinaire, is a big scaly white phallic squiggler who likes to work himself into tight spaces and make that concrete vibrate and explode. Best description: a white flightless dragon working that dank urban underhole, a non-limp wyrm. His Captain Ahab is a bad motherfucker with a brass leg with the somewhat predictable family story named fucking Jericho (yea boi!), a single-minded arsehole who makes his view of the rest of the crew as expendable quite evident early on. And there is a crew, a big load of misanthropes who generally work alone, called monster hunters.
If action is king, characterization is queen. And Mikkel’s trials and tribulations are amped up with the introduction of an old flame who broke with him over the fact that he risks his neck constantly on his quest to clean up the city with his brother Szandor. The recklessness of the pair is made clear throughout the book, at one point resulting in an extended hospital visit in the United States for a guy without a steady job. Peeking at the first pages of the sequel, Support Your Local Monster Hunter, my suspicions were proved right: there are debt collectors coming after Szandor in book three.
As a Canadian, the biggest nightmare in this series about monsters seems to be what would happen in a place without public healthcare when the albino dragon doesn’t kill you all the way and you end up in a hospital. All I can say is ‘SMH and pass the popcorn,’ cause I’m all in for what happens next.
But before I go, I should mention that the end of Mikkel’s tale is what I would call bittersweet. Aggravation of already severe PTSD and early deaths seem to be what awaits our stalwart (albeit heavily boozing and chain smoking) pair. Still, Liggio breaks style and doesn’t even imply, let alone describe, the no doubt hot as fuck make-up sex that is to occur when Mikkel and his true love, Carly, are reunited (with strict conditions re: continued monster hunting on Mikkel’s part). In my imagination, it happens in the back of the souped-up pedo van.
Come on man: why cut out the real climax?
I picked up Jabberwock Jack soon after I read I Kill Monsters. It’s been a long time coming, given some personal life stuff, but I am into Dennis Liggio’s Nowak Brothers series and will get through it eventually, my reading patterns being sporadic at best. Not that it’s a slog, mind you – just the opposite. These books are pretty much pure action movie / character development sauce.
A note about my reviews: I consider myself an appreciator, not a critic. I know first-hand what goes into the creation of art – the blood, the sweat, the tears, the risk. I also know that art appreciation is subjective and lernt good what mama tell’t me – if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. I’m not a school marm grading a spelling test – I’m a reader who enjoys reading. If a book is entertaining, well-written, and I get absorbed into it, five out of five. I have gone as low as three stars – anything less than that and I will not review a book (chances are I DNFed anyway). Regardless, I wouldn’t even put a star rating system on my reviews but for the reality of storefronts like Amazon.
Take from that what you will.
Review – 5/5
If I had to describe Jabberwock Jack, I would call it something like Jaws or Anaconda, except with a lot more angsty young adult shit. Less glibly, the in-novel references to Moby Dick and Captain Ahab when describing a certain big monster revenge obsessed character aren’t the worst comparisons to make. What sets it apart from the first novel in the Nowak Brothers series, I Kill Monsters, are two things: the point of view and the scope.
First, Mikkel Nowak is your dear ‘I’ in the first-person narrative of the book, not Szandor, the younger and more self-destructive one who narrated I Kill Monsters. Mikkel is a bit more level-headed, though it’s only a smidge, really. With his brother Szandor, he hunts the various supernatural beasties of New Avalon, though his weapon of choice is a katana rather than a lead pipe.
Second, the scope is much more limited than the first book. It almost feels cramped, which is appropriate, given that most of the story takes place in the sewers beneath the city. Claustrophobic, dank, and water drippy are the adjectives of the day.
I’ve decided that I’ve come up with a style description for Liggio, another adjective that might sound like a term of abuse, but is just the opposite: explicatory. There’s an old adage when it comes to writing: show, don’t tell. It’s clear that Liggio has learned the rules and in some ways thrown those scriptures to the wayside, almost in the same way that John Carpenter did with B action movies in Big Trouble In Little China. This is an appropriate reference, given Mikkel’s obsession with these kinds of fillums – he even calls his black-hued pedophile van that serves as the pair’s mobile base of operations the ‘Pork Chop Express’. There are explanations for most of what happens in Jabberwock Jack, but it’s definitely not some amateurish mish-mash of exposition. Liggio expertly weaves the story’s flow together and takes the pressure off the reader so you can really get engaged in the action. The prose is taut and sharp.
And there is action. Big monster in the sewers action, even featuring shamanistic little ghouls that worship the thing and lull it into weird cobra-like trances (nice). Jabberwock Jack, titular monster extraordinaire, is a big scaly white phallic squiggler who likes to work himself into tight spaces and make that concrete vibrate and explode. Best description: a white flightless dragon working that dank urban underhole, a non-limp wyrm. His Captain Ahab is a bad motherfucker with a brass leg with the somewhat predictable family story named fucking Jericho (yea boi!), a single-minded arsehole who makes his view of the rest of the crew as expendable quite evident early on. And there is a crew, a big load of misanthropes who generally work alone, called monster hunters.
If action is king, characterization is queen. And Mikkel’s trials and tribulations are amped up with the introduction of an old flame who broke with him over the fact that he risks his neck constantly on his quest to clean up the city with his brother Szandor. The recklessness of the pair is made clear throughout the book, at one point resulting in an extended hospital visit in the United States for a guy without a steady job. Peeking at the first pages of the sequel, Support Your Local Monster Hunter, my suspicions were proved right: there are debt collectors coming after Szandor in book three.
As a Canadian, the biggest nightmare in this series about monsters seems to be what would happen in a place without public healthcare when the albino dragon doesn’t kill you all the way and you end up in a hospital. All I can say is ‘SMH and pass the popcorn,’ cause I’m all in for what happens next.
But before I go, I should mention that the end of Mikkel’s tale is what I would call bittersweet. Aggravation of already severe PTSD and early deaths seem to be what awaits our stalwart (albeit heavily boozing and chain smoking) pair. Still, Liggio breaks style and doesn’t even imply, let alone describe, the no doubt hot as fuck make-up sex that is to occur when Mikkel and his true love, Carly, are reunited (with strict conditions re: continued monster hunting on Mikkel’s part). In my imagination, it happens in the back of the souped-up pedo van.
Come on man: why cut out the real climax?
November 19, 2015
I loved this sequel! If you have not read the first book please do! Any monster lover will absolutely love these two books. I had the chance to read and review the first book earlier this year and rated it 4/5. This second book is great and definitely deserves 5/5.There was a lot more character development in this book and the story is well written and progressed at a good pace. I normally don't praise a book as much however this really was a good book and for a brief moment really made me nervous regarding the fate of one particular character. I like the sudden twists in certain parts of the story and the overall ending. The author did a good job editing, formatting the book and taking the time to make sure certain details were looked at (chapter names, spacing, paragraphs). Details like these although small make a big difference for the reader especially on Kindle. If you like monsters, action, and thrills check this series out!
December 20, 2017
Hmmm
I do want to give this book five stars, just like book one though it needs better editing.
Love the characters and their stories, but hate the mistakes that pull me from the story.
I do want to give this book five stars, just like book one though it needs better editing.
Love the characters and their stories, but hate the mistakes that pull me from the story.
January 20, 2019
Good sophomore story in the series.
February 21, 2017
This second book was better than the first. Still had annoying things that should have been edited out and easily caught, but i enjoyed it.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews