Review: Monster Hunter: Nemesis
<p>As with my last review subject, if you&#8217;re in the market for Larry Correia&#8217;s <cite>Monster Hunter: Nemesis</cite>, you probably already know you&#8217;re going to like it. Though maybe not as much as the previous Monster Hunter outings; the author tries for a change of tone in this book, not entirely successfully.</p>
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<p>Up to now, the Monster Hunter books have been an entertaining blend of action comedy, gun porn, and horror &#8211; more or less the A-Team meets the X-Files, with vaguely Lovecraftian premises implied but played for rough humor rather than cosmic tragedy. They worked well enough on all these levels to be best-sellers &#8211; not Great Literature, but I&#8217;ll take honest genre craftsmanship like this over the kind of pretentious bilge that usually issues from art-for-art&#8217;s-sake posturing any day.</p>
<p>In this book the viewpoint shifts from the familiar Monster Hunter International characters to Agent Franks, the enigmatic Man In Black and top agent of the government&#8217;s Monster Control Bureau. We get Franks&#8217;s personal back-story; in the process, Correia pulls aside the veil a bit on what&#8217;s really going on in the Monster Hunter universe.</p>
<p>Correia has shown that he&#8217;s capable of writing more serious stuff in his <cite>Grimnoir Chronicles</cite>, which this book resembles as much as it does its direct prequels. His writing ability doesn&#8217;t fail him &#8211; making an even distantly sympathetic character out of Franks is no mean feat &#8211; but the reveals about Correia&#8217;s worldbuilding left me with a disappointed &#8220;Huh?  That&#8217;s all you&#8217;ve got?&#8221; feeling. The <cite>Grimnoir Chronicles</cite> were, in this way, much better constructed.</p>
<p>I won&#8217;t reveal details because the book is not so botched that it deserves to be spoilerized, but I will observe that Lovecraftian and Miltonic themes don&#8217;t really mix. Also that there are logical implications from a premise that all human souls have existed from the beginning of time that are obvious, that Correia never engages, but &#8211; given what else is going on &#8211; really ought to have.</p>
<p>Maybe it&#8217;s time for the Monster Hunter sequence to die, staked and silvered like so many of its unnatural antagonists.  I think there&#8217;s life in the characters yet, but the setting is in trouble; Correia seems to me to have painted himself into a corner that he&#8217;s only going to get out of by ignoring the problems or pulling some pretty serious retcons.</p>
<p>I think one of the lessons here is something I learned writing for <cite>Battle For Wesnoth</cite>; for certain kinds of serial fictional settings, writing a final level of explanation of What&#8217;s Really Going On is a bad idea &#8211; it&#8217;s not necessary to what your story is doing, and it closes off too many possibilities for future episodes. I think Correia has made that error here.</p>
<p>Still, if you liked the prequels, you&#8217;ll probably enjoy this well enough. Villains scheme, heroes struggle, stuff blows up a lot. Franks &#8211; of all not-quite-people &#8211; gets some character development. It remains to be seen whether the next book has anywhere interesting to go.</p>
