Review: Monster Hunter International, by Larry Correia

In 2015 I kept running into a name on Facebook. It was vaguely familiar to me from trips at Barnes and Noble. He even popped up in one of my groups from time to to.

So after a while, I shrugged and said, Oh what the Hell? Why not? Being a bit of a cheap bugger, I decided to go for his Three-in-One collected work of his largest series at the time. And book 5 had just come out, so obviously someone likes it. And it was published by Baen Books, and I already read their top authors.

But I really just wanted to understand who or what was a Larry Correia, and why was he writing about the monster hunter video game franchise.

Unknown to me, I had started at the deep end.

I promptly went out and bought ... well ... everything else Correia has written, including the rest of MHI, his three Grimnoir and his Dead Six novels.

Seriously, these books are kinda awesome.  I finished all of them in a matter of days.

One thing at a time.

The story

Five days after Owen Zastava Pitt pushed his insufferable boss out of a fourteenth story window, he woke up in the hospital with a scarred face, an unbelievable memory, and a job offer.

How can you argue with a plot description like that?

Yes, chapter one involves a brawl between the above mentioned Owen Pitt, and his boss, who has become a monster of a completely different stripe than he had been.  Let's just say that I would have considered throwing him out a window before he became a large furry sociopath.

Yup. Pitt has to go toe-to-toe with a freaking werewolf.  And he has no silver. But Own Pitt is 6'7", and gravity kills.

After Pitt hands in his resignation the hard way, he has officially fallen down the rabbit hole. Monsters are real -- all of them. Pick a B-Movie horror film or a Lovecraftian monster. There are only two forces that deal with the legion of nightmares (that we see in this book).  One is the Monster Control Bureau (MCB), a government bureaucracy that looks like it's run by either the Keystone cops, or whatever random thugs can be brought in off the street (though it'll turn out that they aren't random). The other group is Monster Hunter International, a private organization dedicated to collecting bounties as they exterminate the world's nastier pests -- including vampires, giant spiders, and a few creatures from the black lagoon.

And MHI offers Owen Pitt a job. The perks are good -- play with weapons, hang out with the stunning woman who recruited him, and the paychecks are insane -- and, well, why not?

Unfortunately for Pitt, his first day on the job is going to get messy.  He soon finds himself being haunted by an old Jewish ghost, is getting visions of an ancient entity called "the Cursed One"who just arrived on US soil, is hip deep in ghouls, vampires, flying killer gargoyles that bleed magma, and did we mention that the Cursed One might be about to end the world?

This book was awesome from start to finish.  It didn't really slow down.  Despite the constant description of these books as "gun porn," I have yet to be bogged down the guns. Most of the time, the weapon details are critical to the plot, considering what fresh new horrors they run into all the time. The chapters that amount to a large training montage are detailed and interesting, and establish the characters better than heading straight into the action.

Then the shooting started, and didn't really stop for another three hundred pages or so.

And just remember: vampires only sparkle when they're on fire.

The characters

MHI has a wonderfully colorful cast of characters. From a former Vegas stripper who is more vicious and bloodthirsty than the lot of them, to Julie, a member of MHI's founding family, who is also a sniper... and her physical description in the book reminds me a lot of Bayonetta, but we won't go there.

There is a wonderfully broad collection of folks here, from the high school chemistry teacher who had to blow up his school filled with spiders, to the poor guy who had to kill his zombiefied students, to the explosive-happy Q-variant, to Earl Harbinger -- an old member of MHI's founding family with an interesting history.  The characters are likable, the dialogue engaging, and I don't think I came across a single flaw in the execution.

The world

For the record, MHI has nothing, repeat, nothing, to do with the Monster Hunter video game series. Thank you. All the books are fun. There's one novel in the series that you swear is going to be boring, it rallies at the midpoint, and ends with a demonic werewolf hellspawn and his legion of unkillable feral weres.

Imagine a fully-developed world for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, where the government has been aware of monsters for decades, and those civilians who have been dragged into the nightmare little world in the shadows have become Bounty hunters in their own right.  Of five books, I saw only two punchlines coming ... only one of them was more like a feinted jab so we could be decked with an uppercut. That's not bad.

Now, there isn't a ton of worldbuilding in book one. Everyone is too busy trying not to die.

The politics

The really, really, really short version about Larry Correia is that he is an unstoppable writing machine who pumps out books the size of Tom Clancy doorstoppers at least once a year, in addition to maintaining an almost daily blog, is almost omnipresent online, and has a BS tolerance threshold lower than mine.

Correia is, personally Libertarian. He prefers his heroes to be smaller, private groups, rather than sprawling government bureaucracies, though even the bureaucracies get a fair shake in his books (one of them at the very least).  He also owns a gun range, so he likes his weaponry.

Content warning

Monsters and gun violence. There may be a language warning. But I'd honestly give this to early teenagers. Granted, I read Tom Clancy novels when I was 14, so I may not be the best judge of that.

Who is it for?

Anyone who likes, fun, innovative ways to use the forces of darkness as an enemy, and new ways to approach them.

Or, to paraphrase Correia himself, these books are for anyone who thinks Cujo should have been a five page short story, with three pages debating which gun to use.

Why read it?

Larry Correia sets the standard for fun insane action and vivid characters.