I write about flawed characters as a reflex. I’m more interested in exploring the journey of an alcoholic monster hunter with literal and figurative demons than a white knight. Throughout my life, I’ve seen the effects of substance abuse up close, and while difficult, it helped me find the humanity in flaws. I choose to write about those flaws with a humorous bend, because life is far too long to go through without jokes. As a result, I gravitate towards pithy antiheroes and dark comedy. To feel a character’s pain is human, to laugh in the midst of their darkest moments is divine.
Nick Ventner is a drunk, but he’s damned good at killing creatures that aren’t supposed to exist. In Whiteout, his first adventure, he’s pitted in a race against time to find a mythical creature terrorizing a Himalayan village. Enduring frostbite, yak spittle, and the sudden appearance of an old rival, Nick and his apprentice James must fight their way up a deadly mountain if they want to get paid. Along the way, they find that the yeti isn’t the only creature on the mountain, and humans can often be just as dangerous as monsters.
The Nick Ventner Adventures are an homage to classic action-adventure films. The hero laughs at death, and sometimes, death even laughs right back.
I’m a sucker for a creepy carnival and an acerbic necromancer that doesn’t care much for the value of human life.
Cabal, the titular character, is a wonderful blend of calculating, witty, and merciless. It doesn’t matter if it’s a simple salesman or The Devil himself, Cabal addresses every situation like he’s slightly annoyed at being involved in anything that isn’t his necromantic process.
Throw in the fact that this adventure sees Cabal running a dark traveling carnival to capture souls, and I was hooked. While the humor is dry, I still found myself chuckling all the way through this dark tale. Cabal’s flaws make him a stunning, human character.
Yes, he does things that would make him a villain in any story other than his own, but the whole time, I was still rooting for him to figure out the right thing.
The page-turning first novel in the charmingly gothic, fiendishly funny Faustian series about a brilliant scientist who makes a deal with the Devil, twice. • "The spot-on work of a talented writer." —The Denver Post
Johannes Cabal sold his soul years ago in order to learn the laws of necromancy. Now he wants it back. Amused and slightly bored, Satan proposes a little wager: Johannes has to persuade one hundred people to sign over their souls or he will be damned forever. This time for real. Accepting the bargain, Jonathan is given one calendar year and a traveling carnival to…
My second love in literature is unreliable narrators, and from word one, it’s clear the protagonist in John Dies at the End is the worst offender.
There are few likable characters to be found in this book, and none of them are the protagonist. I fell in love with the main character’s sarcastic and often salacious take on monsters, zombies, and everything in between. Every scene feels like a joke to the narrator despite the death and carnage that seems to follow in his wake.
More than any of that, this book felt completely unique. I’ve never read anything quite like it. The words crack like a whip, there’s no slowing down, and even as I re-read lines, I felt like I was starting to lose my mind along with the protagonist. That’s a powerful tale.
It's a drug that promises an out-of-body experience with each hit. On the street they call it Soy Sauce, and users drift across time and dimensions. But some who come back are no longer human. Suddenly, a silent otherworldly invasion is underway, and mankind needs a hero. What it gets instead is John and David, a pair of college dropouts who can barely hold down jobs. Can these two stop the oncoming horror in time to save humanity? No. No, they can't. "John Dies at the End" has been described as a 'Horrortacular', an epic of 'spectacular' horror that combines…
Here is yet another book where at first it seems as though there are no heroes.
Abercrombie writes a masterful world filled with magic, politics, swordfights, and bleak attitudes. One of the main POV characters is a torturer—I mean a full-on break your toes and laugh about it torturer—but even still, I found myself wanting more of his story. He’s certainly not a hero, but he was at one point, and that’s even more intriguing.
The characters drive this fantasy series, but the world is also a gorgeous setting that Abercrombie clearly spent many long nights thinking through. Every detail feels like it matters, and throughout this trilogy, the smallest specks of plot come back to matter.
On top of it all, I loved the audiobook narrator and his particular performances for each character brought the world to life.
Inquisitor Glokta, a crippled and increasingly bitter relic of the last war, former fencing champion turned torturer extraordinaire, is trapped in a twisted and broken body - not that he allows it to distract him from his daily routine of torturing smugglers.
Nobleman, dashing officer and would-be fencing champion Captain Jezal dan Luthar is living a life of ease by cheating his friends at cards. Vain, shallow, selfish and self-obsessed, the biggest blot on his horizon is having to get out of bed in the morning to train with obsessive and boring old men.
Stephen King’s Dark Tower series might be uneven at the end, but the beginning is masterful.
Roland, a dusty old cowboy on the edge of reality, is the prototypical antihero. He doesn’t care much for other people, he’s got a dark past, and I wanted to follow every dusty step of his journey. The broken pieces of Roland are what make The Dark Tower series unique—that and some astral plane travelling shenanigans. With each dark deed or questionable decision, I wanted to know more about Roland and what led him to that point.
It’s difficult to stay grounded in a world with interdimensional travel and monsters, but I always felt like I had one foot planted in humanity through Roland.
The Dark Tower is now a major motion picture starring Matthew McConaughey and Idris Elba.
'The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.' The iconic opening line of Stephen King's groundbreaking series, The Dark Tower, introduces one of his most enigmatic and powerful heroes: Roland of Gilead, the Last Gunslinger.
Roland is a haunting figure, a loner, on a spellbinding journey toward the mysterious Dark Tower, in a desolate world which frighteningly echoes our own.
On his quest, Roland begins a friendship with a kid from New York named Jake, encounters an alluring woman and faces…
I’m going to end on a happy note with Going Postal. This book is part of Terry Pratchett’s expansive Discworld series, but can be read standalone and actually served as my entry point.
Moist Von Lipwig (gross name to read, but appropriate) is a con man that tries so hard to do the wrong thing, and yet inevitably ends up an accidental hero. Pratchett twists common tropes by making the main character the hero to everyone but himself. Moist sees himself as being purely self-serving, which makes it that much more delightful when he ends up helping others.
Pratchett’s humor and biting wit about the ails of modern society are on full display and had me laughing aloud through much of this story. It’s endearing, upbeat, and filled to the brim with sarcastic charm. In other words, my kind of book.
A beautiful new hardback edition of the classic Discworld novel.
Moist von Lipwig is a con artist and a fraud and a man faced with a life choice: be hanged, or put Ankh-Morpork's ailing postal service back on its feet.
It was a tough decision.
But he's got to see that the mail gets though, come rain, hail, sleet, dogs, the Post Office Workers Friendly and Benevolent Society, the evil chairman of the Grand Trunk Semaphore Company, and a midnight killer.
Getting a date with Adora Bell Dearheart would be nice, too.
I became fascinated with 16th-century and 17th-century Europe after reading Don Quixote many years ago. Since then, every novel or nonfiction book about that era has felt both ancient and contemporary. I’m always struck by how much our environment has changed—transportation, communication, housing, government—but also how little we as people have changed when it comes to ambition, love, grief, and greed. I doubled down my reading on that time period when I researched my novel, Dulcinea. Many people read in the eras of the Renaissance, World War II, or ancient Greece, so I’m hoping to introduce them to the Baroque Age.
Dolça Llull Prat, a wealthy Barcelona woman, is only 15 when she falls in love with an impoverished poet-solder. Theirs is a forbidden relationship, one that overcomes many obstacles until the fledgling writer renders her as the lowly Dulcinea in his bestseller.
By doing so, he unwittingly exposes his muse to gossip. But when Dolça receives his deathbed note asking to see her, she races across Spain with the intention of unburdening herself of an old secret.
On the journey, she encounters bandits, the Inquisition, illness, and the choices she's made. At its heart, Dulcinea is about how we betray the people we love, what happens when we succumb to convention, and why we squander the few chances we get to change our lives.
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