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Super Hero Speak
A podcast for true comic book fans
A podcast for true comic book fans
Here we have the start to a series that features a protagonist who is set up as Merlin’s assassin, known in legend and whispers as “The Hellequin”, aka Nathan Garrett. That alone sounds pretty intimidating, but then we find out that he’s thousands of years old, is a sorcerer who knows air, fire, and blood magic, and is a weapons master. It sounds like this series would be a boring record of the Hellequin mowing down opponents left and right until he gets to the boss battle, where he then Supermans the ultimate villain to defeat. But you’d be wrong.
Steve McHugh seems to be playing it smart. All geeks know that no matter how strong and indestructible Superman is, if any of his enemies had played it smart, he would have been toast a long time ago. One hollow point or liquid-filled kryptonite bullet is really all it would have taken. Along these lines, Hellequin runs into the same problem: Reality.
This first book is the “origin story” of Nathan Garrett in that this is our first introduction to him. It’s hard to do an origin story for a character that is thousands of years old, so we find the author using a literary device I’m going to call the “Ouch – Duuuuuhhhhh” effect. I know it’s been used elsewhere and for all time, but the most effective use of it I know of is by Roger Zelazny in his Chronicles of Amber series. It’s an effective way to introduce a character and his world because the hero’s lost memory provides the opportunity for a lot of explanative exposition. We get to see the character discover what kind of person and hero they are, and in the process are treated to an in-depth knowledge of what drives them.
Unlike with Corwin of Amber, we are immediately treated to flashbacks of what Nathan has gone through in the past, which kind of kills some of the opportunities for suspense and mystery his lost memory would have presented us with. It’s not exactly a literary faux-pas, and the flashbacks do give us more information about what kind of character we are dealing with here and some nice background on plot points in the present. I have a small problem with the dual timeline, though, in that the book is written in the first person perspective of Nathan, and so it is kind of weird to be treated to a past that the present perspective we are reading from couldn’t possible know about given his bopped-on-the-head syndrome.
I do feel that calling McHugh out on the temporally mixed perspective is being nit-picky. The book is pretty well written, the character interactions are natural, the main character’s inner dialog tells us enough about his personality and values to care about him, and the plot progresses at a fair clip. There are also a few hooks for a long game story line. For instance, Nathan has some “black marks” on his chest that have always been there and of which he knows nothing about. By the end of the book, they start doing something, but we don’t know what effect that will have on our protagonist. It should be interesting to see what McHugh has planned for them.
What we have here is your now-standard situation of magic and mundane existing on the same world and somehow the muggles are too dumb to notice the supernatural right in their midst. This setup is used in a lot of books these days and it bugs me, but I’m OCD and so it should be less of a problem to most normal people.
In this case we have a secret organization called Avalon that has been around for thousands of years and has perfected the art of keeping the world at large in the dark about that which bumps in the night. I can buy that, given that the organization is run by Merlin, King Arthur, and several of the gods of history, like those in the Greek pantheon. Avalon has apparently stationed their people at all levels of all governments, which provides adequate reasons why no one has broken into the evening news screaming that zombies and magic are real.
There are several types of magic, only a few of which we are introduced to because the main character is a sorcerer whom only has access to certain combinations of certain types. There are werewolves and apparently other were-creatures, though we don’t see any of the latter this time around. There are also vampires, and they and the werewolves play only a very small part in the plot of this first book. Personally, I’d be happy if they stayed that way, but we all know they won’t. You almost can’t write a novel theses days without them.
There’s more than enough history in Avalon and its manipulation of the world over the last few millennia to provide for a LOT of plots, sub-plots, and maniacal goings-ons to keep the series fresh and interesting for however long it runs. The Hellequin character alone has enough history to make that happen on his own, though writing a character with that much experience and history is tricky. Anyone with more than a few hundred years under their belt and with at least a moderate amount of intelligence should be wiser than Methuselah and more tactically competent than Clausewitz. It is really hard to write a character that should be so much smarter and more knowledgeable than you are.
This is McHugh’s first book and it shows, but it is also apparent that he’s already good at it and will most likely get a lot better. The character is sufficiently bad-ass to provide entertaining amounts of trouble for any would-be villain. The world is lively enough to give us a very large tapestry to draw from.
The book has some grammatical errors and obvious auto-correct mistakes that seem to have never been redressed in the Kindle version, something that a lot of authors are doing by having Amazon push “updates” to their books. They don’t really take away from the story, but it is a bit of polish missing from an otherwise excellent read.
Finally, the first book was good enough that I really wanted to read the next one immediately. That’s good enough for me. This one gets seven out of ten capes for being a good start for an new author and a new series.
