The Nowak BrothersMikkel and Szandor kill monsters. They’re not government funded, they’re not from a time-honored lineage of hunters, nor are they rich kids with lots of toys. They’re two twenty-something brothers from the poor side of town who have taken it on themselves to rid the streets and underground of creatures who would prey on the innocent. Donning gas masks and using makeshift … Donning gas masks and using makeshift weaponry, they delve into the labyrinthine sewer system of New Avalon to grapple with snarling zombies, flesh-eating ghouls, insectoid hive creatures, and more. It’s a dirty job and it rarely pays, but someone has to do it.
I Kill Monsters (Nowak Brothers #1)
Hired by a woman from the rich side of town who believes she’s being stalked by monsters, the two brothers think they’ve finally gotten an easy job that will pay well. But as they follow the clues, things are not adding up. Kidnappings, jackbooted commandos, and mysterious emails are just the beginning. Soon they find themselves involved in something bigger than monsters. It’s anybody’s guess whether they’ll come through it alive, much less get paid.
I Kill Monsters is an exciting punk rock urban fantasy for those who enjoy their protagonists with a mouth on them and a weapon in their hands.
Jabberwock Jack (Nowak Brothers #2)
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 darkness 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?
Support Your Local Monster Hunter (Nowak Brothers #3) – Coming August 2016!
Support your local monster hunter! And specifically, support Szandor Nowak, because he needs help. After an unfortunate and unwilling break from monster hunting due to debt and poor health, Szandor is getting back into the business, riding along with older, more experienced hunters to get a feel for the work. This should have been easy and boring, but instead it all goes wrong. In a dark alley, Szandor finds a man hidden in trash. When he tries to help, the man’s head explodes bloodily and spontaneously… and all over Szandor. This seems a horrible but otherwise anomalous encounter, so with no leads or reason for the man’s death, Szandor continues on with his reckless life and hunter ride alongs. But when he encounters a second man whose head also explodes, Szandor’s life starts to fall apart – his relationships, his friends, even his chance at hunting again. He even finds his brother Mikkel turning his back on him. But in the blackest night of loneliness, he finds a new hope – a mentor and a friend. But with this comes a hidden secret of Avalon’s darkest places, a hidden underbelly he didn’t know about. Things are going to hit the fan in Szandor’s life – an army of monsters, a police homicide investigation, and his back against the wall. When all doors are closed, when he finds himself all alone, can Szandor fight a war he knows he can’t win?more
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 really liked the first book in this series, I Kill Monsters, but I have to say that this was even better! The Nowak brothers are back, and hunting even bigger game this time around! The pacing and buildup kept me turning the pages until the wee hours of the morning; I can’t wait to read the next one!