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Monster Hunters, Stand To! Woot! Woot!
Despite the best-laid plans for stealth, security, and situational dominance, every now and again, you gotta stand to.* Today, the eBook version of John Ringo’s Monster Hunter Memoirs: Saints was released. Waa-hooo! (That is not a sardonic, ironic, or snarky wa-hoo).
When John Ringo stumbled onto Larry Correia’s Monster Hunter Universe, he was like, “Oh, I so need a piece of this.” He coordinated with Correia and got permission to publish some books based on Correia’s universe. Correia later complained that Ringo spit out the first two books faster than he could edit them.
Correia and Ringo collaborating is like chocolate ballistically meeting peanut butter. Magic happens. Let me explain–no, there is too much–let me sum up. With nothing that even approaches a spoiler. Mostly. Ringo offset the timeline of the universe so as not to interfere with Correia’s stories. Ringo set his novels in the ’80s, thus:
Monster Hunter Memoirs: Grunge
Oliver Chadwick Gardenier hates his parents. They are radical lefty academics whom he despises. Chad is a genius, so when mom makes a comment that his getting straight A’s with ease compared to the efforts his classmates have to make, he makes a snap decision that, for the rest of his academic career, he will get a perfect “C” average. “You know how hard it is to get a perfect C average?”
Chad’s shop teacher, a Marine vet, takes the miserable youth under his wing and teaches him to work with his hands, learn marksmanship and the Japanese Way of the Sword.
The young man earns the nickname “Iron Hand” for his sword work (which is not necessarily a compliment).
In an effort to thoroughly frustrate his parents and make them froth at the mouth, on graduation he enlists in the United States Marine Corps. After boot, he is assigned to the 1-8 Infantry, and journeys to the Middle East to get blown up with all the other Marines in Beirut. Chad is deader than fried chicken. But, he meets Saint Peter who tells him “you’re already in. You can go straight into heaven. But, the Boss thinks you’re the right man for a job back home. You can go back to do the job. It’ll be a miracle that you survived.”
I’m a Marine. No way I’m turning down a mission from God.
“You’re all blowed up; it’s going to suck.”
And your point is?
“Final thing: you’ll know your mission when you see the number 57.”
Chad goes back, a little hacked off at his vague mission recognition signal. (You know what it’s like walking down the condiments aisle of a grocery store?)
He works his butt off through medical treatment and physical therapy. He is medically discharged, little more than a cripple. He finds his number 57. His life becomes killing monsters.
His first assignment is in Seattle. Thus, Grunge.
Monster Hunter Memoirs: Sinners
Chad’s predilection for doing the horizontal boogaloo with any female that’s even vaguely interested in the dynamic impact of glistening giblets leads Chad to have to get out of town, fast. He gets reassigned to New Orleans, where he basically comes into his own as a warrior.
New Orleans is the home of hoodoo. Chad finds the place so out of control that he is going out on missions as a singleton that in Seattle would’ve called for a team of four or five hunters. He excels. With the help of Light hoodoo workers — and of course, the loas — he builds a life meant to perfectly support him in his mission to become a human weapon against the forces of darkness.
Monster Hunter Memoirs: Saints
Chad mentions, attending a classic NO funeral, that the song played is “When The Saints Come Marching In.” He opines that the meaning of the song is that, in the final battle of good and evil, the warrior Saints will stand with the warrior Angels against the forces of hell. He looks forward to the opportunity. I’m betting that has something to do with the title of this, the final installment of Ringo’s journey into the Monster Hunter Universe.
I’m happier than a fat kid trapped in a candy store.
Iron Hand and Me
One aspect of Ringo’s story-telling genius is that one cannot help gaining a deep affinity for all of his characters, warts and all. You can’t help (well, I can’t help) comparing oneself to Iron Hand.
The guy’s, uh, copulative drive is formidable. I can dig that, although I’ve managed to work mine into my monogamy fetish. He doesn’t want any widows or orphans left after he dies, he assesses, a young and violent death. I figured, hell, no way I’m not keeping the Mongo genes in the human inventory. My brother insists that the fact that three out of four of my kids are daughters invigorates his faith that there is Karmic justice. I’m pretty sure my brother is an ass.
Hand’s Faith is undoubted and unassailable. He doesn’t need to know “why;” he’s a Marine and he figures the Big Guy has a plan, he’s a part of it, so drive on and complete the mission. I have that. If anyone’s “doing it wrong” it’s me and not the Big Guy. Don’t know too many other Roman Catholics that habitually wear Thor’s hammer around their neck.
The one thing that Hand relies on is indomitable will. If you refuse to lose, you will win. More than athletic ability, smarts, or Faith, it’s the obdurate refusal to cede. Check.
Finally, Hand loves bringing the good news to bad monsters. That’s probably the largest component of my love for Hand and this series. Nothing better than end-stating a monster, whether meat or metaphoric.
Stand to.
* It’s a great clip, but has some tactical flaws, I know. I mean, honestly, who bounds their only two SAWs forward together?
Published in General
I see what you did there.
Don’t forget his sense of humor. If you think the name of Larry Correia’s old business is hysterically funny (it was Fuzzy Bunny Movie Guns,) you’ll probably like his stuff.
You say that like it’s a bad thing. Write what you know… which turned out to be small business, guns and B movies. Since FBMG’s business was supplying Class III weapons (and IIRC training) to movie and TV production, that meant:
• CPA level document handling and attention to detail
• Working with monstrous egos
• Lots and lots of guns
Which pretty much sounds like Owen, except that in MHI, Hollywood’s monstrous egos turned out to be B-movie monsters.
Proverbs 26:11?
Eewww. I’d rather go with Psalm 144: 1 WRT monster hunting.
You have to go full Blues Brothers if it’s 106 miles to Chicago, it’s dark, and you’re wearing sunglasses.
Sure, for the hunting. But @hankrhody did say “I’ll admit I read these things like a dog bolting steak…”
Point.
My issue comes in where everything magically comes up roses for him in MHI book 1. It grates on me when it looks like an author stand in has all his dreams come true basically. It gives me the bad fan fiction vibe of people writing themselves into their work.
I’ve seen plenty of love for Larry’s Hard Magic series here — any love for Son of the Black Sword as well?
That’s true, but I never altogether stopped laughing after “my [expletive] boss is a werewolf. I tend to cut first novels a fair amount of slack anyway, provided that I mostly enjoy reading them.
MHI was initially released bit by bit to like-minded souls, and got reinforcement as well as critiques from them. They’re part of why it became a publishing phenomenon. Correia’s learned his craft better since.
@hankmorgan: absotively posolutely.
One of the things I love about Larry is his ability to manipulate the narrative voice. Guys like Dean Koontz and Louis L’amour and Jack Higgins (love ’em all; this is not a criticism) made it big time by writing the same book 20- or 30-times over.
Each one of Larry’s series is written in a different narrative voice. If I wasn’t aware of the author, I would be able to tell I was reading, say, a Heinlein novel within 10 pages. Not so with Larry.
And that’s to the good.
Agreed, and I enjoyed it far more when I first read it, but it hasn’t held up as well on repeat readings/listenings for me.
There is definitely something to be said for having your own distinct narrative voice, but Larry’s ability to have multiple consistent and good narrative voices is impressive.
I hope he gets back to the Black Sword series soon. It’s been a few years and it was a dang good book.
You can check out Monster Hunter Nation, where Larry keeps fans updated. Every month or so he’ll post up his writing/publishing plan for the next two or three years, God bless ‘im. He’s not one of those guys that leaves you in the lurch for a year or two at a time.
I like this about him–especially because I vowed to him, after he contributed considerable swag to my retirement ceremony–that I’d read every for-profit word he writes until one of us dies. Probably me first; his Mormonism has him living all healthy and whatnot.
Actually, a little booze, etc. can keep a guy going later. As for tobacco, my great-grandfather smoked until the day he died at 88. It’s all in the genes and the bad attitude.
FIFM.
Heh.
One of my hopes for the afterlife–even if it’s a reincarnation universe, I hope we get a pit stop–is that someone takes a time out and explains some stuff:
What was actually bad for me?
What was actually good for me?
How often was what I was told bad for me good or neutral?
How often was what I was told was good for me was bad or neutral?
Will I really go blind if I–? Oh, wait. I’m not blind, so question asked, question answered.
It’s on my RSS feed, but the link was broken until literally an hour ago.
“The first novel is Son of the Black Sword and it won the Dragon Award for Best Fantasy. #2 is House of Assassins, which will be out in February.” – from one of his Origin debacle posts.
One of the things about reincarnation is that these questions don’t matter as much as we might think. What matters is whether we learn the lessons we came into this specific incarnation to learn. These questions, even as idle curiosity, tend to fall into lesson #3 for me. The physical realm isn’t going to matter as much when you’re on the other side, but someone who carefully watches science for forty or fifty years and pays attention to what longevous people say know that long life has to do more with moderation (alcohol, coffee, sugar, tobacco, medications, etc.), movement, good genes, and epigenetic factors. (Oh, and not stopping moving projectiles with one’s body, whether bullets, trains, trucks, or the ground coming up to meet you when you misjudged your bungee cord length.) People who consume moderate amounts of alcohol tend on average to live longer than those who consume none. Go figure.
Remember in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress when Mike wakes up and he and Mannie are talking about humor? Mannie classifies jokes into “funny once” and “funny more than once.”
That’s a good general test for art. I had a job once in retail computer sales, and we would put a CD into one of the machines to show off the various speaker systems we sold as accessories. Usually we’d change them fast because we got tired of them.
I brought in one of mine, Ella Fitzgerald singing the Great American Songbook. Six hours and multiple plays later, I was still interested to hear her take on one of the songs. It still sounded really good. Ever since, I’ll play a piece of music several times in succession; if I still like it I’ll put it on a permanent playlist.
That killed a lot of the music I grew up with.
The question is how much more than once.
I used to know a man who took a bullet in the chest in WWI and lost part of a lung. He was Jewish, and kept a picture of the Kaiser on his living room wall, and one of himself in the Kaiser’s uniform. He and his wife got out of Germany; she spent the war in the UK and he (I don’t remember the circumstances) wound up in a camp in the Bahamas, interned as an enemy alien. He went vegetarian so that he could keep kosher, and felt that it really had helped his health. His posture was pretty erect well into his 80s, but a trained eye could see the pull that the scar tissue exerted on that side of his body. That said, he had a lot less scar tissue than I’ve seen from less severe wounds and it was more elastic than I expected.
I’ve concluded that healing with minimal scarring (which is in and of itself a reflection of good nutrition and minimal systemic inflammation; heredity plays a role, too) is correlated with good health and long careers in work where you use your body hard.
Heck, yeah! Just re-read it for the umpteenth time a couple weeks ago.
Re-reading is a favorite subject of mine. I have always tended to completely wallow in books that I love: Heinlein, Zelazny, Conan Doyle, Rex Stout, where I can hold my own in a quote-spotting contest. My wife’s reading habits are the polar opposite; she reads five or six books a week, and almost never re-reads one. She used to drive me crazy on trips to the library, where she would read the last few pages of a book to see if she liked the way it was going to end, then decide whether or not to put it in her bag. Whatever.
Somebody (there are too many quotes floating to the surface of the cesspool of my mind) once said that books were like wine: some are to be sampled, some are to be enjoyed repeatedly, and some are to be thrown out.
Audiobooks add a new dimension to the favorites for me. Some treasured books are available with different voice actors (Derek Jacoby doing “Hound of the Baskervilles!”). Some favorite books are semi-spoiled by the performance (I wish JG had narrated “Liberal Fascism”). Michael Pritchard on the Nero Wolfe Mysteries is workmanlike and unspectacular but allows the characters to shine through. Martin Jarvis narrating “Good Omens” is downright stunning. The gems of my collection are nine of the ten Amber novels and “A Night in the Lonesome October” narrated by Roger Zelazny himself. He died before he could record the last Amber novel; in fact, he passed a few weeks after narrating “Lonesome October,” which he recorded in a single take.
I like Michael Pritchard’s reading of the Nero Wolf books. I normally listen to audio books when I am driving, and with the Midwest accent Pritchard has I almost feel like Ohio-born Archie Goodwin is sitting in the passenger seat as I drive telling of his adventures with Nero Wolfe and the gang.
One of the signs of how much I like an author is how often I re-read their books. I’ve reread all of Larry’s books multiple times. (Did all of MHI just last week, as it turns out. Just because.) Ditto for Ringo, Weber, Butcher, and a few others. There are also authors that I never re-read. Not that I disliked them, but they just don’t hold my attention the second time through.
He will always sound like Archie to me. On a recommendation from fellow Wolfe Pack members I bought copies of the A&E series. Now Archie looks like Timothy Hutton to me. I tried to appreciate Maury Chaykin as Wolfe, but he’s too shouty and too short. The actors (names escape me) who play Inspector Cramer and Fritz Brenner are spot on.
Audiobooks are like radio; the pictures are better than television.
Same. I’d say that if I manage to make it through a book once, I’ll probably end up rereading it at some point.
Timothy Hutton took a pass on trying for a Chillicothe, Ohio accent.