Book Recommendation: Monster Hunters International

No film today. Instead, I’m going to recommend a book that you will enjoy a lot, and I’m going to crap on another one. Both are by conservatives and I think there is a valuable lesson in comparing the two.

The book I’m going to recommend is called Monster Hunters International and you can get it FREE ==> HERE. The book I’m going to crap on is called Freehold and you can get it FREE ==> HERE. Consider this...

MHI is written by Larry Correia, who is some sort of conservative. He’s probably libertarian more than conservative, but I’m not sure. The book starts with the premise that all the mythical monsters we know, e.g. vampires and werewolves, are real and are a genuine menace. To eliminate the menace, the Federal government has a secret agency whose job it is to hunt these creatures – it’s illegal to tell the public about the existence of these creatures and people who do tell the truth are made to disappear.

The story isn’t about the Feds, however. Instead, it’s about a group of private bounty hunters who hunter monsters for something called PUFF bounties. This is a program set up long ago in the past which continues today because powerful political allies keep the Feds from shutting it down. Monster Hunters International is one such group of bounty hunters, and the main character finds himself recruited to the group after he fights off a werewolf with his bare hands.

What works so well in this book is Correia’s style and his originality. The writing is funny and easy to read, yet Correia doesn’t sacrifice description or storytelling to dumb the book down. The monsters are interesting too. Indeed, he twists them all a bit to make them unusual, and the main monster is an original creation with a fascinating history. He even pokes Tolkien rather playfully. (You’re going to love Skippy.)

Now, the book has a few flaws, but not enough to ruin the book. For example, I find the main female character to be pure cardboard. There are a couple of “coincidences” in the ending that weakened the story too. But all in all, I enjoyed the book very much.

So let me touch upon the politics. Correia is obviously a conservative and he’s certainly overt in his conservatism, and he’s clearly a gun nut. But it never bothered me. To the contrary, it felt entirely natural that these private-sector monster hunters would be anti-authority/free market types who despise the Feds, and it never felt like he was preaching or lecturing. To the contrary, it just came across as natural whenever the issue arose in the book.

That brings me to the comparison.

After finishing this, I went looking for other conservative authors. I came upon someone named Michael Williamson, who wrote a book called Freehold. This is the classic example of being blinded by ideology. Williamson is clearly a libertarian, though he seems to be the type who confuses libertinism with libertarianism. Freehold is the story of an Earth woman who works for the UN Peace Force, which controls the world, and she flees after being wrongly accused of stealing military equipment. She flees to the only planet in the galaxy that is run on the principle of individual freedom and small (non-existent) government.

The problems with this story mount from page one. For one thing, good writers know to introduce your characters in ways that make them memorable. This book doesn’t do that. Instead, the book begins with the main character fleeing Earth, traveling to the new planet, and then getting settled all in massive administrative detail. There is no action here, just page after page of the main character walking around as the author describes how horrible the regulated world is and how great the unregulated world is. What’s more, the main character acts as little more than a straw-man character who asks question so that others can lecture her on how great their unregulated world is. This makes for a truly dull read as it feels like you are being lectured rather than being told a story.

Finally, as an ironic aside, even if I accepted the ideological arguments Williamson makes, and I definitely do not – he basically makes the mistake of arguing that a libertine/anarchical world would cure all problems and make all people good – I still found myself cringing at the idea of living in his “perfect” world. When Correia railed against the government, I accepted what he said and I saw the wisdom in it because he was pointing out how government interference prevented better people from doing what needed to be done in the right way. When Williamson does it, it sounds like a childish fantasy cure-all.

The lesson here is again that injecting politics is fine, but the story must always come first and the politics must fit naturally within the story and the characters. The purpose of the story can’t be the politics and the politics can’t be so overwhelming that the audience feels like they are being lectured. And seriously, if you’re going to inject your politics, make sure it sounds like a good thing to your readers.

Thoughts?