Book Discussion: Monster Hunter Fever
It’s no secret I’m a long-time fan of Larry Correia, if there is anything of his I haven’t read it’s probably a short story in an obscure collection. In all honesty, I am much less familiar with Jason Cordova. I know that he was able to get his first book published by trad-pub on the very first submission, indicating either a high amount of native literary talent or an absurd amount of luck. In either case I can’t judge what I haven’t read yet because I’m not a Woke jerk wagon. He does have over forty works published, so he knows his stuff.
Monster Hunter Fever is the second entry in the Monster Hunter Memoirs series. The first series was the Chad Gardeniar trilogy that took place in the 1980s.
This second series takes place in the 1970s and features a new hunter named Chloe Mendoza. She is an apparently immortal Mexican demi-goddess, her father being the Aztec Jaguar god, Tezcatlipoca.
The character of Chloe Mendoza and her team were excellent. Cordova and Corriea delivered on the problems an immortal were-jaguar would have in this world especially as the Jagaur half of her was uncontrollable.
The plot was well-structured and progressed as you would expect from a book that was being overseen by Larry Correia. Introduction and the stakes laid out, an escalation of events happened as they should have and crucially you couldn’t predict quite how they would progress. I did get one thing seriously wrong, I thought Alex was a young Director Stricken. Nope, apparently he was a little kid that had been whisked out of the picture by his mother. Although, we did get to meet Stricken’s father LeRoy who seems fairly intriguing.
It was also interesting to meet Grandpa Shackleford in his prime and Chloe still thought of him as a wet behind-the-ears boy instead of her new boss. Which meant she had adjustments she had to make. That was good detail work.
I felt for Chloe when she had to put down a team member she’d grown close to who had been bitten by a werewolf. That was excellent stuff.
I also liked Monster Hunter International’s growing problem with the Monster Control Bureau. That was an issue that scanned. Things were probably a lot easier in the forties and fifties when containment of the supernatural was just a phone call to an editor and back then all of the editors would have been playing ball.
By the 1970s, television was everywhere and containment was getting harder. Especially as you had this new dumbass generation that was rejecting Christianity en masse for hidden knowledge. With Herbert Hoover freshly dead things would have been in flux at the MCB.
This book had no trouble getting the big events right.
However, it fell flat on its face when it came to historical detail work.
I was a tiny kid when the Seventies started and a dumbass kid when they ended and I was happy to see them end. That doesn’t mean I don’t remember that decade. There were too many low-level anomalies and flat-out inaccuracies in this novel.
The story clearly takes place about 1973 because the Yom Kippur War had just ended, there were gas lines at the gas stations, and there was no mention of the Hostage Crisis. The gas panic didn’t last the whole decade. Anyway, this leads us to our first big problem, the name of the book was Monster Hunter Fever and it was set in Los Angeles. When you set a book in the Seventies and put Fever in the title then you are obliged to put a Disco in it. Which sadly they did. Did I mention it was set in LA in 1973? Yeah, Disco was strictly a New York City gay club thing at that point. It wouldn’t blow up until 1977 after Saturday Night Fever became a smash hit. That was the biggest goof in the book but there were a ton of little ones that kept pulling me out of the story.
At one point one of the characters says, “It’s okay. We’re chill.” No, you weren’t. You wouldn’t be “chill” until 1990. In the early seventies, you’d still be “cool.”
In another scene, Chloe goes on for three paragraphs about a bad cup of gas station coffee that wouldn’t exist for a few more years. The styrofoam cup was patented in 1970 but it wasn’t universal by 1973. Most disposable coffee cups were made of paper with little cardboard handles on them, and no one in their right mind would drink one in a car. There were no built-in cupholders in cars at that point. Aftermarket plastic cup carriers had showed up but those were for pop cans and nothing else.
Gas stations didn’t sell coffee either. The “gulp and dump” model didn’t exist yet. In 73, you drove up to a pump, the rubber hose thing went “ding-ding” and an attendant came out to fill your car for you, check the oil, tell you it needed to be changed, and then clean windows. Deluxe service involved checking the air in your tires. There would be a pop machine and a candy bar machine. Coffee was a needless pain in the ass because no one would buy that from a guy with grease on his hands.
If you wanted coffee you grabbed your Stanley thermos or Thermos thermos and stopped at a breakfast diner or one of those 7-11 things that had popped up all over the place. Or you made your own but it was going to be messy and a pain to clear up. If there was a pump jockey in LA selling coffee during the Energy Crisis, he was seriously ahead of the power curve.
Okay, that is stuff the book got wrong. Now perhaps this is just me autistically detail-oriented but it’s the details that sell a period piece. There were just a whole lot of little slice-of-life details that should have been there and weren’t.
Where was the twelve-year-old boy buying a pack of Marlboros out of a cigarette machine?
When the team’s van was destroyed why didn’t they just pile into the back of a pickup? It would have let Chloe describe how much she hated the bite of the cold air washing over her or loved the rush of hot air through her hair and the whole team could have laughed when she got hit in the face with a June bug at 70 MPH.
Where were the beautiful blonde girls wearing shorts and walking barefoot down Sunset Boulevard on Saturday night?
Where were the pet rocks? Or given that this is a Monster Hunter book, where were the pet rocks that were actual pets and would attack people who tried to harm the team?
Where were the church keys?
Where were the mood rings?
AND WHERE WERE THE FUCKING TUBE TOPS? In the words of PJ O’Rourke, “When Alzihiemers takes my memories away, let tube tops be the last thing to go.”
There was an appropriate amount, of ‘groovy.’ hea-vy,’ and ‘righteous.’ But no, “Di-di mao” from the Vietnam vet. It’s not required but that or something like that is expected in 1973.
No mention of Enter the Dragon. Again not required but kind of is.
Any one of these little details is not required but as a whole, these optional extras are absolutely mandatory if you are going to be painting on a deep canvas. This is History Channel levels of detail work. 1973 is now, (sigh) a half-century away. America was a different world back then. That gulf of time needed to come across and just didn’t.
And speaking of mandatory in a Monster Hunter book, what about the gun porn?
It was, bluntly, weak, and flaccid. Chloe Mendoza had lived in Isreal since its creation. She carried a Browning Hi-Power which is a dull but acceptable choice for the period. But she apparently carried it hot, with a round in the chamber which no Israeli would have done, especially back then. In 1973, empty cylinder and empty chamber was a very common safety practice for a good reason, there was no such thing as a drop-safe gun. Israelis, due to their threat profile were noted gunfighters, they used pistols more than anyone else back then. And everyone knew they practiced the Israeli Draw (where you pull the slide as are you coming up to the ready position). They were famous for it.
There should have been a much bigger reliance on revolvers because back then semi-autos were very unreliable unless they were put together or modified by a gunsmith like Jim Clark or Armand Swenson. Or better yet stress that you’ve got a competition-grade armorer on the team or at Cazador or something that acknowledged the gun world they lived in.
And maybe this is just me but something more exotic than what I was given would have been appreciated. Like a Garand Enforcer from Vietnam or a StG 44 picked up from an Arab. Either would have been appropriate to the period.
It’s the detail work that sells a period piece, and this book was lazy about that. Given the age of the authors, they would have been reliant on their beta-readers for this kind of thing and they should have recruited two or three of the appropriate age. If they did, then they are the ones who let their authors down.
If you don’t know or aren’t at all interested in the history of the period, then it remains a good read and will keep you entertained. Let me stress once more, the narrative itself is quite good and there are no structural faults in the story. But if you are interested in history or just remember the 1970s, the anomalies will jerk you out of the story repeatedly. The detail work was way weaker than I’ve come to expect from Larry Correia. The Hard Magic series was practically a how-to book on writing a period adventure piece. He did all the mental sweat that that story required for the reader to be taken into the world the author had created. This is even more true of the Sons of the Black Sword series.
But it just wasn’t here.
Okay, I’m done here.
