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    No Hero
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    No Hero
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    No Hero
    Ebook404 pages7 hours

    No Hero

    By Jonathan Wood

    3/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    “SO FUNNY I LAUGHED OUT LOUD” CHARLAINE HARRIS What would Kurt Russell do? Oxford police detective Arthur Wallace asks himself that question a lot. While he's a good cop, he prefers his action on the big screen. But when he sees tentacles sprouting from the neck of a fresh corpse, the secretive government agency MI37 comes to recruit Arthur in its struggle against a threat from another dimension known as the Progeny. But Arthur is NO HERO! Can an everyman stand against sanity-ripping cosmic horrors? “Impeccably written - literally unputdownable... Unarguably one of the best novels I've read so far this year.” BARNESANDNOBLE.COM “The book Lovecraft might have written if he had a sense of humor and watched too many Kurt Russell movies... Recommended.” THE MAD HATTER BOOKSHELF AND REVIEW “[An] overload of awesome. The story reads like a fever dream of action, in a good way.” BOOKGASM
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTitan Books
    Release dateMar 11, 2014
    ISBN9781781168134
    Unavailable
    No Hero
    Author

    Jonathan Wood

    Jonathan Wood is an Englishman in New York. He has written short stories for The Best of Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Chizine, and Weird Tales. No Hero is his first novel.

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    Reviews for No Hero

    3/5

    5 ratings5 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Aside from an irritating repetition of characters telling the POV character to "grow a pair," I really enjoyed this urban fantasy with a cast of characters even more misfit than usual (especially by the end of the tale).

      No spoilers in saying this has Lovecraftian touches as well as some good wry British humor to alleviate pressure.

      In all, a good solid read that improves from a slightly slow start (at least the POV character took more warming than usual for me).
    • 4/5
      Great story of a typical Joe doing his job as a police detective til one day he gets a sword through his torso after seeing a woman lop off a man's head and a squid like creature coming out of it! Holy cow, what a start! There is a newness to the story that makes it fresh and different in the genre. I can visualize Bruce Campbell playing Agent Arthur! Loved it, and am already buying the second book "Yesterday's Hero"! What would Kurt Russell do?? Run out and buy this book!
    • 4/5
      This is interesting in that I just read about a study that said identifying with your favorite super hero is good for you. It's supposedly good for your ego and causes you to try to be your best self. It certainly works for the hero in this story who asks himself "What would Kirk Russel do?" whenever he is stymied.
      There is a hush hush British government organization called MI37 that deals with all the extra-terrestrial, supernatural goings on in England. They are underfunded and don't seem to receive much training, just told they are smart and should jump in and cope as best they can.
      There are lots of funny bits and great characters. It's kind of a mix of "Dresden Files" and "MI5". I enjoyed it and immediately purchased the second book which I liked just as well. This is a wonderful diversion during the election season's lies and backstabbing.
    • 2/5
      No Hero is a fairly slapdash riff on the paranormal govt agency setting. Wood's heart is in the right place, but the weak characterisation and narrative contrivance, and lack of originality let the book down - especially compared to similar-but-superior books like The Rook. Arthur Wallace's life as a detective is turned upside when he gets involved in a supernatural case, and is recruited into the shadowy MI36, dedicated to preventing eldritch horrors from crossing over into our world. This book, the first in a series, deals with a particular threat, kickstarted by the prophecy that one of the team members will die. In many ways, the "prophecy" is representative of the broader problems of the book. The only reason it exists is to kickstart the story - as does the only other prophecy featured. There's no reference to previous predictions, no rhyme or reason to the nature of them; they exist in perfect narrative isolation. This applies to almost every aspect of the helter-skelter plot you care to name. Things only happen when and because they need to, anything eyebrow-raisy can be explained away 'because MAGIC' - but the magic is so damned convenient. No Hero doesn't just have a Chekhov's gun, it has a Chekhov's Red Army, and watching the barrage is tiring as it rids the book of any sense of danger, and often surprise. It's hard to invest in a narrative where you know the author will do whatever is required to move the story where he wants it to go. Unfortunately these errors are compounded by the characterisation, which is built on wafer-thin types that never grow into real people. The whole thing just has a real thrown-together quality, as if Wood thought potential readers wouldn't care. I was mystified by the usually-reliable endorsement from Publishers' Weekly, as this is not a strong novel. Worse, for a book set in Oxford and populated by Brits, the actual locations are both super-anonymous, but the language and idioms are almost comically American. A British man calling for his "mommy" is just ridiculous. No Hero isn't terrible, but it's very, very weak. The kind of book that would make a publisher keep an eye on the writer, but not lose money on.
    • 4/5
      This serio-comic take on cosmic horror exists somewhere in a triangulation between "The Laundry" stories of Charles Stross, the magical police procedurals of Dan Aaronovitch and the collected works of Douglas Adams. Is Wood quite as good as any of those other authors? Probably not; none of the other characters are quite as well done as Wood's put-upon Detective Arthur Wallace. I still look forward to reading more books in the series though.