Michael Patrick Hicks's Blog

In April 2025, I announced that all of my books would be exiting Kindle Unlimited and that I would be going wide via Draft2Digital. This April, Draft2Digital announced that they would be charging a $12 maintenance fee to indie authors who make less than $100 in sales annually, in addition to the commission they already make off every book sold by every author on their platform. New authors joining up with Draft2Digital for the first time will also have the luxury of paying $20 just to open an account with them.

Over on BlueSky, author Isobel Starling speculates that these new fees have “a lot to do with the amount of data center space AI is taking, meaning a knock on cost rise for digital platforms.” Will other independent publishing platforms soon be taking away yet more money from their authors? Time will tell, but if the publishing industry, tech-bros, and the oligarchy ruling it all have taught us anything, the answer is yeah, yeah, they absolutely will be. It’s not really a question of if but when. I wouldn’t be surprised if Starling’s suggestion that these rising costs are due to AI is, in fact, correct. We’ve already heard plenty about the costs of these data centers to local communities in terms of noise pollution, skyrocketing electricity costs, global warming, water demand, and how normal, regular, everyday people like you and me get to the foot bill for all it in exchange for absolutely nothing whatsoever. It certainly looks to me like the effects will be trickling down in other ways, as well, like these new Draft2Digital policies. Indie authors and publishers, I suspect, will also be forced into ever-narrowing channels of release until we’re forced to return to the underground, like those dark, primordial pre-Kindle days.

For many of us, $12 isn’t a lot of money on its own, but coupled with the increasing cost of living, thanks in no small part to Trump’s failed economic policies and warmongering in Iran that has resulted in a pretty hefty Trump tax at the gas pump, and the simple fucking fact that I don’t make $100 a year on non-Amazon platforms, there’s no reason for me to stick with Draft2Digital. I don’t even make $12 a year on non-Amazon platforms, which means I would be paying Draft2Digital $12 each year to do… well, nothing at all.

So, here I am now, in April 2026, announcing my return to Kindle Unlimited in the very near future. After emailing Draft2Digital to close my account, I was informed that I could avoid these new fees by mass delisting all of my titles, which I am now in the process of doing.

I’m not sure how long it will take for everything to matriculate through the various storefronts and systems, but if you’re an ebook reader who avoids Amazon, I’d suggest you grab up my titles on your platform of choice before they disappear. If they’ve already been pulled from B&N, Kobo, Apple, etc., you can still buy ebooks direct from my store for a little bit yet! My shop will remain open until I return in full to KU, which demands complete exclusivity and will thus necessitate the shuttering of my online shop. So, buy up what you can/want as soon as possible!

Speaking of old things being new again and resurrecting that which we thought was long dead, buried, and squarely in the rear-view, Beau Johnson’s debut story collection, A Better Kind of Hate, has returned to print with a new publisher, following the collapse of its prior press. Bishop Rider lives once more thanks to the efforts of Shotgun Honey, which re-released A Better Kind of Hate earlier this month. And hot damn, look who happened to appear on a fancy little blurb card for the book’s online advertising.

I’m sure a lot of people who came across this advertisement got to my name said “Who?” and shrugged their shoulders fairly unimpressed, but hopefully I didn’t help steer any potential readers away. As for where that quote comes from, I had the pleasure to read A Better Kind of Hate some years ago from its previous publisher and reviewed it kindly. This collection was right up my alley, and both Bishop Rider and Beau Johnson became instant favorites. You can check out my review on Goodreads, and if that doesn’t help sell it, I’d suggest you give Beau’s interview with Ron Earl Phillips at Shotgun Honey a read-over.

NEW REVIEWS

April was a light month review-wise, although I did significantly more reading than my review output might suggest. Most of that reading time involved catching up on a backlog of comics, along with an ARC of Douglas Wynne’s forthcoming Wellspring, a heavy metal folk horror novel that he’ll be releasing via Kickstarter. I dug Wellspring quite a lot, but am holding off on posting my review until his Kickstarter goes live. While we wait for that, go follow Wynne’s project at Kickstarter so you can be notified once it starts.

As for what I did read and review this month:

The Dorians by Nick Cutter

The Peril of the Brutal Dark, Orla!, Absolute Batman 19 … In Brief

A River Red with Blood by John Connolly

This past weekend was Indie Bookstore Day, so of course I hit up my local shop. Road Less Traveled Books opened in 2024 and quickly became my favorite bookseller thanks to its spaciousness. I really dig the aesthetics of this place, and it’s got a warm, inviting feel to it, with devoted spaces for reading, enjoying some locally brewed coffee, working on puzzles, and regularly hosts a local silent book club and writing work shops. It’s just a cozy little bookstore! I went in the hopes of finding the new hardcover edition of Christopher Buehlman’s Between Two Fires and what do you know, it was the first book I spotted on the door-facing best-sellers shelving. Nearby was the paperback edition of Monika Kim’s The Eyes Are The Best Part, which certainly caught my eye. The sprayed edges made it an immediate must-have, and doubly-so since it’s been on my want-to-read list for a bit.

I left with more than I had planned on, but not nearly as much as I wanted once I started browsing. Still, not bad. It’s respectable little book haul, if I do say so myself and I’m hoping to get to both of these titles in the near-future.

How was your Indie Bookstore Day, and what did you treat yourself with? Sound off in the comments below!

Currently reading: Molka by Monika Kim

Currently listening: I literally just finished Book 7 in the Dungeon Crawler Carl series, This Inevitable Ruin, and am already jonesing for Book 8, A Parade of Horrible, to drop in audio. I cheated a bit and read the preview on Amazon of the next book’s opener and, goddamnit, I cannot wait to hear Jeff Hays acting it all out. But apparently I have to wait two weeks. Ugh. Mongo is appalled. IWKYM.

Currently playing: Still having my ass handed to me regularly in Marathon on the PS5.

Maine PI Charlie Parker returns for his twenty-third outing in John Connolly’s A River Red With Blood. This time around, Parker and Connolly square-off against the troubled-teen industry.

Imprisoned father Ward Vose hires Parker via an attorney to investigate the death of his son, Scott Theriault, whose corpse was found in the Kennebec River. Theriault, it’s posited, ran away from the Spero School – a behavior modification joint for at-risk teens whose parents can’t deal with them anymore – and rather than flee toward civilization went several miles deeper into the woods, broke his leg and drowned. Vose doesn’t buy the official story and Parker finds himself compelled to assist the grieving father, especially as news grows of a missing girl, Mallory Norton, who may have been linked to Theriault.

Connolly layers in additional complications, as well, like a group of twisted killers who participate in what they The Game. We’re introduced to them during a hunt for their next victim in Detroit. I have to say, as a metro-Detroiter, it’s always nice to see some Michigan representation and familiar locales getting unexpectedly name-dropped in this Maine-centric series from an Irish author! Meanwhile, further east, professional hitman and Parker confidante, Louis, learns of a hit that’s been placed on him.

And then there’s the wrinkle of old memories resurfacing in Parker’s mind, and dreams shared by Louis and Angel, of lives that may not be their own… These minor hints at notions of reincarnation serve to deepen the mythology underpinning this long-running series, as well as the relationship between Parker and his unlikely allies. Painting these figures as lost souls bound to one another across time and space gives this overarching mythos some added philosophical weight, as well, not to mention some minor shades of Roland’s own ka-tet in Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series. Parker’s reflections on these new dimensions of his relationship to those around him draws on French thinkers and musings on masculine emotion and love, reminding us of just how well read both Parker and Connolly are. If Parker isn’t already the heir apparent to Robert B. Parker’s Boston gumshoe, Spenser, he’s certainly in the running.

While A River Red With Blood is smart, smart-mouthed, and literate, it’s also grisly in its depiction of life within the academic halls of the metaphorically and possibly literally haunted Spero. Much like Tananarive Due’s excellent historical horror book, The Reformatory, Connolly reminds us of the real-life terrors these types of schools and their “tough love” approach to remodeling children’s behavior are best known for. Students are pitted against one another, and the school itself is run on a hierarchy of sociopathy. There’s little to distinguish these academies from juvenile detention centers, making them hardly more than prisons with a school curriculum for tortured youths.

Like all good, long-lasting crime and horror fiction, Connolly uses his work to hold up an empathetic mirror to society. That so much focus lies on child detention facilities by another name and the abusive, sociopathic officials running them, in our era of prison industrial complexes and ICE sweeps to abduct and disappear immigrants and their children, not to mention US citizens, hardly feels coincidental. Connolly makes direct note of this, even, as Maine has been pushed into a climate of government-created and mandated fear by overreaching federal immigration taskforces running amok and terrorizing communities, and reminding us of the hard and harsh realities of life as an inmate for both Vose and, by extension, his son. As Connolly reminds us, if the system can get away with doing it to the weak – like poor immigrant laborers and children – eventually it’ll get around to doing it to you, too. Just ask Alex Peretti and Renee Nicole Good.

The Peril of the Brutal Dark: An Ezra Cain Mystery #1 and #2

Vertigo Comics | February 25, 2026 and March 25, 2026

Writer: Chris Condon

Artist: Jacob Phillips

Letterer: Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou

Writer Chris Condon and artist Jacob Phillips craft an engaging, fresh-feeling period-piece mystery with The Peril of the Brutal Dark: An Ezra Cain Mystery. Right off the bat, these two capture the 1940s well with a familiar patois, look, and feel of the era involving Cain trying to get his hands on a briefcase he’s been hired to recover. Nothing’s ever easy for PIs of Cain’s ilk, so naturally he ends up exchanging bullets with a Dick Tracy-like flat-topped hood with a Tommy gun and getting into a car chase to close his case. Cain himself is a nicely constructed PI — a former Air Force pilot and cop, he’s also got a background in anthropological archeology and an Errol Flynn mustache.

Rather than just trying to ape Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips’s Criminal books, but with a ‘40s finish, The Peril of the Brutal Dark puts a neat Indiana Jones riff on the noir detective story, and right from issue one’s opening pages you just know this book’s going to be a little bit different than the usual. Cain’s own history makes him the best candidate to recover a missing museum piece discovered by his mentor in Greece and secreted back to the US before the Nazis could invade and claim it for themselves.

Condon and Phillips craft some great action set-pieces that look absolutely terrific, while the script doles out a lot of background information in brief, unobtrusive, punchy fashion without feeling like info dumping. Issue two spells out the threats more directly, providing important background on the nature of the ancient artifact, an anvil linked to Hephaestus that imbues the weapons forged upon it with a mysterious energy that, in the hands of evil, could spell doom for the world. Certainly not something you’d want Nazis to have! Or whatever this cult known as The Brutal Dark is; both Cain and readers are left in the dark as to their motivations. Maybe we’ll find out more in issue 3!

For now, though, Ezra Cain is a welcome addition to the noir comic book canon, and a very much welcome return of DC’s Vertigo Comics.

Orla!

Mad Cave Studios | April 21, 2026

Writer: John Lees

Artist: Sally Cantirino

Letterers: Lucas Gattoni and Shawn Lee

Orla Bard has a bit of a problem… Perpetually single, she relies on dating apps to try and find the right man, but usually only manages to hook up with the worst of them. There’s the douchey techbro, an antivaxxer, a right-wing nutjob (is there any other kind?), and the self-centered CEO who can only think about himself and his own pleasure (again, is there any other kind?). They make for shitty dates.

But they sure do taste good.

You see, Orla Bard isn’t your average, run of the mill single woman looking for love in all the wrong places. Orla Bard is a monster. Or, at least, half-monster. She’s more like a shape-shifter, I guess, but at least she’s using her violent impulses for good. Until she agrees to go on a date with her friend, the nebbish bookstore owner, Gwyn, who helps keep her stocked up in bawdy romance novels. Gwyn has had a crush on her for ages and their first date goes swimmingly as he proves to be the opposite of all the duds Orla’s been bringing home. She finds herself falling for him, but every time things heat up, the monster wants out.

Although John Lees’s scripts play with some serious issues, Orla! never takes itself too seriously across the five issues collected here. It’s a topical read, dealing with toxic masculinity, broken relationship, loneliness, political nuttery, an attempted date rape, and a whole lot of murder, Orla! is still very much a silly romcom at its core, albeit one with a horror bent. Artist Sally Cantirino makes it all bloody and gory, but never repulsively so. There’s a cartoonish cheekiness about it all that helps to separate the horror, and Orla in her monster form looks more like a Pixar creation than a nightmarish Stan Winston creature. Yes, she has horns and claws and a whole lot of sharp teeth, but she’s also big and fluffy and purple.

The end result is a whimsical bit of fun that’s actually pretty damn cute for a story featuring a man-eating monstrosity.

Absolute Batman #19

DC Comics | April 15, 2026

Writer: Scott Snyder

Artist: Nick Dragotta

Letter: Tim Napolitano

Colorist: Frank Martin

One of the things I most enjoy about Absolute Batman is the simple fact that I never really know what to expect from issue to issue, except that it's going to take what we know from the traditional Bat-line, punch it in the face, and make it stand on its head in admirably horrific ways.

This one marks the debut of Scarecrow and he couldn't be further from the mainline DC version. Christ, just look at him! Nick Dragotta stages the opening pages of Scott Snyder's script to wonderfully awful effect, expertly teasing us with what's to come with methodical precision, and then BOOM! The whole sequence is unnerving and makes for one hell of an iconic introduction that feels downright apocalyptic. The mainline DC Scarecrow is a nutjob with a medical degree. Absolute Scarecrow is a harbinger of doom, a horsemen of the apocalypse that's just stepped out of Stephen King's The Stand.

And then it just keeps going. It doesn't fucking stop. Snyder piles on several other shocking sequences, along with a few wonderfully tender moments of character development. There's a small scene between Bruce and Waylon that's a heck of a tear-jerker, while Harley provides some much needed comic relief amidst all the darkness. And there's a lot of darkness to be sure, particularly as Snyder and Dragotta queue things up for the cliffhanger and tease the events of the next issue, letting their manga-inspired freak flags fly as even more visitors come to Gotham.

Where's all this headed? I don't fucking know. I don't even want to try guessing at this point. All I know is, I'm hooked and am here for every single bat-nasty issue these guys put together.

Stories about mankind’s search for eternal youth and beauty are almost as old as mankind itself, ranging from ancient tales about the Fountain of Youth to present-day cosmetics industries and their promises of wrinkle-vanishing creams and lotions that restore the skin’s lost elasticity. Nowadays, social media influencers peddling nonsensical promises under the guise of attention-grabbing headlines are a dime a dozen. Yet, the allure of such promises refuses to fade despite the mountains of scientific evidence – and worse – that runs contrary to such wish fulfillment.

On the horror fiction front, Nick Cutter’s latest, The Dorians, most certainly runs headlong toward the “and worse” part of the equation. In this book of science gone wrong mayhem, a group of elderly folks at death’s door – quite literally, given their preparations for medically assisted suicide – are offered a last-minute reprieve and a promise to cure what ails them. The offer, or perhaps more so the mystery surrounding this offer, is too tantalizing to ignore. They quickly find themselves secreted off to a remote island that’s home to a scientific compound spearheaded by 19-year-old Dr. Astrid Marsh, a super-genius who graduated from Princeton before reaching her teens. Now funded by corporate benefactors to the tune of billions and billions of dollars, she’s in the process of fine-tuning a procedure to reverse aging via a biological implant genetically engineered from coral, jellyfish, and fungal mold. Marsh has named this specimen the Hydra but, of course, the results are less Cocoon and more Jurassic Park.

Once the Hydra has been implanted in our handful of dying old folks, they soon find themselves feeling better and looking younger. But it wouldn’t be much of a horror story if everything turned out hunky-dory, would it? Oh no, no no no, that simply would not do. The trials and tribulations of Marsh’s astronomically high IQ comes with a cost. Not only is she socially inept, she’s also got severe anger management issues and is crazier than a sack full of rabid cats. And then there’s the test subjects themselves, particularly the tall, broad-bodied Hugo, who lost his daughter at a tender young age to an innocent mishap and who spent much of his own youth doing very bad things, and Claire, whose hunger for youth has turned her into a manipulative minx.

As the experiment progresses, the group can’t get younger fast enough for their liking and begin taking things into their own hands. Much of this initially involves doing a lot of talking, threatening, and cajoling that contrasts their rediscovered youthful appearances with slang from the 50s, so they sound like outdated greasers, minus the leather jackets and finger snapping, until they finally concoct plans to violently expedite their aging reversal. Eventually, Ian Malcolm’s infamous words from Jurassic Park come to haunt all involved as the Hydra exerts its own instinctual controls over their bodies because, you know, “life finds a way.”

Much like the Hydra, The Dorians itself is a mishmash of works that have come before, engineered into a cobbled-together end-product made from pieces of this and bits of that. Rather than trying to shy away from what’s come before, Cutter leans hard into the various influences that constitute The Dorians. You can see the stitchwork binding together Michael Crichton and Stephen King, The Island of Doctor Moreau, dashes of Carpenter and Cronenberg, a smidge of The Substance, Frankenstein, and plenty more. So much of The Dorians reads like an Easter egg hunt to spot all the ideas and constituent components that Cutter’s cribbing from earlier creatives who have done all the work for him. Little of the story is fresh or original, and there’s an almost meta-level commentary to this book’s existence, which lives much like the Hydra itself, as a parasite riding on the backs of others.

Which brings me to a central mystery of my own making – how to fairly judge The Dorians on its own terms when so much of it exists in relation to works that came before. In liberally taking so many constituent parts from so many other works, Cutter has managed to take much of what works from his forebears and dismiss a lot of what didn’t. While The Dorians is wholly unoriginal, with so much of its plot points virtually cut-and-pasted from a veritable goldmine of sci-fi horror genre definers that ran headlong into the fray so Cutter could stroll his way through decades later, it’s not without its own thoughts and complexities, shallow though they may be. It’s derivative, but so recognizably so one could argue it’s pastiche. It’s premise and execution are so overly familiar in too many crucial ways, but it’s never dull or unreadable. For the most part, I found myself enjoying the read, even as I recognized so many of its combinate parts from so many other previous sources. Could The Dorians exist in its current state without Jurassic Park or Frankenstein or Doctor Moreau before it? I doubt it; the whole book is the literary equivalent of memberberries, albeit in a blessedly less pernicious way than a Ready Player One or some such equivalent. Is a book that’s unoriginal but enjoyable better than a book that’s original but boring? Or is it just six of one, half-dozen of another? I don’t know. I guess at the end of the day, my thinking is that The Dorians is little more than junk food for the brain. It tastes good, but it’s not good for you, and you’ll probably forget all about it in a day or two anyway.

March was such a clusterfuck, I’m not even sure what happened or where to start. I know plenty happened, but time itself has once again taken on that weird elasticity where it felt like it moved way too fast and way too slowly simultaneously.

There was stuff with Iran and Israel and Trump being a fucking idiot per usual; I remember that much but won’t get too deep in the weeds here. It’s just another pointless war our ignoramus president has tossed us into with absolutely no thought, plans, or objectives beyond whatever spur of the moment brain fart he had and has since forgotten in the fog of dementia. Since the war began, we’ve both won it and haven’t won it yet, need to keep fighting it, require more troops and more money, won it again, obliterated Iran’s nuclear program, but it’s still a threat, and allies need to join us, even though we don’t need them because they’re useless and we’ve already won, but they need to do their part anyway to… who knows what. And that was just in one single goddamn fucking speech/mindless ramble. Apparently Trump is also helping Iran make a ton of money off sales of their oil reserves to the tune of $14 Billion, while domestic gas price averages surpass $4/gallon, since he eased economic sanctions against the country he’s at war with so they can… continue being at war? I guess? No doubt that’s just the art of the deal and more of Trump playing four-dimensional chess! Selfishly, I sure am glad I switched to an electric vehicle when I did back in mid-2025, because, wow, who saw this economic disaster coming with Trump at the helm yet again? (Spoiler: literally every fucking body in the world, minus Trump supporters.) I know I said I wouldn’t get into it, and I now realize I’ve also put more thought and effort into this whole quagmire than Trump and the nitwits he’s surrounded himself with. At least Trump supporters are getting what they voted for, and I’m sure whatever upset they’re facing over having to pay more at the gas pump is mollified by the assurance that our president* is dropping more bombs on more brown people.

Then there’s the rancid puddle of dog shit Andy Wier stepped in by appearing on a right-wing podcast while promoting the movie adaptation of his book, Project Hail Mary. I’ve said my piece on all this over on BlueSky in response to the awesome TC Parker. Go read her stuff if you haven’t yet! Apparently, Weir thinks his works are free of politics, claims he doesn’t insert any social commentary at all, and that his books have absolutely no point to make whatsoever, but he’s somehow inspired by Star Trek. Meanwhile, others are shocked at the level of obliviousness this author must possess since his book is, apparently, an allegorical story about rival nations setting side their differences to combat climate change. Yeah, because that’s not political at all! LOL

I haven’t read his books, but based on Weir’s pitch alone they sound awfully boring and lacking in any kind of intellectual curiosity, whereas people’s reactions to what they think the books are about are far more interesting! Furthermore, it’s awfully damning to see an author refer to their works as being not just completely sterile but also completely pointless. Maybe it’s just me, but Weir doesn’t seem too savvy when it comes to marketing his works. “Hey, give up hours of your life to read my book! It doesn’t have any point of view, isn’t influenced by the world around us, doesn’t have anything to say about anything at all, and is utterly pointless!” I’m sorry, but what the fuck kind of pitch is that supposed to be? Who is this alluring to?

To add to all this, Weir has apparently been posting A.I. slop images of his wife on some of his social media pages, too, which… ugh. And he has a massive misunderstanding of what Star Trek is all about. AI slop user, media illiterate, and apparently the lowest of the low-information voters around us? Yeah, I suppose him being right-wing isn’t much of shock when you add all this up.

Word has it that the adaptation of Project Hail Mary is pretty good though, with audiences and critics responding overwhelmingly positively to it. I’m excited to check it out one of these days, most likely when it hits disc, and certainly well before I bother reading anything from Weir himself. I quite liked Ridley Scott’s The Martian, and apparently this new flick is even better. I’m not quite ready to cancel Weir for his beliefs, but what I’ve learned about him this past weekend certainly doesn’t have me in much of a rush to dive into his books. I’m not tossing him in the bin with J.K. Rowling or Neil Gaiman, and I don’t think he’s as actively harmful as either of those authors so much as he’s maybe just naive, ill-informed, and ignorant at best or stupid at worst. I think I’ll stick to those larger team efforts when it comes to his works, where there’s a broader array of voices between him and his ideas. Given that Weir finds his own works pointless, it’s perhaps better to wait for the film adaptation anyway, so a screenwriter can inject the depth and meaning Weir refuses to for a crew of actors and a director to breathe life into. I do have copies of both The Martian and Project Hail Mary in my Audible library, due more to the narrators helming these books than the author himself, and I expect I’ll get around to them at some point. The movies will most certainly suffice in the meantime, particularly since Weir, by his own admission, has nothing of substantive value to add to the canon of science fiction. Thank the stars this dude isn’t involved in Star Trek after all this!

Anyway, as I also said over on BlueSky:

As an author, I can't even imagine being proud of claiming my works lack any kind of symbolism, message, or politics. That just makes for one-dimensional, stale-ass, boring storytelling. It's like chewing cardboard.

Side note: even when you think the work is apolitical, that itself is political.

For fuck's sake, have a fucking backbone about what you're writing. Show some balls. Even if your right-wing and want to write the most anti-woke shit conceivable, have a fucking spine about it. Be honest, at least with yourself if nobody else. Whatever happened to the courage of one's convictions?

Who wants to write, let alone read, a book that's free of any kind of substance or value? Who is this intellectually incurious, and what would even motivate them to spend time with a book? I'm just so fucking lost with this argument.

Hey, you know what, you should all go grab a copy of Friday Night Massacre. It’s totally not at all political! There’s no social commentary in it either! It’s perfect for Andy Weir!

NEW REVIEWS

Well, there’s no getting around the fact that March was pretty light at the blog. I DNF’d a few books, one of which I quit far too late in the misguided hopes it would get better as things went along, but alas… I hit the 75% mark and it was such a slog, and had eaten up so much of my precious reading time, that when I finally pulled the pin, I’d already wasted several weeks. Thankfully, I ended the month on a high note with a pair of excellent books back to back. You can check out my thoughts at the links below.

Estuary: A Ghost Story #1 by David “DB” Andry, Tim Daniel, Maan House

A Violent Masterpiece by Jordan Harper

Marla by Jonathan Janz

Currently reading: The Dorians by Nick Cutter. I’m expecting to have this one wrapped up soon and reviewed in a few days, so do keep an eye out.

Currently watching: I finally snuck in the first episode of HBO’s The Batman spin-off, The Penguin. Not too bad, and hopefully I can get through the rest of the show in short order.

Currently listening: I finished Book 5 of the Dungeon Crawler Carl series, and if the TV adaptation gets off the ground and makes it through The Butcher’s Masquerade, the climax better be choreographed to "Ballroom Blitz," or else I will kill their mothers! Is this song pick a little too on the nose? Oh, absolutely it is, but I don’t give a shit because it would be so fucking glorious to witness. I moved right onto Book 6, The Eye of the Bedlam Bride, and finished that just as March wound down to the end. Which means I am now listening to Book 7, This Inevitable Ruin. I don’t know the last time I binged a series this hard. Even more remarkable, it hasn’t gotten the least bit stale at all for me, yet. The plan is to finish This Inevitable Ruin in time for the release of Book 8, A Parade of Horribles. I might even be able to squeeze in a podcast episode or two from one of the series languishing in my app if all goes well.

Currently playing: Marathon (PS5). I absolutely suck at player vs player games, and Marathon ramps that up by adding in enemies to shoot, too. The learning curve is high, and the difficulty level is nigh-on impossible (for me), and yet rather than frustrate it’s somehow fun and super addictive. I’m loving it. I love the atmosphere and goth-cyberpunk aesthetic of it all. Fantastic game all around.

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Ever since its publication as a signed, limited edition hardcover by Earthling back in October 2022 (and good lord, does it ever feel like it’s been so much longer than that!), Janz fanz have been clamoring for a wider release. Thankfully, a new three-book deal announced in February saw Janz joining Blackstone’s Weird Tales imprint, with the long-awaited Marla first up in August. Well, dear readers, having just read an ARC, I’m happy to report that Marla was worth the wait. Cue the waving of Janz handz!

Strange things are afoot in King’s Branch, starting off with the discovery of a murdered man whose body appears to have been pile-driven headfirst into the ground. Soon thereafter, another victim is found whose head has been caved in following a violent collision with his living room ceiling. Little connects one corpse to another, save for their uncommon demise, violently bloodshot eyes, and the terrified expression frozen on their faces. Detective Carl Lancaster believes there’s something even stranger connecting the dead men — a young woman named Marla Gorman. He’s seen her watching him each time he’s called out to a scene, either from her bedroom window or inexplicably standing in the road. Little is known about the Gorman’s, with both Marla and her mother, Irene, shrouded in local rumors. The girl is a shut-in, her mother possibly abusive. Or they’re witches or cultists or god only knows what else. The only thing that’s certain is that Marla is somehow involved, despite never having left her house, and the secrets she keeps could tear King’s Branch apart.

Janz opens Marla with an epigraph quoting Stephen King’s Carrie, tipping his hat early and letting readers in on what they can expect in the pages that follow. While Marla is clearly an homage to King’s classic, and King himself if the town of King’s Branch is anything to go by, it’s very much its own book and Janz treads his own ground within some now very familiar tropes. Or so it seems initially.

We know early on the kind of talents Marla possesses, so much of what drives the story is Carl’s attempts at figuring out and understanding what, exactly, it is he’s dealing with here. While Marla is gussied up as a bit of a horror mystery, readers will inherently know more than the characters — to a degree. Yes, Carrie White serves as an inspiration, but Marla couldn’t be further from that bullied, telekinetic teen. Any initial similarities are lost in the sheer odiousness of Marla, and the more we learn about her and her grand designs, the further she distances herself from her literary forebear. Rest assured, there’s plenty of secrets to uncover and Janz lays in some pretty damn good surprises along the way. For the most part, though, the central focus is on the journey, not the destination. Getting there, after all, is half the fun. And although Marla is a slow-burn, it’s far from slow-paced.

I really dug the point of view Janz brings to the table here, couching it all in familial themes. Carl has lost both his wife and daughter to a tragic accident and the only thing that gets him out of bed is the energetic puppy he’s adopted, and his job, of course. Then there’s Annie, who’s recently returned to full-time employment and is having trouble balancing work and family life, a job in its own right that’s made even more difficult by her idiot husband’s constant sabotaging of her efforts to both connect with and discipline her children. When she forbids her daughter to go to a party, Brian’s right there giving the girl his car keys so she can go enjoy some underage drinking. Brian’s the kind of toxic asshole male Janz is so good at writing, the kind you instantly hate and want to see suffer. Carl’s partner, RJ, has kids of his own and a wife he’s not there for nearly enough, and even less now that bodies are stacking up all around town. And then there’s Marla and Irene, but the less said about them, the better.

As he often does, Janz dangles and unravels the horror through Gothic aesthetics, and there’s few horror contemporaries that plumb the depths of Gothic horror half as well as Janz. He knows the genre inside and out, and he clearly has a deep affection for it, having penned a number of other such works over the years, like The Sorrows, House of Skin, and The Dismembered, to name a few. An ever-present gloom resides over King’s Branch, and the decaying Gorman house is a nasty piece of work. The interior feels claustrophobic and dark, and that’s before you even get to the playroom where… well, you’ll see. Even in the sunny-set scenes, you just know there’s trouble lurking beneath it all. There may be a party going on all around you, but you’re Chief Brody, uneasily sitting on the beach waiting for shit to hit the fan when the shark attacks once more. That’s you, and that’s Carl, too. I suppose that makes Marla Jaws, but I’m pretty sure it’s Janz who’s the real shark here, the sharp-toothed son of a bitch you don’t see coming with a nasty surprise of a lifetime.

Jordan Harper’s aptly titled follow-up to 2023’s Everybody Knows is a timely and hard-hitting reflection on the current sociopolitical state of America as viewed through Los Angeles noir. In another era and another genre, A Violent Masterpiece could be mistaken for a straight-up dystopian horror, but here in the USA circa 2026 it’s a fractious crime story ripped straight from the headlines, tweets, skeets, and viral videos of the here and now. As Harper notes at the end of his story, and which Jake says in the book’s opening chapter, Los Angeles is America. One might almost make the mistake of saying Harper’s Los Angeles is a dark mirror of America, but no, sadly, it is not. It’s a straight-up reflection, tackling the lie that is the American myth in a fashion similar to Gabino Iglesias’s Coyote Songs. All of the griminess, seediness, and pure corruption at the heart of Harper’s latest is a stark and unflinching look at American dysfunction and a potent reminder that, oftentimes, fiction tells us the uncomfortable truths our mainstream media shies away from and which history has whitewashed.

In Los Angeles, ultra-wealthy, drug-addled perverts run the city, just as they run the country. They’ve got a private paramilitary outfit, Blackguard Security, that kills on their behalf, making people disappear and covering up crime scenes that would otherwise implicate the rich fucks that have gotten themselves in trouble. But hey, what’s a dead woman when an elite pedophile risks jail-time or, more likely, minor humiliation online. Doug Gibson has been tapped to defend a jailed Hollywood executive, Eric Algar, with a penchant for underage girls and a blackmail list a mile long. If Algar and the ensuing conspiracy Gibson finds himself enshrouded in reads a lot like the Epstein Files, congratulations on paying attention. There’s Jake, too, a too-handsome for his own good ex-journalist turned nightcrawler, roving the midnight streets chasing down one crime scene after another for his livestream subscribers and showing them exclusive, behind-the-scenes murder scenes from the LA Ripper, who’s left behind three violently mutilated, dismembered, cannibalized women. Kara fears her best friend, Phoebe, has fallen victim to the Ripper, but having witnessed Phoebe’s apartment getting cleaned out by Blackguard promises there’s an even deeper and more sinister layer to these serial murders.

A Violent Masterpiece plays out like a mosaic novel for the bulk of its page count. Harper takes his time layering in information while forcing readers to connect the dots of his elaborate and evolving conspiracy. Our three central leads don’t even all intersect with one another until three-fourths of the way in, and by then it’s anybody’s guess how all this is going to shake out or how these three nobodies can stack up against and stick it to the city’s elite vanguard, their army of killers, and the grossly unequal levying of laws. Each ends up having their own small pieces of the puzzle, and once everything’s assembled it could cost them everything — like, buried in an unmarked grave where they’ll never be found everything.

In between is the proud LA tradition of Death Tours. Harper takes us to ultra-nasty crime scenes, overdoses at exclusive nightclubs, and rich people party spots where there are “no rules, only prices” for any vice imaginable, from drugs to porn stars to little kids. Police clad in masks and black strips of tape covering their badge numbers run riot, and attend training seminars where they’re reminded that the sex they’ll have after killing somebody is the best they’ll ever have, echoing Dave Grossman’s gross man’s killology seminars. Courthouses spare a young white man credibly accused of rape because he comes from a rich family and a criminal conviction could destroy him, while a homeless black woman has the full force of the LAPD hunting her, all the while denying the existence of the LA Ripper. Cops in riot gear and with an army of dump trucks and bulldozers tear up parks to rid it of squatters and shoot protestors in the face with rubber bullets and tear gas canisters, but turn tail and beat feet fast as fast can be when a rich man’s name is dropped following an OD at a party. LA is America, indeed. Or, as Jake tells his Creepy Crawl subscribers, “LA is America with no place left to run. LA is America with its back against the wall.”

Harper’s staccato writing style confronts you like the wrong end of a Tommy gun as he pushes you through the dark, corrupt underbelly of Los Angeles, giving you an angry and unvarnished look at the true and truly repulsive underbelly of Hollywood ‘s fictitious glitz and glamour, like a modern-day James Ellroy. Cops, crooks, stars and starlets — and everyone in between — collide in the intersection of fame, drugs, death, and violence. A murdered rapper in a diner, the prowling citizen journalist, pedophiliac Hollywood studio execs, people too powerful to be held culpable for their crimes against humanity and too rich to fail or jail — A Violent Masterpiece is LA Confidential for the 21st Century, with fact and fiction drawn into a gnarly, headlong collision that spares no survivors. Like Jake tells his online audience, we’re here “in the strange, confronting the real.” That’s what Jake promises; it’s what Harper delivers. And Harper. Well. Jordan Harper is the real deal, man. This one’s not just a violent masterpiece, it’s a searing fucking indictment.

Estuary #1

Oni Press | April 8, 2026

Writers: David “DB” Andry and Tim Daniel

Artist: Maan House

Estuary opens with the striking visuals of a sunset vista over a beautiful Monterey bay and a car engulfed in flames crashing through a bridge’s guardrails to plummet into the water below. The action quickly unfolds across a series of panels, with the crash sequence smartly rendered in a beautiful splash-page that’s one hell of a showstopper. Intercut with images of an alluring woman praying by candlelight, readers are forced to wonder how, exactly, these events are connected. Right from the first panel, the whole sequence is an immediate attention grabber, and Maan House’s visual stylings, as colored by Steve Canon, are a bit reminiscent of artists like Jae Lee and Andrea Sorrentino. House did the cover art here, too, so if you dig that image you’ve got a whole book’s worth with the interiors. Writers Andry and Daniel use the moment to set up the book’s conceit with some smartly delivered dialogue as we learn that the praying woman, Maris Cristobal, is kneeling within the grounds of a mission at Arbues Point, one of the California’s most haunted locales and now tourist hot spot.

Turns out, Maris is a marine archeologist and has been hired by one of the sisters at the convent to locate a wreck lost in the bay. Teamed up with a charter boat captain, Willis Hunter, the two head out into shark-filled waters to locate their salvage. Andry and Daniel use the boat ride to flesh out Maris and Hunt, doling out details about their upbringing in between some casual flirting. It’s pretty smooth sailing, and does a lot to help define Estuary’s central leads as defined human beings with a past. The writers keep the pacing brisk, turning what could be dull infodumping into a budding camaraderie that helps bring these characters into focus. As the action descends beneath the waves, the paranormal aspects lurking at the edges of Estuary come into sharper focus, as well, with questions piling up in very short order. The rapid fire delivery of odd occurrences, discoveries, and Hunt’s worry over Maris’s safety underwater keep the pacing frenetic, and Andry and Daniel deliver some terrific “oh shit!” moments as they build toward this first issue’s cliffhanger ending.

Estuary is smartly plotted and well-executed, and House’s art really helps turn this work of maritime horror into a next-level comic event. The visuals are absolutely stunning and the action is perfectly framed. Combined with Canon’s coloring, Estuary delivers a perfect horror-noir tone, and even sunny-set scenes are filled with deep, luxurious shadows that truly sell the aesthetic and otherworldly atmosphere. As Andry and Daniel’s ramp up the action, House’s paneling grows all the more claustrophobic both aboard ship and in the water below. Wide-open seas transform into tightly confined spaces thick with kelp and underwater life that makes the bay feel more like a narrow, crowded alley than a watery expanse. House pushes his camera in close, putting us nose to nose with these characters as they’re forced to confront mounting horrors, none of us exactly sure what’s lurking just below the horizon or right behind us.

Estuary’s opening issue is a perfectly executed work of sea-based horror that will leave readers on edge in its final moments and hungering for whatever comes next. Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water, too…

Catharsis has been at the forefront of my mind this month — and for quite a while longer, if I’m being honest — for all kinds of reasons. In the summer of 2024, I began writing a new book, my first real long-form project since writing Friday Night Massacre back in 2020 (and released in 2021, with a rather unfortunate but all too predictable coincidence timing-wise; and hey, if you know, you know). The book was going to be a dark horror story, but with a bit of hope and optimism. I was convinced that my fellow Americans would not vote against their best interests (despite, you know, pretty much all of American history) and that we’d continue on the road to correcting the disastrous and dangerous missteps from the 2016 election. But then the election did happen, Americans did foolishly, stupidly, and racistly vote against their own best interests, and whatever streaks of hope and optimism I might have had for the future were angrily swept away. The political allegory at the heart of that book required a bit of reworking to reflect the unwelcome turns reality provided as 2025 settled into place and we found ourselves, once again, under the rule of an authoritarian sewage monster, now unchecked and unrestrained by any sense of ethos those surrounding him might have had to try and keep the republic together.

As I kept plugging away at the book, it only got darker, and I found myself leaning hard into the bleakness. A part of me thrilled at the idea of this book becoming the most nihilistic work I’d produced thus far, and maybe ever. It was to be a gnarly, ghastly, blood-soaked affair, no happy endings in sight, and making reference to a lot of current events, which I was incorporating into the plot as the story unfolded. The plot itself revolved around war, with mankind pushed to the brink of extinction, and the survivors grappling with the pervasive horrors surrounding them in their newfound post-apocalyptic reality. And lo and behold, here we are, yet again, involved in yet another war in the Middle East that will probably span multiple generations and claim far too many innocent lives. Thankfully, I stopped writing that book before this week’s news about Iran, and before news about A.I. war game scenarios constantly and consistently ending in nuclear war, which just so happened to coincide with Pete Hegseth threatening to punish Anthropic if they don’t give the military unrestricted use of their AI, because safety standards are “too woke.” Yes, dear readers, not wanting to die in a nuclear holocaust is now woke! Surprisingly, Anthropic stood their ground (so far, at least) against the Pentagon’s demands, which honestly shocks the hell out of me given how so many other industries, businesses, media conglomerates, and Richie Riches were so eager to kowtow and capitulate to these nutjobs. Of course, Sam Altman swooped in to keep the trend going, striking a deal for the Pentagon to use his OpenAI bullshit. I don’t feel particularly bad that Anthropic may now incur the wrath of our far-right extremist government, even as I am heartened that they have (so far) taken the correct stance here. And, hey, speaking of Anthropic, I’m still waiting on my settlement money from all my books they pirated to use without my permission in training their environmentally destructive, slop generating, plagiarism machines. And speaking of AI, FUCK AI. And fuck Anthropic, too, as a whole, but also good on them for giving Trump et al the proverbial finger. Anthropic still fucking sucks, regardless, and I do believe their existence will ultimately be a net negative for humanity at large. And fuck OpenAI while we’re at, simply for existing. All this should, once again, be a hearty reminder that there is absolutely no ethical use for AI and that it is only ever an instrument for fascism.

Anyway, the book was going to be just this unrelenting meatgrinder of misery. Somewhere along the way, I lost my appetite for it. The nihilism got to be too much, even for me. Too much reality kept intruding, ensuring that my fictional nightmares only got deeper, darker, and more depressing. While the commentary in Friday Night Massacre was not the least bit subtle and very much in your face, this book was even starker. At least Friday Night Massacre was fun, given its focus on comic book-like action scenes and 80s horror flicks. I had a blast writing that book! This new book… not so much.

Simply put, there wasn’t anything cathartic about it. The story wasn’t cathartic — it was too bleak and oppressive for that. It was misery for misery’s sake and, well, we already have social media, the news, and Donald Trump for that. I stopped finding reasons to write, or ways to fool myself into thinking I was writing in response to and reflecting on real-world horrors. What I was doing was allowing myself to get bogged down in the muck, and giving myself permission to be miserable and angry and depressed far more than was healthy.

I set that book aside. Walked away from it unfinished, and with no intent on going back to it ever again.

But I still had that itch to write some more, and I’d been noodling around with a much smaller concept that I couldn’t quite figure out how to properly frame. I wanted to write something that would, if not help heal my nation or my readers, at least help heal me. I needed to write something cathartic for my own sake, something that could help put my own personal demons to rest, or to at least make them quieter and a tiny bit easier to deal with.

If Project A was a work of angry, resentful reactionism, then Project B — my current project — is a slower burn, one that’s more thoughtful and much, much more personal. It’s quite likely the most autobiographical piece of writing I’ve done thus far, although there are certainly bits of me in everything I write. This book is even more me than usual, drawing on a lot of my own history and relationships, albeit in highly fictionalized ways. It is a horror book, after all.

Unlike Project A, Project B actually feels good to write. The ideas are coming in fast and fully baked. All I need to do is sit down and write the words. I started writing this book in the middle of January and recently passed the 20,000 word mark. I figure I’m about half-way through, maybe a little bit more? Honestly, I’m a terrible judge of projecting word counts. I figured this would probably be in the ballpark of 30,000 words, but maybe 40,000 is more accurate. The end product should be at the long end of novella-sized, or possibly a short novel.

Whether or not it sees publication is a whole other matter. I suspect it will, but cannot — will not — say when, if ever. Right now, this project is just for me. Mostly, it’s just to see if I can do it again. It’s been a long time since the book writing bug has been biting, and I’m just content to do the work for now without any expectation of future reward (or thievery by billionaire technofascists).

If it does end up breaking free of my computer and making its way into the world beyond, you’ll be the first to know. In the meantime, feel free to check out my past works if you haven’t already!

Speaking of my works, it’s time for Smashwords’ annual Read An Ebook Week and all of my titles are heavily discounted on that platform and available to purchase as downloadable, DRM-free ebooks. You can find my entire collection at a promotional price at Smashwords only from March 1 - March 7. Novels and novellas will be 75% off their usual list price, knocking them down to only 99c or $1.24, while my short stories will be available to download for free. Be sure to check out the sale and grab some books! And don’t forget to drop a review if you like what you’ve read, or talk them up online. Word of mouth is vital, especially in this day and age of the almighty algorithm, and every little bit helps.

On the topic of my books, thanks to a recent partnership allowing even more expanded ebook distribution by Draft2Digital, most of my ebooks are now available at Bookshop.org, where each dollar you spend goes toward helping your local independent bookstores. For some reason, a few of my short stories, like Revolver, Black Site and Let Go, were not eligible for inclusion although I haven’t received any details about why (see also: the almighty algorithm). Thankfully, all of these stories and more are available to read in my short story collection, In the End, Nothing. They’re also available individually pretty much everywhere else you might buy ebooks, including my own webstore! These books being blocked from sale for whatever arbitrary reasons there may be is, as they say, why you don’t put all your eggs in one basket! As for the the rest of my books that are now up for purchase, I’ve put together a nice little storefront at Bookshop.org to make shopping easy. And if you buy these from Bookshop.org, I’ll get an itty-bitty affiliate payment. Again, every little bit helps.

In January, I talked about being able to lose myself in books and comics after the hellacious start to 2026 we were all forced to endure as Americans living under a violently fascist regime that had begun killing US citizens opposed to their brutality. No so much this month. February started off with a family emergency that rocked my wife and I pretty fucking hard and it’s been difficult to focus. I spent a lot — and I mean A LOT — of time video gaming in order to keep myself distracted. Words were pretty goddamned hard to deal with, speaking them, creating them, reading them. I just couldn’t focus and found myself mentally exhausted and constantly tense and stressed out.

So, things were fairly light on the reading and reviewing front. Will March fare any better for me, now that we’re apparently on the cusp of entering yet another multi-generational war in the Middle East after our “leaders” assassinated the leader of Iran so soon after seizing Venezuela and imprisoning their leader, all thanks to the pedophile rapist who wanted a Nobel Peace Prize and was actually given one by FIFA?!?! (yes, seriously, FIFA, the soccer group) just to shut him up, fucking everlasting joke that he is, while the multinational crime syndicate masquerading as the US government continues to burn down everything it touches. How’s the release of those Epstein files coming along again?

Anyway, things seem to be faring better on the Hicks’s homefront. Regarding March, I guess we’ll just have to play along and find out.

One thing I did read and enjoy in February was an advance copy of Steve Stred’s forthcoming Kaiju Killers, which is releasing as a two-part novella series. Steve was gracious enough to send me both parts so I could read the whole story in one go, and I thought it was pretty damn awesome. It’s definitely a welcome return to the world he established previously in Mastodon, and now I’m jonesing for the next book. Part One releases March 15 and is up for preorder now. I’m not sure when Part Two releases, so keep an eye on Steve’s Instagram or Facebook for details on that.

Here’s a look at the cover art for Kaiju Killers Part 1 and the blurb I sent to Steve!

Kaiju Killers is a brutal one-two punch spread across a pair of meaty novellas. The research lab at the heart of Mastodon was but a small glimpse into the world Steve Stred has smartly built and expanded upon here. Killer is a terrific and nasty entry in the canon of military-centric creature features that would make Dr. Moreau green with envy…and maybe razor-sharp lizard skin. — Michael Patrick Hicks, author of Friday Night Massacre

New Reviews

While February as a whole was lighter than January in terms of reading and reviewing, I still managed to lay down some thoughts on a few titles.

The Denizens by Brennan LaFaro

Twin Lotuses by Zhang Xiaoyu

Star Trek: The Last Starship #5

Death to Pachuco, Blink and You’ll Miss It, Be Not Afraid …In Brief

Red Empire (Rogue Team International Series Book 5) by Jonathan Maberry

Currently reading: The Hive by Ronald Malfi

Currently listening: The Butcher’s Masquerade (Dungeon Crawler Carl Book 5) by Matt Dinniman

Currently watching: Only Murders in the Building Season 5, Scrubs (2026). What are we calling these new episodes of Scrubs, anyway? Is it Season 10? Scrubs 2026? Scrubs: The Revival? I honestly don’t know, but I sure did enjoy the opening two episodes that launched this latest batch of episodes. I dug Scrubs back in the day, although I don’t think I ever finished the entire show and tapped out due to life things around season 6 or 7, maybe? I don’t know exactly. And while I wouldn’t have counted it among the shows I was excited to see being revived or rebooted, I was surprised at just how welcoming it felt to return to Sacred Heart Hospital with JD and crew. It was fun and funny, and it was only in watching these episodes that I realized I actually did miss these goofballs quite a bit. I desperately need this brand of silly, endearing humor, and I think we could all do with a bit more of that considering the state of the world right now. I’ll definitely be tuning in for the rest of the season and am curious to see what these kooks get up to next.

Currently playing: Fortnite (PS5) with my kiddo, Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous (PS5)

The radar of long-time Joe Ledger readers might ping at the mention of red in Red Empire, given our hero’s tumultuous past with The Red Order and their vampiric Red Knights. Since their debut way back in 2012’s Assassin’s Code, these blood sucking genetic whackadoos have grown into a series staple with multiple appearances along the way, including 2023’s Cave 13. Red Empire leans heavily on these earlier entries, but Jonathan Maberry does his best to make the convoluted history easy to digest. And hoo boy, does Red Empire ever have a lot of history behind it, so much so that Ledger even comments during a session of intelligence gathering that “Dan Brown just got a woody.”

Following an attack at a graveyard, Ledger has found himself targeted by the enigmatic and possibly demonic Nicodemus, just as a new threat rises from the ashes of the past. Some goofballs have been playing around with yersinia pestis, aka the bubonic plague, which swept through Europe in the Middle Ages. The Black Death was the deadliest pandemic in history, but modern science now offers the bad guys a chance to make this bacteria even more lethal as a genetically engineered, fast-acting, weaponized bioagent whose victims show signs of infection within hours and a painful death soon thereafter. When one of Rogue Team International’s own falls victim in London, the race is on to find a cure, the terrorists responsible, and to put an end to this latest threat before humanity itself goes extinct.

As with previous books, Maberry intercuts the present-day action with interludes flashing back to earlier periods that help give context to the unfolding events and to develop the bad guys and their motivations. Red Empire’s interludes just might be the farthest Maberry has stretched, reaching all the way back to the Crusades and the war between the Church, Islam, and The Red Order and their Knights, and the plague of the 1300s. Maberry weaves them all together in a complex tapestry of religious warfare, shadowy warriors, political infighting, and a conspiracy that carries through into the present.

There’s also the history of the many-aliased Mr. Church, a figure that’s almost as much of a riddle as his villainous counterpart Nicodemus. Maberry has been teasing this book as Mr. Church’s origin story for the last few years on his various social media accounts and he certainly delivers on that promise, adding yet more layers of complications to Ledger’s life and mental well-being. For his part, Ledger isn’t exactly on the most solid mental footing following the last couple books, forcing readers to question if he can survive this latest doomsday scenario both mentally and physically, given all of Church’s very many secrets and Nicodemus’s mind games.

Red Empire is a thick book in terms of both page count and plot. Coming in as the fifth entry in the Rogue Team International series and fifteenth overall Joe Ledger book, there’s a lot of unpack in here, although Maberry tries to make it accessible to new readers. For those who have been following along since Patient Zero, Red Empire offers the usual familiarities that have become staples of the series thus far. You’ve got your outsized, egomaniacal James Bond villain hellbent on world domination, genetically engineered super-bugs, and plenty of militaristic violence that’s blessedly free of American jingoism that would certainly feel false in our current political landscape. Although Ledger insists he’s apolitical, and Mr. Church’s war waves no flag other than humanity’s secular own, it’s hard not to see some incredibly relevant commentary in here about America in the age of Trump. It’s certainly a pleasure reading about Ledger wiping the floor with racist, Christofascist douchebags, although I wish more pages had been spent allowing his titanium-toothed attack-dog, Ghost, to maul the hell out of them along the way. There’s always the next book for that, I suppose. Hope, you see, it does spring eternal.

I think that with a series as long in the tooth as this one, fans may not be looking for originality as much as familiarity, and much of Red Empire certainly is familiar, at times feeling like a hodgepodge of prior books mashed together. Thankfully, it’s a comforting sort of familiarity, a pleasant bit of brain-candy, rather than a been there done that kind of bore. Besides, Empire’s climax might be among Maberry’s finest as Ledger does his best Die Hard impersonation as he and Havoc Team find themselves trapped in a towering office building thick with plague and terrorists, and the threats only get larger and wider in scale from there. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t completely on edge for the last third or so of this book, my hands gripping my e-reader tightly with tension and sweating bullets as I turned the pages and Maberry made me his emotional plaything. And, as with past Joe Ledger books, I finished feeling full and satisfied, and excited to see what comes next. Like I said, these books are the good kind of familiar, and I really can’t get enough of them.