Human Monsters: Medallion Press, March 2015, 400 pages. Human Monsters is the sixth and concluding volume of the Jake Helman Files, which began in Personal Demons. One of the Jake Helman books, Cosmic Forces, was nominated for the Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel, one of three Stoker nominations Lamberson has received.
Jake Helman is a private eye specializing in supernatural forces, to which most of the world remains oblivious. As Human Monsters opens, New York City has been devastated by a storm summoned by the storm demon Lilith, just before Jake killed her in the last book. Jake's girlfriend Maria Vasquez is a detective with the NYPD. She has been assigned to investigate a series of deaths attributed to a serial killer taking advantage of the storm, but which she knows to be collateral damage from Jake's last misadventure. Meanwhile, Jake is anxious to locate his missing assistant Carrie, who seems to have run off with all his files.
Flex: Angry Robot, March 2015, 423 pages, cover art by Stephen Meyer-Rassow. Flex is the first book in the 'Mancer trilogy. The second volume, The Flux appeared last October. Steinmetz was a Nebula Award nominee for his novelette "Sauerkraut Station."
Flex is set in an alternate version of our world where 'mancers can perform various kinds of magic, although it's been illegal in the U.S. since magic devastated Europe. And 'mancers can distill their magic into a crystal drug called "Flex," which anyone can take and become temporarily magical. Flex essentially allows you to bend random events to your favor, so you can have nearly anything you want, by apparent good fortune. But there is a backlash, called "the Flux," in which you will suffer from bad luck in proportion to how much you relied on Flex.
In the prologue, a young man uses Flex to win over a beautiful woman, whose boyfriend just happens to call at that moment to confess he's been cheating, which makes her want some angry revenge sex. That's pushing Flex a bit too far, and so after some amazing lovemaking, the gas main underneath them explodes. Then in the first two chapters, we meet Paul Tsabo, a former policeman filled with guilt from shooting a young 'mancer. His marriage has ended and he has gone to work for an insurance company, where he has discovered he has a talent for "bureaucromancy," performing magic with paper. His six-year-old daughter is staying with him when the gas main bursts. He uses his magic to tunnel through the flames separating him from his daughter, only to have the Flux from his bureaucromancy set her on fire.
The Battle: If you like labels, you can say we have two urban fantasies doing battle here, although I think both authors are trying to step outside the usual conventions of the sub-genre.
Human Monsters starts out at a slight disadvantage, because it's the sixth in a series. Lamberson spends most of the first 25 pages filling in background information that regular readers of the series surely already know. Meanwhile, Flex introduces us for the first time to the type of magic in Steinmetz's universe, effectively illustrating just how dangerous it can be.
So there's a lot more drama to the opening 25 pages of Flex. And, as always with Steinmetz, the prose is first rate. Even though Paul, the main character of Flex, doesn't appear until thirteen pages in, I feel like I've already gotten a pretty good sense of his personality. The guy was having a tough go of things even before his daughter caught fire, and my sympathy for him makes me want to keep reading.
I don't yet feel that kind of connection to the characters in Human Monsters. In the opening 25 pages, Maria Vasquez describes some of the bizarre experiences she's had hanging out with Jake, including battling "zonbies" (dunno yet how they differ from zombies) and demons in Central America and back home in New York, but in a dispassionate way that hasn't much drawn me into the story so far. Perhaps reading further would have pulled me in, but the Battle of the Books is cruel that way.
THE WINNER: Flex by Ferrett Steinmetz
Flex advances to the second round to face either Blood Will Follow by Snorri Kristjansson or Hexed by Michael Alan Nelson.
To see the whole bracket, click here.
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