This book really hit the spot for me ... a modern-era 'urban fantasy' with an anti-hero protagonist who starts out as not some innocent wide-eyed waif coming of age or pure-souled heroic archetype striving to right all the wrongs of the world, but rather a deeply flawed and emotionally dysfunctional everyman that stumbles into hero-ness (is that a word?) through a combination of blind luck and bad planning.
Dave is a safety engineer for a deep water oil drilling rig, and when said rig accidentally drills a hole into the underworld and unleashes a horde of orc- and goblin-like inhabitants upon the world, he steps up to risk his neck for his friends and coworkers. He somehow takes out an orc-boss and in the process gains superhuman powers. Dave doesn't understand what happened, and neither does anyone else, and he's hesitant to share his new-found powers and his increasing awareness of impossible knowledge lest he discover that it was in fact all either (a) a dream, (b) a bad acid trip, or (c) he's simply completely lost his mind and none of this is real.
The story starts out fairly slow, and paints a very disagreeable picture of who Dave is in the first few pages ... he's not the kind of character that you instantly bond with, and you are definitely lead to consider him to be fairly repulsive as a human being, but if you keep your mind open and a sense of humor about you, you should eventually warm up to him. He has his good parts, but they are usually kept leashed by his drinking/gambling/drugging/whoring habits, and he has to do a lot of soul searching to begin to understand, accept, and hopefully change his wayward ways. Dave is thrust into an unimaginable situation, forced to try to make the best of it, comes to understand that he's changed / is changing, and tries to do some good where he can. He does succeed at that ... doing *some* good.
Secondary / tertiary characters are mostly interesting, some quite entertaining, although as this is the first book in a series many of these characters are not yet fully developed. I expect to see many of these people again in future installments, for good or ill. One of the interesting mechanisms of this book is the author lets us see a couple/few events from the viewpoints of different characters ... I don't mean Event A from Our Hero's POV and Even B from Characted B's POV ... I mean we see the same event from two or more different viewpoints, and we get to see how it's understood and interpreted differently by those different characters even though it's the same event. I really like that particular style of storytelling.
I started this book about 8 p.m. and finally turned out the light at 2 a.m. having read about 80% of it ... couldn't keep my eyes open any longer, but I seriously did not want to put it down. Finished it the next morning. There are so few books that grab me like that ... so very few books that I can honestly say something like "I couldn't put it down" or "I couldn't tear my eyes away from the story" ... it was that entertaining. Not deep emotional drama, but lots of (small) twists and turns that made you want to find out what happens next, enough actual chuckles at situations or dialogue to keep my brain active so that I hardly noticed the passage of time as I read.
If you like urban fantasy stories, dark(ish) humor, and a counter-intuitive anti-hero, you should give this book a chance. You may be quite pleased with it.
Emergence: Dave vs. the Monsters
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