Morgon Newquist

Hellgate: The Neighborhood Watch book 1 by Morgon Newquist is a story about things that are more than they seem. Which is entirely appropriate, since the cover image and the urban fantasy tag normally would have made me steer clear of a book that ended up exceeding my expectations.

Emilia, the pink-haired girl on the cover, is what I take to be typical of female-oriented urban fantasy. Or perhaps more precisely, paranormal romance. Although my impressions really come from the cover art of books I don’t read, with the exception of The Hunger Games [Amazon link] by Suzanne Collins. She is young, fashionable, very pretty, but also vain about it. She’s on the rebound from a relationship with a man with Dark Triad personality traits, and swears she’ll never do it again, but of course we all know that isn’t true.

Needing a fresh start, Emilia moves in with her widowed grandfather who is suffering from dementia. Everyone of course thinks she isn’t up to the job, including Emilia’s very accomplished mother, and Emilia herself is full of doubts. It would be easy to cast aspersions on Emilia’s vanity and fecklessness, but if I’m really honest with myself, was I any less foolish when I was her age? It is easy to conveniently forget all the dumb things we ourselves have done.

What is interesting about Emilia is while she is not precisely an example of φρόνησῐς, the virtue of judging rightly in all circumstances, her heart very much is in the right place. For example, Emilia’s mother Lydia is notably absent from the care of her own father. Perhaps she is too busy, and her time is very valuable, but ensuring that your own father is cared for is a very basic building block of right action.

Of course, as the book goes on, it becomes clear that Robert would have resisted otherwise reasonable requests to move either into his daughter’s home or into assisted care, reasons far beyond elderly stubbornness, so perhaps we can also cut Lydia just a little bit of slack. There is a sweet sadness in caring for someone with mental decline, a person who is a shadow of themselves. It may be that Lydia, for all her worldly accomplishments, isn’t cut out for facing the reality of who her father has become.

Emilia very much lives in the shadow of, and in constant rebellion against her mother. There is a very basic personality clash at the root of this. Emilia simply isn’t as organized or put together as her mother. It is quite challenging to parent when your children end up with a personality that is opposed to your own in some basic dimension. For example, my wife and I are both introverted, but my daughter is extremely extroverted, to a degree that honestly puzzles me because it is so foreign to the way my own mind works. It is a constant struggle not to impose myself on her. So I have some sympathy for Lydia, even as she has clearly gone too far in trying to form her daughter’s character.

And as the events of the book make clear, Emilia is made of stronger stuff than her mother imagines. Which is good, when Hell threatens to break loose in her grandfather’s purportedly sleepy suburban neighborhood. And since this really is at least a little bit of the kind of book that the cover promises, there is a hot jerk guy and a hot dweeby/sullen/kind of strange guy. Not being the target audience for this part of the book, I can offer no comment, other than it seems to conform to type as I understand it.

The Neighborhood Watch will probably never be my favorite series, as it is written in a mode that is primarily designed to appeal to women, but I was entertained by Emilia taking on the role her grandfather had filled, and impressed by her willingness to do what it takes. I am sufficiently intrigued to read the next volume in the series, just to see what happens. Which is all you can ask for from a book.

Hellgate is available at Silver Empire direct from the publisher or on Amazon. I was provided an advanced review copy through my affiliate relationship with Silver Empire.… (plus d'informations)

I received a free copy of this book via Booksprout. Thanks to the author, Morgon Newquist, for reaching out on Twitter. I’m always happy to review new stuff.

As soon as I finished the first chapter, I was hooked. If this chapter didn’t start life as a short story, I think it could easily have stood alone, and been a damn fine piece of work. Each character comes to life in a few short pages, and the stage is set for everything that follows from the unexplained tragedy of the Rampage. I wept a little bit when I read it the first time, and then I wept again when I read it again at the end, now knowing why.

The question this book asks is: what is the greatest weakness of a superhero?

One might guess from the eponymous Achilles, the disgraced hero who nearly destroyed the city he was supposed to protect, that each and every superhero has their characteristic weakness, a secret that can be used to defeat them. While this is true, it isn’t as interesting as the realization that heroes [and villains] share our fallen human nature, no matter their powers, and are just as prone to vanity, foolishness, and moral turpitude.

A man who cannot control his passions is forever weak, no matter how much he can lift.

This sets the stage for Newquist’s world-building, which is about the kind of society that would emerge when powers can get you fame, influence, or money, but no one has been granted unusual wisdom or exceptionally good judgment beyond human ken.

In Serenity City, being a superhero is much like being an Instagram personality: a pretty facade hiding a winner-take-all mad dash for endorsements where appearance rules all. Into this cutthroat and remorseless world steps Victoria Westerdale, our young heroine and POV character. She is young, but not young enough not to be disillusioned by the phoniness and media-whoring of the hero business.

As the story progresses, we learn just how deeply Victoria was wounded by that world, and why she fled from her chance at fame and fortune for a walk up flat in the bad part of town and the night shift at a seedy convenience store. Nearly twenty years after Achilles fought his former friend and colleague Pendragon, devastating the city, Victoria finds herself drawn into all of the unanswered questions that lingered from that terrible day. Her inability to let this mystery go is in part because the answers give her the ability to finally stop running away from her own past.

Heroes Fall is the first novel in a shared universe, funded by a Kickstarter campaign. The other four authors are J.D. Cowan, Kai Wai Cheah, Jon Mollison, and Richard Watts. I’ve previously reviewed a short story by Kai Wai Cheah, so I’m likely to give at least the initial five novels a read. Given how much I enjoyed Heroes Fall, I am looking forward to Newquist’s sequels as well.… (plus d'informations)