Monster Hunter International

De: Larry Correia

Narrado por: Oliver Wyman

Five days after Owen Zastava Pitt pushed his insufferable boss out of a 14th story window, he woke up in the hospital with a scarred face, an unbelievable memory, and a job offer.

It turns out that monsters are real. All the things from myth, legend, and B-movies are out there, waiting in the shadows. Officially secret, some of them are evil, and some are just hungry. On the other side are the people who kill monsters for a living. Monster Hunter International is the premier eradication company in the business. And now Owen is their newest recruit.

It's actually a pretty sweet gig, except for one little problem. An ancient entity known as the Cursed One has returned to settle a centuries-old vendetta. Should the Cursed One succeed, it means the end of the world, and MHI is the only thing standing in his way.

With the clock ticking towards Armageddon, Owen finds himself trapped between legions of undead minions, belligerent federal agents, a cryptic ghost who has taken up residence inside his head, and the cursed family of the woman he loves. Business is good.... Welcome to Monster Hunter International.

©2009 Larry Correia (P)2011 Audible, Inc.

Entertaining but juvenile

The story was somewhat entertaining but mostly campy, juvenile and underwhelming. Characters and dialogue are very shallow.

MONSTERS ARE REAL !!!!

Well the situation is like this:
MONSTERS ARE REAL most of the creatures from books, fairy tales and movies are real, perhaps they look different, maybe they act different, but without doubt they are real!!!

And in this book Vampires sparkle only if you torch them!!!! :-)

The story of MHI began more than hundred years ago during the infestation of some ungodly creatures;
Some people decided it's time to fight back and they formed an organization, later called " Monster Hunter International" (MHI) , they helped everyone by destroying monsters for a small fee.
Government of that time denied any information about creatures to general public, but it also supported Monster hunting.

"There's a federal bounty paid on undesirable unnaturals.
It's called the PUFF,"
"Perpetual Unearthly Forces Fund,".

For the Price list follow the link below


In 1995 because of some strange accident government decided to break up MHI's Monopoly in this business, and the Monster Control Bureau, a special unit in Justice Department, with special powers not only to kill monsters but also witnesess and victims who won't keep silent about their experience, took over and MHI was out of business for a while.


But as usual government can't be the best in everything and in 2000 MHI was brought back online.

Based on the rumours and prophesies "The END" is near!!!
For hunters it means that big payday is coming!!!!

Fantastic!

This book was EXCELLENT. It was a little bit slow at times, but more than made up for that with the action-packed battles. If a book could be badass, this would be that book.

Good Fun, Not Too Serious

This book was good fun. If you want a series that is going to be a serious read, stay away, but this one plays like an enjoyable action movie...which is the obvious intent. I will be reading more in this series.

Action movie monster-hunting fun

While I really liked Correia's Grimnoir trilogy, I'm not that fond of urban fantasy gun porn, so I probably would have passed on MHI, except that Audible put the first book on sale for $1.99. So why not?

Monster Hunter International is a great big cheesy action flick, and more than any book I can ever recall saying this about, it really, really read like the author had the movie visuals in his head as he wrote. He wants MHI to be a big-budget summer blockbuster movie, and I admit it probably would look pretty cool. It would also be one of those big dumb movies that are fun for the special effects and the action scenes, and probably feature pretty actors who can't act and care even less about consistency and suspension of disbelief than the book.

Don't get me wrong - MHI was fun. I probably liked it better than I liked Harry Dresden. Owen Pitt bears suspicious evidence of being a bit of authorial wish-fulfillment (great big guy who used to be an accountant, a gun nut, and of course an almost unkillable action hero who gets the hot girl by virtue of True Love and not actually doing much other than shooting lots of things to impress her), but if you want an urban fantasy hero who's all testosterone and none of that whiny faux-gallantry of Harry's, Pitt's got all of that plus a dose of Chosen One.

Oh, the plot? Well, Owen gets attacked by his weenie middle manager boss, who went and got bitten by a werewolf and thinks this is the path to upper management or something. Pitt throws him out a window, and wakes up in the hospital being grilled by federal agents who slap a bunch of made-up secrecy laws on him. Then a mercenary shows up and gives him a business card for Monster Hunter International. This leads to him joining a monster-hunter organization, killing lots of undead, and having to save the world from a medium-weight Big Bad who wants to summon Cthulhu. (Not actually called Cthulhu in the book, but same basic idea.)

The premise is basically that all the monsters of myth and legend are real, more or less. As is usual in these sorts of stories, somehow you've got a world full of vampires, werewolves, faeries, ghosts, chupacabras, and eldritch horrors, but the general population remains unaware of them. MHI makes money by hunting down and killing supernatural creatures. There is a lot of kvetching about the government and bureaucracy, with the government Men In Black being obstacles to the MHI actually getting stuff done. This is actually kind of funny since MHI gets its money from government bounties on the creatures it hunts. ("The government sucks! Except when we can get rich off of taxpayer-provided subsidies...")

There's nothing special about the writing or the setting, but for fast entertainment (despite the length of the book), Monster Hunter International was enough fun that I'll probably try the next book in the series. This is really a book for genre nerds, as in- jokes abound and no trope goes unexploited. And the trailer park elves and heavy metal-loving orcs were pretty funny.

Stunning Performace, Libertarian Nonsense

I came to this the the Grimnoir Chronicles, which I thoroughly enjoyed. This, well, it's not that, and it's pretty clear that it's both a first book and self-published.

The narrator gives a stunning performance and as a Southerner I appreciate having a story set thoughtfully in the South. That said, I almost couldn't get through the first few chapters because of the heavy-handed use of simple-minded Libertarian gun nut talking points and knee-jerk anti-government stuff. Fortunately, that tapers off a bit as the book goes on.

Still, the evil uber-villain gets a deeply evolved character where everyone who works for the government remains a caricatured by-product of libertarian paranoia. The eponymous Monster Hunters run around hating and resenting everything to do with the corrupt and incompetent government, all while happily collecting windfall paydays from a government fund. So, there's that.

But the performance is stunning, and the writing is excellent when the characters refrain from talking about politics, pretending to know what liberals actually think about the world, or embodying a self-conscious, wooden pretense that they live in a post-racial world. Seriously, when the book sticks to the fantasy part of the story, it's great.

The gun porn will delight gun nuts, and is probably a great anthropological window into the gun nut imagination for the rest of us. The gore levels escalate to the near comical, and the plot is predictable, and yet somehow fresh.

tl;dr: Awesome narrator. Entertaining romp. Echo-chamber, self-affirming red meat for libertarians, and written porn for gun nuts.

Good story in here but you have to be persistent

I came to this book after listening to Correia's Hard Magic series, which were fast-paced and fascinating. The story in this book is hampered by frequent diversions into dime-store libertarian polemics and exhausting, jargony descriptions of firearms.

If you read all of that and it made you go "Woo!" then have at it, but it really deadens the narrative. Especially when I'm wondering how these characters resolve their hatred of government with the fact that most of their income comes from government funds.

But there's a great story here and a lot of potential for the rest of the series, so I will probably keep reading in the hopes that Correia becomes more interested in the story than he is the ranting.

Meh

80% gun porn, 10% monster hunting, 10 % cringe inducing 'love' story. Probably would have scored worse If I hadn't used a game to half distract me while I listened to it.

Monsters and Gun lovers this is for you.

If you love monsters and guns this is the book for you. This book was suggested to because Im a big fan of the Dresden files. This is also urban fiction thats basically about good vs evil. There are some similarities but for the most part the Harry Dresden and Owen Z Pitt are different.

You can tell its the authors first published work. Its a little clumsy at times and unnecessarily long. Its also predictable.

The narrator did a great job! I enjoyed listening. I plan on listening to the next book in this series.

A Fun Read You Just Can't Take Seriously

Go into it expecting a good bit of fun and monster-infused violent pulp fiction, and it is possible to really like this book. If you are coming to this from the Grimnoir Chronicles, you may be a little disappointed, but you will recognize the fast pace, shoot-em-up style that works well for Correia. Come looking for literature and you'll probably be traumatized.

Correia serves up action and the supernatural pretty well. If that is why you're reading, you'll be fine. He is great at keeping your interest. It is hard to put down.

It is also hard not to roll your eyes in places. The characters are stock parts bought right off of the shelves. Except the main character who is basically loaded to his eyeballs with every single trait it takes to make a dime novel hero except a soul.

Correia uses the rest of the cast to make the book out to be a manifesto for libertarianism. Every good guy is a government-hating, rugged individualist, gun nut. Every bad guy is a bureaucratic, authoritarian. And there's no depth in the story as to why or a description of personal motivation, the characters are like sandwich boards for "evil bureaucrat" or "gun-toting, freedom-loving hero."

Another thing that some readers may love, and I kind of like to a point (a point, that is, which is exceeded very early), is Correia's in depth - sensual, really - description of gunfights. I feel like it goes way too far and drags on the story, but some readers may love it. Correia's characters do not just draw, aim, and shoot. They will reach for the stained hickory grip of their custom two-tone chrome 1911, pull the well-lubed slide back to chamber a 405 grain .45 caliber bullet, then fall into a standard weaver stance, calm their breathing, focus on the front site post of their, after market, tritium sites, squeeze the trigger to allow the hammer to strike the firing pin which, in turn, strikes the primer at the base of the shell, this primer then ignites the main charge causing the powder to burn and the pressure of that rapid expansion of gasses to propel the led slug down the barrel causing the soft metal of the slug to engage the rifling of the 4" barrel and on, and on, and on. It wouldn't be so bad if it only happened once. Anytime a gun is mentioned it gets the full catalog description. I don't mind guns in real life, and they are certainly appropriate to this story; still, it's like "enough already!" The guns have more personality than the people.

The reader is ok. He seems to be talking through gritted teeth even when not characterizing a voice, but that is not inappropriate as lots of the characters are tough guys. He does some voice characterizations which work well. The overall effort is less than brilliant. A gentleman's 3/5.

Despite my focus on its faults, I like the book. The action is tight and plentiful and I am a sucker for that stuff. Planning on continuing the series.