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Title: Strange Company
Series: Strange Company #1
Author: Nick Cole
Rating: 2 of 5 Stars
Genre: SF
Pages: 419
Words: 150K
~huff~ Well then. When I was reading the Forgotten Ruin series, I wondered which author to blame for the style it was written in, Jason Anspach or Nick Cole. This book answered that in spades. It fell squarely on Nick Cole’s shoulders. It was all his fault and this book was completely his fault, as he was sole author here.
Let me be clear. This was not badly written. It was not poorly executed. But it was written in a style that I detest and in a manner that I’ll only read over my own dead body from here on out. Much like Solzhenitsyn’s Experiment, this was my own Literary Experiment in Masochism. It was a complete success. Or failure, if you’re a normal person.
And that cover? I love that cover. A lot! If the book had been even 1/10th as awesome, well, it would have been awesome. Pooh.
This was some SF space version of Forgotten Ruin. We have our narrator who tells us everything except that cool action’y stuff we want to read about. Do you want to know the big secret lie that the nigh immortal rulers of the galaxy have been hiding and is about to be divulged to Strange Company? Too bad. You get the story of why a kid joined Strange Company. Who promptly dies on the next page. Now is that awesome or what? And can I get a “please repeat that gung-ho military as many times as possible please” while I’m at it? I can? Fantastic. Nothing is more awesome than a catch phrase used ad nauseum.
This has confirmed to me that Jason Anspach is the storyteller behind the Galaxy’s Edge duo and that Nick Cole is whatever he is. It also has shown me that if I start a new series by them and I don’t like the first book, that series will never change and I will never end up liking it. That’s not a bad thing to learn.
There is a second book, but I would rather cut my own throat with a rusty spoon, scoop out my esophagus with said spoon and then eat it than read that second book. Nick Cole gets no more chances from me.
★★☆☆☆
From the Publisher
Stack bodies, get paid, get to the ship.
“If you can survive Reaper Platoon in the Strange, then Ghost or Dog Platoons will get you for their own. Best to steer clear of the freaks in Voodoo, kid.”
Surrounded and outgunned, a group of private military contractors known as “Strange Company” find themselves on a remote planet at the edge of known space, and on the losing end of a bad contract. Orbital D-beam strikes, dropships bristling with auto-guns, missiles, and troops – even Monarch space marines in state-of-the-art advanced battle rattle – will try to prevent the company from reaching the exfil LZ and getting off-world.
For Strange, that means it’s time to hang tough and get it on with as much hyper-kinetic violence as they can muster to get clear of the whole mess. And what the Strange can’t get done by violent assault and crazy firefights, they’ll get done by the freaks of Voodoo Platoon – operators who have been changed by the Dark Labs into powerful and unnervingly unnatural asymmetrical weapons.
This is the Strange Company. Because in the Strange, it’s always really Strange. Join them – and get ready for full auto combat at the furthest limits of human exploration
