By Lyndsey Holder
Griffiths, Michael D. The Chronicles of Jack Primus Book 1. Living Dead Press (January 1, 2010). 202 pp. $15.99 USD. ISBN: 978-1935458432.
Perhaps close to a year ago, someone posted a fake review of the Twilight movie on YouTube. It’s long since been taken down, which is unfortunate because the reviewer was talking about a Twilight movie that I would have wanted to see: one where Bella turns out to be a vampire slayer and ends up waging an enormous battle against all vampires. The movie ends with Bella riding off on her motorcycle, knowing that the next wave of enemies will be hunting her soon, but being way too cool to worry about that. Although the fake review made me laugh, it also made me sad because I wanted to watch that movie so badly, but I knew it didn’t exist. I would have read more than thirty pages of Twilight if Bella had been a tough, motorcycle-riding monster hunter. I think that my absolute, unrestrained need for such a book must have been so great that it became an entity unto itself and flew, disembodied, through space and time until it hit Michael D. Griffiths right in the brain, causing him to create The Chronicles of Jack Primus.
Jack Primus, besides having the last name of one of my favourite bands from the 1990s, starts off being vaguely awesome in a way that is difficult to define. If there is ever a Jack Primus movie, someone needs to go back in time and get young Jack Nicholson to play him because he has exactly that same kind of tough and unpredictable quality that Nicholson lends to all of his roles.
There is no long, arduous backstory. The book drops you into the middle of the action with astonishing speed. Jack finds out that there is a heck of a lot of evil all around him and does what any normal, superawesome guy played by a young Jack Nicholson would do: he fights back. This seals his fate – the evil now knows about him and is hunting him down. The life he has always known is now lost to him and this new one that he’s been dragged into is dangerous in ways that he’s not used to. He makes mistakes, which is wonderful because it underlines the fact that, despite what has happened, he is just a person (a superawesome, butt-kicking person, maybe, but a person nonetheless and one who is as capable of being tricked and manipulated as anyone else).
As a reviewer, I feel like I never shut up about clumsy sentence structure and spelling errors in books and for this, I apologize, but it is an empty apology because I will never, ever, ever stop, especially when it is an otherwise great book. There is nothing that drags me out of a book faster than a misspelled word or a poorly-worded sentence, especially in a story that I’m really enjoying. If bad stories have bad spelling, it doesn’t matter because I was never “in” the story in the first place, so I can’t be taken out of it. It’s the difference between watching a play with bad writing and bad acting and watching a play with just bad acting. The former you can just dismiss as being a load of crap, but the latter will forever haunt you because you’ll be constantly wondering how it would have been if the actors hadn’t forgotten their lines, delivered emotional monologues with less feeling than a plank of wood, or been drunk. During the review, I was so tempted to change little things here and there because this is an amazing, fantastic story and deserves better.
I think I am coming off a bit like an obsessive ex-girlfriend here and for that, I also insincerely apologize. If I ever meet that bad spelling and awkward sentence structure that has shamelessly subverted this beautiful story in a bar, I can promise you that I will instigate a drunken brawl which will be so vicious and peppered with profanities that it will become the stuff of legend.
I must really like this story because, even when I’m talking crap about it, I’m still praising it. I think this is because it’s exactly what I’ve been missing for so long: a proper action hero. I love protagonists like Jack Primus: brash and rough and not afraid of fisticuffs, giving and taking beatings with style and snarky one-liners. I grew up on reruns of The Avengers, The Saint and James Bond movies starring Roger Moore. I still idolize Emma Peel – I bought a pair of boots once because someone said they were the kind of boots she’d wear. Lately, I’ve noticed that there is a dearth of this kind of hero in books and movies. They tried to bring Indiana Jones back, but he lacked the style and sheer butt-kickery that was inherent to the Indiana Jones of the previous movies. Star Wars has now moved from Han Solo, the ultra-slick space cowboy, to Anakin Skywalker, the pretentious and overdramatic emo kid. Even vampires these days have gone from the cold, calculating evil of Bram Stoker’s Dracula to the whiny and foppish Cullens of Twilight fame.
The Chronicles of Jack Primus isn’t just a good book. It’s a good book that gives me hope that the Age of the Hero isn’t over yet, that not every book is about someone who complains bitterly about his or her station in life while doing things that make it worse. The Chronicles of Jack Primus proves that there is still at least one person writing stories about protagonists who, when faced with a horrible situation, get out there and fix it with such enormous amounts of charm, wit and brute force that even Emma Peel would be impressed.
Purchase The Chronicles of Jack Primus Book 1 through Amazon.com