Michael The Super Assassin, resident of Drama World

Title: Iron House

Author: John Hart

Progress: 54%

Platform: Kindle

Amazon Rating: four out of five stars

I’m halfway into Iron House, the first book of my little 107 books project. Most of the readers on Amazon love it, and the critics seem happy with it as well.

So what makes this book tick? What am I learning from it?

First, I learned that reading big blocks of italics is annoying. The prologue is just a couple pages, but in italics.

Second, Hart’s prose often strikes me as pretentious, as if he’s trying a little too hard to sound writerly.

“His world was black and white, except for where it was red.”

That sentence bugged me to no end and I was 300 words into the book.

Wasn’t then the world black, white and red? And if the kid, who is running through a forest during winter, is seeing lots of black and white, why would he be seeing red? There is blood on his hands, sure, but implying that his world had a huge amount of red in it seemed a vast overstatement. I would rather just be told he had blood on his hands. A kid with blood on his hands is dramatic enough. I don’t need the poetic imagery exercise.

Also, it reminded me of that riddle that was hilarious in third grade… “And what’s black and white and red all over?”

Another taste of Hartian prose: “Frozen to the blade of a knife no child should own.”

What kind of knife should a child own? Is this a big knife? A pen knife? One of those jagged-edged affairs that Rambo might wield? I can think of a lot of knives children shouldn’t own.

So this novel and I got off to a rough start. Hart’s voice was grating on my reader’s ear. I suppose that happens a lot. You need to learn the rhythm of an author, get accustomed to how he uses the language. Sometimes it’s difficult.

I worked through it and eventually got into a reader’s flow, that golden state where time flies and you flow along effortlessly on the current of a well told story.

The story revolves around Michael, who is the kind of protagonist I will now dub “The Super Assassin™.”

Super Assassins are super heroes without costumes, and they show up a lot in books and movies. They are weapon’s experts, and can kill with everything from a paper clip to a bazooka to a ball of twine to a poison made from hummus, lemon juice and bubble gum. They are constantly referred to as “good” and as “talented.” They can beat up people, sneak around while almost invisible and are, for some reason, fantastic in bed.

Sometimes they have regrets about what they do, and the story is about redemption, about how the cold blooded killer discovers his moral compass, but too late in his life to do him any good other than cause his undoing. My favorite movie about one of those guys is Grosse Point Blank starring John Cusack. Rent it immediately if you have any interest in the assassin genre.

In other cases, the killers love what they do because they kill only for good reasons. James Bond is one of those. The Punisher from Marvel Comics is another.

The Super Assassins are great fictional characters because they are powerful, highly skilled, extremely rich, sexually irresistible and not bound in by any moral code but their own. In short, they are what every man wants to be.

Also, they are dangerous bad boys with five o’clock shadow and great taste in clothes and fabulously rich, which makes them what every woman wants.

So as fictional characters, they are fantastic. They appeal to pretty much everyone.

It’s too bad they don’t exist. They are too skilled, too bullet proof, too able to do the impossible over and over again.

They are also too rich. In the assassin mythology, they live in swanky homes, tastefully furnished, and have endless piles of cash to pull from. Killing people would seem to be big business.

In reality, there is not much market for real assassins. The guys who actually do it for a living are idiots and thugs, working as bag men and muscle for gangsters who are all but extinct.

Check this out…

http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/the-iceman-confessions-of-a-mafia-hitman/

That guy is not sexy. He’s a goon. He’s scary. He didn’t get rich. He made a living and not much more. He is disgusting. He would be great bad guy, but not a hero in a best-selling novel. But he is an absolutely real assassin.

Michael is not. Michael is the unreal kind of super assassin. He is the product of a tough childhood in a brutal orphanage and also his powerful sense of justice mixed with a primal need to protect his younger, weaker, sickly and sensitive brother.

As a backstory, it’s deviously designed to make us sympathize with Michael, and to also have a reason to root for his brutality. When he kills, we are rooting for him to do it well. He kills only people who have it coming, always careful not to injure civilians. What a sweetheart.

The more I read Iron House, the more I know this character is designed specifically to manipulate me, to press all the dark emotion buttons…revenge, anger, bloodlust, righteousness…and yet I don’t care. I like Michael and I like how good he is at everything he does. I can’t wait for him to actually kill the bad guys, who are pretty awful and prove it over and over again, like when one of them pours gasoline over a pregnant woman and teases her by lighting a cigarette and dangling it over her. Nice. That guy needs shooting.

Around Michael, the Super Assassin, revolves a world as far from reality as he is. Everything is too big, too dramatic, too emotional and too convenient. Everyone is beautiful, often covered in some kind of grit or dirt, or sometimes their prettiness obscured by age, but no matter…the beauty shines through. Michael is beautiful. So is his brother. So is his the mother who adopted his brother. So is the mother’s husband. So is the crazy hillbilly witch who lives out in the woods. So is the dirt-covered hillbilly daughter of the witch who wears next to nothing and lives like a mountain panther. That is one extremely physically attractive group people trying to kill each other up in the Virginian mountains.

It’s unreal, exaggerated, contrived and filled with stereotypes. And yet, it’s entertaining. I can’t wait to see what happens next. In the last 10 pages Hart has added in a hint of Satanism, ritual sacrifice, and incest. This is Drama World, a world where nothing is like ours, where Super Assassins roam the land and witches covered in grime can seduce rich men on their way to becoming senators.

What’s not to like?

What have I learned from Iron House so far? If you are entertaining, you can be as contrived and unrealistic as you want.

And don’t write in italics for more than 20 words.