Quincy Harker Year One – Great book marred by a few issues.

Quincy Harker: Year One (Quincy Harker Demon Hunter 1-4) by John G. Hartness.
My rating: ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ out of 5 stars.

Straight out of the pages of the legendary vampire novel Dracula comes a demon hunter for the modern world. Mina Murray and Jonathan Harker had a son. They named him Quincy. His guardian angel calls him Q. Dracula calls him nephew.

Demons call him The Reaper.

“There are things in this world that men and women aren’t meant to understand. We aren’t supposed to know these things exist, much less how to fight them. The things that go bump in the night, the monsters in the closet, the shadow out of the corner of your eye — that’s where I live.”

Year One collects the first four short novels in the Quincy Harker, Demon Hunter series.

I kind of stumbled on this book by chance and I am rather glad I did. This is a roller coaster ride of supernatural adventures, monsters, demons, vampires, really fun dialogue and so on and so forth.

The main protagonist is my kind of character. He is generally competent, strong, kicks ass and has a quick, sharp and really foul mouth. His uncle, the one and only count Dracula is yet another take on Dracula but it is a rather good one. Then there is Dracula’s manservant, Renfield (of course) who is a rather hilarious but very competent take on a manservant for the most famous vampire ever.

As the story progresses Harker’s entourage slowly expands and the most noteworthy new acquaintances are a mysterious agent from an obscure and very secret government organisation. His name is, surprise, surprise, Smith. Then there is a police detective who hates his guts (at first). Both characters are as competent, as ass-kicking and as sharp and foul mouthed as Harker. There are also more to them both than what first meets the eye.

There are of course a number of bad guys floating around, ranging from stupid bureaucrats, equally stupid street thugs, stupid demons, smart demons etc… Actually the entire menagerie of classical supernatural creatures, ghosts etc… are around. Luckily they are not just thrown in to create some sensation effect but they all have their place in the story.

The book is really four short novellas turned into one normal sized book. Normally I’m not too keen on short story collections but these four novellas are still reasonably sized and they do string together rather well story wise. Kin of like four big chapters of a book.

The story overall is good. There’s really a lot of things I like in it and it is well written. The book is not for the easily offended who have a problem with adult language though. For the rest of us the dialogue is, at times, quite hilarious. There are of course plenty of action weaved into the story and a few surprise moments when people discover that there are indeed things that go bump in the night. I really like those.

On the whole I really liked this book and it would easily have gotten 5 out of 5 stars if it wasn’t for one really annoying issue. The author just had to sprinkle his woke and obviously left leaning opinions and comments all over the book. That is so annoying and unnecessary. Just leave your race, religion and political views out of the damned books! At least if it is fiction and fantasy books that you read for entertainment only. One of my favourite (and very successful) authors have very strong opinion about politics, guns etc… but he keeps that out of his books.

Fortunately the bulk of the book and the story is really, really good and fun to read so this is one series that I’m going to continue reading.