'Nemesai' – John Urbancik & Brian Keene (DarkFluidity)

We're now into Week 5 of Brian Keene's Reader Recession Relief where every week, a different title is made available for 99c (or whatever the equivalent is where you are). My aim is to read along with each discounted title, as the discount hits, and that has led me to 'Nemesai' this week. As much as I'm all about revisiting old favourites, especially these days, this read-along is also about filling in the gaps and that's exactly what I got to do with 'Nemesai', a book that I somehow missed back in 2020 (to be fair, I was off sick with stress and gearing up for a dose of COVID). My copy turned up last night and it's only a short read (127 pages) so I got all comfy and started reading...

It starts with the red dreams. Everyone has them every night. But they’re just a precursor, because something deep within the bowels of the earth has awakened—something we defeated and sent back thousands of years ago. First, there are scouts which decimate cities, and the armies of humanity find their weapons impotent. Enter Atiya Destine, professional adventurer and mercenary. She and her team will venture deep into the middle of China to follow the scouts back to where they came from: a hole in earth once protected by thousands of warriors awaiting the return of humanity’s Nemesai .Enter Jane, a survivor of the destruction of Shanghai. Enter Stefan, trying to put down the unstoppable Nemesai with his fists. They’ll enter the tomb of China’s first emperor, untouched for thousands of years, with rivers of mercury and pearls as stars in its sky hiding an underground city. Somewhere in that tomb, Atiya Destine hopes to find a way of driving back the rising army before it’s too late. Enter the Nemesai. They cannot be stopped.

'Nemesai' is a short, sharp and basically awesome dose of the best mercenaries money can buy fighting giant creatures from underneath the earth. There's no fluff here, everything is all stripped back and lean which gives us a book that is incredibly easy to get into and very difficult to put down. I finished it in one sitting, which is increasingly rare these days, so that should tell you how I found it. The only thing that bugged me a little bit was that the ending was a little vague and by that I mean that I was left wondering if there's a plan for more of these books as while the plot itself is self-contained, things are left open for more stories to come. Or are they? I'm still trying to get my head round it but either way, I'm good. It's hard not to be when you've got 'Nemesai' playing in your head (I would love to see the Nemesai in iMAX but anyway...)

Urbancik and Keene don't give themselves a lot of room to play in so it's all credit to them that they fill 'Nemesai' with plenty of cool stuff and still find time to make Destine's team relatable and people that you want to succeed even if they're not that nice (apart from Johnson, screw you Johnson). Along with all the action, 'Nemesai' also comes across as a cautionary tale of how everything can hang on co-operation, the one thing that humans just aren't good at. Co-operation and keeping decent records...

There's plenty here to get your teeth into then, thanks to Urbancik and Keene really being on it in terms of backing up a cool concept with characters and firepower to match. Now... what happens next...?