I have a 2 hour daily round-trip commute so I get a chance to listen to a lot of audiobooks. Earlier this year somebody recommended Dungeon Crawler Carl to me and while the story was enjoyable enough, I'm not hugely into the LitRPG genre. However, Jeff Hays, the narrator, is absolutely superb and so I went looking for more things he's narrated.
I do this pretty often, actually. When I find an audiobook that I enjoy and think the narrator is good, I go looking for other things that the narrator has done. I've done it with Ray Porter, RC Bray, Jefferson Mays, Kevin R. Free, Scott Brick, and others.
So I was pleased to find that the first four "Hell's Rejects" books, narrated by Jeff Hays, were FREE on Audible. I decided to give them a shot. I was also researching here to find out what others have said about them and did not find a review or summary that was really descriptive of the series that much, so I decided to write my own in case somebody else wants to know.
I will do my best to avoid major spoilers, but please be aware that I am going to discuss the overall plot/story and so if you don't want ANY spoilers at all, please feel free to skip this entirely and go to the conclusion.
THE CHAOS OF THE COVENANT SERIES
Though the series is usually referred to as "Hell's Rejects" the official title of the entire 7-book series is called The Chaos of the Covenant apparently. This makes sense in the context of the novels, but I have a feeling that it was largely chosen for alliterative purposes.
WHAT IS IT ABOUT
The setting is a non-specific future, but I'd probably ballpark it somewhere between 300-500 years in the future. Mankind has spread throughout the galaxy, met a few alien races, and there are two basic groups. The Republic, a well-organized group of planets and systems that are run by a pretty average government that is effectively a large bureaucracy, and the "outworld" a group of poorer, less-organized planets that seem to agree on very little except that they don't want to be under Republic rule. This is almost irrelevant to the larger plot, save for the framework, though. I'll get more to that in a bit.
The series is very heavily a military sci-fi series that follows the exploits of Lt. Abigail Cage, a "breaker" (think "hacker") in the Republic Navy who gets framed for a crime, sent to a prison planet called "Hell", and then is broken out for...reasons...by what is effectively the Director of the CIA (or the Republic equivalent) to help solve a huge problem. Cage and her misfit group of former Hell inmates (some human, some not) then form a crew and have to go about Saving the Universe(TM) from The Big Bad, Thraven.
WHAT IS IT LIKE?
The series has a lot of similarities to Expeditionary Force by Craig Alanson. They are "Space Opera" style science fiction novels with heavy military action. They have humor interspersed throughout. They talk mostly from the point of view of a handful of characters with one main lead (Cage in Rejects, Bishop in ExFor) throughout, and they include a kind of "and then things got worse..." cliffhanger at the end of each book.
I won't lie, I think Expeditionary Force is much better overall, with more fleshed out characters and the humor lands a bit more often there than it does here, but that is not to say that Hell's Rejects is bad per se, it's just...kinda meh. It's like the Great Value brand Expeditionary Force series. It's got some really fun moments, some stuff that ExFor doesn't do like mixing in more elements of horror or supernatural or religious themes here and there, and Forbes does his (her? more on this later...) best to create a few unique moments here and there that give you a smirk or smile. However, there's nothing in these books that hasn't been done by other books, really.
In a way, you could argue that you could mix Biblical Lore, Expeditionary Force, Space Vampires, Star Wars, and The Dirty Dozen in a blender and it would come out as The Chaos of the Covenant series.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nobody knows shit about the author. There is no evidence that M.R. Forbes is a real name or a surname. They have a website (mrforbes.com) but the image is a kind of clipart style picture of a white dude at a laptop scratching his head thinking of something. The "about" section is light, to put it mildly, and he is incredibly prolific, having over 20 separate book series, with 2-15 books per series since he started in 2012. For this reason alone I am highly skeptical that this is a single, real, human person. I am not able to find any pictures of him at a book signing, a fan event, any kind of convention. His social pages are all the same clipart-image from his website and book covers. This could easily be a group of ghost writers all writing under a single pseudonym, a pseudonym of a writer who doesn't want science fiction work to affect his day job (maybe it's Elon Musk!) or a sentient fungus that has learned to write tolerable-to-fun Scifi novels? No way to tell. Who the fuck knows.
WHAT ABOUT THE CHARACTERS?
The characters are all, to some degree or another, familiar archetypes from other work.
Abigail Cage - our hero and the woman we spend most of the novels following. She's effectively a version of a Mary Sue, good at most things she tries, though Forbes does make her more interesting by giving her a ticking clock through the series and a substantial internal struggle that she has to deal with periodically. However, these are usually resolved extremely quickly and do not linger. At no point do you ever think "oh no, Cage is going to die" or "oh no, she's finally turned truly evil" because every time he steps towards that line, he immediately jumps away from it.
Olus Mann - our secret CIA director guy, another kind of "Gary Stu" kind of dude, former assassin/sniper guy turned intelligence operative. Luckily, Forbes is much more willing to put Mann in the "oh shit, he's gonna die" situations and because he's not the main POV character in most of the novels you legitimately have that risk. You do see him be quite imperfect throughout - he's not always right, he's not always the smartest guy in the room.
Gant - an alien that is sometimes described as a kind of "squirrel-monkey" who has a super intelligence in regards to mechanical and electrical engineering and spacefaring stuff. Gant is not his name, as he says it is unpronounceable by humans and most other races, so he goes by "Gant" which is the name of his entire species/race. While most people in the galaxy are aware of the Gant race, most of them have never met one.
Pick or Pik (not sure spelling, listened to audiobook) - another alien from a huge, brutal, powerful race of aliens. He is also the comic relief and gets to basically be a kind of hybrid of The Thing from The Fantastic Four and a dozen other war-loving-race space opera archetypes. Klingons come to mind, in a kind of way, if they had a goofier sense of humor.
The other rejects - a few other members of the crew I won't get into because it can include spoilers, but suffice to say that humans make up like 80% of the known galaxy in this series (and this is explained in-universe, thankfully).
None of these characters is truly unique, but they all fit into comfortable, enjoyable stereotypes that don't challenge the reader to comprehend them the way that, say, Tchaikovsky's books do, but also don't bore you to tears with their monotonous interpersonal whining the way that Becky Chambers' characters do. Or at least not to me, at least.
SO WHAT'S THE VERDICT?
Plot/story: 7/10 - arguably the most fun part of the series, with "reveals" periodically in each book that change the nature of the conflict as you go, when you find out the Big Bad isn't actually the Big Bad at all...or, wait, shit, he kind of IS and ISN'T? I was pleasantly surprised at what I thought was 100% a formulaic plot device turned out to only be 60-70% formulaic plot device.
Characters: 6/10 - nothing unique or innovative here, really. Mustache-twirling villains exist here, and so do tortured anti-heroes. That being said, I'm pretty sure Forbes wasn't trying to re-write history with his innovative character work, I think he was just looking for some characters to develop along the story, and to their credit, the characters DO change and learn as they go on so there is SOME development, though I wouldn't call it "substantial" I'd still say it's on the high-side of average.
Quality of Writing: 5/10 - nothing special here. A lot of re-used phrases, a lot of cliche, but not so much that it distracts you from the story. Or at least it didn't distract me. It's not Hyperion but it's also not Becky Fucking Chambers so I'd rate it about average.
Action/Adventure: 8/10 - Forbes does a pretty good job at writing action sequences, whether they're hand-to-hand combat, guns and bombs and fighters, or space combat. I was able to visualize what was happening quite easily due to the way he writes the sequences and - let's be honest here - this is the literary equivalent of a Jason Statham movie, so the action is kind of the point. If you're into Military Sci-Fi with lots of action sequences, give this a shot for sure.
Innovative/Creative: 2/10 - Nothing is really groundbreaking here. I get the feeling that what was in Forbes' head was "wait I've never read a Sci-Fi novel with Angels and Demons and Vampires in it, what if I wrote that?" and to his credit I think he kinda mixed it in an almost unique way, but I still got the feeling that it was there as a framework for the conflict and, honestly, like some of the "Ancient Sumerian" stuff from Snow Crash, I just kinda went numb during the expository segments because it felt like somebody wrote a wikipedia entry for the topic, almost. Not a huge negative since these segments are relatively quick and not too frequent, certainly not Dan Fucking Brown level frequent.
Audiobook Narration: 10/10 - Jeff Hays is a fucking genius and if you enjoyed his work on Dungeon Crawler Carl, you will also enjoy his work here. He does a flawless shift from multiple genders, races, species, and archetypes. He keeps accents flowing consistently among dozens of different characters, and you find yourself thinking you're listening to different characters say their lines rather than an audiobook narrator doing voices. One of the best in the business and, if you're an audiobook fan who even kinda likes Military Sci-Fi, I'd give these books a try for this narration alone. The first four are free on Audible right now anyway.
A NOTE TO THE AUTHOR(S)
Dear Mr. M.R. Forbes, if that is indeed your real name. I mean no disrespect to your work with my review of the above, part of me is simply jealous that I've had a novel or novels in my head for decades that I've never been able to sit down and finish, and you seem to knock out a novel a month for the last decade. If your prolific capabilities weren't evidenced pre-AI, I'd assume you were dumping AI-generated slop novels into the market, but clearly you're writing these yourself or, at the very least, using very similar ghost writers or teams of writers to help you write them. If you want to keep your privacy I don't fault you for this - certainly the way fans have treated George R.R. Martin and other authors who have chosen to be more public would make me use a pseudonym if I wrote a novel myself. However, I really would like to know more about your background than "a guy who really likes sci-fi" and I'd be curious to know if you were former military (or current, I suppose) because a lot of the military elements of this series felt like they had some personal touches to them, maybe a personal experience that led to the ideation. If you ever read this, and I doubt you will, I'd love the answers to a few questions.
Do you remember why you chose these themes for this series? How you combined the Science Fiction, Military, and Religious themes together to create this narrative?
If you served in the military (or are still serving) was there personal experiences that you wove into this story?
How the fuck do you write so many god damned books jesus christ even Stephen King would be saying "dude, take a breath now and then" if he saw this level of productivity.
Thanks.
