He Who Fights With Monsters by Shirtaloon review

    HE WHO FIGHTS WITH MONSTERS by Shirtaloon is the archetypal LitRPG story. It is the story of a geeky young man being transported who dies in a sort of accident and gets deposited inside a fantasy world that operates on the rules of a tabletop RPG. From there, he begins an extended campaign to level up his abilities, accumulate treasure, and stick it to every authority figure while making pop culture references that his fantasy companions are deeply confused by. That description will more or less tell you if you are the target audience of HWFWM or not. 

    For me, I think of this book series as a nice example of "popcorn" fast fiction and the kind thing you can enjoy as a Kindle Unlimited subscriber without much difficuly. The books are long, entertaining, and have a lot of stat blocks with a variety of rules regarding everything from essences to how much damage you can do in a single round. This is a straightforward bit of brain candy and not much deeper than that (except for one element that I'll get to later).

    LitRPG is a bit like John Oliver describes cocaine or Insane Clown Posse, which is, paraphrased, "It's not for everyone but those who are into it, are into to a life destroying degree." It took me awhile to get into LitRPG but once I did, I found myself really enjoying it and digging the contrast of rules with storytelling. If you ever wanted to know what it would be like to be wandering around the World of Warcraft with vendors, magic salesmen, leveling up and other statistics in-universe then this is a good example of how it might work.

    I like the attempts by the author to justify things like why there's so many monsters in the world (they're randomly produced by monster surges), why adventurers are an actual profession (because monsters are so common but drop harvestable magical loot), and what sort of power blocks are created when some human beings are able to get vast amounts of wealth as well as personal magical power that makes them effectively demigods (they form into a new nobility that tries to make sure their children also become adventurers).

    If there's one flaw with the book, it might be the fact that Jason is a polarizing character. I mean this in-universe but a quick look at other reviews indicate this is an out-of-universe view. Jason is a biracial Australian atheist with strongly socialist views on how society should be run. He's also very open about enjoying trolling people by adopting the persona of a Nineties anti-hero ala Spawn or the Darkness (while being a dorky geek in RL). 

    Ironically, I'm less annoyed by his occasional lecturing than I am by the fact that Jason gets away with before getting tossed in a dungeon by all the super powerful people he's insulting. Terry Pratchett was an atheist but whenever people mocked the gods on the Discworld, they got hit by lightning. It'd be more funny if that happened a bit more often and Jason had to keep it to himself or a small circle of friends. The supporting cast is okay, though seem a bit flat compared to Jason himself.

    In conclusion, this is an excellent pick up on Kindle Unlimited. It's very much a self-published work with a few flaws but nothing that stopped me from being able to enjoy it (and some of that might just be differences between Australian and American English). I do recommend this to be gotten on audiobook, though. At 28 hours of content, it's certainly worth an Audible credit.

Available here