Review time! with some of Greg Hatcher’s writings!

To my eternal shame, I never reviewed several of Greg’s stories when he was still alive – I did some, but not all the ones I had. I wish I had, but I just didn’t. After his death, I picked up his collection of “Dr. Fixit” stories, and I still didn’t review them. Well, better late than never, I suppose, so now I have read what I have, and I’m going to write a bit about all of them. Let’s take a look!

First up, we have Greg’s novel, The Silver Riders (all of these books, by the way, are from Airship 27 Productions). The Silver Riders is from 2017, and it’s Greg’s crack at a “weird Western.” Our POV character is Cheyanne Parsons, a teenage orphan who was taken in by Dr. Lisbet Shaw, who works in a small town in Oregon in 1878. Early on, a man from her past – Fallon – arrives in town and tells her she’s needed, as something they thought they left behind is coming back and things are going to get bad. Cheyanne goes with Lisbet and Fallon, and their quest begins. In alternating chapters, Greg goes back and forth between the present and their search for the other people they once hung out with and the past, in which he gives us their “origin” stories. All of them ended up at a strange compound run by a man called Ezekiel, who promised to teach them how to become their best selves, basically. Lisbet, for instance, had left Boston for the West when she was diagnosed with leukemia, but while she was out in the desert waiting to die, she stumbled across Ezekiel, who cured her. Ezekiel uses a “Language” to do miraculous things, and the people who gather around him learn it, too. We learn about each acolyte as we come across them, and Greg does a nice job giving them interesting personalities so they’re not just stock characters. One of the group is a big jerk, but Greg – in real life as in his fiction – is too smart to make him a boring bad guy, as the guy has more layers than you expect even if he’s a big jerk. It’s clear that Ezekiel is doing something untoward, as well, but because Greg is writing this both from Cheyanne’s perspective and from the perspective of each character in their specific “flashback” chapter, he can be coy about what Ezekiel is doing, as we only find out as the characters do. Eventually, of course, they get the band back together and head off for the compound, and that’s when everything comes to a head.

Greg has a nice, easy-going kind of writing style – he almost effortlessly gives us complex characters with very little ornate introspective writing (I know it’s not effortless, but it feels that way as you’re reading it). He gives us characters and reveals them through their actions and concise descriptions, so we zip through the nifty plotting and we find out that these characters are a lot more interesting than we expect. Greg isn’t afraid to delve into the dark sides of these characters, but he’s not the kind of person to be too explicit, which works quite well as he hints around at things, which allows our imaginations to pick it up from there. These are people who have lived hard lives in a hard land, but they’re also able to find small moments of grace, which makes them fascinating to read about.

The biggest problem I have with the book is the ending, which works perfectly well as a big good-vs.-evil confrontation but doesn’t seem to last as long as it should. It feels like the threat is dealt with a little too easily, which is a bit jarring. I mean, it’s a good set-up and Greg has everything in place nicely, and I don’t mind the resolution at all, it just feels … I don’t know, easy. It’s hard to explain without giving too much away, but that’s just how I feel. I do like that the ending isn’t just a “punch the bad guy in the brain” kind of thing, because Greg knows that’s definitely too easy, so he makes it a bit more emotionally resonant than that, but … again, I can’t explain it well enough without giving too much away. However, it’s a minor complaint, because the book is about more than the big confrontation at the end, despite it being a plot-driven book. Greg wants to look at marginalized people and how they survive in a world that doesn’t care for them, and he does that quite well. Greg’s stories are full of empathy, and this is just another example. I might not love the ending as much as the build-up, but it’s still a well-done book.

For whatever reason, we don’t do links with images here anymore, but here’s the link to Amazon for this book (with brief reviews by both “Edward” Bosnar and Perry Holley). Give it a look!

Up next, from 2022, we have Greg Hatcher’s Dr. Fixit (yes, the attribution to Greg is very important to note!). Greg created the character a few years earlier and had some stories published, which this book collects, and also a final Dr. Fixit story that he didn’t finish before his death but which Fred Adams Jr. completed for him. These are, frankly, my favorite stories that I’ve read by Greg. They’re just a ton of fun.

Greg gives us another POV character, Christine Vance, a young reporter for NPR who visits Ernie Voskovec in a nursing home sometime in the 1980s (or possibly early 1990s). She did some research on Voskovec and has figured out that he was once a player in the city’s superhero scene, and she wants to find out more about him. Voskovec then tells her about his exploits in the 1960s, which form the meat of the story. In the final story, Voskovec disappears, and Vance and a retired superhero have to find him, but the bulk of the story is still narrated by Voskovec. There are four stories in all, and they’re a lot of fun.

Voskovec is a henchman, and Greg uses him to comment on superheroes in general, but also to bring superheroes down to a more “realistic” level, as Voskovec builds stuff for the big guys and breaks down how things work. Greg wanted to write a story about the Batmobile, so in the second story, Voskovec is hired by a Batman-esque hero to build a car for him, and he has a good time with that. As I’ve noted a lot, I love stories that treat superheroes realistically – I don’t mean with extra-evil violence and sex, but with characters who have to deal with the fall-out from superhero fights, for instance, or the nuts and bolts of a supervillain lair. Voskovec takes job to help his wife, who has cancer, and the issues he has with getting her care form the emotional center of the stories. He also likes tinkering with things, so we get him trying to figure out how to make these wacky things work, and Greg does an excellent job with that. However, as a henchman, he also realizes he’s expendable, so a lot of the stories are how he tries to get the job done but also figure out how he’s going to survive if it all goes to shit. He’s a brilliant guy, but because he’s not a big, strapping dude who dresses in weird costumes, everyone tends to underestimate him, and the fun in the stories is seeing how he walks the line between finishing his projects for the bad guys but staying one step ahead of them and the law at the same time. It’s very cleverly done.

Greg, as usual, does an excellent job creating these characters. Voskovec is a fun guy, old and irascible, but desperately in love with his wife and always willing to tell a good story. I know, you’re thinking, “Well, he’s obviously Greg himself!”, and you would not be wrong at all, but that doesn’t mean he’s not a well-written character. Greg also does a very good job humanizing the superheroes and supervillains in these stories – they’re just people, too, and while “humanizing” them doesn’t always make them sympathetic, it still makes them more three-dimensional than you usually get in your standard superhero comics. You’ve all read “Who Remembers Scorpio?” in Defenders #46-50, yeah? Of course you have! Roger Slifer and David Kraft give us a clinically depressed, beer-swilling Scorpio, and he’s just weird and realistic and pathetic and admirable all at once, and that’s the kind of characters you get in this collection – the people Voskovec interacts with are just people who happen to have some powers and/or like to dress up in outlandish outfits. They’re real.

This is just a terrific collection, and if you buy only one Greg Hatcher book (which is crazy; you should buy them all!), it should be this one. Here’s the link, if you’re interested!

Finally, I read several of his short stories in collections, so I’ll check those out briefly. They are: “Mages of the Obsidian Shard” in Sinbad: The New Voyages volume 6 (2019); “The Adventures of the Irregular’s Innocence” in Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective volume 10 (2017); “The Adventure of the Conundrum King” in Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective volume 11 (2018); and “Moon Boys” in The Moon Man volume 2 (2018). All of them are good, because Greg is a good writer, but there are some similarities among them that bug me. The Sinbad story is a good, swashbuckling adventure, as Sinbad and his crew need to fight some evil wizards. Greg has fun with the machinations of the plot – much like the Dr. Fixit stories, he likes to figure out how things would work and show them in action, and Sinbad and the crew need some ingenuity to fight the bad guys. In the first Holmes story, an old Baker Street Irregular who has grown up a bit shows up at Holmes’s office to ask for his help exonerating another old Irregular. In the second Holmes story, Greg simply wanted Holmes to go up against the Riddler, so he invented a bad guy who sends riddles to Holmes, and that’s that. For both of these, Greg writes in the afterwords that he enjoys writing Holmes stories that take place right after his return from the dead, so around 1895, and he likes to do “postscript” stories – meaning stories that piggyback on ones from the existing canon and see what’s up with some of the characters from those stories. In the first one, he goes off “The Bruce-Partington Plans,” and the second one is a bit of a follow-up to The Sign of Four. Both are very Holmesian – Greg obviously knew a lot about the Conan Doyle canon, and he gets the voices right. The Moon Man story is about a group of “at-risk” kids who decide to become sidekicks to the Moon Man, a 1930s pulp hero who was a police detective by day and a vigilante by night. Greg notes in his afterword that he worked with at-risk kids, and he wanted to write a story in which those kinds of kids were working to pull themselves out of their situation, as the “Moon Boys” do. It’s a fun adventure story. The biggest problem I had with the stories in that three of them, the bad guy is someone who the good guys initially trust. I know it’s hard to keep the suspense level up and if I had read these when they first came out and not all together, it probably wouldn’t have bothered me, but it still rankled a bit. It’s not too big a deal, but it is a deal. But overall, these are neat stories. Greg always has command of the language and the plotting, and they’re fun to read. I think the Moon Man story is my favorite, because it feels more “real” than the others – Sinbad is Sinbad, and the fact that he’s fighting evil wizards puts him even further out there; Holmes and Watson are interesting, certainly, and Greg writes some good mysteries, but he can’t do too much with it. The Moon Man is not as well known, of course, but because Greg is so close to the subject – in terms of knowing a lot of at-risk kids, not that he used to go out and fight crime with a fishbowl on his head – it feels like the characters are a bit more real. But that’s just me.

Here is Greg’s author page on Amazon, where you can find these books and the many others in which he had stories published. I’m not sure how much Julie gets if you buy these books, but it has to be something, right, so go nuts. Honestly, they really are good books – fun to read, cleverly plotted, and especially the novel and the Dr. Fixit book, more emotionally powerful than you might expect in a pulpy kind of story. Check them out!