Review: We Who Hunt Alexanders by Jason Sanford
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher in return for an honest review.
‘Amelia is a ripper, a monster who feeds on violent people who have so thoroughly forsaken love that they’ve burned away their souls.
‘Unseen and unnoticed by most of society and living as both hunter and hunted, the only emotion rippers feel is anger. But Amelia is different from her fellow rippers and also feels happiness, sadness, fear, love and every other emotion. To her mother, Danjay, that makes Amelia the strangest of all monsters.
‘Driven from their home by religious zealots, Amelia and Danjay must learn to survive in the city of Medea, where violent men rule and kill anyone who opposes them. Worse, Amelia has never hunted on her own, and her mother is ill and growing weaker by the day. Only a chance encounter with a human who can see Amelia gives her any hope that she might be able to save her mother.
‘To succeed, Amelia must learn to hunt in an increasingly dangerous city brought to the brink of war by the corrupt, rich and powerful. Amelia will also have to discover if her differences from her fellow rippers makes her weak, as her mother believes, or if she can instead be a new kind of monster that the world has never seen before.’
In We Who Hunt Alexanders, by Jason Sanford, we meet three rippers – monsters who feed on irredeemably bad men (and, very occasionally, women): ancient Danjay; her novice daughter Amelia; and Ziee, a spiky acquaintance who grudgingly takes Amelia under her wing.
Unusually for a ripper, Amelia experiences the full range of emotions, whereas Danjay and Ziee can only feel anger. What’s more, while rippers can generally make themselves invisible to the warm people whose homes they squat in, Amelia and Danjay’s new teenage housemate, Abner, can see them, and even bonds with Amelia over their shared enthusiasm for penny dreadfuls.
The city of Medea, where mother and daughter have fled after religious zealots forced them from their previous home, is far from a refuge, however. A church demonfinder holds a great deal of power locally, and as an incendiary who doesn’t get his own hands dirty, he’s not technically an Alexander, so can’t be dispatched by the rippers. Can Danjay and Amelia survive, despite their respective frailty and inexperience?
I found We Who Hunt Alexanders a fun and unexpectedly heartwarming read. Right from the start, you can’t help but be on the rippers’ side, as Amelia is such a compelling, endearing narrator, and the type of people rippers target aren’t exactly a loss to the world. In fact, it’s rather satisfying seeing Alexanders get eaten by monsters!
Despite the constraints of the novella format, Sanford not only successfully realises the characteristics, rules, and lore of rippers – the many-toothed personal “blood-maws” they summon from hell to help them with their kills are thrillingly gruesome, and I enjoyed the explanation of why their victims are called “Alexanders” – but also the Victorian-coded city, and the broader world of the story, where many other supernatural entities also happen to exist.
More than anything, though, this is a coming-of-age story. At the beginning, Amelia has never killed an Alexander herself, is late developing the ability to summon a blood-maw, and suspects her capacity for feeling is a liability. Over the course of the book, she finds a true friend in Abner, gains Ziee as a mentor, learns about her mother’s life before she knew her, and – without giving too much of the ending away – discovers that difference can be a strength.
As suggested previously, though, Amelia doesn’t find it easy to get Ziee on her side – in fact, rippers being extremely territorial, Ziee initially nearly kills Amelia when she happens to visit the building where Ziee lives.
Between rippers’ adversarial relationships with one another, and the risks they have to take to keep themselves fed, there’s a lot of tension and danger to keep you turning the pages, culminating in a dramatic and gory finale.
We Who Hunt Alexanders is an imaginative, suspenseful, and surprisingly touching coming-of-age horror novella.