All you citizens of the Manosphere who gave up on literature 15 years ago and either spend your down time watching movies or playing video games…you might not have noticed that books are being written for you again.

The resurgence of old-school action-adventure began in earnest about 2010, and I’ve been up to my neck in it. I’m not talking about the stuff that trickles through the TradPub (traditional publishing) gatekeepers from big name authors who still have enough clout to produce something other than chick-lit, urban fantasy or gay/lesbian. This revolution has been taking place among the Indies (independently published authors), and some of it is even better than the action paperbacks of yesteryear (before the TradPub industry drowned in estrogen).

I am fortunate to have rubbed cyber-elbows with (I think) the majority of authors producing good work in the big daddy genre of action-adventure. Nate Granzow is one of those authors and his latest novel is a humdinger.

Before I get into the nuts and bolts, I should distance Nate’s prose somewhat from my masculist rhetoric. The protagonist in Hekura (one of them, anyway–arguably the main one) is female; and though she is not a pixie ninja (thank-you, Mr. Granzow), I certainly would classify her as a strong character.

Deep in the rainforest of South America, an indigenous tribe (the Yanomani) has encountered a race of monsters they call the Hekura–the evil spirits of dead white men, they assume. But you know how much those superstitious jungle tribes exaggerate. It’s probably just some overblown legend about harmless albino apes that they use to scare children into obedience or something.

Wrong! They are real, grotesque, and plum scary.

It just so happens that a humongous pharmaceutical conglomerate is sponsoring an expedition into the very area where these monsters are rumored to dwell, in search of a medicinal plant with miraculous healing characteristics.

So far we’ve already got some promising ingredients for an adventure yarn–the exotic locale you can only reach by plane, then on foot, a dangerous, mythical antagonist (or whole herd of them, actually), an expedition to find the Holy Grail of medicine…oh, and there’s mercenaries and Third World drug lords, too.

But even with all these elements in the mix, thousands of published authors out there right now would still fumble the ball. Nate Granzow romps all the way to the End Zone unscathed, with aplomb.

As an author, he obviously knows that the way to make a tale like this bigger than the sum of its parts is through memorable characters. I could write a lengthy essay about the dimensionality of his cast, but suffice it to say that it is outstanding. I normally don’t yammer on about how great moral ambiguity is, like it’s the pinnacle of narrative or something. But it is nice to run into sympathetic characters who are not pure as the driven snow. And the hard-drinking, chain-smoking British pilot who shares the spotlight for a while with our heroine has had some…shall we say major moral lapses while trying to earn cigarette money. And the soldier of fortune would normally serve as just another heavy to hiss and boo at while waiting for him to get greased with extreme prejudice…well, circumstances turn things around and you wind up compromising right along with his would-be victims.

One final kudo, and this is probably a minor one for most, but there were fewer typos in this novel than I find in most TradPubbed mass market paperbacks. That contributes to a pleasant reading experience with minimal distractions.

Hekura is well-crafted adventure of a caliber that is timeless, and gets a strong recommendation from me.