My Cultural Diet

Gregg Hurwitz churns out Orphan X novels at a yearly pace, and I keep reading them, even though they all follow the same basic pattern. Evan Smoak, a former government operative trained since childhood to be a peerless assassin, now uses his deadly skills to help the powerless. That usually results in a not-insignificant body count. Antihero throws in a slight twist, however. The latest recipient of his aid — a devout young woman who was kidnapped, raped, and brutalized by a gang of young men who post their exploits online — makes Evan promise to not kill her attackers, but instead, leave them to God’s judgment. So what’s a former black ops assassin supposed to do? Antihero plunges into the world of online porn while commenting on what social media and terminal online-ness is doing to people, and especially disaffected young men. (In a stroke of serendipity, Antihero paired nicely with Adam Kinzinger’s recent diatribe against streamers like Clavicular.) Because of the sexual violence involved, Antihero was more difficult to read than other Orphan X novels, but it possesses a certain righteous anger that makes it more urgent than its predecessors. But Antihero was difficult to read at times for other reasons. When he’s describing Evan in full operational mode, Hurwitz’s prose is the very definition of a page turner. But when he tries to write Gen Z characters, with their slang and leetspeak, Antihero gets pretty cringe.

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