Review: Heartless

Heartless by Matthew Rossi
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Matt Rossi continues to make some interesting and compelling fiction, and Heartless, the second book in the Nameless series, takes a different tack that works really well for the series. Where Heartless felt like more of a focus on a traditional-style fantasy informed by video game narratives and interesting fantasy/horror tropes, Heartless succeeds in flipping the script around. It leads with some cool action and then moves into a narrative that is more about people coping with the world they're now in, complete with our heroes involved in romantic trysts and real-world scenarios while everything else around them is insane.

It's a way to handle a story that I can't say I've read before, and the result is a story with a different style of investment compared to other epics or urban fantasy tales. If you're looking for a lot more action similar to the first book, this might be a jolt to the system, but the character base here, and the way our heroes interact with each other? That's where the quality comes into play.

This isn't to say the book is perfect. The way the book handles its action sequences this time around does not have the same feel as the first book, and the dialogue sequences on occasion feel more informed by the setup in games than in real life, but these are more nitpicky issues than true dealbreakers for the story. At the end of the day, this book was a solid and enjoyable read. My only regret is that I didn't get to it sooner.

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