Predator & Prey: Mage is the fifth in a series of novels published by White Wolf Publishing. This novel series draws from White Wolf’s World of Darkness, especially
Hunter: The Reckoning and—in this novel—
Mage: The Ascension. That means that this book is game-related fiction, and game-related fiction is notorious for be worse than a Harlequin romance novel.
Predator & Prey: Mage fails to rise above such expectations, so I’m going to save you a lot of grief as well as your cash and spoil as much of this waste of wood pulp as I can.
In preparation for this review, I gathered some of my friends and held a group reading. We took turns reading aloud from the book, and we switched when a reader hit a chapter break or when a reader couldn’t handle anymore. I took notes. By page 90 my friends threatened to burn me alive in my chair if we continued any further, so we stopped there and called it a day. Yes, it was that bad.
Our protagonist is Adrian Cross, a divorced father of one with cripple child support payments and a psycho-bitch ex-wife with severe issues (and a severe need of a bullet in the head). He begins the book in the fictional city of Iron Rapids, Michigan on Highway 38 during rush hour. He’s severely sleep-deprived and falling asleep at the wheel. The traffic sucks, and it’s bad and it’s really fucking annoying—much like the redundant, repetitious and repeating of points (like this) that Mr. Bowen makes throughout the book—and to quote Robin Williams: “Fuckin’ DUH!” It’s RUSH HOUR TRAFFIC; IT’S SUPPOSED TO SUCK! Then Bad Shit Happens: a big rig jackknifes and turns over, causing all traffic on Adrian’s side to crash into it. Everyone dies but Adrian, who didn’t have so much as a scratch.
It turns out that a quartet of Technocrats made that accident happen. These paragons of characterization—with characters called “The First”, “The Second”, “The Third” and “The Fourth” you know you’ve (not) got quality writing—make Jeremy Irons as Profion in the D&D movie look good. Their dialogue is akin to listen to wannabe Daleks go on about how they almost got The Doctor. (Note: When read aloud, one of us actually used the Dalek voice and interjected “EXTERMINATE!” periodically. It made reading the book fun, which is a bad thing.) They figured out that something went awry, so they make with the contingency plans and put Adrian Cross into a nearby hospital.
By this point we’ve hit White Wolf Capitalization, far too many hyphenated words for anyone’s comfort and two turgid scenes that—together—should take five minutes of screen time or one page of a comic book. Instead, we’re at page 21 and it feels like we’ve read the transcript of a bad game session run by a drunk or stoned Matrix fan; it doesn’t get better than this anytime soon.
The next scene, which begins the second chapter, has our protagonist—he’s not hero material by any means—awakening in the aforementioned hospital. First he deals with a doctor that’s far too interested in his past and lacks bedside manner. This doctor turns out to be another Technocrat that works with Agents First, Second, Third and Fourth; he also screws up and Adrian falls into mundane hands. These Technocrats aren’t nearly as competent as they ought to be, and the reliance on incompetence to advance the plot (at the glacial rate that it is) compels me to think that the writer isn’t any better than these characters. Oh, and by this point Adrian’s seen things so clearly—a fact mentioned about six or so times—that he might as well have Superman’s supervision.
Adrian’s next big scene is a long, pointless bitchfest with the ex-wife in his hospital room. This entire scene did nothing to advance the plot, had no pay off by the time we stopped and completely killed all enthusiasm for this book. This bit of reality neither foreshadowed anything to come nor advanced the plot; this was a scene that should’ve been deleted. This was a 20 page trek through shattered glass with bare feet, and we weren’t happy about it until it was over.
Adrian gets dicked over again and again until about page 90, where we stopped; he loses his job, much of his stuff and gets dicked around by all sorts of people whom he’s either unwilling or unable to confront to get his due. He also blindly interacts with several plot devices, avoids the Keystone Technocrats and is approached by a Traditionalist. At this point, we realized that this guy had ripped off The Matrix and wasn’t trying too hard to cover his tracks. Between the forced use of big words, the layout that forced hyphenation of words that shouldn’t be hyphenated, the ceaseless repetitions—in one case, an entire paragraph verbatim—of over-written details that mean little and do less, the choppy sentences that inhibits the flow of the words (and thus the ability of the reader to read the book) and appalling stupidity of these unbelievable characters the pain became too much.
By page 90, the story went nowhere and had no promise of going anywhere. Glaciers advance at faster rates, high school goobers write stories with better plot advancement and Harlequin novels possess higher quality control. This book isn’t worthy of being anything other than emergency toilet paper, target practice, mockery by Joel (or Mike) & the Robots or kindling for firestarting. I suppose you could use it as an example of bad writing for students of the craft, but there are better example out there for that. Don’t waste your cash; avoid Predator & Prey: Mage. It’s not as bad as The World of Synnibarr, but that doesn’t mean that reading it won’t hurt your brain. How this book got published is beyond me, as it certainly doesn’t stack up to White Wolf’s own guidelines.
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