Dark, harsh and haunting, Antihero is Orphan X’s most infuriating and shattering mission to date. It’ll rip you apart inside as it hits you with a barrage of emotional gut-punches. Gregg Hurwitz delivers a masterful novel that threatens to murder the Fourth Commandment: never make it personal.
Evan Smoak, aka Orphan X, aka The Nowhere Man, is summoned to the East Coast to help the powerful Luke Devine get a grip on reality. It’s upon arrival that he learns of a young woman who was abducted off a New Your City subway. With little to go on, he and Joey get to work finding the woman, tracking her down and learning about what happened to her. Evan vows to make her kidnappers/assaulters pay, but the woman makes him promise not to kill them. An odd conundrum for a man who is used to meting out lethal punishment. But she didn’t say he couldn’t do significant bodily harm to them. If only he can find them first.
Antihero is Orphan X as you’ve never seen him. Combining lethality with mercy, rigidness with flexibility, brutality with tenderness, and reverting to his training while also showing personal growth. It’s fascinating to witness the various incongruities he must navigate, especially given how foreign some of these things are to him and the emotions that this mission elicits. But that’s part of the fun this time around. Watching The Nowhere Man with his steadfast moral code accomplish his mission in a different way than we’re used to seeing.
Additionally, this is an emotional book, though it’s hard to describe the exact feeling that this book evokes. Maybe because it’s not one feeling, but many. Despair, anger, disgust and bloodlust stemming from how the lowlifes victimized an innocent woman and left her in shambles, combined with curiosity, hope, respect, and admiration at how she ultimately responds to her trauma and how it impacts Evan’s approach to functioning on and off mission. Of course, there’s also the feeling of relief, vindication and schadenfreude as the bad guys get what’s coming to them at the hands of our hero (or antihero).
All of this makes for one hell of a novel that blends raw emotion with quiet reflection. A story that mixes exhilaration with heartache in a way that’s impossible to shake. Antihero is a book that cannot soon be forgotten and promises to stick with you for a very long time. It’s a must read and perhaps Gregg Hurwitz’s best work to date.
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