He Who Fights with Monsters 2

A Solid Second Outing

Review by: The Audiobook ReviewAfter finishing the first, I jumped into He Who Fights with Monsters book 2, written by Shirtaloon - aka Travis Deverell. That alone should give you a clue of how much I enjoyed the first, and the second was no different. It continues from the first, where a lot of what was set up starts to pay off and become more evident in this one.

Jason and the gang are sent to an astral realm, once home to people who worship the astral being of the Reaper. Jason's fighting style and many of his abilities fit in well. The journey, as outlined in book one, is to retrieve an artifact for a diamond-rank adventurer from the realm. Only iron-rankers like Jason and his pals are allowed in.

Much like the first, this book had me listening for hours and hours at a time. Its sizable length of 22 hours just flew by. There never seemed like a good point to stop listening, the plot keeping me fully engrossed and reluctant to press the stop button.

A nice change of pace was that we didn't get the occasional info-dumps of Jason's character sheet. There were a lot of "system" type messages being read as people's abilities were powered up, which could be a little much from time to time. The plot in this one lent itself to a lot of loot and powerups flooding the players.

Jason is still the fish-out-of-water character he was in the first, but he's starting to settle down a little as he accepts his place in the world. He's still got the irreverent side to him, which had me laughing on a couple of occasions as he talked shit to influential people.

Narration by Heath Miller was once again top-notch. He's easy to listen to, with plenty of voices and accents to differentiate the many characters - no issues at all with the narration or quality of this audiobook.


I'll be diving into the next book soon, but I need a little break from the series. Not in a bad way, mind you. I just want to space it out a bit and get some more variety in my ears.