This is why they don't put cords on the controllers anymore.
A series of ultraviolent novels that satirize the action adventure genre. The story follows the adventures of the eponymous Kill Team One, whose real name is Sid Hansen. Sid is a teenage super soldier of mysterious origin. Trained from birth to kill and do little else, he runs away from the secret government agency that created him and tries to make his way as an everyday person in everyday America. That turns out to be a terrible idea.
The series has a dry and irreverent style, often drawing attention to its own shortcomings and overused action adventure tropes, or subverting them altogether. Genre-Busting applies liberally.
The books in the series are:
- Rated R (2014)
- Godless Murder Machine (2015)
- Red Scare (2017)
- #Justice (2018)
This book provides examples of:
- Anti-Hero: Sid. He's an angry loner with a Dark and Troubled Past.
- Blood Knight: Sid seems to prefer solving his problems with violence over other alternatives.
- Catchphrase: "I don't have time for this."
- Conspiracy Kitchen Sink: The mysterious Graveyard company is said to have been involved in the JFK assassination, the recovery of crashed alien spacecraft, and MKUltra, as well as some other notorious events.
- Dangerous Forbidden Technique: Victor does this when he tears a man's beating heart from his chest and shows it to him. Also when he 'shadow kicks' Sid.
- Deadpan Snarker: Sid. He's seen way too much ludicrous ultra-violence to be anything but jaded by it. Lily to a slightly lesser extent.
- Fille Fatale: Lily. She point blank offers Sid sex to kill her abusive stepdad. Later, she fakes her own death so Sid will kill a Russian mob syndicate in retaliation.
- Genre-Busting: The series defies classification. It pulls elements from horror, techno-thrillers, superhero comics, science fiction, urban fantasy, all with a strong dose of satire and black humor.
- Gun Porn: All throughout, real-world firearms are detailed pretty extensively, sometimes going so far as making a sales pitch for the firearm in question. Also taken too literally when Sid and Lily have sex on a pile of guns and ammo.
- Ninja: Yoshida Tanaka is very much this.
- Plot Armor: Sid has this and it is lampshaded liberally. Possibly subverted. Unbeknownst to him, he actually has an alien deflector shield that redirects bullets so they always miss him.
- Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil: Victor. He has "Rape God" tattooed on his chest. He attempts to rape Lily and Helen and is implied to have raped Lily's mother and Amy.
- Secret Art: Both Sid and Victor are masters of ansatsuken, the forbidden martial art of the assassinating fist.
- Slasher Movie: The Ghoul. Mask? Check. Perpetually Not Quite Dead? Check. Super-Strength? Check. Panoply of stabby weapons? Check. He even tries to kill Lily in the video store horror aisle.
- Sliding Scale of Idealism vs. Cynicism: Cynicism. So much cynicism. None of the characters are traditionally good people. The best ones are morally ambiguous and the worst ones are beyond vile. Garden variety incompetence leads to some of the most horrific events in the story.
