Storey’s Debut Novel Filled with Blood and Tropes

Nothing Short of Dying - Erik Storey

Cliché number 1: Clyde Barr, who left his western Colorado home after a horrendous youth to “see the world,” became a mercenary. Unlike most, he (claims he) chose the good side of his fights, protecting the little guys. Nevertheless, he apparently perfected his skills: Barr’s a stone killer. Just sprung from a Mexican jail, he stops in his home town to reach out to the only one of his three sisters he still talks to, only to find that Jen has been taken by an unnamed “big guy” to help him with some crime, after which she’ll be “discarded like a used needle.”

Barr knows nothing of the situation, not having been in the Junction in years and not even knowing what his sister’s been up to. Nevertheless, it takes him only a couple of hours to figure out where to go to get this information, and only a couple of beat-to-hell thugs (cliché number two) to find out who has the girl. Not bad, eh? Trust me, it will get worse: but Nothing Short of Dying will keep Clyde Barr from honoring a promise to his sister.

Clyde enlists the aid of some of his long-ago criminal homies (Messicans, of course, cliché number three) and takes up with a hot bartender name of Allie (cliché number four -- time to stop counting) on his way to finding the missing sister. Of course, he must first negotiate the middleman – the drug honcho being purty darn smart -- but that’s no problem for Clyde, who puts down another dozen or so thugs and kidnaps a teenaged girl along the way to his missing sibling. Next, he enlists the aid of one of his sociopath buddies to sneak up on the huge compound where the bad guy cooks truckloads of meth: six straight trucks of the stuff leave one of his three compounds at a time – I kid you not! (Note to Storey: that’s very likely more than the total annual output of every meth lab in the Midwest).

As the body count rises, first-time author Erik Storey falls back on all the usual tropes of the invincible good guy thriller; such as berserker rage, ability to shrug off pain and continue to kill, double-crosses, heart-rending deaths, and the like. Just about no trope is omitted, including the inevitable swapping of bodily fluids with the female lead. Storey’s debut novel could be considered, if nothing else, action-filled. Of course, by “action-filled” I mean “filled with murder and mayhem.” Throughout the text, Barr’s opponents – and friends – find death at close and long range, through the instruments of firearms, arrows, knives, and bare hands. Barr himself seems to have the recuperative powers of some sort of Norse god. Storey’s hero goes on a wild romp from one side of the Western Slope to the other; pausing occasionally to observe the beauty of the mountains before going on to fire an ounce or two of lead into the chest of another black-clad ex-paratrooper.

Barr, for all his skill as a tracker and hunter, seems to lack the ability to think through his actions. As the tale opens, sister Jen says, “After I help him get inside a week from now,” he’s going to kill me. Yet Clyde does absolutely nothing to figure out where this obvious break-in will take place; instead gallivanting across the Western Slope looking for a hidden hideout. Give me a thinking hero any time – I’m getting tired of men of action who seem to lack brains!

Those who enjoy reading strings of clichés and literary tropes strung together in near-endless conflicts will enjoy this superficial novel, although those hoping to find a character with even the depth of Reacher or Bourne will likely be disappointed by the novel. Storey does manage to insert the occasional well-written passage or slip in a bit of humor, but for the most part, Nothing Short of Dying reads as though assembled by concatenating the fight scenes of a stack of second- and third-rate thrillers.

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