I really enjoyed this book and the overall premise. It was an enjoyable read that was a bit out of my comfort zone but that's why I chose it.

This one was difficult to get through for me. I rarely give 1 star reviews. Even if a book is really bad to me, even if I wish I hadn’t read it, I’m generally willing to give something 2 stars if I could see some merit to it, but I just can’t with this one.

The biggest issue is probably that the plot is incoherent. I don’t really have much to say about that other than that very rarely did I feel like one scene followed well from the last. The parts that made the most sense were random encounters where for some contrived reason, Gunfire had to fight someone. Most of the mystical elements have no foreshadowing prior to their pay off. No part of this book felt satisfying or engaging.

Despite there being a bunch of characters, there’s really not much distinct characterization and when there is, it’s fairly contradictory, often relying on telling the reader how this or that character is and, in the case of the main character, showing the opposite. The minor characters are constantly talking about how insane Gunfire is, but despite being eccentric, he’s not particularly crazy and his goals tend to be clearer than anything else in the book. While sometimes disparity between a character’s reputation and actuality is intentional, it didn’t feel like it was here. The rest of the characters pretty much blend together. They’re not interesting nor do they have distinct personalities. They’re also pretty much all men and frankly, pretty gross. There are way too many characters for most any of them to become interesting or fleshed out and the book could’ve done without half of them. I didn’t find myself liking any characters, I despised most of them and the only thing I liked about Gunfire was that he was killing said characters.

I thought going in that the book would give an interesting depiction of historical Japan, or at least nods to Japanese culture, but after having read the whole book, I’m still not sure what time period it was trying to mimic. There’s mention of modernized technology and the Tokugawa Shogunate as well as the United States (implying its existence) so I’m guessing later Edo, but it seems like the claim that this takes place in an “alternate Japan” was just an excuse to not bother being accurate with anything. Perhaps the greatest such offense is modifying the religion to follow some sort of strange ancient Greek-influenced vague spirituality (I kid you not, the samurai curse people to Hades repeatedly) and believe that on their death they will be reunited with loved ones. This makes seppuku an act that will reunite a samurai with his family and means basically nothing like it should to a follower of Bushido. Seppuku becomes not an act of honor leading to rebirth, but a gateway to paradise. I won’t claim to be any kind of expert on Buddhism, Bushido, or seppuku, but that’s a pretty fundamental change even on the face of it. Again, I realize the story lampshades that this is an alternate world, but when you’re making seppuku into some kind of merciful and peaceful end for a samurai, it completely changes so much about the act and the samurai code that I’m not sure what the point of them being samurai is. I would’ve appreciated the religion in the book more if it had been called “Gunfire Dude.” Or it could have worked better if the book took place in a fantasy world with a Japanese aesthetic.

My best hope for the book was that maybe it would just get into some kind of cool fight sequences, but it never really did. It was about half the book before there was consistent action and even then, the fights weren’t very interesting. It was usually a lot of cringey trash talk (that, to be fair, does read like some bad translation from a samurai movie) followed by very simple hack and slash, yay the main character wins because he’s a bad ass and no one can offer any challenge to him.

The prose is also very sloppy. Not only is it littered with mistakes, but even the parts without plain typos are clunky and confusing. I read the ARC version on NetGalley (this is also why I have provided no quotes as examples) so maybe the typos have since been cleaned up, but even beyond that, just the basic phrasing sounded really off. There is also a slew of poorly-worded, anachronistic, and hyperbolic phrases, descriptions and dialogue that weren’t just cringe, but antithetical to any sense of immersion. These issues only made the book more difficult to get through.

Ultimately, I think the author probably had some cool ideas in mind when he sat down to write this. The elements that are there hint at a creative mind that had a lot he wanted to do with the story and world. But this feels like a first draft more than anything and it’s just too all over the place to form an enjoyable narrative. I kept looking for things to enjoy about it and came up short. I can’t really recommend this book to anyone in its current state.

I was provided a copy by NetGalley. All opinions herein are my own.