Literary rating: ★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆
I was initially a bit concerned this was going to be a slightly-more horror oriented version of Harry Potter, based largely off the title. I needn’t have been worried. For at least the first two books, this is quite startlingly dark and on the razor’s edge. As for the third… well, we’ll get to it. The setting here is a world where Filipino shapeshifters called aswangs, which feed on the fear of their victims, are migrating across from their home country and through Alaska. Lined up to stop them, by any means necessary, are hunters; it’s a harsh and often brief occupation. To replace those lost in battle, the titular establishment exists on Kodiak Island, to train hunters – mostly members of families who have been in the bloody business for generations.
Into this comes Ollie Andrews, a waitress who kills an aswang, and is recruited (well, abducted is probably closer) into Fear University. Her survival is largely down to an unusual illness/talent: her inability to feel pain. No pain = no fear, and so nothing an aswang can use against her. However, this ability has caused her issues in the past – not least, her abduction by a father/son pair of psychopaths. Though Ollie escaped, killing the father in the process, she has been pursued by the survivor, Max. This has forced Ollie to change her identity and keep on the move to avoid him tracking her down. FU [I’m not sure if the author chose the name for that acronym!] might offer her somewhere to belong, replacing the family she never had.
Keyword: might. For she has to overcome the prejudices of the other students, due to Ollie not being from one of those historic families. And that’s just the start, as she begins to discover the university’s quest to win the war under its head, Dean Bogrov and his shady scientific experiments. It also turns out there is a third group, operating between the aswangs and the humans, and Ollie’s past comes back into play; she was an orphan who never knew her father, and whose mother abandoned her in a closet. That’s an awful lot to unpack, and for the first two books, Collett does an admirable job. It’s a gritty approach, with Ollie a severely-damaged heroine, who has enough issues for an entire conference.
Those opening two books keep the story going forward. In the first volume, Fear University, she learns to tap into the power her talent gives her; builds a relationship with the similarly-broken young hunter Luke, who is her mentor; discovers aswang saliva can make her feel pain; finds out who her father was; and has to go through a life-or-death test involving both her, and her best friend at FU, Sunny. The second, Killing Season, is a rather drastic change in approach, with Ollie, Luke and others sent north to Barrow for the winter break, when the aswang are most active. That was the location used for vampire action film 30 Days of Night, and serves the same kind of purpose here. However, it’s almost as much a whodunnit, with the large house which is the hunters’ base apparently home to a killer. Not helping matters: Max shows up in town.
Then there’s the third… I should probably have detected the change in approach, based entirely on the title: Monster Mine. For sadly, the series loses its edge entirely. Rather than turning into Harry Potter, it instead becomes something which combines the whiny angst of the Twilight series, with the Daddy issues from Star Wars. That’s about as appetizing as it sounds, and by the end, this was a chore to slog through. To the point, indeed, that the free novella included in this omnibus edition, was left entirely unread. Collett does, at least, tie things up reasonably well, giving the reader some closure. It’s a pity that the groundwork laid for a memorable anti-heroine over the first two volumes, evaporates so drastically in the third.
Author: Meg Collett
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Books 1-3 of 5 in the Fear University series.