Who’s ready to blast some monsters with high-caliber weaponry again?

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Overview of Dust Sacrifice

What is It?

A Man Who Stands Against the Monsters

Mike Spears is a drifter with a gun, a grim code, and a habit of following blood trails no one else will touch. Across the forgotten towns and backroads of the American West, storms roll in from places no map can find—“Sometimes Places,” where the boundary between worlds wears thin. When those borders weaken, monsters get through.

Spears makes sure they don’t make it back.

Now a girl has gone missing, a lost waif most would write off as expendable. But for Spears, she is someone’s daughter, and he isn’t writing anything off. The trail leads to a dying town, a masked killer, and a door that shouldn’t exist—one that opens into a twisted empire of blood, sacrifice, and ancient, hungry gods.

From nationally bestselling author Larry Correia (American Paladin, Monster Hunter International) and artist Alex Wisner (Always With Honor) comes a tale soaked in grit, folklore, gun smoke, and the blood of men and monsters.

Welcome to the front line of a hidden war. Hope you brought ammo.

American Paladin: Dust Sacrifice is the first entry in Larry Correia’s new series, American Paladin, and was first published as part of the Kickstarter for the upcoming novel American Paladin. (Boy howdy, I’m going to need to try to minimize how many times I type Amer—erm, those two words in this review.) As contemporary/urban fantasy featuring a highly proficient protagonist with lots of weaponry, fans of Correia’s Monster Hunter International will find Dust Sacrifice very familiar territory, although not exactly identical.

Who Wrote It?

The author of Dust Sacrifice is Larry Correia, perhaps best known for his Monster Hunter International books, although my favorite work of his is Saga of the Forgotten Warrior. At the time of writing he’s authored or co-authored dozens of novels across multiple genres, mostly consisting of various shades of science fiction and fantasy, and worked with multiple publishers, although Correia is best known for his work with Baen Publishing.

(American Paladin and Dust Sacrifice are being published through Ark Press, I should note.)

The artist of Dust Sacrifice is Alex Wisner. Wisner is best known for his graphic novel adaptation of Always with Honor: The Memoirs of General Wrangel, published by Passage Publishing.

Content Warnings

Swearing and violence, the usual Correia fare.

I would put Dust Sacrifice on the upper end for swearing for Correia. F— is used quite liberally, both as part of jokes and as expressions of pain, anger, or frustration.

The violence is notable as well. A bullet is put through a man’s head. A man’s arm is broken. A girl accidentally gets fishhooks stuck in her face because of a trap. These, and other things, are given focus, although they aren’t nearly as grotesque as comics famous for violence, such as Invincible. I also, in my opinion, think the black-and-white art significantly reduces the impact of the violence.

The Review (Mild Spoilers)

I need to start with a disclaimer: I am not a graphic novel or comic guy, so in attempting to review American Paladin: Dust Sacrifice I find myself a bit out of my element. That’s not to say I never enjoy a graphic novel or comic here and there, but I’m not sure that reading the Bone novels while in middle school and high school, or following The Order of the Stick most of my life, qualifies me as any sort of connoisseur. I don’t even know enough to fake it halfway well.

So I can’t compare Dust Sacrifice to much of its direct competition. What I can say is that I found Dust Sacrifice fine. In hindsight, I wouldn’t have bought it on its own, but I found it extremely effective as an appetizer for the upcoming traditional novel, American Paladin.

Let’s get into a few more details.

As is often my experience with graphic novels, I was frustrated by how little the story generally advances on any given page (compared to traditional novels), and at the end I was amused that it took eighty pages to tell what was effectively a short story. (The script was around ten pages long.) That doesn’t mean it was a bad story, however. I was entertained. The protagonist, Mike Spears, rolls into a small town largely abandoned by the rest of the world on a quest to rescue a girl who has been kidnapped. He stops by a bar, gets in a fight, learns her location, and ends up bringing the girl’s brother with her as Spears heads off to where she’s been taken. There, he rescues the girl from being sacrificed, gets in a fight with what I would guess is an Aztec-inspired monster, kills it, and returns the kids to their parents before leaving. It’s straightforward and effective.

The art style is good. Again, I don’t have significant experience with graphic novels, but I generally enjoyed each panel that I looked at, and in particular I thought Mike Spears had a strong visual design. There were also many moments where zooming in on a specific detail, or putting shadow over part of a panel to focus on an un-shadowed part, was extremely effective.

Wisner did his job well, and I think he got the most out of the script he was given.

Correia’s script was pretty good, too. It’s light on details—it throws you in just as the action starts and then leaves very shortly after it ends, only giving hints at the bigger picture—but I knew enough to understand what was going on, have a good time, and care a little about these characters. Mike Spears in particular—I found him compelling, and I wanted to learn more about him.

Something else that Dust Sacrifice accomplished, which I think is critical for the American Paladin series to have any footing to stand on: it felt different from Monster Hunter International. These series are not set in the same universe, so far as I am aware, but both are urban/contemporary fantasy, and both feature highly competent, highly armed protagonists, lots of violence, and are set in our real world, except with the addition of other worlds or dimensions occasionally brushing against our world and letting things through—usually very evil things that desperately need to be tossed into a meat grinder. That’s a lot of parallels and, particularly coming from the same author, really risked making Dust Sacrifice feel like a spin-off of its own show.

It’s hard to explain why Dust Sacrifice felt like it had its own identity quite substantially. I mostly can only go off of instinct right now. But there were two things that stuck out to me as possible exlanations, and both are related to the way that the similarities between American Paladin and Monster Hunter International still manage to be recognizably different from each other.

As an example, despite sharing many traits on paper, Mike Spears is a very different character from Owen Zastava Pitt—he appears smarter, better put together, and, while tall, isn’t nearly as thick. His introduction to this world of monsters and mayhem appears to be quite different, and he appears to be much more of a loner. Spears appears to be built with more precision in mind, while Pitt is more of a wrecking ball—though both are still quite lethal.

As another example, despite both series featuring other worlds crossing over into ours, the way that worked, and the type of creatures popping out, felt different. Mike Spears finding a random door in the middle of a field and suddenly stepping very lightly did not feel like a Monster Hunter International moment. In the same vein, the monster—I don’t even know how to describe it.¹ There were Aztecan magics and monsters in Monster Hunter International, but that series, to my memory, was mostly filled with monsters drawn from the Old World. It would be very interesting if American Paladin exclusively, or nearly exclusively, drew from the Americas for its critter mythology, ranging from the monsters of (or inspired by, as happens in Dust Sacrifice) ancient peoples to modern cryptids.

Or perhaps having Spears in largely normal, if rural areas, where Pitt tended to roam in cities or ancient ruins, is what made all the difference. As of now, I’m uncertain.

It can’t be emphasized enough that Dust Sacrifice is quite short—I don’t have a lot to go off of, particularly compared to Monster Hunter International (a large, almost completed series). Perhaps my predictions, perhaps what I’m sensing that Correia is trying to do with this story, will be off-base when the novel releases. Or, perhaps I’m spot on the money. We won’t know for a few months.

But if there’s one good thing Dust Sacrifice accomplished, it’s make me very curious about American Paladin—a feeling that will more sustainably keep me paying attention for future updates than quick-burning hype ever would. This is why I consider Dust Sacrifice as more of an appetizer than anything else. The main course is coming, but this graphic novel gave me a pretty good idea of what to expect, and, if I’m right, I’m going to really like this meal.

Dust Sacrifice can be purchased on its own, and I imagine fans of graphic novels, or fans of Larry Correia in general, will have a good time with it.² That said, those in the latter group are decently likely to have backed the Kickstarter (and thus received Dust Sacrifice) already. For everyone else, I’m not convinced this is worth your time. That’s my generalized, final thought—it’s good, it’s all right, I like the promises it makes of what’s to come, but if Dust Sacrifice were expected to stand entirely on its own I’d be a bit disappointed.

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I haven’t written urban fantasy—yet—but fans of science fiction might enjoy my novel The Failed Technomancer, set in a post-apocalyptic world where robots are eating people. If you prefer fantasy fantasy, my novel Inner Demon, featuring found family and interesting fantastical creatures, might be more your speed. Consider checking those out!

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1. By this I mean the feel of the monster, of course. The monster isn’t difficult to describe physically—it’s basically an ancient Aztecan warrior with a snake head, but that snake head is overlarge and at the end of a very long, very thick neck. Also, notably, the head appears to be covered in skin rather than scales, which just… is gross, but in a good way for a monster. ↩︎
2. That said, the ebook is about $15 and the hardcover novel about $30—I don’t know what standard prices are for this media format, but those numbers seem ridiculous to me. If I’m paying $15 for an ebook for a traditional novel, I expect to be receiving an anthology of substantial length. ↩︎