He’s Big…He’s Brutal…He’s BACK!
And this time, he’s got a bone to pick…out of someone’s fresh corpse to stab someone else with. Just in time for Halloween, Sledge comes back with a vengeance and a new target rich environment and the blood is gonna fly.
Two years ago, Nick Horvath burst onto the indie scene with a simple name and concept: Sledge. What you see is what you get: a big ass dude smashing even worse dudes with a big ass hammer. With all the brutal, bloody fun of an 80s R-rated feature, it managed to do something few indie books have done and created an aura around the main character that had him breaking containment into lanes that his premise wouldn’t normally carry over. Namely fantasy booktubers and some in the booktok/bookstagram lanes. I gave in to the interest and reviewed the original and loved the hell out of it.
Naturally, a sequel was forthcoming and finally arrives on our doorsteps this October with a double dose of bloody brutality. Following on the heels of the events of the first book, Sledge vs the Wendigo is exactly the sequel I thought would happen given the Wendigo were primed as an antagonistic force during the events of the first book. In the first book, Sledge took on The Labyrinth, a series of deadly dark web assassins in a series of fights to the death only a man like him was capable of facing.
During those events, he crossed paths with a deeply entrenched and deadly group of Native-American/Canadians known as the Wendigo. Think of them as sort of deep-woods dwelling Indian mafia residing on the Canadian/American border. While he crossed paths with them, they weren’t in his crosshairs–until now.
Sledge vs The Wendigo sees him drawn into conflict with this group when his on-again-off-again love interest Kiira calls him to assist in hunting down a teenage-girl murdering rapist who livestreams his kills…only for it to be a trap designed to pin the murders on him. He’s saved by a princess of the Wendigo, a femme fatale who brings him into their fold and tells him that a splinter group within the Wendigo have been trafficking girls and she needs his help to stop them. Thus, Sledge is once again drawn into an escalating series of bloody conflicts against the Wendigo’s ranks.
Whereas the first book was fairly straightforward and bounced between Sledge fighting up the Labyrinth’s ranks, trying to figure out how to stay one step ahead when he was always one step behind, here he’s pitted against an insidious cult of cannibalistic killers, the elements, and trying to solve the mystery of who is behind the killings and does their belief in the supernatural mean he’s up against a force he can’t even begin to reckon with. He loses his iconic sledgehammer early on, sadly, but it is soon replaced with a new melee weapon: a hooked boat anchor and chain. The results are as crazy and spectacularly bloody as you might imagine if you know anything about the first book and Sledge’s penchant for old school 80s R-rated brutality.
The book’s plot becomes a dark, winding maze of sex trafficking, murders, and cultish mysteries as getting closer to the truth starts to look less like a bloody fight with creeps and underground sleaze and more like a showdown with satanic forces straight from hell. This time, though, Sledge manages to have a few allies on his side and they become standout characters–especially Errol, a quirky, salty old prepper. His enemies have names rooted in what I can only assume is native-american language and I gave up trying to pronounce some of them long ago. It's reminiscent of Ryan Williamson’s use of other languages in that it helps flesh out the legitimate feel of their culture, but as a reader I did gloss over the names after seeing them enough times.
The book came courtesy of author Nick Horvath and it came with packs of cards from a Sledge trading card game for sale on his website. Admittedly, I’ve never been a huge trading card game player, but the game looks interesting for those who have a penchant for it.
The book is even more imaginative and gruesome than the original, so long as you are suspending enough disbelief. I said of the first book that Sledge, at times, strains the credulity of what you think the human body can survive. I’ve seen an insane amount of trauma delivered to a human who still manages to survive. This book strains it even further but also brings Sledge closer and closer to the edge of death believably. After a while, you stop thinking about it and wait to see how he can out fight or outwit his enemies.
The book does delve more into his mysterious backstory, the reason he refuses to fight with guns, and the events that made him the legend that is Sledge. Nick Horvath knows what makes Sledge work and delivers even more of that in spades. This book is NOT for the squeamish and this applies to more than just the buckets of blood and visceral brutality delivered. There are scenes that are flat-out pornographic given the dark subject matter Sledge is dealing with. Not in a gratuitous or glamorous way, but as a way of showing how evil his opponents really are.
Critiquing Sledge comes with a caveat, mostly because you either vibe with this kind of book or you don’t. I’ve read my share of dark books before: Sara Douglass wrote some bleak and dark stuff into a lot of her novels. Trials of Ashmount by John Palladino and The Hellborn King series by Christopher P. Brenning comes to mind as well. It's not for everyone, but it also at times strives to be a bit more than just another blender to throw bodies into. Sledge has some depth and you get to see that side of him a bit more this time around.
But If Sledge vs the Wendigo has a flaw it is certainly a pair of ending chapters that out of nowhere delve into a meta-physical spiel that felt wildly out of place compared to so much that came before it. In fact, this was something that played out in the first novel involving a specific plot revelation that happened at the end which, while it made sense from a story perspective, also felt a bit weird in the context of the rest of the story.
Wendigo builds up the notion of supernatural forces and that Sledge might be facing an actual demonic force and then the plot drops some acid and goes naval-gazing in a way that had me going “What the actual hell?”. This element does not ruin the book or the ending, though. In fact, you could skim over it and not lose anything. It reminded me of the end of one of my favorite sci-fi books “Kiln People” by David Brin, where an antagonist mad scientist character goes on for pages about meta-physical dime-store Treknobabble that made my eyes glaze over. I didn’t know if I was supposed to take that section seriously or not.
In the end, Sledge vs the Wendigo is a worthy successor to the first novel, which is still an awesome read. And the author has promised a third novel, a prequel, which covers the events of Sledge’s time in the Pit, the prison death-match gauntlet that made him Sledge. Those who love blood and brutality, visceral violence, and unfettered carnal rage will love Sledge vs the Wendigo.
Just don’t forget to bring a body bag.
Sledge is available on Amazon.
It also has a spotify playlist for those interested in the music inspiring the action.
