The American Spectator

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"YOU THINK ANYONE EVER really up and quits doing the wrong thing on their own?" an antagonist asks Hunter early on in Mechaniks, when hope still has a discernible pulse. At the time the answer appears ambiguous, but as the novel progresses one of his tormentors turns to religion and works to right the wrongs of his past. We see it answered in the affirmative. Alas, his question proves not to be the only pertinent one. A corresponding query might be, Can they quit before the sin becomes unforgivable?

It is not, one presumes, an exact science.

By novel's end several of Hunter's real and imagined interlocutors pay an irrevocable price, yet none of this redeems Hunter or the life that once held so much promise. "It was never suggested that Heath Hunter go to hell…" Bonazelli writes. "Even at the end, most people knew redundant when they saw it."