Literature / No More Heroes

No More Heroes - Amazon cover

No More Heroes is a 2014 Fantasy novel set in modern day Brighton, England, and the magical High Fantasy world of Avia.

Howie, Eddie and Sally have their dull daily lives of commuting, personal issues and tedious routine shattered when they are accidentally transported from their home town of Brighton to a mythical and terrifying world of wizardry and swords by Razz, a naive apprentice mage who is searching for legendary magical beings to save his world from an unimaginably horrific apocalypse.

In this brutal fantasy land they encounter monsters, magic, mercenaries and mind-shattering dimensions of horror, and all they have to help them are an iPod, a management strategy certification and a passing knowledge of Dungeons & Dragons. But in a land of fantasy their normality makes them extraordinary and their belief that even fate itself can be defied starts to affect a world...

As much a deconstruction of the fantasy genre as it is a straight adventure across magical worlds, No More Heroes invokes, parodies and inverts many of the main tropes of Fantasy Novels and Roleplaying Games, occasionally crossing over into Lovecraftian Cosmic Horror.

Not to be confused with that No More Heroes

No More Heroes contains examples of:

• Action Survivor: Howie, Eddie and Sally
• Another Dimension: Avia, Ko’Thaggor
• An Adventurer Is You: The entire book is the equivalent of a Dungeons & Dragons adventure - characters with a modern everyday mindset making generally terrible tactical decisions in a world of swords and sorcery
• Apocalypse How: Kurn's plans to kill at least one universe, possibly more if required
• Badass Normal: Howie becomes this, with a little help from Frank
• The Big Bad: Kurn
• Big Damn Heroes: Played straight and also inverted by the hero group calling themselves Vengeance
• Black Mage: Kurn, an immensely powerful, evil and completely insane sorcerer
• The Chosen One: Averted – On several occasions Razz is openly angry that he ended up with Eddie, Howie and Sally instead of Heroes with actual useful skills.
• The Chosen Zero: Eddie who lacks even a useful magical item (although he is quite good with Excel)
• Crapsack World: Avia is a brutal world with a barely functioning economy under military occupation by mercenary armies who will kill you as soon as look at you. And there are all sorts of dangerous creatures. And lethal dungeons filled with traps and monsters. And then there’s The Circle which is a protrusion into the sanity-destroying hell world of Ko'Thaggor which is filled with eldritch abominations that can drive you mad just by seeing them. And there’s the Evil Overlord who plans on killing absolutely everyone horribly. There are also dragons (but these aren’t too dangerous).
• Cold-Blooded Torture: Kurn is a master of torture and thoroughly enjoys it, carrying out horrific mutilation for little reason. He also likes to talk about it. Sokol is also an expert torturer but does at least employ it to learn relevant information
• Cool Sword: A lot of swords in Avia including examples of Flaming Sword, Elemental Weapon, Weapon Wields You, Named Weapons, I Call It "Vera"
• The Determinator
• Despair Event Horizon: This is approached several times, getting progresively worse as they approach The Circle and Kurn's Keep. Eventually in Kurn's cells
• Dual Wielding: Two powerful magical swords are ultimately dual-wielded. It is implied this has never been done before on Avia - this may be because it comes with a cost.
• Dungeon Crawling: The Crypts of Ramen are the very embodiment of this trope (the layout is based loosely on the dungeon in Fighting Fantasy novel Deathtrap Dungeon)
• Dungeon Maintenance: Humboldt and his unseen clan tend to the Crypts of Raman
• The Dragon: Sokol, Hox
• Eldritch Abomination: The things which live in The Circle, and the denizens of Ko’Thaggor
• The Fatalist: Almost everyone on Avia is this, except for some of the Magemasters
• Fate Worse than Death: What Kurn has planned for everyone on Avia perhaps even ultimately Earth
• Fantasy Character Classes:
  • The Rule-Based Mage: Razz
  • Necromancer: Kurn
  • Evil Fighter Mage: Sokol
  • The Summoner: Troda
  • The Brute: Hox
  • Barbarian Hero: Xantox
  • The Illusionist: Sleevane
  • The Assassin The Thief: Portissia
  • The Ranger: Forgen
  • Other examples: The Swashbuckler, The Berserker, The Scout, TheCleric The Bard
• From Bad to Worse: Almost becomes Eddie’s catchphrase every time he discovers the latest downturn in their situation
• Functional Magic: Fulsing bluestones with Jagen
• Genre Savvy: Our protagonists are a Computer Game Developer, an ex Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master and a history graduate with a wide knowledge of classical mythology. But their genre savviness is mostly negated by their inability to form anything approaching a coherent plan
• Grim Up North: Kurn’s stronghold and The Circle itself are of course, In The North.
• Heel–Face Turn: Vengeance, particularly Xantox
• Hell: The dimension of Ko’Thaggor which, if not actually hell, is pretty much similar in terms of madness and suffering (maybe even worse). It's a place which can drive you insane even just by being near to it…
• Here There Be Dragons: Actually spoken by Howie when he realises they are on Avia.
• High Fantasy: Avia is a world of magic, myth and monsters.
• In Medias Res: The Prologue on the ship
• Level Drain: The Battlefield Drain around Brighton’s Pier is implied to be able to do this so severely that it clearly terrifies the mage Razz
• Mind Control: Eddie is placed under a form of this, also Sokol has several people in Brighton under a Thrall spell
• A Minor Kidroduction: We open in flashback with one of the characters as a kid playing Dungeons & Dragons.
• Morning Routine: Eddie’s routine for getting out of bed is described in painstaking detail.
• Mordor: Everything inside the circle is Kurn’s domain and effectively populated by his psychopathic Black Dagger guards. Although the barrier they have to travel through to get there is actually even worse.
• The Multiverse: Earth, Avia, Ko’Thaggor, and countless others are implied. Eddie illustrates with strings on a harp.
• Omnicidal Maniac: Kurn intends to kill not just our heroes or the whole of Avia or even the entire universe in which Avia exists but possibly multiple universes, including the one in which Earth exists
• Once Upon a Time: The title of the opening chapter (although with a Bon Jovi twist).
• Our Dragons Are Different: Puff dragons are like big floating cows. That can explode.
• Our Vampires Are Different: The vampire in The Crypts. Vampires on Avia are basically black holes to life and magical energy and frighten even Sokol
• Player Party: In a sense Howie, Eddie and Sally are literal [player characters], ‘real’ people enacting with a ‘fantasy’ world
• Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies: Invoked no further than p2 of the book the child DM had previously killed a player’s character under a rockfall for giving it an overly stupid name
• The Quest: Played straight, inverted and possibly subverted as our heroes have to complete a Quest that they don’t care about and isn't even for their world, simply to get home.
• Secret Identity: Howie, Eddie and Sally have to pretend to be temps, then True Heroes, except when they are pretending to be Wandering Minstrels, except when they are pretending to be magical researchers… after that it gets complicated
• Sliding Scale of Free Will vs. Fate: A central question in the story.
• Spell Levels: Razz explains spells in Avia have levels according to difficulty in casting. This doesn’t mean that low level spells can’t drain magical energy at a huge rate (Eddie drains Razz’s stone after asking for repeated small pointless bottle levitations when they first meet)
• Tomes of Prophecy and Fate: The Codex of Koth
• Treacherous Quest Giver: Razz’s master Birau is suspected to be not entirely trustworthy, by just about everyone except for Razz
• Turn Undead: Averted – When encountering a terrifying and debilitating vampire they have no magical means of repelling it
• Urban Fantasy: The first part of the book is set in Brighton, England as two magic users arrive in our world
• We Help the Helpless: Averted – True Heroes on Avia are implied to have been selfish and arrogant (Razz openly mocks this specific suggestion)
• You All Meet in an Inn: Played incredibly straight as homage to the fantasy genre. We first meet our heroes in a Brighton pub and this is also where they first meet Razz