Finishing A Series

Almost by coincidence I just finished all the currently written entries in two semi-similar series. Those series are Jon Land’s Blaine McCracken and Buck Stienke and Ken Farmer’s Black Eagle Force. (Many entries from both have been reviewed on Fuldapocalypse).

Unlike my 27-book megabinge with The Survivalist, it took me getting about halfway into the Blaine McCracken series before I started reading the books sequentially (it “helped” that some of the books I read that I thought would be more grounded as a contrast turned out to be just as crazy in some ways). The BEF books I never read more than two in a row.

There are more differences-McCracken is an individual action hero, while the Black Eagle Force series is, as I put it, “More Mack Maloney than Mack Maloney” and focuses around units and super-aircraft. But their structural similarities are clearer-they’re both series whose literary “fundamentals” aren’t the best (although Land is considerably better than Stienke and Farmer in that regard), but which have a knack for crazy action. Thus, their weakest entries are the most mundane, and the strongest the most crazy.

I benefited from reading both these series in all their “amazingly stupid to stupidly amazing” glory, and it always feels bittersweet to conclude something that I’ve enjoyed.