With books like Lucifer and Losers on their way out, Vertigo has a bunch of new ongoing titles coming up.  Testament came out last month, but with the best will in the world, I can't bring myself to feign interest in the Bible.  So we'll skip that and jump to Simon Oliver and Tony Moore's Exterminators.

It's certainly an unusual premise for a series.  It's a book about pest controllers in Los Angeles.  Straight out of jail, lead character Henry James reluctantly takes a job with his stepfather's company, Bug Bee Gone.  In the manner of such stories, the other pest controllers are an eccentric bunch.

Vertigo are billing it as "a scary, darkly comic story best described as Six Feet Under with cockroaches."  I'm not sure I agree there.  You're setting expectations awfully high if you start comparing yourself to Six Feet Under, and bluntly, this book isn't in the same league.  There's certainly an interesting idea in here about bug killing as a metaphor for man's struggle with nature, but the execution isn't desperately compelling.

Most of the book follows Henry and his obnoxious partner AJ.  AJ has fallen off the back of a stereotype truck, and is basically there to be loathsome.  Henry, despite his prison record, is the soul of reason and isn't a very strongly defined character at all.  As narrator, he's prone to awkwardly hammering the "war with nature" metaphor by spelling it out for the slow members of the class, complete with lines like "[Nature's] chaos is barely held at bay behind this thin line, which is always at its breaking point in the poorest neighbourhoods."

I don't want to be too down on this book, which does have some intriguing concepts.  But none of the characters are particularly engaging, and there's a very uneven tone, as the book wavers between politely explaining the concept and grotesquely shoving it in your face.  It lacks the subtlety of Six Feet Under, not to mention the humour.  Six Feet Under treated the corpses with relative restraint, this book has a splash page of a man tearing out a live raccoon's intestines.  I know which one I'd rather watch.  And hey, they're the ones who brought up the comparison, not me.

It might pick up as the storyline gets under way, but this isn't a great start.

Rating: C+

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