Robert Repino ‘s Mort(e) – War With No Name – Indie Book Spotlight

Welcome to 2021, Readers! I hope you got a ton of great books for the holidays. And, if not, let’s see if we can find you something cool to read in the new year. (The list of things I want to read keeps growing, even as I try to wear it down. It’s a blessing. And a curse. Mostly a blessing.)

The first book of this new year is a doozy.

My Wife snagged this one for me on Audible and she knows me so well. Let me give you the most basic details and let’s see if you can avoid getting excited: It’s the post-apocalypse, humanity has been all but destroyed by giant, intelligent ants and the animals they’ve raised into sapience. Rise of the Planet of the Apes meets THEM.

Now if that isn’t a hook that immediately grabs your interest? I don’t know what to say. It was described to me almost exactly that way and once I’d picked up my jaw, I also picked up my headphones. Stories like this are why I got into reviewing books, and especially Indie titles, to begin with. Big narratives with massive scope that hit different and land outside the norm. When something like this comes along, I’m always reminded of this one quote from Toni Morrison: “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” I feel that this kind of story doesn’t get told without that kind of moxie.

So, grab your listening or reading device of choice, make sure there’s a can of Raid at the ready and give your cat an extra serving of Friskies just to stay on their good side.

Book Stats

Author: Robert Repino
Formats: Kindle, Paperback, Hardcover, and Audiobook.
Price: $9.99 for the Kindle. $14.38 for the paperback. $28.77 for the Hardcover. $14.99 for the Audiobook.
Length: 369 pages or 11 hours 8 minutes in Audiobook.
Narrator: Bronson Pinchot
Number of books in the series: Three at the time of writing – two full books, one novella. A fourth will be available for pre-order and will be released August 24th 2021.

Basic Premise

Sebastian is a house cat in a home with four humans (Janet, David and their children Michael and Delia.) and that’s just great by him. He takes his job as protector of the home very seriously. He loves his people very much, even if they aren’t perfect. For example, Janet, the lady of the house, is having a spurious affair with their neighbor. Sebastian, though, doesn’t mind this as it’s what introduced the neighbor’s dog Sheba into his life.

He and Sheba come to care for one another very much. He and she would explore the house together and lie down in the sunlight on the carpet, curl into one another, and just enjoy the closeness. Dog and cat together in perfect harmony. (And this isn’t even the part where the world’s gone crazy!) This curiousness and care eventually becomes a very deep love.

That is until the fateful day that Sheba gave birth to her litter, sired by another neighbor’s dog. Sebastian, his understanding limited by his fuzzy cat brain, is entranced by the new puppies.

That’s when David gets home and puts two and two together. The neighbor’s dog in the basement while he’s out taking night classes? It’s not a good look. He wants to do the most harm he can, his rage and hurt making him callous. What happens to the puppies is never explicitly shown but you can probably guess.

Sheba runs away as a result, leaving Sebastian mortified, shaken, and alone.

And that’s when the change takes place.

He grows in size and stands comfortably on his hind feet. His de-clawed paws grow and become stunted, but functional, hands. (Sidebar: Declawing cats is straight-up abuse. Your couch isn’t as important as allowing your pet to keep its paws in-tact. The equivalent is chopping your fingers off to the first joint and declawed cats generally have foot pain their entire lives. So. Don’t do that.) He suddenly realizes that he can understand human speech. He can produce it. He can communicate with the family he loves.

This doesn’t end well for David. (Which is straight up cathartic.)

Sebastian immediately sets out to find Sheba. Surely she must be going through the same change? He encounters giant ants and a ruined city, all the while calling for his friend.

This is when he meets Culdesac and is drafted into the Red Sphinx – an all-feline military cell on the front lines of the war against humankind. It seems as though the queen of the ants has taken note of the little orange house cat and has big plans for him.

He takes the name Mort(e) because it can have two meanings. Mort is the name of a regular guy, which is something he hopes to be one day. Morte means death, which is his current business. He quickly creates quite the reputation for himself, working diligently to exterminate the human scourge at every opportunity. He asks the hard questions; “If we’ve become so like humanity, what’s to set us apart from them? How are we any better?” But he does all this philosophizing while crushing the human rebellion with a steely resolve.

EMSAH is another worry. A human bio-weapon that can infect almost any life form and corrupt it.

But even this concern doesn’t sway him from his primary mission, which is to meet up again with his best friend and build a life together with her. His unwavering devotion becomes a thing of legend, quite literally.

So. What happens to this crazy world? How did the ants bring all this to be? And why? Does Mort(e) ever find his beloved Sheba? Or is she just another casualty in this un-named war?

You need to read this to find out.

My Take

So, with a premise like this, you could be forgiven for expecting something erring on the side of humor or cynicism or on the other side of the spectrum, an earnest, but brow-beating, environmentalist message.

You get none of that stuff with this book, except maybe the earnestness. It doesn’t second guess itself at any point, charging fiercely into complicated characters and difficult moral questions that never really get answered – questions where the point is the discussion they generate, not an easy answer, were one to be provided.

Sebastian’s road to becoming Mort(e) is ugly, bloody, and often joyless. This is a war story, after all. But it’s so well written that you often forget that you’re reading a story about an anthropomorphic cat in a world run by ants. His anxieties, his stresses, his loneliness are all things that are inherently human… but maybe that’s the wrong word.

All in all, this is a really solidly written book with great prose, engaging characters, and a fantastic sense of itself that shines because of its premise as opposed to shining in spite of it. I try to keep these reviews as professional and objective as possible, keeping a positive bent without gushing over things even if I really enjoy them… but that’s been hard this time around. I thoroughly loved this. And its sequels. (There’s one other full book as a true sequel and a novella taking place at an indeterminate time during the first book dealing with Culdesac. I binged them all over the course of a week. Don’t judge me. I also have the new one on pre-order.)

I recommend Mort(e) wholeheartedly.

A word with the Author:

Jim Newman: The premise for the War With No Name series is so completely out-there and different from anything I’ve seen before, in the best way possible. Was there one big wallop of inspiration that brought all these elements together? Or did they collect over time until they coalesced into the story we have today?

Robert Repino: I would say that there was a wallop of inspiration, but it took several months of research and meditation before I decided it was ready to be a novel.
 
In the fall of 2009, I had a dream about an alien spacecraft hovering over my childhood home. The ship emitted a beam that caused all the animals in the neighborhood to act like humans. They walked upright and could use their paws like hands. For reasons I cannot recall, the animals began hunting the humans. The last image I remember was the army of animals marching up a gangplank to board the hovering ship. It stuck with me for a while, but the premise made no sense as a novel. I mean, why would aliens travel all the way across the galaxy just to punk us like that?
 
The premise lacked a plausible villain, so I changed it from an alien to an ant queen. I figured she would have a good reason to hate the humans. I was also doing some research into ant colonies (e.g. books by E.O. Wilson) and animal behavior. And I had always wanted to do some kind of epic science fiction/fantasy adventure. So once all of those elements were in place, I began to write. That was about three months after the dream.

Jim: Mort(e) is a really engaging protagonist and his journey from content kitty to warrior is awesome to see. Was he inspired by any one figure in particular?

Robert: Thank you for saying that. For the hero, I based the character on the family cat, Sebastian, who had a dog “girlfriend” named Sheba. (That scene in chapter one in which he attacks the babysitter happened in real life,.) Sebastian may have even believed that he was a dog. In the book, he also has some elements of archetypal action movie heroes: he’s grizzled, wounded, cynical, and feels it necessary to hide that he still has some decency left. My editor helped to tone some of that down, which prevented him from becoming too much of a stereotype. But you’ll definitely find a little John McClane and Axel Foley in there, with a little of the tenderness and toughness of Ellen Ripley.

Jim: How much research into ants and other animals did you end up doing before and during writing?

Robert: I did just enough to learn what I could get away with. For the ants, I watched a lot of documentaries and read some amateur-friendly research, including the work by Wilson I mentioned. It turns out, for example, that ant queens are not rulers in the traditional sense, but are merely specialized workers. The Queen in my book is a little bit of both. She’s a ruler and a slave at the same time.
 
I began writing this book around the time that Michael Vick joined the Philadelphia Eagles, so there was a lot of information out there about the sordid world of dogfighting, which becomes a plot point. I also read some fiction from an animal’s point of view including Paul Auster’s Timbuktu.

Jim: The characters in your story, cats, dogs, pigs, raccoons, all take on some really human ways of doing things, mannerisms, thought patterns. What process did you use to decide where animal stops and human affectations begin?

Robert: It becomes a running joke in the book that the more the animals claim to reject humanity, the more human they arguably become. History has shown that some revolutionaries are doomed to repeat the mistakes that they claim to be fixing, simply because they can’t see any other way of doing things.
 
The animals in my book tend to adapt to human civilization based on their experience before “The Change.” Strays and wild animals like Culdesac the bobcat are the most enthusiastic about waging total war against the last humans. Farm animals like Bonaparte the pig are processing the trauma they experienced. While they resent what has happened to them and their loved ones, they sometimes act more subservient and more accepting of their fate. Fairly or not, the other animals look down on them for not realizing sooner that they were being raised as a food supply. The pets like Sebastian are in a strange place; they were kept as playthings, but have a genuine affection for at least some of the humans. They are valuable as spies, and as tacticians, but they are also regarded as soft for having never lived on their own.

Jim: What’s your writing process like? Do you come up with characters first and work a premise around them, or the other way around?

Robert: I usually devise a premise first before populating the world with characters. I’d love to do it the other way around one of these days, because I have often become so enamored with a world or a scenario that I fail to notice that the characters don’t fit until I’ve written thousands of words already. I may have simply gotten lucky with this one. Sometimes, you need to take your time and ask who would be the most interesting person to follow in a given situation.
 
As far as the day-to-day writing process goes: I try to work from 10 to 12 at night. Even if I eke out a hundred words, it’s progress. Do that for a year, and you’ll have a draft.

Jim: Do you have any advice for other authors? Things you wish you knew when you started out?

Robert: Mort(e) was my third completed novel. And if you’re just starting out with writing, I recommend practicing with short stories rather than novels. Ray Bradbury has a wonderful speech about this here. Novels, he says, will often get bogged down after a few thousand words, leaving the new writer discouraged without having learned much. As an alternative, he challenges writers to produce a short story every week for a year. After that period of time, most of your stories will be bad. But some will probably be good, and you will definitely be a better writer without the soul-crushing defeat of a failed novel. As I often tell my students: “It’s too late for me. Save yourselves.”

Jim: Do you have any upcoming projects you’d like to let our readers know about?

Robert: This is a very busy time for me. First, I’m wrapping up my middle grade series that we have billed as “Toy Story meets Stranger Things.” That would be Spark and the League of Ursus and Spark and the Grand Sleuth, which are about warrior teddy bears that fight monsters.
 
Meanwhile, the last War With No Name book comes out in late 2021. It’s called Malefactor. Big selling point: it’s got wolves! And they’re pissed off!
 
In my day job as an editor, two of my years-long projects are finally meeting the world. The Oxford Handbook of Comic Book Studies (edited by Frederick Luis Aldama) just released (with a video companion here), and The Oxford Handbook of Humanism (edited by Anthony Pinn) comes out in print in late 2021.
 
Finally, I’m still teaching for Gotham Writers Workshop. My first Zoom class starts in January, and we also did a mini-lesson/lecture on short genre fiction here.