ar is destroying the planet Harmony and Reason (known as HAR for short). Long ago, cryogenically frozen humans came to HAR in a slowship, as did the Magh. The Magh are a collective, much like ants or bees, with a single hive-mind that controls millions of worker and warrior Magh--or Maggots, as the grunts on the front lines call them.
It is those grunts that this book is really about--the guys on the front lines who duke it out with the Maggots. The title Rats, Bats & Vats refers to the manner in which The Company and the Shareholders (the real corporate fat cats who control the planet) wage war against the Maggots. Purchasing certain alien technologies, The Company creates its soldiers out of rats, bats and humans. (The humans are born and grown in vats; hence the title.) The rats and the bats, a little less than knee-high, are scrappy fighters with little respect for authority. They, along with the humans, are conscripts, slaves required to fight until they can offer The Company sufficient remuneration for being born, grown and implanted with a degree of intelligence and culture downloaded from Earth's history. But grunts never live long enough to buy that freedom.
When a horde of Maggots overruns a Company bunker, a human, five bats and seven rats get trapped behind enemy lines. The best thing for them to do would be to put aside their personal, political and racial differences to band together and find a way out. Unfortunately, HAR is not a perfect world. The group finds itself struggling through a giant scorpiary (the Maggot version of a humongous anthill). Surrounded my millions of the enemy, these grunts have little hope of survival.
Liquor, fornication and mischief
Take Watership Down, Catch-22, Starship Troopers, any random Shakespeare play, The A-Team and Kelly's Heroes and toss them into a big kettle. Add a couple dashes of sex, drinking, swearing, violence, politics and more sex. What you end up with is Rats, Bats & Vats, a brilliant action/adventure novel on par with an Indiana Jones film.
Freer and Flint's latest tome offers a wide assortment of characters, each priceless and perfectly flawed. In it, you will find a galago (an animal like a lemur) that confuses himself with Don Juan; a coddled Shareholder's daughter with too many Bronte sisters' downloads in her soft-cyber implant; a grunt trying to survive (and who, incidently, is nothing like Heathcliff); a group of Irish bats (yes, you read that correctly) with a sincere affection for all things explosive; and a handful of rats with a penchant for liquor, fornication and mischief.
The rats, the bats and one well-trained sous-chief grunt human bicker back and forth with quick-witted patter and puns that put Abbott and Costello or Chaucer to shame. And yet, despite its overflowing base sexual innuendo (not to mention downright lewd behavior), Rats, Bats & Vats finds time for a moments of tender romance.
The only legitimate gripe about this novel is its wonderfully and perversely penned characters. Not that there's anything wrong with them, but it can sometimes be confusing to keep track of them all. (There are up to 14 in any given scene!) To minimize the confusion, a dramatis personae reference list is provided in the front of the book. Readers will use it often. But it is important to note that if this is the only complaint, then there is nothing to complain about at all.
