In a lot of ways, your career with us is going to be a lot like being in the military during wartime: long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of stark terror. A Cell doesn't make it any better by parceling out information in dribs and drabs on a "need to know" basis, which has gotten some good men and women killed over the years...but I digress. Perversely, there's so much popular fiction that skirts along the edge of the truth that there's a strong temptation to try and sift through the sludge in order to find the occasional pearl of information, but on the other hand, in this business, the more you know, the sooner you die or go completely batshit crazy. Or both. Quite aside from the distinct possibility that if you know too much, it attracts attention, and it never seems to be the right kind of attention, if you know what I mean.

Anyway, I like to read some of those books myself, comparing notes, so to speak, though some of this stuff...it's just out there. Take this guy Gross, for example. He's got a bunch of books out about this guy, Rob Howarth I guess his name is, who works for the Brit equivalent of Majestic 12. They're pretty interesting stories, but the guy's trendy, nihilistic atheism gets up my nose after a while. Also, I have to admit I get annoyed by all the high-tech stuff, and the widespread use of magic/higher maths. Maybe that's just an institutional thing; after all, a night at the opera usually involves killing things and blowing people up (or vice versa) as opposed to unleashing eldritch wizardries from our IPhones. Because we don't want to know. We just want to stop these goddamn people - or things that used to be people, or things pretending to be people - from unleashing the end of the world, and if we can destroy some of the blood-soaked tools they're using, so much the better.

Which brings us to this other guy, Coelho, the one that writes about the accountant turned werewolf. Now, what I like about this is not the smartass accountant, but the Monster Containment Bureau agent who might pass for one of us in a bad light, if any of us were built like Arnold Schwartzenegger and as tough as Ahnuld's most famous character. This Agent French, not only is he a serious badass, he has exactly the right attitude: going into battle against a small army of demons, outnumbered and outgunned, what's the order he gives? "Fucking kill everything".

Yeah. He'd fit right in, for as long as he lasted. You want another beer?