Book: (Mostly) Human Resources: A Novel by Grace Viall
Reviewed by Weird | weird.reads.books
Rating: 2/5
Everything about this book appealed to me. I was initially drawn in by the playful title and a premise that promised a workplace romance urban fantasy mixed with Appalachian folk horror. A company whose sole job is to manage worldwide monsters and cryptids? Sign me up. Unfortunately, while the concept was brilliant, the execution fell flat.
On a positive note, the world-building is incredibly fun. I loved the concept of Entity and how the author created a corporate environment complete with department hierarchies and clever employee handbook snippets at the start of each chapter. The adventure into the Appalachian mountains to track down a missing employee was genuinely unique, and the horror elements were easily my favorite part of the book. The dread of monsters lurking around every corner was genuinely exciting, and getting to see lesser-known myths and hauntings come to life kept me engaged.
However, as a corporate professional myself, my logical brain simply refused to shut off during the workplace segments. While urban fantasy and romcoms require a healthy suspension of disbelief, the role of HR in this story felt entirely unbelievable. Our protagonist, Alexys, is introduced as a star employee who knows the rules inside and out and yet she never actually enforces them. For a character’s deviation from their ethics to feel profound, the ground rules need to be established early on. Instead, Alexys just seemed bad at her job.
The most glaring example of this was when her colleague (in a different department) and rival, Nic, secretly added himself to her hotel booking, forcing them into a separate beds, same room situation. Excuse me, what? For an esteemed HR manager to not immediately remediate a massive, unauthorized corporate travel violation—even if the hotel was at capacity—felt like a flimsy, forced excuse to check off the one-room trope.
Because of this, the romance felt like it went from zero to one hundred. Alexys and Nic supposedly can’t stand each other, yet during an unauthorized recon mission, they fall in love at a jarringly fast pace. While their petty bickering had its cute moments, the insta-love felt misplaced against the high-stakes horror backdrop.
Between the rushed romance and a focused creature-hunt mystery format, the pacing felt off. There were also just too many logic gaps to overlook. This included a moment where the main characters are strictly told by a medical professional not to sleep after sustaining concussions, only to immediately fall asleep anyway.
Perhaps I am just a bit too critical to fully embrace this book's non-serious tone. While this first installment leaves plenty of intentional, unanswered questions for the rest of the series, I don't see myself continuing past book one.
Thank you to Crooked Lane Books and NetGalley for the eARC. All opinions are my own