Jason Wood

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A series of short stories by Ryk E. Spoor in which everyday hero Jason Wood battles mythological monsters with modern technical know-how. The first six stories are collected in Digital Knight, published by Baen Books, and are online as part of the Baen Free Library. Two more are available free from Spoor's blog.

Stories

1. Gone in a Flash (vampires)
2. Lawyers, Ghouls, and Mummies (exactly what it says on the tin)
3. Photo Finish (werewolves)
4. Viewed in a Harsh Light (The Reptilians)
5. Live and Let Spy
6. Mirror Image (basilisks)
7. Shadow of Fear (things that go bump in the night)
8. Trial Run

Tropes used in Jason Wood include:

• Big Bad: Virigar, the Werewolf King
• Friendly Neighbourhood Vampire: Verne Domingo in "Gone in a Flash" and Father Jonathan Turner in "Live and Let Spy".
• Horrifying the Horror: Even other monsters are terrified of Virigar.
• Immune to Bullets: Pretty much every kind of supernatural menace. Lampshaded in "Mirror Image":

"I should have known, I should have known, you can never kill a monster with bullets, never, it's in the friggin' Monster Union Rules!"

• Just Toying with Them: In "Trial Run", Virigar explicitly says he could kill Jason any time he likes, but that would be "unamusing".
• The Only One Allowed to Defeat You: Virigar, of Jason Wood. There are occasions when the only thing keeping Jason alive is the fact that Virigar is the monster that other monsters have nightmares about.
• Our Monsters Are Different: A standard of the series, including both Our Vampires Are Different and Our Werewolves Are Different.
• Patchwork Story: Digital Knight
• Playful Hacker: "The Jammer"
• Post-Modern Magik: The series is all about this.
• The Reptilians: In "Viewed in a Harsh Light".
• Silver Bullet: Jason Wood makes some silver bullets first to fight a vampire (which didn't work) and then a werewolf (which did). He ran out of silver bullets while fighting the werewolf king, and was forced to improvise.
• Spot the Impostor: Jason finds himself having to distinguish between his Friendly Neighborhood Vampire and a werewolf doppelganger. Having discovered by this point that silver bullets work on werewolves but not vampires, he just shoots both of them.
• Things That Go Bump in the Night: In "Shadow of Fear"
• The Time of Myths: In the backstory of the series; most of the supernatural stuff Jason encounters is connected to it one way or another, and some of the creatures are old enough to have personally been part of it.
• Unfazed Everyman: Jason Wood.
• The Unmasqued World: After the 'Morgantown Incident' in "Photo Finish", everybody knows about the werewolves. Other parts of the Masquerade also pass into public knowledge as the series progresses.
• Voluntary Shapeshifting: Werewolves, in this series, can take a variety of forms, and can imitate other people, down to their fingerprints and their DNA.