Grace Viall’s debut novel, (Mostly) Human Resources, is a delightful combination of several popular tropes and genre elements. It offers an enemies-to-lovers workplace romance that evolves during a supernatural adventure, and it’s also the first in a series. Though Viall’s novel may be shelved under “Paranormal Romance,” protagonist and HR professional, Alexys Keane, is in no danger of falling for a monster or cryptozoological creature. Instead, against her better judgment and company policy, she finds herself increasingly distracted by her very annoying — yet very attractive — work nemesis, Nic, from Research and Cataloging. But before she can do anything about her feelings for Nic, she’ll have to survive a work trip that does not go as planned.
(Mostly) Human Resources is a slow burn; it begins in the office, setting up the characters and the company they work for. The real drama starts when Alexys learns that this year’s evaluations will take place in the field. She will have to physically travel to the hills of West Virginia to see how one of her newer employees, Elliot, is doing his job. Perhaps this would be a pleasant trip with outdoor recreation opportunities if it were not for the fact that Alexys, Nic, and Elliot all work for a company called “Entity,” which specializes in researching, locating, and sometimes eliminating monsters, cryptids, and other paranormal activity.
The narrator says that Alexys “focused on the human side of the business almost exclusively and was happy to keep her attention there”, and for good reason: her father was an Entity employee who died in the field, and she has been experiencing nightmares that seem to have paranormal origins. Even with her employee discount, though, she can’t quite afford a full investigation, so she’s coping to the best of her ability, asking for off-the-record assistance from another researcher and drinking lots of coffee. As she heads to West Virginia, Alexys desperately wants to keep the field evaluation simple, but even though all projects must be approved by HR, Elliot has gone against Alexys’s advice and ventured to Mercyhill, pursuing a rare creature called the “Hollow Walker.” So when Alexys arrives for their scheduled evaluation, Elliot is nowhere to be found. What’s more, Nic decides to crash the evaluation because, unbeknownst to Alexys, this whole situation is partly Nic’s fault. Nic encouraged Elliot’s detour to Mercyhill because he wants to locate and document the Hollow Walker himself.
There are some potentially distracting elements, particularly word choices, sentence structure, and character behavior, that certain reviewers have called attention to online. For example, the narrator says that “Nic quirked a smile”, a West Virginian character says “yens” even though they seem to be in the southern part of the state, and alleged rule-follower Alexys does not report her missing employee to company leadership. None of these aspects struck me as unusual for the genres in which Viall is working, nor were they pervasive or severe enough to detract from the overall story. Ultimately, I found them all relatively easy to overlook as I was much more interested in what would happen next.
The overall feeling of (Mostly) Human Resources is akin to Heather Fawcette’s Emily Wilde series, though the characters, settings, and writing style differ significantly. Additionally, while Viall’s novel does not take place in an academic setting, Nic’s devotion to research and his tendency to “lecture” those around him about topics that interest him lend the story overall a bit of a “dark academe” vibe. In (Mostly) Human Resources, the characters work together in an office setting but spend the majority of the story “in the field.” The romance element is more of a subplot, with nothing “smutty” or spicy; there’s just a sweet, developing relationship occurring alongside the monster-focused investigation. The reader is aware of Nic and Alexys’ growing affections long before the pair are willing to admit their feelings, much less act on them. The more horrific elements of Viall’s novel emerge slowly as well, escalating from eerie and foreboding to graphic physical encounters near the end.
If you’re a frequent reader of cozy paranormal romance, you’ll have some sense of what you’re getting into. The jacket text sets up expectations very clearly, but Viall still has some tricks up her sleeve. After all, monsters and cryptics aren’t the only potential threats, and challenges related to landscape, human interference, and corporatism all add complexity to their investigation and the relationship between Nic and Alexys. At the end of (Mostly) Human Resources, Viall sets up the next entry in the series quite neatly, and I’m already interested to see where their work with Entity takes Nic and Alexys next… whether together or separate.
FICTION
(Mostly) Human Resources
By Grace Viall
Alcove Press
Published 4 August 206
Southern Review of Books 