English isn’t Dirk’s first language, but it doesn’t show. Fates Worse Than Death: Hunter is extremely well written, with almost no errors in grammar and only one type-O I could find. However, the author is a creature of modern post-Christian socialist Europe and it shows. Hunter, perhaps like his creator, is trapped in a society that is in decline. Forsaken by their parents, doomed to a hellish existence in the urban abyss, unable to find meaningful existence either as individuals or within the family structure, the young characters in this book choose to loose themselves in a demimonde of drugs, gang loyalties, meaningless eroticism, and nihilism. In many ways, FWTD: Hunter is less about a dystopian future in Manhattan than it is about the modern socialist dystopia of Europe. The character Hunter is a reflection of the cultural psychosis that the author finds himself surrounded by: the breakdown of the modern family under the weight of state-sponsored mediocrity, the horror of a culture literally aborting itself out of existence, and the bleak reality of a parasitic older generation greedily draining away what is left of the life’s blood of an already dying society. Like many modern young Europeans, Hunter is surrounded by societal untrustworthiness and uncertainty. The State is unreliable and corrupt, content to manage its own decline with as little effort as it can get away with while still restricting as many individual liberties as it can manage. Corporations, while vastly more effective, are either hostile or indifferent to the individual, demanding a nearly inhuman level of conformity from their employees. The older generations are utterly corrupt and have given themselves over entirely to sexual deviancy, drug addiction, and the sterile, false world of full-emersion video games.