John Golden Books in Order

The John Golden books take urban fantasy and run it through computer support, corporate contracts, and gamer logic. They are short, funny, and proudly geeky. If you have ever looked at a broken machine and felt sure something malicious was living inside it, this series is very much speaking your language.

John Golden is a debugger, but not in the ordinary sense. He literally goes into computer systems to clear out the gremlins, fairies, and magical pests that have taken up residence there. That gives Freelance Debugger its central joke, but it also gives the story a setting where office work, digital space, and fairy-tale weirdness can all share the same frame.

John is a good lead for this kind of world because he is competent without being grand. He is helped by his sister Sarah, who is currently inhabiting a laptop, and he spends a lot of time trying to survive jobs that would be easier if powerful people were even slightly less shady. The scale is smaller than Wexler's epic fantasy, but the pace is quick and the humor lands.

The second book, The Heroes of Mazaroth, pushes the premise in a slightly different direction. John steps through a portal into a fantasy realm and discovers that, from the inside, he has been cast as the Dark Lord. That lets the series poke at adventure-game storytelling while still keeping one foot in modern urban fantasy.

These are novellas, so they make easy entry points. The pleasure is in the mashup, the tech jokes, the magical nonsense, and the way John keeps stumbling into problems that are both absurd and genuinely dangerous.

It is urban fantasy for people who suspect the help desk should carry charms as well as passwords.