Swashbucklers

Dan Hanks has a thing for throwback adventure, and his second novel, Swashbucklers, published by Angry Robot in November 2021, leans into that instinct with full commitment. The setup is pure popcorn cinema: thirty-two years ago, a group of kids in the English town of Dark Peak fought off an invasion led by a pirate ghost called Deadman’s Grin. They saved everyone. Nobody remembers. Now Cisco Collins, divorced and dragging himself through middle age with his eight-year-old son George in tow, moves back to his hometown and starts piecing together those buried memories. Strange deaths in the news, a stuffed animal that shouldn’t be moving, and an unmistakable feeling that the old evil is stirring again all push Cisco to track down his childhood friends: Jake, Dorothy, and Michelle. What follows is a 400-page sprint through retro video game weaponry, enchanted forests, a talking fox, and a giant killer Father Christmas stomping through Manchester’s Christmas markets.

If that sounds like Stephen King’s It collided with Ghostbusters in a British pub, you’re not far off. Hanks blends science fiction, fantasy, horror, and 80s nostalgia into something genuinely hard to categorize. The book wears its influences openly: Stranger Things, The Goonies, Ready Player One. But where many nostalgia-driven novels simply borrow from the past, Swashbucklers builds its own story around the question of what happens when the heroes grow up, get tired, and aren’t sure the world deserves another rescue.

The novel reads like the second half of a story whose first chapter you never got. That structural choice, telling the childhood adventure only through adult memories and fragments of dialogue, gives the whole book an eerie momentum. You’re reconstructing the past alongside the characters, piecing together what happened in 1989 while the present falls apart around them. It is a bold narrative gamble, and for the most part it pays off, making the backstory feel mythic rather than mechanical.

Character Arcs and Development

Cisco Collins carries this novel. He is not a reluctant hero in the brooding, cinematic sense. He’s a man whose knees ache in the morning, whose ex-wife trusts him barely enough to let him take their son for the holidays, and whose biggest daily challenge is packing the right snacks for George’s school bag. When the supernatural threat returns, Cisco doesn’t suit up with grim resolve. He panics. He tries to shield George from what’s happening while simultaneously realizing he can’t save anyone without putting his son in danger. That tension between fatherhood and heroism gives Cisco a genuine internal conflict that most adventure novels skip entirely.

His three friends land with varying degrees of success. Dorothy (Doc) has the sharpest edge of the group; she’s spent decades building a life that has no room for ghost pirates, and her reluctance to rejoin the fight feels earned rather than convenient. Michelle brings warmth and stability. Jake functions mostly as comic relief and muscle, which works in action sequences but leaves him feeling thinner than the others when the story slows down. The children in the novel, particularly George, exist primarily as stakes and obstacles rather than as characters in their own right. George gets a handful of charming moments, but he never develops beyond the role of “kid dad needs to protect.” In a book so interested in the relationship between childhood and adulthood, the actual children feel like a missed opportunity.

Deadman’s Grin, the pirate ghost antagonist, operates more as a force of nature than a character. He’s menacing in bursts, but the novel keeps him at a distance for most of its runtime. When he does appear directly, the threat lands because Hanks has spent dozens of pages showing what his influence does to ordinary objects and spaces: Christmas decorations that kill, toys that walk, a landscape that warps and bleeds.

Pacing

The first half of Swashbucklers moves with real confidence. Hanks establishes Cisco’s return, reintroduces the old crew, and launches into action set pieces with barely a pause. The Manchester Christmas market sequence early in the book is genuinely thrilling, mixing large-scale chaos with small human moments as the friends scramble to remember skills they last used as teenagers. Hanks writes action cinematically, in wide shots and fast cuts, and when the story is running forward, you run with it.

The second half loses that clarity. As the stakes escalate, the narrative splinters into multiple perspectives, flashbacks, and sequences that tip from the surreal into the confusing. The fantasy logic, which works beautifully when it’s grounded in recognizable spaces like shops and streets and living rooms, becomes harder to follow once the story moves into more abstract territory. There are stretches in the final third where the book’s energy outpaces its coherence, and you find yourself enjoying individual moments without being entirely sure how they connect. The ending, however, delivers something genuinely unexpected and emotionally resonant, which compensates for the structural wobble that precedes it.

Deeper Thematic Exploration

Beneath all the laser guns and ghost pirates, Swashbucklers is asking a question that hits harder than it has any right to in a novel this fun: do people deserve to be saved? Cisco watches the news in 2021, sees a world chewing itself apart through a pandemic, political division, and casual cruelty, and wonders whether risking his life (and his son’s safety) for these people makes any sense at all. Hanks doesn’t let this bleakness curdle the book’s energy, but he doesn’t ignore it either. The tension between youthful idealism and adult cynicism runs through every scene where Cisco hesitates, every conversation where the old friends argue about whether they should bother.

Nostalgia itself becomes a subject rather than just a flavor. The 80s references are abundant: retro game consoles repurposed as weapons, pop culture callbacks, a general atmosphere of neon and synth. But Hanks consistently pushes past warm memory into something more complicated. The past wasn’t actually better. The friends remember their childhood adventure as glorious, but the fragments that surface suggest it was terrifying and traumatic, and the town’s decision to blame a gas leak rather than confront what really happened is itself a kind of collective nostalgia, a community choosing a comfortable fiction over a disturbing truth.

Parenthood reshapes everything in this novel. Cisco, Jake, Dorothy, and Michelle are not the same people they were at twelve. Their bodies are slower, their priorities have shifted, and the things they’re willing to sacrifice have changed fundamentally. Cisco’s willingness to abandon the fight if it means keeping George safe is not presented as cowardice. It’s presented as the reasonable response of someone who has learned, over three decades, that some things matter more than heroism. The book earns real emotional weight from this insight, particularly in its quieter scenes where Cisco sits with George and tries to figure out what kind of father he’s becoming.

Style and Voice

Hanks writes with the volume turned up. His prose is energetic, cinematic, and relentlessly forward-moving, almost breathless in the action sequences and looser in the reflective passages. He has a strong visual imagination: a giant animatronic Father Christmas crushing market stalls underfoot, a forest that shifts and whispers, ordinary toys twisted into weapons of genuine menace. When the book is at its best, reading it feels like watching a film from the era it celebrates.

The narrative voice is third-person but sticks close to Cisco’s perspective for most of the book, which grounds the more outlandish events in a recognizably human point of view. Hanks handles humor well, particularly the running joke about middle-aged bodies trying to keep pace with supernatural threats. The British setting (Dark Peak, Manchester) gives the story a texture distinct from the American small-town adventures it draws on, and Hanks uses that Englishness to good effect, especially in the contrast between cozy village life and the cosmic horror lurking underneath. The multiple perspective shifts in the second half, while occasionally disorienting, do add emotional breadth when they work.

Verdict

Swashbucklers is a book that swings big and connects more often than it misses. If you’re the kind of reader who grew up on Ghostbusters and The Goonies and wondered what those kids would look like at forty-five, fighting the same monsters with bad knees and school runs to manage, this is your novel. Hanks builds something genuinely warm and exciting around a group of characters you want to spend time with, even when the plot around them gets tangled.

The structural looseness in the second half is a real weakness, and readers who need tight plotting may find themselves frustrated. The child characters deserved more development, and some of the contemporary references (Covid, Brexit) sit awkwardly in what is otherwise a fantasy adventure. But the emotional core holds. Cisco’s journey as a father trying to figure out what bravery looks like when you have someone small depending on you gives the book a weight that pure nostalgia could never provide. For readers who want adventure fiction with heart, humor, and a willingness to ask hard questions between the explosions, Swashbucklers delivers.

Frequently Asked Questions about Swashbucklers

What is Swashbucklers by Dan Hanks about?

Swashbucklers follows Cisco Collins, a divorced father in his forties who returns to his English hometown of Dark Peak with his young son. Thirty-two years earlier, Cisco and his childhood friends saved the town from a supernatural invasion led by a pirate ghost called Deadman’s Grin. Now the threat is returning, and the old crew must reunite to fight it again, this time as exhausted adults juggling parenthood, jobs, and aching joints.

Is Swashbucklers by Dan Hanks part of a series?

Swashbucklers is labeled as Book 1, suggesting Dan Hanks planned it as the start of a series. However, as of 2026, no sequel has been published. The novel tells a complete story with a definitive ending, so it works perfectly well as a standalone read.

What are the main themes in Swashbucklers by Dan Hanks?

The novel explores nostalgia and whether the past was really as good as we remember, the way parenthood transforms our relationship to risk and heroism, the bonds of childhood friendship tested by decades of change, and a surprisingly pointed question about whether a broken modern world deserves to be saved. It wraps these themes in a package of 80s pop culture, video game references, and supernatural adventure.

How long is Swashbucklers and is it a difficult read?

Swashbucklers runs 400 pages and reads quickly thanks to its fast pacing and action-heavy structure. The prose is accessible and entertaining, pitched at the level of a fun genre adventure rather than literary fiction. The second half introduces some surreal sequences that can be disorienting, but overall it’s a breezy, engaging read suitable for anyone comfortable with fantasy and science fiction.

Is there a movie or TV adaptation of Swashbucklers?

There is no movie or TV adaptation of Swashbucklers as of 2026. The novel’s cinematic structure, with its large-scale action set pieces and ensemble cast of nostalgic heroes, makes it a natural candidate for adaptation, but nothing has been announced.

What age group or reading level is Swashbucklers appropriate for?

Swashbucklers is written for adults, with its themes of divorce, parental anxiety, and middle-age disillusionment aimed squarely at grown-up readers. The violence is moderate and fantastical rather than graphic. Mature teens (16+) who enjoy adventure fiction would likely enjoy it too, but the emotional core resonates most with readers who understand what it means to feel old while remembering what it felt like to be young.

How does Swashbucklers compare to Dan Hanks’s other books?

Dan Hanks’s debut novel, Captain Moxley and the Embers of the Empire, shares his love of pulpy, high-energy adventure with a retro sensibility. Swashbucklers is generally considered more ambitious in its themes, particularly around parenthood and nostalgia, while maintaining the same breakneck pacing and genre-blending approach. His third novel, The Way Up Is Death, continued his exploration of adventure fiction with emotional depth.

Should I read Swashbucklers by Dan Hanks and is it worth it?

If you enjoy nostalgic adventure fiction with genuine emotional stakes, yes. Swashbucklers is at its best when it balances big, ridiculous action sequences with quiet moments of a father trying to do right by his son. Readers who need airtight plotting may find the second half frustrating, and if 80s pop culture references leave you cold, some of the book’s charm will be lost. But for anyone who has ever wondered what happens after the kids save the day and grow up to face real life, this novel offers a satisfying, funny, and surprisingly moving answer.