Candlemas Eve

Candlemas Eve, by Jeffrey Sackett

May, 1988  Bantam Books

A few years back I reviewed Mark Of The Werewolf by Jeffrey Sackett; checking my review, it seems I mostly had an issue with what seemed to be Sackett’s overly passive and casual narrative style, which did little to convey any sort of suspense, drama, or tension. Well, friends, it’s almost as if an entirely different Jeffrey Sackett wrote Candlemas Eve, as this earlier novel of his does not suffer from that humdrum writing style, and also features a lot more in the sex and violence departments. 

That said, at nearly 400 pages of small print, the book is still too long for its own good, but that’s common for ‘80s horror paperbacks. And yes, Sackett does dwell on lame stuff too frequently, and also commits the usual “1980s pulp horror novelist” mistake of making his “heroes” incredibly lame losers that you can’t stand and can’t wait to see gutted and sent off to hell, but then maybe that’s intentional. I’m willing to forgive these things, given that Sackett injects a bunch of explicit sexual material in Candlemas Eve, something that was sorely lacking in Mark Of The Werewolf. 

The plot is also more interesting: basically, a down on his luck rocker gets involved with a pair of witches, and fame and fortune ensues. The only problem is, one of the witches has a sort of “fatal attraction” for the rocker, and has a tendency to kill anyone who gets in his way. And then when the rocker turns on her, she really goes batshit crazy. 

The rocker is named Simon Proctor, in his “midforties,” a guy who has managed to barely hang on in the music biz since the ‘60s. Sackett is guilty of misleading the reader in Simon’s intro; Candlemas Eve actually has two fakeout openings. For one, we start off in the 1690s, as a pair of hot whores lure a guy to their place, have super explicit sex with him – complete with the detail of one of them taking his, er, essence in her mouth and then spitting it into a cup – and then the girls slit his throat, mix his blood with his essence, and commit his soul to Satan and whatnot. 

This sequence is more OTT than anything in Mark Of The Werewolf, and we’re only a handful of pages in! Then Sackett pulls back on the camera, as it were, and we discover that all of this is a movie, one that is being broadcast to a live studio audience(!!). I mean seriously, it’s straight-up hardcore, and we’re supposed to believe that not only was it shown to a TV audience, but also the filmmaker, rock star Simon Proctor, sunk a few million bucks into the movie and hopes to make a windfall upon its release in theaters. 

Okay, I know we must suspend belief when it comes to horror fiction, but come on! In what world would an adult movie get a theatrical release and be previewed for a studio audience? Sackett sort of brushes the movie under the narrative carpet – it’s only mentioned sporadically from here on out – but it’s really hard to believe. 

But Sackett commits an even greater sin immediately thereafter. Simon is on this talk show to debate a panel of fellow guests, among them a Tipper Gore type and also an old German guy who is a professor of comparative religion, and this guy mocks Simon’s “silly story” of 17th century witches that cannot be based on fact, despite what Simon insists. And Simon Proctor keeps demanding that he is indeed a witch, descended from a man named John Proctor who was hanged for witchcraft in the Salem Witch Trials of the 1690s. 

But here’s the thing: we readers will soon learn that Simon, who dyes his hair jet black and who paints his face with “ghoulish” makeup and wears pentagrams and whatnot, really is just a fraud, as the professor of religion accuses him of being; Simon does not believe in the devil, or any witch stuff; he’s just doing it for the money, because it’s what “the kids” are into these days. 

This I felt was a big misstep, one that Jeffrey Sackett is unable to get over in the ensuing novel. While it is fine as-is, Candlemas Eve would have been immeasurably superior if Simon Proctor was the character initially presented to us: a stern-faced practicioner of Satanism. But it’s just an act, and Simon will prove to be a total loser: neurotic about his failing fortunes and his growing age. 

It gets even worse: after the talk show, Simon performs for an audience of ten thousand in New York City – which sounds like a lot to me, but we’re to understand it’s nothing compared to the audiences Simon and his band, Witch’s Sabbath, used to pull in. But after the show, Simon wipes off his makeup and drives himself home to New Hampshire, moping all the way. I mean at this point I was wondering what the hell sort of “Rock Novel” I was reading…what self-respecting rocker drives himself home after a gig? 

It gets even worse (again): Not content to just write a rock novel, Sackett also wants to bring in the horror-mandatory “family and kids” aspect, so he can have more drama. Simon lives on the old family inn with his daughter, 16 year-old Rowena, his son, 22 year-old Lucas, and his father, old Floyd. (There’s no wife, and Lucas and Rowena have different mothers, both of whom are long out of the picture.) 

So yes, we also have this family drama dynamic, because in addition to Simon’s kids there’s also Lucas’s girlfriend, Karyn (who is pregnant), and Lucas’s best bud Jeremy, who is the nephew of the local minister and who also carries a torch for Rowena. These will be the characters Jeffrey Sackett focuses on in Candlemas Eve; the members of Simon’s band only appear infrequently in the narrative. 

The character of Floyd is especially hard to take. He’s an old prick who spends the narrative either berating Simon or mocking him, or telling him how disappointed he is in him. This only further serves to make our hero, who is supposed to be a Satanic rocker, seem like a chump. I mean honestly folks, it’s like Frasier, only with Kelsey Grammer replaced by Alice Cooper. 

Things improve greatly with the appearance of Gwendolyn and Adrienne, a pair of young witches who show up one night and tell Simon they’re going to make him a star for Satan. We readers however know these two are something else entirely: the spirits of two witches who were hanged back in the 1690s. One of them – the current Gwendolyn, formerly Abigail in the 17th Century – is in love with John Proctor, Simon Proctor’s ancestor (ie the man who was hanged for witchcraft), and the devil has brought her back to life so that she can be with him again; Simon, we are told, is the spitting image of his ancestor John. 

It all sounds muddled, and really it is, but Sackett does a good job of making it all sensible in the novel itself. The important thing is that Gwendolyn, who is a smokin’ hot brunette with an incredible body, says that Satan will make Simon Proctor a star; there will be no more of the fakery. So she and Adrienne – who is mousy and scrawny – take up their lutes and perform some 17th century tunes, and Simon can’t help but think how good they’d sound if they were rockified, sort of like “the Byrds used to do.” 

I have to give Jeffrey Sackett credit: by not giving a shit about what was going on with rock in the era in which he was writing (ie the late ‘80s), he managed to make Candlemas Eve come off as timeless. Indeed, the only rock groups Sackett mentions in the book are the Byrds, Jethro Tull, and Donovan(!). In other words this novel could just as easily take place in the 1970s; there are no topical ‘80s details, and the revamped Witch’s Sabbath, with the two actual witches Gwendolyn and Adrienne on “amplified lutes,” comes off more like Fleetwood Mac with Satanic overtones than any ‘80s metal band. 

I’m also happy to report that Sackett is a rock novelist who actually describes the music…at least he sort of does. There are several concert sequences, and we’re told that characters will play guitar solos or lute solos, and the lyrics are reprinted throughout…but otherwise it’s not properly conveyed what the music sounds like. We do know that it’s not heavy metal, per se. I think the implication is that it sounds wholly different from anything else going on at the time, and for that reason – not to mention the notoriety Gwendolyn generates – the band becomes a huge success. 

I had a hard time buying this; I mean the hardcore mainstream movie was one thing, but it’s entirely another to think that “the kids” of the late ‘80s (of whom I was one!) would go for the ornate lyrics-cum-poetry that Sackett strings through the novel. The most curious thing is that none of the lyrics rhyme, and there’s no hook to any of the songs; I also got a Comus vibe from how Sackett described Witch’s Sabbath, and Comus was a cult band at best. 

In this regard Candlemas Eve greatly resembles The Armageddon Rag, with Witch’s Sabbath becoming more and more popular as they go along, with the caveat that Sackett doesn’t work in a subplot that they are generating evil in their audience and threatening the status quo. Rather, Candlemas Eve revolves on more of a personal space, with Gwendolyn becoming increasingly evil and controlling and Simon becoming increasingly anxious about her. 

Well, sort of. It’s actually Simon’s daughter, Rowena, who distrusts Gwendolyn. Simon Proctor is more focused on the money and the fame; he’s such a dimwitted “protagonist” that you can’t help but root against him. With her penchant for wearing revealing clothes, proclaiming to all and sundry that she is a Satan-worshipping witch, and also giving Simon blowjobs right in front of his teenaged daughter, Gwendolyn easily steals the novel – and, what’s more, the reader sort of roots for her. Sure, she’s an agent of darkness, and murders several innocent people in the course of the book…but at the same time she died for love, and is reborn for love, and commits herself to Simon Proctor. 

In a way Candlemas Eve is like Bewitched; a mega powerful witch falls in love with a mortal man who doesn’t realize how lucky he has it. Just like Darrin would always shame Sam for using her witchcraft, so too does Simon Proctor constantly tell Gwendolyn that she’s not “really” a witch, that the Devil doesn’t exist, that it’s all fantasy. Yes, folks, it’s another of those horror novels where the characters don’t realize they’re in a horror novel. 

It must be stated that there isn’t much “horror” stuff per se for the majority of the novel. Other than a bit where Simon – this time with Gwendolyn – goes back on that talk show, and Gwendolyn kills the religion professor via witchcraft voodoo (of course people think the guy just had a heart attack, as no one else realizes this is a horror novel, either), Candlemas Eve is more of a rock novel, with Simon and Witch’s Sabbath practicing new songs and taking them on the road. 

As mentioned this time around Sackett doesn’t shirk on the juicy details; being a Satanic witch and all, Gwendolyn isn’t one to stand on ceremony, and gives herself to Simon on the night she meets him. First there’s a humorous bit where she smokes dope with him, uncertain what this “weed” is he’s referring to. Sackett does a good job of showing how out of time Gwendolyn is with the twentieth century, though her awkward, oldstyle English gets to be annoying after a while. Ie, “Know you not” and the like. But anyway, when Simon and Gwendolyn get down, Sackett leaves no juicy stone unturned – a marked difference from Mark Of The Werewolf. Yes, I realize I used “marked” and “Mark” in the same sentence. 

Sadly the sleaze is minimal after this, other than a bravura bit where Rowena, Simon’s killjoy daughter – who despite being a killjoy is always on the road with the band – comes in on an in-progress orgy, with all the Witch’s Sabbath guys banging various babes and her dad getting that aforementioned blowjob from Gwendolyn. Even the pregnant girl, Karyn, is in on the festivities! Sackett shows a dedication to sleaze that I would not have expected; he even opens the novel with a preface stating that readers who frown on sexual explicitness should not read the book!

But otherwise the novel is tame on that regard, and also the frequent cutaways to what really happened in the seventeenth century became obtrusive. I had no interest in Adrienne and was not eager to read about her sad sack life in the 1690s and how she ran afoul of jezebel Abigal, ie the future Gwendolyn. I also kept wondering what happened to the two “actresses” who played Abigail and Mary in the opening sequence of the novel, ie the full hardcore movie based on John Proctor’s life, but as mentioned Sackett sort of drops the movie angle. 

Instead, the focus is on the fame the band has generated, and this really brings in some similarities with The Armageddon Rag. Their audiences become bigger and bigger with each city, the fans really eating up their overly wordy Puritan-era lyrics and songs, praising Satan and whatnot, but if Gwendolyn’s goal was to spread the word of her “Master” through Simon’s music, Sackett drops this subplot, focusing more on Gwendolyn’s growing evilness. 

Now as I’ve said before, I love my hot Satanic chicks. Gwendolyn as presented is the ideal woman: a stacked beauty who is totally devoted to her man and, what’s more, is superhumanly powerful, and will use her superhuman power to protect and empower her man. But dullard Simon doesn’t appreciate this; again, it’s what I call the Bewitched Conundrum. And Gwendolyn is totally fun, other than her penchant for killing ministers, that is. 

She’s surely more fun than Simon’s deadbeat daughter, and she’s more fun than sad sack Adrienne, and she’s a helluva lot more fun than old pisspot Floyd Proctor. Either Sackett had so much fun writing Gwendolyn that he didn’t realize how likable he was making her, or his tongue was in his cheek and he knew exactly what he was doing. 

The horror element slowly creeps in, beginning in the final quarter when Gwendolyn finally tells Simon the truth – that she is the spirit of Abigail, a witch who has been dead for 300 years, and who is currently possessing the body of a modern girl thanks to her master, Satan. You win a no-prize if you guess that Simon doesn’t believe her. What’s more, he’s such a piece of shit that, when Gwendolyn begs to marry him, Simon agrees to go along with it…but secretly plans to just fake it, and also to secretly record it, to add it as a bonus to a video he’s making. Because “the kids” will love it. Now honestly, what kid in 1988 would “love” to see their rockstar idol get married at the end of the video? I mean it’s like if that longform 1990 Danzig video ended with a Satanic wedding ceremony…come on. 

Gwendolyn is truly the villain in the final chapters, as even she can no longer take Simon’s shit and thus vows to kill him – along with all the other Proctors. Sackett again proves his horror credentials by killing off characters the reader would think is safe; the finale is particularly gruesome, with eviscerated zombies shambling around under Gwendolyn’s control, people being turned into flame, and corpses who are invariably possessed by either Satan or by kindly ghosts. 

Given the plot, it’s not surprising that Sackett brings in a religious theme, and Candlemas Eve features a saccharine “you’ve proved the goodness of your soul” finale that isn’t too heavy on the treacle, much to Sackett’s credit. But man, given the people who are bloodily butchered in the finale, you wonder how any of the survivors are going to be able to cope. 

Overall I really enjoyed Candlemas Eve, with the caveat that all of the characters were for the most part unlikable, save for the friggin’ villain. But again, I like my hot Satanic pulp horror chicks, so it was only natural that Gwendolyn would be my favorite character. The novel was much, much better than Mark Of The Werewolf, and I’d recommend it if you are in the mood for some horror reading this Halloween season. 

That said, thanks to my son I myself am in a horror mood – he’s been bitten hard by the Halloween bug – so I’ll have more horror reviews up this month.

The Spider #31: The Cholera King

The Spider #31: The Cholera King, by Grant Stockbridge

April, 1936  Popular Publications

It’s funny; the volumes of The Spider that I think I won’t enjoy turn out to be the most entertaining. It happened before with Reign Of The Death Fiddler, and now again with The Cholera King. Norvell “Grant Stockbridge” Page really keeps the story moving…mostly because he changes the direction of the plot so many times that the book veritably speeds by. 

It’s a month after the previous volume, the events of which aren’t mentioned, but when we meet him Richard “The Spider” Wentworth is taking a much-needed vacation, along with his ever-suffering fiance, Nita Van Sloan. On a boat in the mid-Atlantic, Wentworth is in the process of having a marksman contest with a fellow shipmate, when the shipmate abruptly tries to kill Wentworth. The man then jumps off the ship and is picked up by a plane, making his escape. 

However, this is not the plot Page wants to fool around with. Immediately thereafter we learn that cholera is rampant on the boat, and what’s more, Wentworth is informed that there’s been a cholera outbreak back in New York City. Wentworth does what any other pulp hero would do; he commandeers the boat’s sea-airplane and takes off for New York. 

One thing I have been much appreciating about the latest volumes of The Spider is Nita’s growing involvement. Whereas past volumes shunted her off to the side, only appearing long enough to be captured, this time out Nita flat-out insists that she go to New York with Wentworth; she demands to take part in his adventures, now. This leads to a great bit where Wentworth, after flying alone in what he’s thought was a solo capacity for several hours, finds himself attacked by dogfighting planes – and is saved by the surprise appearance of a stowaway on his little airplane. 

However this sequence is the only part of The Cholera King that I didn’t enjoy, as Page indulges in several pages of “aeronautical fiction.” Once Wentworth lands in New York, though, we get back on firmer pulp ground; Wentworth learns that cholera is rampant in the city, with thousands dead, and what’s more New York has been quarantined. This was especially timely in our post-Covid world, Norvell Page once again displaying a strange prescience: 

Yes, “God help a city when the very children forget to play.” Not to mention a city where mothers are arrested for taking their children to playgrounds. Or where a man is arrested for paddleboarding on an empty beach. Not to mention the hundreds of other injustices the ruling class of “experts” perpetrated on we the public in the reign of Covid – things which they just wish we’d forget about, today – all in the name of “public health.” 

It’s pretty sad that even the imagination of a 1930s pulp writer pales in comparison to reality, especially given that the New Yorkers in Page’s novel rebel against these injustices, and indeed unite, rise up together, and take their salvation into their own hands. But then, these people have none other than the Spider to lead them. 

Page isn’t content to just write a novel about New York under a cholera quarantine, though. He also works in a murder-mystery plot, with city notables getting killed, and “tit-tat-toe” (or, more commonly today, tic-tac-toe) diagrams carved into their torsos. Wentworth is certain these murders are related to the cholera outbreak, but police boss Kirkpatrick doesn’t believe it. 

We get more flying fiction as Wentworth (with Nita!) goes off in pursuit of men who try to sabotage a supply of acids or whatnot that’s being brought in to counteract the cholera in the city’s water. After this it’s back to the murder mystery subplot as Wentworth chases down various red herrings, certain that someone is the mastermind behind this nefarious plot. 

Once again Wentworth himself names the villain of the piece: it’s the Plague Master, and sadly he continues the trend of being a poorly-costumed villain. He’s tall, bald, wears a crimson robe, and has a mummy-like face. He operates mostly in the background, but like all other Spider villains, he not only has an army of criminals at his command but he also knows who the Spider really is. 

Speaking of the Spider, the best part in The Cholera King entails Wentworth donning his Spider guise and going out into the city to take down the looters – yet more prescience on Page’s part, with the caveat that in his day looters were still considered criminals. Wentworth, slouching through the city in his cloak and deformed mask, comes upon a pair of sadists as they toss a woman out of a window, and the Spider goes up there to dish out some bloody payback. It’s a cool moment, the best in the book, and it would’ve been great if Page had just written the entire novel in this manner. 

Unfortunately, our author has other intentions: for one, he introduces yet another subplot where Wentworth disguises himself yet again and goes into the slums of the Bowery, posing as a criminal in the hopes of being drafted into the Plague Master’s criminal empire. This subplot is humorously dropped as Page changes his mind and instead has the Spider become a hero for the downtrodden, quarantined masses of New York City. 

If only there had been a Spider in the real world of 2020! After taking down many of the looters and criminals who are plaguing the disease-ridden, quarantined city (not to mention being chased by the cops himself), Wentworth the next day comes upon a group of desperate people who are about to drink from a water hose, even though the water is contaminated with cholera and it will mean sudden death if they drink it. Wentworth is driven to help them and, still in his cape and whatnot, makes a stirring speech and says he will lead them to safety. 

This part is great and shows that Page understood the concept of masculine strength, another thing the “experts” have tried to make us forget. There are constant asides of “What a man!” from the women who flock to the powerful leader that is Richard Wentworth, one of them even mentioning later on how no man will ever equal Wentworth in her eyes. Wentworth, we’ll recall, is a man of wealth who has seen a need in people and has willingly put himself in harm’s way to help them, despite being branded as a criminal and hated by the authorities. Boy, this sure reminds me of a particular real-world person… 

Now The Cholera King becomes a survival yarn as Wentworth, still posing as the Spider, leads a few million New Yorkers on an “exodus” into the country, where they can have fresh water and live again, away from the cholera. Again there’s that prescience as they are constantly impeded by the authorities, ie the “experts,” who even draw guns on them and tell them they cannot proceed, because they are infected with cholera and it’s important for the “public health” that they stay in New York. To die. 

But Norvell Page and Richard Wentworth are on the side of freedom and life, not tyranny and death, and Wentworth leads his millions on into the wilderness, breaking right through the government troops who have lined up to stop them. It was awesome to read this and to be reminded that there was a time when a pulp writer could still believe in the independence and free spirit of the American people, to imagine that they would buck against the forces of oppression. Sadly, as demonstrated by the willful masking, one-way-aisles-at-the-grocery-store, and “six feet of separation” of the Covid years (the majority of which was bullshit that was made up on the fly), this independence and free will has either been lost in the 89 years since The Cholera King was published, or it never existed in the first place and is just the product of a pulp writer’s imagination. Personally, I believe the former. 

The exodus sequence is almost disconnected from the rest of the book, but is entertaining as hell, especially given its connotations with our modern day, or at least the modern day of a few years ago. (Fortunately, things seem to be changing profoundly.) But then it’s back to the “posing as a criminal to get hired” subplot, which of course leads to Wentworth being trapped by the Plague Master, who by the way also has Nita prisoner – and also wants her to marry him! 

There’s no big action finale for The Cholera King; indeed, Norvell Page relies on deus ex machina, with Wentworth being saved as he’s being led to his death. Really, Page has spent so much of the narrative on the tic-tac-toe mystery (including a super-long footnote in which he tells how to solve the various ciphers in the text, perhaps unintentionally inspiring the future Zodiac Killer), not to mention the exodus from New York, that the poor Plague Master himself is reduced to almost a footnote…and the “revelation” of his real identity is (intentionally?) hilarious, as it’s some dude Wentworth and Nita knows, but the guy hasn’t even been mentioned in the book! 

Anyway, I really enjoyed The Cholera King; the plot was all over the place, but the high points were really high, and Norvell Page’s unwitting prediction of the Covid era gave the book a lot of resonance with today.

Raga Six (Doctor Orient #2)

Raga Six, by Frank Lauria

December, 1972  Bantam Books

The second volume of Doctor Orient picks up some time after the events of the first volume; indeed, it appears that a whole novel’s worth of stuff has occurred in the interim. When last we saw him, Dr. Owen Orient was taking down a Satanic cult in New York City, in between meditation sessions with his colleagues in his swank, three-floor townhome. But here in Raga Six, author Frank Lauria dispenses entirely with the setup of that first volume. 

But as mentioned, Orient has had another adventure since we last saw him; working with another doctor, one named Ferrari, Orient apparently cured the Vice President’s daughter of her lifelong paralysis of the legs and the girl can now walk again. But this is only infrequently mentioned in the narrative or in dialog; it all has happened after Doctor Orient ended and before Raga Six begins. Humorously, this material – which was never even covered in the first novel – is brought up more often than the actual plot of the first volume. In fact the events of Doctor Orient are only referred to once, in passing. 

The bigger focus here is that Dr. Orient has decided to let go of all of his worldly trappings: the three-floor home, the deluxe antique car, etc. Wanting to get back in touch with the world, Orient dispenses of all his wealth, as well as his retinue. In the previous book I remarked that there was certainly the vibe of a 1930s pulp to this series, with Orient the wealthy occultist leading a Doc Savage-esque team of followers. 

But that setup is now gone; Frank Lauria proves himself fearless of smashing apart what came before and starting anew. Which essentially is the vibe that drives this second volume of the series. I should note however that Dr. Owen Orient is not a driven protagonist, particularly not in this installment: his focus is more on “following his fate” and taking it one day at a time, with no exact goal or objective that he is working toward. 

This certainly lends Raga Six a laissez-faire vibe so far ast the plotting goes. After reading mostly men’s adventure novels for the past several years, it was a bit hard for me to adapt to a protagonist who was not driven to save people, or to get revenge, or who had some other goal he was working steadfastly to achieve; Owen Orient is driftless and aimless, and this extends to how the novel plays out. 

For example, even when he encounters evil, Orient is not driven to stop it. Like early in the book, he comes across a Satanic cult that operates out of the Lower East Side. Instead of smashing it, like your average men’s adventure protagonist would, Orient instead bides his time to figure out what is going on, and only gradually decides to perform an exorcism to save the two people who have been possessed by a demon. So yes, he does save these people, but what I mean to say is that he is not driven to do so; it takes him a while to figure out what is going on, mostly because Orient once again seems curiously incapable of noticing signs of the supernatural, a plot contrivance that stymied him in the first book. 

In a way Raga Six can almost be read as a standalone. Most of the characters who were so important in Doctor Orient aren’t even in this followup, and Orient himself is a different man. And as mentioned Lauria does not refer back to that previous book. Orient walks away from everything, and on a whim heads to the Lower East Side. It’s been five years since I read the first book, but I recall it did a phenomenal job of capturing all the details of the Groovy Age, complete with a psychedelic nightclub in Manhattan. 

In Raga Six, however, the Groovy Age is replaced by the Hippie Age; Orient, in his early 30s, spends the first quarter of the novel in the company of a group of Lower East Side hippies. Lauria really takes his time with the narrative – it runs to 277 pages of small, dense print, and is not a quick read by any means – and allows these characters to breathe. In many ways Raga Six has more in common with the low-simmer potboilers of Burt Hirschfeld and other contemporary popular authors than it does with horror; this is not a fast-moving horror tale in the least. 

While he might not be the most action-prone series protagonist, Dr. Orient still at least gets laid. This is courtesy Moon Girl, a sexy hippie chick Orient encounters during an East Side music festival that quickly devolves into a riot, with cops tear-gassing the hippies who refuse to leave the area. Curiously, Lauria makes it clear that the hippies are the ones who start the riot, refusing to comply with the police and then throwing things at them. I found this quite prescient in our post-“summer of mostly peaceful but fiery protests” world. 

Moon Girl has a five-year-old son named Julian, and soon enough the two are living with Orient. This seems to set up an entirely new cast for the series, but Lauria will change his mind and drop both Moon Girl and Julian for the majority of the text. More focus is placed on Cowboy, a drug dealer who puts Orient to work, having him manage the various deals and payoff schemes and whatnot. As mentioned, the plotting here would be more at home in a piece of hippie lit than a book with “horror” labelled on its spine. 

Through Moon Girl, Orient finds out about a strange group operating out of a storefront on the East Side. Moon Girl has a friend who has been acting weird lately, and Orient goes to visit her – and gradually suspects she is being inducted into a Satanic cult. He also meets the mysterious man who runs the place, a guy who goes around in a black rubber suit and carries a whip, along with the guy’s wife, a beautiful young woman who during seances will channel the voices of dead people for a paying clientele. 

There follows a great sequence where Orient gains the employ of an acquaintance, a heavyset woman who is famous for giving readings in the city, and the two contrive to perform an excorcism on the possessed husband and wife without their knowing it. Lauria has certainly done his occult rituals homework, and as with the first book, Raga Six is filled to the brim with arcane lore, particularly here where Orient banishes the demon that has possessed these two. 

But here’s the thing – what would have been enough for a single novel is over and done with in a few chapters, and never mentioned again! Instead the wily-nily plotting has it that Orient is soon off on a ten-day voyage via freighter to Tangier(!), sent off by Joker, who for plot-contrivance reasons has flown the coop and left Orient with a ticket for this ocean voyage. And, because he has nothing else to do, Orient just goes along with it. 

It’s quite brazen how Lauria jams so many separate plots together into the novel; soon enough the previous quarter of the novel is immaterial, as everything now focuses on Orient’s fellow passengers on the ship, in particular the mysterious Dr. Aleistar Six and his retinue. Among them is the titular Raga Six, Dr. Six’s wife: a lovely woman with pale skin, yellow eyes, silver hair, and “full breasts.” The latter concession surprised me, as Frank Lauria is not the most exploitative of authors; as with Doctor Orient, lurid and sensational details are minimal, the author going for more of a reserved tenor in his narrative. 

There’s also Pia, a beauty who seems to be a “potential,” meaning she harbors latent psychic abilities. Orient is interested in her, but the overbearing Dr. Six seems to have a firm grip on Pia. Regardless, Dr. Orient enjoys himself a good ol’ three-way; one night Pia calls him telepathically and Orient goes to her, but ends up in bed with both Pia and Raga. Again Lauria does not dwell on the sleaze, instead doling out lines like, “he sunk into her honeyed depths” and whatnot. (For some reason I’m suddenly hungry for Honey Nut Cheerios!) 

There is a great liberal vibe to Raga Six, and of course I mean the traditional definition of “liberal,” in that Orient approaches everything with an open mind and a lack of judgment. I miss liberals like that, don’t you?? So Orient’s three-way with Raga and Pia is just another event in his easy-going, wherever-fate-takes-me life, with no hangups or judgment or condemnation. This extends to Orient’s drug usage, but that is minimal in this volume. We do however get more scenes of Orient and others staring into the tips of their cigarettes as they smoke, something we were told incessantly in the previous book. 

Only gradually does Lauria bring any kind of tension or “horror” into this interminable sea voyage. It’s mostly centered around Dr. Six and his possessive attitude toward Pia. This comes to a head when Orient’s young cabin mate, Presto, runs off with Pia in Tangier, and Six goes off in rage-filled pursuit…and Orient shacks up with Raga for several days. Again we are more in Burt Hirschfeld territory, as Lauria focuses on their growing love and their plans to be together, once Raga divorces Dr. Six. 

Horror material does not return until Six comes back into the narrative and retrieves Raga, a submissive Pia in tow, and off they go to Six’s clinic in Italy. Now as we’ll recall, Orient is in love with Raga Six and knows something strange is going on with her husband. He also suspects some misdeed has happened with his young cabin mate; Dr. Six claims he left Presto in a drug coma in Marrakesh. So Orient goes there to check on him…and ends up spending a month working on his meditation skills and such with a guy there who is one of the Nine Unknown Men, and who trained with Orient’s own master, Ku. 

This is what I mean about the laissez-faire plotting. You’d expect Orient would be gung-ho to find out what the hell was going on with Dr. Six and to claim Raga as his own, but instead the next chapters are all focused on Orient astrally voyaging to find out what happened to Presto, who truly is in a coma, but one that does not seem to be drug induced. 

The plot changes again when Orient finally goes to Italy and hooks up with Sordi, his former chaffeur. A girl in Sordi’s village has come down with a “sleeping sickness,” which of course made me wonder if Stan The Man Lee read this novel and copped the idea for The Virtue Of Vera Valiant. Orient tries to figure out if this could be a supernatural menace, then at great page length tracks down Dr. Six’s clinic – and there’s a rushed action scene as Orient frees Pia and Raga from the now-maniacal Dr. Six. 

Again, a normal novel would end here, but instead Orient receives a telepathic message from one of his students, Argyle, a black American who factored into the previous book and is an actor; he’s in Rome shooting a cowboy movie, and what’s more Moon Girl and her son Julian are with him. Dr. Orient heads there…and learns that little Julian is lost, having disappeared a few days before while they were visiting the Coliseum. 

So what does Orient do? He starts meditating while Raga offers to make sandwiches. It’s kind of impressive how Lauria consistently refrains from injecting any kind of tension or drama into his tale. Instead of freaking out and canvassing the city, Moon Girl is content to wait while Argyle and Orient voyage to the astral plane to see if they can locate her son. There’s even a part where they discover they have more success in the morning, so they decide to break for the rest of the day and start again the next dawn! 

I admit, this leisurely approach to the plot can be a little wearying, especially if one wishes for a more proactive protagonist. Also, it must be mentioned that Orient is very much a master of the metaphysical; the extent of his physical abilities would be meditation, and it’s not like he happens to be a karate master on the side or anything. He’s not tough at all, is what I mean to say, and the finale is especially grating because it consists of Orient sleeping due to the psychic attacks of the monster who turns out to be behind everything. 

Yes, sleeping – Orient spends the final pages either in bed or struggling to keep his eyes open. That is when he isn’t turning on faucets or throwing around salt as banishing rituals to ward off the psychic attacks. It might be “legitimate” so far as the occult stuff goes, but it makes for a very lame “action finale.” Indeed when you visualize what Orient does in the finale – struggling not to sleep, even so lethargic at one point that he passes out while trying to chase a villain into the woods – it becomes quite clear why there was never a Doctor Orient movie. 

I won’t ruin the surprise finale, but it becomes clear who the main villain is, and Orient alone must face this villain. That said, the “thrilling conclusion” is again sort of uninententionally humorous, as it features Orient – again trying not to fall asleep – muttering some words as he stares at a ring on his finger. At least Bantam Books did not market Raga Six as an action thriller, but still. The reader kind of expects a little more. 

The leisurely plotting extends to the final pages, as despite the book ending, Lauria keeps writing, and eventually Orient heads back to New York, where it turns out he still owns his three-floor home. We’re told he spends “months” getting back into the swing of things, working at a hospital and opening up his own practice. Presumably this is all setup for the next volume, Lady Sativa, which came out the following year – and I’ll try to get to it sooner than I got to this second volume. 

Overall I enjoyed Raga Six, appreciating Frank Lauria’s strong writing and his determination to let the characters breathe, but at the same time the lethargic plotting got to be a drag. But then, if you want action with your ‘70s occult sleaze, you’d probably be more happy with the concurrent Mind Masters series (which I think I might read again one of these days).

Men’s Mag Roundup: Satanic Sleaze

 

Boy, it’s been several years since I’ve done one of these men’s adventure magazine roundup reviews. Ever since Bob Deis and Bill Cunningham started up Men’s Adventure Quarterly, I’ve rarely dipped into my collection of men’s adventure mags. But recently I hit Bob and Bill up with an idea for a “Satanic sleaze” sort of MAQ Halloween special, focusing on the lurid “killer cult” tales of the latter men’s mags (ie, from the early to mid 1970s), and then I decided that I’d just read some of these stories from my own collection. 

Yes, as documented in Barbarians On Bikes (which Bob put together with his other co-editor, Wyatt Doyle), as the ‘60s progressed the editors of the men’s mags started looking for more than just the typical “Nazi villain” of the earlier pulps. So there was an increasing amount of stories with biker villains, or cults, or Satanists, or hippie killer freaks. 

First up is this Man’s Story from April 1975. This mag was one of the “sweats,” meaning it traded in more lurid and sensationalistic content than the “upmarket” men’s mags (which were pretty lurid themselves, but still). And the cover is the proof in the pudding, illustrating some Nazi terror. I really love the covers on the later men’s mags, and this one’s great. Though I have to admit, the Telly Savalas-lookalike Nazi in the far corner almost looks like a TV game show host, the way he’s grinning and pointing at that poor blonde. “And you just won – a flaming poker enema!” 

This issue serves up the exact sort of story I had in mind for my “Satanic sleaze” Halloween MAQ special: “Blood Rites Of Satan’s Darlings,” by Chuck Graham. It features a great splashpage, which again demonstrates how cool this latter-era men’s mag artwork was: 

Yeah man, this one is short but it serves up the whole thing. Curiously, it’s written in present-tense, which is unusual for a men’s mag. It would appear that the editors were open to experimentation in the later days. But then again, the drugs were just better back then. The story concerns an unfortunate young American girl named Jan who is on vacation in Mexico (apparently a hotbed for Satanic cult, at least so far as the men’s mags were concerned). 

The story opens with Jan enjoying dinner with the female friend who brought her here and the three people who live in this house: two beautiful native women and an older native man. But something seems off and Jan’s thoughts are fuzzy…yes, folks, Jan’s been drugged, but the drug leaves only her body unresponsive but her mind is cogent, because the Satanists want Jan to know every horrid thing that happens to her. 

We go immediately to the “sweats” stuff, with Jan taken into a cult chamber where the man and four women strip her down to her “nylon panties” and start pawing her up…but some of the “depredations” done to poor Jan are too much for even our author to recount. About the most we know is that she is tortured; the author intimates that the four use her sexually, but does not go into detail. At any rate, Jan’s heart is ripped out, and that’s it for her. 

I first read this story probably around 2011, when I bought the magazine, and the finale made me laugh then and it still makes me laugh now: after recounting all this lurid horror, author Chuck Graham finishes off the story in a faux stentorian style in which he soundly condemns the atrocities of Satanists in the western world…as if he hadn’t just exploited such atrocities in his lurid story! But then, it is quite evident that most of these men’s mag authors had their tongues firmly in cheek. 

Overall this one certainly serves up the sleazy Satanism, but otherwise “Blood Rites Of Satan’s Darlings” is really just a torture story, with no actual plot or anything else. But then, that’s what we want from the sweats. 

Much longer and more enjoyable is “I Joined A Cross-Country Sex Circus,” by Don Peters “as told to Steve Lawton.” From Barbarians On Bikes I know that this story also appeared in the April 1972 Man’s Story. The men’s mag editors were not shy about reprinting stories. (And by the way, that is not my finger, or carpet, in the screengrabs above; these images are from an eBay listing for the magazine I came across many years ago!)  As mentioned above, bikers were also prime “villain candidates” for the mags, as demonstrated here. 

In this first-person tale, “Don Peters” (though our narrator never actually refers to himself in the story) is going across the Denver area in search of a particular biker. His girlfriend you see was raped and killed by a biker, an act which Don witnessed, but was too busy being knocked out at the time to stop it from happening. He only saw a brawny biker push his girlfriend up against a tree, rape her, and then gut her with a knife – Don got to her before she died, saw that she was holding the broken half of a Maltese Cross, and now Don is going around looking for a biker with a broken Maltese Cross. In other words, the biker who has the other half of this broken cross is the biker who raped and killed Don’s girlfriend. 

Well, it’s an okay setup, I guess. Doesn’t really live up to the title of the story, though. But then, that’s standard for the men’s mags. Don thinks he’s found his bikers when he latches onto a group near Denver and hitches a ride with one of them to a party in the woods. Oh, and by the way Don himself is not a biker, which sort of robs the appeal of the story. He’s really more of an aimless drifter; “dude” is how everyone refers to him, including the “mama” of the club’s boss, who promptly slips into Don’s sleeping bag that night for some barely-described hot action. 

Our hero’s kind of dumb, though. He sets his sights on one of the bikers, sure it’s the man who killed his woman, and then gets him to go off on a pretext. But our hero has been played for a fool and is knocked out. This leads to the climax, where Don somehow manages to free himself – memorably taking out one of the bikers by stomping him repeatedly in the balls. There’s a bizarre editorial error, though; our narrator is about to be killed, too weak to fight, and then the boss’s mama kills the man who is about to kill our hero – but the editor goofs and writes “I” instead of “she,” ie giving the impression that the narrator has saved himself, though it’s clear he did nothing. 

“Bride Of The Corpse – The Incredible Terror Ordeal of Lucia Alvarez,” by sweats veteran Jim McDonald, is another torture piece that lives only to illustrate its memorable splash page. Essentially our narrator, Lucia, an actress in an undisclosed South American country, is brought in by the despotic regime as a “traitor,” and after being groped and tortured she’s tossed into the fresh grave of one of her compatriots, being made to sleep with the corpse. This one’s pretty lame and at least has a happy ending, with Lucia being rescued. 

The last story I’ll focus on from this April 1975 Man’s Story is the cover story, “The Hideous Evil Of The Nazi Fire Beast,” by Hal Sommers. This one’s crazy because it starts off really good: the narrator, a German reporter, is in the morgue, looking at the corpse of a man in his 60s who was an arsonist. Indeed, the old man accidentally killed himself in a fire he was setting. But our narrator suspects a Nazi, and sure enough finds the SS code number (or whatever it is) tattooed beneath the corpse’s arm. He identifies him as a beast named Breslaur. 

From there our narrator goes to a war records place, where he reads about Breslaur’s background…and here the story becomes just another sweat. Without warning we are thrust into the first-person recollections of one of Breslaur’s many victims, our narrator listening to her tape-recorded statements. So now the story’s in 1944 and we read as this beautiful young woman outside Paris is sent to a prison where Breslaur rules with an iron fist. 

He’s not only a sadist but an arsonist, a man who is sexually aroused by fire, and there follows lots of sweat mag stuff where Breslaur tortures women with fire and flaming pokers – ghoulish stuff, somehow made even more ghoulish given that the author doesn’t go into full-bore exploitation, though letting us know without actually saying it that some of the women are raped by the poker. 

This poor girl who has become our new narrator is “only” raped by Breslaur in the traditional way, ie not with a flaming poker – but she knows her time is coming, and the author does a good job of mounting the suspense. But man, this one comes to a rushed end; the war’s over, and Breslaur escapes before he can kill this particular girl, and then we’re back to the narrator’s POV and he’s sickened by all this stuff he’s read – more laugh out loud stuff, because the “sickening” stuff is exactly why the author wrote the story in the first place, which is another indication of how these authors had their tongues in their cheeks – and then the narrator figures that Breslaur must’ve accidentally killed himself in this fire he set, a fitting end for the sixty year-old sadist. The end! 

Otherwise this issue of Man’s Story is filled with the usual sex articles of the later men’s mags, not to mention a whole plethora of ads for sex toys and sex services and sex books. It’s interesting that none of the ads have nudity in them; the nipples are usually blacked out and the actual penetration is also blacked out, so no doubt the concern was Federal charges for sending out porno in the mail. 

I reviewed this December 1974 Man’s Story before, but at the time my focus was on the WWII pulp action story, “OSS Carter’s Death Doll Platoon,” which later made its way into MAQ #5. That’s a good story, but I’ve read it a few times, now – and reviewed it on here twice – so this time I’ll focus on the other stories in this issue. This time I’ll focus on the Satanic sleaze! 

“Helpless Virgins And The Night Of The Slithering Horror” is by Mark Powers “as told to Ted Harper,” and serves up the sleazy Satanic goods. Indeed, this one would be an even better candidate for my imaginary MAQ Hippie Horror Halloween Special. Our narrator is a writer who is visiting Mexico, where apparently he discovered the corpse of a young woman, who appeared to have been killed by snake bites. But the local cops disbelieve him and tell him he’s imagining things. The narrator is content to bang his native girl; cue some of the slightly-more-risque material of the later men’s mags. 

But as I mentioned above, Mexico was apparently a Satanic Disney World in the ‘70s, and you guessed it – there’s a friggin Satanic snake cult operating out of the area, and our narrator saw too much when he came upon the murdered girl. So now the cult abducts his girl, leading to the splashpage illustration where the robed and cowled cultists are about to kill her with a bunch of snakes. But we’re in the world of the men’s mags, thus our hero’s able to get out his gun and start blasting away – a fairly graphic bit where he blasts out the brains of one of the cult leaders. 

A notable element here is that the narrator goes off to a happily ever after with his native gal; as I noted before, the white heroes of the earlier men’s mags were all well and good with having sex with native gals, but rarely if ever stayed with them. But our narrator assures us that he’s staying with his native Nina. Well, that’s progress! That said, there’s an unintentionally hilarious editing snafu where Nina becomes “Linda” for a paragraph. 

“Rape Rampage Of The Sex Cult Savages” is by Rod Brady, and is the title piece of this issue. The most interesting thing about this short and rough story is how the author strives to cater to the splashpage (and cover) illustration; it seems clear that he either saw the artwork, or he was given thorough description of it. Otherwise this is another story that really hinges on sadism and nothing else – but again, that’s what we expect from the sweats. 

A curious thing about this story is that it goes into second-person later in the tale, an unusual stylistic gimmick that you don’t see very often. Outside of Choose Your Own Adventure books, at least. (And yes, I used this exact same joke in my previous review of this tale, but so what! At least I steal from the best!) This grungy little tale, which could almost be a cheap drive-in flick or something that played on 42nd Street, concerns Herbie, a loser who lives with a trio of other losers in Alphabet City, in New York (not referred to that way in the story, but that’s where they are – off Avenue C). Oh, and one of the group is named “Batman!” 

Well, the group has often “gang-banged” women and done other outrageous things, but so far as Herbie’s concerned, all the women have been in on it, or enjoyed it, or were whores and were probably so strung out they didn’t even care. But this time it’s different! The group has picked up a young woman who was waiting for the bus, and they’ve taken her off in van, and now they’re stripping off her clothes and one of them’s carving her initials on her leg…and basically all the other stuff that is shown on the memorable cover/splashpage art, so again it’s clear the author was trying to cater to that. 

But Herbie doesn’t like it, and after a few pages of describing the girl’s horror as she’s pawed and raped – including that aforementioned strange bit where the narrative goes over to “you thought this,” “you thought that,” and other second-person narration – Herbie decides to do something about it, and steps in to save the day. A short, nasty tale, but commendable for actually trying to live up to the artwork, which is something too few of these men’s mag stories ever do. Yet at the same time, it is another indication of how the plots of the actual stories seldom if ever lived up to the potential of the titles.

Otherwise in this issue we have “The Nazi War Who Made War On The Maidens Of The Maquis,” which I also reviewed previously, as well as the usual sex-based articles and ads. One of the ads really made me chuckle, though: 

Well, as the cover will attest, we’re now in a totally different men’s mag world. And yes, I did block out the ta-tas in the above screengrab; don’t want the blog to get hit with another random sensitive content warning. But boy, the pulpy thrills of the early days are for the most part gone; this December 1976 issue of Male is printed on slick paper, not the pulpy paper of earlier men’s mags, and it features full-color interior photography. And boy, folks, we’re talking straight-up Penthouse sort of stuff. The models who pose for us are fully nude and, uh, fully spread, so absolutely nothing is left to the imagination. 

In a way it’s a sad end to the men’s mags; the cool “I’m an honest vet who fought for my country and now I just wanna work at my blue-collar job and go home to read about virile yanks banging big-boobed broads during the war while I have a smoke and a drink” vibe of the early days is completely gone; this is porn, and sleazy porn at that. The market had clearly changed, and the men’s mag editors were desperate to cater to a readership that wanted Hustler instead of quality tales of military action. For, believe it or not, Male was one of the “upmarket” men’s mags I referred to above, offering stories and articles that were much better than the grungy stuff in the sweats. But reading this December, 1976 issue of the magazine, you’d never guess that. 

That said, they still managed to get some fairly good fiction into the pages, and “Ex-MP Who Became The Sex-And-Crime King Of Europe” by Jerry Trumbalt is a case in point. In fact I think this story is the reason I picked up this issue many years ago. It’s a heist yarn, about a moral-lacking MP who heists the Army payroll with a team he puts together, and then goes into the slave-trade business outside of Tangier. 

As with many of these stories, it’s framed as a nonfiction piece; Harry Malone is an MP with a mind for an angle and he gets responsibility for all the payrolls in a part of Germany. He puts together a team from the stockade and they pull the heist – but all that is sort of told in summary. The meat of the tale is Malone taking the money and starting up a lucrative sex-trade business, which he runs on a ship in the Tangier area. He also enjoys testing out all the girls he will sell: 

“Anal sex was something she held the patent on.” Now there’s a line that needs to be stolen for a book. More focus is placed on Malone and his run-ins with the abovementioned Arabic criminal, culminating in a firefight by some ancient Roman ruins in the desert. Overall a pretty good story, but not as long as such a story would have been in an earlier men’s mag. 

Earl Norem, my favorite of all the men’s mag artists, handles the nice splashpage for “The Rape Hunt Brothers,” by Anthony Farrar, another short piece that harkens back to the men’s mags of yore. This one’s a fairly short revenge piece about a group of five scumbags in Baja California who drive around in a “high-powered car” and enjoy raping female American tourists. And beating their men to a pulp. 

But the group, which manages to evade arrest, sows its own fate when one of the rape victims goes back home and tells her three brothers to get revenge for her. So now these good ol’ boys head down to Mexico to find the scumbags and make them pay…though, for vague reasons, their sister wants it all to be “legal.” Okay, whatever. This grim setup doesn’t prevent the author from “inserting” a random sex scene: 

As you can see, the sexual material has become more risque in the later years. The revenge angle is given short shrift, with the brothers catching the scumbags in action – as illustrated by Norem in his splashpage – and then shooting at them as they drive away. 

The sexual material is even more risque in “Porno Girls And The Casting Couch,” by Eugene Grant, which purports to be another nonfiction piece, the author interviewing a few porno actresses, but this is really just the framework for a bunch of explicit sex scenes: 

It’s like this throughout; the author will introduce a girl “in action,” then spend some time talking to her about how she got into the porno biz – and even here sex is factored in, as the girls all got into the biz after having sex with a guy (or, in the case of one of them, sex with a gal). This story too suffers from an abrupt finale, as if the author hit his word count without expecting it. 

Then there’s “Secrets Of A Whore House Detective,” by George Harris “as told to” Simon Koch. Note the title: It’s “Whore House Detective” here in the magazine, whereas it’s shown as “Cat House Detective” on the magazine cover. Again, methinks the concern was over what could and could not be shown on the cover, due to these magazines being sent out in the mail. This is another pseudo-nonfiction piece, about a detective who works for a “consortium” of health insurance companies – his job to root out “pockets of infection” in the prostitution world. 

The detective is currently in NYC, where a shipment of fifty whores have been sent in by “the Chicago Syndicate” to entertain the delegation that’s come in town for a Democrat convention(!!!). Word has it that a new strain of syphilis or whatever has broken out, and this detective’s job is to find the infected hooker(s); the consortium isn’t concerned with morality or legality, they’re just sick of paying out for men who contract STDs from infected hookers! So this detective’s job is to find an infected whore and report her to the cops, to keep her off the streets. 

Other than that, this issue of Male features the usual sex exposes, not to mention a lot of full-color photographs of fully-nude women (one of whom sports very unattractive hairy armpits!), in a manner more Hustler sleazy than anything you’d see in Playboy. It’s no surprise that the men’s mags would soon wither away.

The Last Ranger #10: Is This The End?

 
The Last Ranger #10: Is This The End?, by Craig Sargent

January, 1989  Popular Library

Well, I just finished Doomsday Warrior, so it’s only fitting that I’m also now finishing The Last Ranger, a sort-of sister series to that earlier (and longer-running) post-nuke pulp, at least in how The Last Ranger was written by Jan Stacy, who co-wrote the earliest volumes of Doomsday Warrior with Ryder Syvertsen. 

As I mentioned many years ago in my review of the first volume, I was a fan of The Last Ranger from the beginning, and not just because – for once! – I got in on the ground floor, having bought the first volume soon after it was published in 1986. No, I was also drawn to the entire setup, of a young man trying to survive in a violent, hellish post-nuke world, driving around on an armored Harley with his faithful pit bull at his back. To this day I still remember so excitedly talking to a fellow young fan of the series in the WaldenBooks store in the Valley View Mall, in 1987, when the fifth volume was published. 

I wonder how long that kid stuck with the series; I believe the fifth volume was the last one I purchased new, and it wasn’t until shortly after I started this blog in 2010 that I decided to go out and pick up all the volumes of the series. Reading it as an “adult,” I can’t say The Last Ranger floated my boat like it once did…but then, that’s really only true for the final installments of the series. It would seem that Jan Stacy lost interest in the series soon after I did, as volumes 6 through 9 weren’t very good, and seemed quickly turned out. 

But then (again), this could be because Jan Stacy had other things on his mind; as we know, Stacy passed away in 1989, from AIDS. As I also mentioned in my review of the first volume, this really brings a “hmmm” element to the nihilistic final volume of The Last Ranger; spoiler warning and etc, but the answer to the title, “Is This The End?,” is most certainly yes. I mean, the entire planet blows up – it doesn’t get much more “the end” than that. 

As with those most recent volumes, Stacy here is more focused on sadism and ghoulish spectacle, again bringing a “hmmm” reading to the books. No exaggeration, a good portion of Is This The End? is devoted to the excessive detailing of post-nuke horrors, horrifically mutated humans and the equally-horrific tortures they put others through. There is a definite nihilistic bent to the book, and not just due to the finale; this is the work of an author who has become sick of life in general and the human race in particular – it is an excessively dark work, with little in the way of the goofy humor that leavened the darkness of earlier books. It’s almost as if hope had run out in Jan Stacy’s own life, and he brought that into his fiction. 

We’re well beyond the opening gimmick of “a young man on his Harley with his pet dog” of the earliest books; indeed, the dog, Excaliber (and yes, it’s spelled with an “er” instead of a “ur”), is insensate for the majority of the book, in a coma derived from injuries in the previous volume, and thus there is none of the goofy bantering between dog and young man in this one. 

As for the young man, Martin Stone, he spends the majority of this final volume being captured by one group or another. Also, I’ll note here for posterity than in this last one Stone does not make a return trip to his mountain-side nuclear bunker retreat; for whatever reasons, those parts were always my favorite when I read these books as a kid. Back then – and even now – I wondered why Stone didn’t just find himself a girl and go live in that place forever. If he had, the world might have survived, but more on that in a bit. 

As with most other volumes, Is This The End? opens directly after the events of the previous volume – indeed, it’s a mere two days later. Excaliber is injured and near death, in a coma that he won’t wake from until nearly the end of the book. Stone is on his new bike and he’s trying to get to Texas, where series villain the Dwarf, an armless and legless sadist who basically controls the world, has taken Stone’s perennially-abducted sister, April. 

Jan Stacy fills pages with abandon; despite being only 168 pages, Is This The End? is a trying read, mostly because Stacy doesn’t really have a plot to hang the sadism on. There is a lot of stalling and repetition; the first quarter of the book has Stone enduring a freak thunderstorm, after which he eventually hooks up with a hotstuff biker chick named Rasberry Thorn, saving her from rival bikers. 

Rasberry takes Stone back to her headquarters, where it turns out she runs The Ballbusters, an all-female biker gang that’s in a constant state of internal warfare. Rasberry casually remarks that Stone must be her prisoner: no men are allowed in the camp, except prisoners who are there for to satisfy the sexual needs of the biker women, after which they’re killed. Stacy is unlike Ryder Syvertsen in that he has not removed the graphic element from his books, thus the Stone-Rasberry conjugation leaves little to the imagination. 

Meanwhile Stacy has served up heaping helpings of OTT gore, courtesy the Dwarf and his retinue of equally-mutated, equally-sadistic fellows. Stacy delivers a whole freakshow of deformed creeps who either serve the Dwarf or rule the world alongside him. The Dwarf operates out of an underground missile bunker in San Antonio, and Stone is captured by the freak’s minions mere minutes after arriving in town. 

Here the novel goes into its main focus: an endless barrage of Stone either being tortured or being forced to endure disgusting acts. The Dwarf plans to marry April in a perverted ceremony, and he wants Stone alive long enough to witness it. It becomes particularly grueling as Stone is treated to “dinner” in which bugs and mutated, still-living creatures are on the menu, and Stone is forced to eat his entire plate. 

Stacy also delights in the freaks created by a former Nazi doctor, one who was pals with Hitler and who now works for the Dwarf, creating human-mutant hybrids. There’s a lot of stuff about the various victims of this character, in particular a hermaphrodite that has been created by anatonomical parts taken from one person and grafted onto another. All told, whole stretches of Is This The End? are very repugnant, with no light to lessen the darkness. 

It’s especially galling because Martin Stone is so ineffectual in this final volume. He really doesn’t manage to do anything, and is shuffled from one captor to another. He’s even caught without a fight by the Dwarf, and so essentially for the majority of the novel Stone is either beaten, tortured, or forced to do disgusting things, all while the Dwarf triumphantly gloats. There’s also an endless part where Stone is put through “the Games,” where he must fight a three-armed mutant monster. 

Stone doesn’t even manage to save himself, but only by the “surprise” appearance of a character who shows up long enough to run amock in the underground base. SPOILER ALERT: And only here, in the very final pages, does Jan Stacy deliver anything relevant; one almost gets the impression the only thing he had planned out was how to end the series, and just winged it for the majority of the book until he got there. So basically Stone hurries to save April from being raped by the Dwarf – an insane bit were the Dwarf is slowly lowered by a machine onto April’s drugged form. 

But the Dwarf has sworn that if he can’t have April, the world will pay; the underground complex gives the sadist access to the Star Wars defense system (ie the satellite system proposed in the ‘80s that would house a ton of nuclear warheads), and the Dwarf, as ever managing to easily escape despite not having any limbs, scurries to the missile-firing area and punches a bunch of buttons with the stubs of his arms. 

I’m still in SPOILERS here, by the way. But man, talk about a loser – Stone doesn’t even manage to kill the Dwarf! That is left to another character, one of the mutated freaks, who strangles the evil bastard. And meanwhile Stone isn’t sure if the Dwarf managed to fire all of the missiles or not. 

The finale of Is This The End? finally sees Stone and his sister April reuinited – they’ve been separated the entire series, with only infrequent and short reunions – and standing above ground as they watch the sky for the raining nukes. But Stone to the end is uncertain if the Dwarf managed to fire all of the missiles at the Earth, hence the last image we see of Stone is his looking to the sky, jumping at everything he sees, thinking it might be the nuclear missiles coming to destroy the earth. It’s interesting that the last image we see of our hero, Martin Stone, he’s afraid, and he’s praying. 

But as demonstrated in the preceding pages of the book, there is no hope in the world of Jan Stacy; we cut immediately to a paragraph in which our author casually informs us that the world is turned into “glowing powder” by the raining nukes: “An intelligent species had made all the wrong choices.” 

In other words, the hero did not save the day, and the Dwarf managed to destroy the entire planet. It occurred to me that Stone himself is responsible for the end of the world; the Dwarf decides to nuke the Earth in spite, because he is unable to have April. I mean, if the Dwarf had never met April, then perhaps he wouldn’t have committed such a horrific act. If Martin Stone had only heeded his father’s warning, and stayed with his mother and sister in the safety of his nuclear bunker, then not only would Stone’s mother not have been raped and killed, and his sister April not adbucted, but the friggin’ Earth itself would not have been destroyed! 

So, once you take all that into consideration, it seems evident that Martin “The Last Ranger” Stone is the lamest “hero” in the entirety of men’s adventure; the dude got the entire planet destroyed. 

Well, end spoilers. Overall I was happy to finally read the entirety of The Last Ranger, but the increasing nihilishm really took a lot of the fun out of it. Compare to Doomsday Warrior, where Ryder Syvertsen also clearly grew bored with everything, but at least Syvertsen delivered a series conclusion that wasn’t so dark and hopeless. 

However, I’m not finished with Jan Stacy; years ago I picked up both volumes of his 1989 Body Smasher series, which is another I’ve been meaning to read for a long time; indeed, Body Smasher #1 was the last men’s adventure book I bought as a kid (well, I would’ve been 14 at the time, but still). However I’m pretty certain I was unaware at the time that the “Jan Stacy” credited for the Body Smasher books was also the “Craig Sargent” of The Last Ranger.