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.

Barbarians on Bikes: Bikers and Motorcycle Gangs in Men’s Pulp Adventure Magazines

Barbarians On Bikes, edited by Robert Deis and Wyatt Doyle

No month stated, 2016  New Texture

A big thanks to Bob Deis for hooking me up with a copy of Barbarians On Bikes a few years ago – I seem to recall it was in early 2020, ie right before the world went crazy – and though I read it at the time, I failed to review it. Well, I recently got back on a biker pulp kick, and it was straight to Barbarians On Bikes that I went for my fix. 

This one is a project of Bob Deis and Wyatt Doyle, the fellows who also brought us Cryptozoology, Cuba: Sugar, Sex, and Slaughter, Atomic Werewolves, and so many other deluxe hardcovers devoted to men’s adventure magazines. Unlike those publications, or the Men’s Adventure Quarterly series Bob Deis produces with Bill Cunningham, Barbarians On Bikes is devoid of any reprinted stories and focuses solely on artwork. Thus, the majority of the book is comprised of either full-color reproductions of men’s adventure magazine covers, or black and white splashpages or other interior art from the magazines. 

I recall that when I first read this book, like a total geek I wrote down a list of stories I was hoping Bob would feature in an upcoming book – and ended up listing out pretty much every story in the book! But friends, as usual the titles of the stories are so promising that one can’t help but want to read them…but then again, I’ve read so many of these men’s adventure magazines over the years that I now know that the stories themselves generally do not live up to the promise of the titles. 

Thus, focusing on the art alone isn’t really a bad idea, as the reader is free to use his own fevered imagination to come up with the plot for, say, “Sex Life Of A Motorcycle Mama” or “You Can’t Split From Hell, Chick!” That said, I still hope that someday Bob and Bill do a special “biker” issue of Men’s Adventure Quarterly, or that Bob and Wyatt do a Barbarians On Bikes followup that includes stories in addition to art.  Though to be fair, we did get a few such stories in MAQ #7. 

The appeal of this book is just flipping through the pages and admiring the incredible artwork of the gifted artists who worked on the men’s magazines. Pretty much all of them are represented here, and as usual our editors have done a swell job of reproducing the art – with, as I’ve said before, a lot more care and love than the original men’s mag editors ever displayed for their product. 

For me the biggest effect of Barbarians On Bikes is that it’s made me decide to read more of the old biker pulp paperbacks I bought years ago and never got around to reading. And also it’s made me decide to do another “men’s mag roundup” of reviews, this time focusing on some of the “hippie killer cult” stories that the latter-day men’s mags specialized in – and there was certainly a carryover between bikers and cults, at least in the world of the men’s mags. 

I highly recommend you pick up a copy of Barbarians On Bikes. Looking through it takes you to a long-gone world of virile men, easy women, and leering biker brutes…oh, and I’ve failed to mention the terrific afterword Paul Bishop provides for the book; an exceptional read in which he talks about the time in the late ‘70s when, as a rookie LAPD officer, he pulled over a Hell’s Angel. 

Here are some random pages from the book! 

Contact Info Update

First of all, apologies for not getting a post up this week. But this is a good opportunity to do something I’ve been meaning to do for a long time – let you all know that my email address changed! 

Long story short, but quite a while ago I lost all access to the email address I’ve used for over 20 years, perfectpawn@hotmail.com. This means that all the emails I got from Len Levinson, Stephen Mertz, and so many others are forever lost – unless I can somehow regain access to the account. (Outlook by the way does not offer any help in regaining access…you have to answer a bunch of challenge questions – questions which I must’ve set up back in 2004, and can no longer remember – and there’s no option for a live agent to help you. Their solution for what to do if you can’t regain access? Start a new account!! Thanks a lot, assholes!) 

Anyway, if you click on my “About Me” profile pic you will see my new contact info, if in the case that you might want to write to me. But I just wanted to note here that, if you have written me in the past year or so and did not hear back from me, it’s not because I’m ignoring you – it’s because I never got your email, thanks to being locked out of my account!

Finally, I will have two posts up this coming week.

Neq The Sword (Battle Circle #3)

Neq The Sword, by Piers Anthony

No month stated, 1975  Corgi Books

This final volume of the Battle Circle trilogy by Piers Anthony was only published in the UK, until it came out in the United States in 1978 as part of the collected Battle Circle paperback. It’s curious that it did not receive prior publication in the US, but having read the book I would wager a guess that it was because Neq The Sword is a bit of a mess. 

Sadly, the first quarter of the novel is great, and had me ready to declare this final volume the best entry in the trilogy. But then the book took a dark turn, after which it took a goofy turn, before coming to a close in a very muddled fashion. Given that “narcotic flowers” play a big part in the second half of the novel, my guess is that Piers Anthony was ingesting some sweet leaf of his own, and this translated into the book itself. But then I always prefer to imagine that my pulp authors are messed up on some drug or other – even cheap booze would suffice – because the only alternative is that he just turned in a bad book. 

As with Var The Stick, Neq The Sword can be read separate from first volume Sos The Rope…to a point. As with the previous book, while this one starts off for the most part self-contained, eventually we get a lot of “so this is how such and such a thing happened, and why it happened” sort of stuff, as titular Neq gradually ponders and ultimately deduces everything that happened in the previous two books, at much expense to the narrative. Oh and speaking of which – this one is the longest book in the trilogy, and a lot of it could have been cut. 

As mentioned, the first quarter of Neq The Sword is really good. Neq when we meet him has just turned 14, now a man in this post-Blast world, and he’s chosen the sword as his weapon for the battle circle. After some misadventures he ends up in the empire of Sol, from the first book. Anthony skips through the ensuing years, already documented from the perspectives of other characters in the previous books: Sol’s empire grows, and Neq becomes one of the top “sworders” in the empire, even running his own army. 

But a decade passes and everything falls apart – the empire disintigrates, thanks to the disappearance of both Sol and “The Weaponless,” aka Sos, and Neq ventures off across the blasted United States to start a new life as a nomadic warrior. He meets up with the same “crazy” who briefly assisted Sos, back in the first book, and ultimately goes off on a road trip with the crazy’s twenty-something secretary, a hotstuff blonde who made eyes at Sos back in that first book; we learn here that she was formerly “wild” herself, having grown up in the wilderness and rescued by the crazies at a young age. 

Her name is Ms. Smith, but within a few chapters she will be Neqa, as she takes on Neq’s arm bracelet – a recurring gimmick here, that the bracelet indicates that a woman belongs to a particular man, even if just for one night. But here’s the thing: Neq is a virgin, having been too anxious to take a woman (as was his right, per the battle circle rules) for all these years. And here’s the other thing: Ms. Smith, aka Neqa, is also a virgin, and we have this sort of post-Blast setup straight out of a 1940s screwball comedy where two virgins must travel together via truck across America. 

There are also elements of The Road Warrior here, what with Neq insisting he’s the only chance the crazies have of surviving outside of their high-tech world; long story short, the crazy empire has also been destroyed, which happened off-page in the previous book, and Neq has realized that the setup needs to be reinstated, otherwise the world will plunge into anarchy. So he insists on acting as security for Neqa as she drives a truck to get supplies from Helicon mountain, ie the mountain where Sos went to become a metahuman in the first book. 

This part is all pretty great, with Anthony doing a swell job of building up the rapport and eventual love between the two characters, with frequent action scenes as Neq makes short work of attacking brigands (the novel, however, is pretty anemic on the violence factor). But it ultimately becomes goofy, because despite growing close and spending nights together, these two still can’t get over their hangups and just do it already. 

It is almost laughable to read as they hold each other, and tell each other they want to, but then one of them will chicken out, or there will be a sudden brigand attack to distract them, or whatever. I mean, I can understand the skittishness on Neqa’s part, but come on – Neq is like in his mid twenties, at this point, and still a virgin…how much incentive would this guy really need? Indeed one starts to wonder if Neq just has a whole ‘nother type of hangup entirely, and just doesn’t realize it. 

For that matter, Neqa is even older than Neq, and there follows a humorous bit where Neq can’t get over how “old” she is, what with her being in her mid twenties. (To make it even better, Neq keeps referring to Neqa’s breasts in this part, saying how they look like a younger woman’s.) But at least here Anthony makes clear what was only understood in previous books: the non-crazy world is a world of youth, where boys become “men” at 14 and fathers soon after, and where a 35 year-old woman thinks of herself as a grandmother. 

That said, the prepubescent factor that sullied Var The Stick is not evident in Neq The Sword, but Anthony quite makes up for it by taking the novel in an unexpected and dark direction. In fact it gets so dark that I laughed; but long story short – Neqa does end up losing her virginity, but not to Neq. Instead, it’s to like the 50-some men in a tribe who take their turns with her as a bound Neq watches on helplessly. 

After this insane bit of nihilism, there follows an equally-good part where Neq goes out for revenge. Only problem: the brigands cut off both his hands. Problem solved: Neq finds a crazy doctor who gives Neq a sword for a hand, and also gives him pincers for his other hand. How Neq feeds himself or cleans himself is unstated, but it’s all good – he soon goes out to kill the members of the tribe, one by one, chopping them down with his sword hand. Patrick Woodroffe well illustrates this on the cover; as Neq enjoys cutting off the heads of his victims and staking them as warning to the others that their time will soon follow; note that Woodroffe also gives us the sword for a hand in his artwork. 

The only problem is, Piers Anthony has decided he wants to lecture us on how revenge never solves anything. Fine, but save the messaging for a novel that doesn’t feature a dude with a sword for a hand, okay? So we get all this crap where Neq, at much expense, realizes that nothing can bring back Neqa and etc, and etc. Oh and meanwhile the dude is still a virgin. Well anyway, in another (possibly cannabis-inspired) change of plot, Neq next decides that his reason for being will be to restore order to the post-Blast world by rebuilding Helicon, ie the high-tech underworld that was destroyed in Var The Stick. 

Oh and speaking of Var – SPOILER ALERT – Neq kills him, folks! Seriously. There’s another change of plot as Neq is tasked by the crazies with finding all these people and bringing them to the crazies to help rebuild Helicon, for reasons never adequately explained. So he has to get Tyl the stick fighter, and also Sos, and Sol, and Sola, and Sosa, and even Var – but the thing is, everyone is still under the impression that Var killed the little girl who was sent to fight him…but as readers of the previous book know, she instead ran off with Var, grew up into a teenaged beauty, then married Var and became Vara. 

Well, so much for Var, and now we have another change of pace as Neq is disgusted with himself and wants Vara to kill him – and Vara is quite ready to, given that she’s lost Var due to Neq’s “kill first, regret later” policy. But here comes Tyl, a minor character from the previous books now thrust for some reason into the limelight, who gives a lecture on how revenge doesn’t solve anything…and it goes on and on, with the three venturing across the badlands while Tyl argues with them over whether Vara has a right to kill Neq, and etc. 

Then we get to these hallucinogenic flowers that cause nightmares to be real, and it just goes on and on and on, and it gets even more laughable because soon a flower-maddened Vara is trying to screw Neq, but even here Neq pushes her away (as Arsenio would say, “Hmmm…”), and then finally they do it, and Piers Anthony leaves it off page entirely. I mean Neq loses his virginity in his late 20s and you’d think we’d at least get more than a sentence about it, but we do not. 

But folks, things get even more befuddling, as the crew makes it back to Helicon, and there’s a debate over whether Neq should lead them…oh, and have I mentioned yet that at this point it’s Neq The Glockenspiel? Folks I kid you not. As a way to show how he has sworn never to kill again, Neq has a glockenspiel molded to his sword-hand, and thus goes around singing to people as he taps out a melody on his glockenspiel hand. Like seriously, they had some good drugs back in the ‘70s, didn’t they? I almost wonder if Piers Anthony didn’t make a drunken bet with someone: “Dude, I’m gonna write a book where a guy has a glockenspiel for a hand! Hey, is that Sabbath? Turn it up, man!” 

Then it’s old home week as various characters return to Helicon, some of them characters not seen since the first book, but again it lacks any resonance because Anthony must deliver a lot of exposition to explain where they’ve been for all these years. Oh and SPOILER ALERT, but neither Sos nor Sol return, indicating that they did truly have a heroic sacrifice in the previous book. 

Neq does pretty damn well for himself; by novel’s end he knocks up both Vara and her mother, Sosa, the sultry and built lady from the first book who is now “old” in her mid-30s…folks there’s even a bit where Neq argues with Sosa that lots of men will want her despite her age, because in Helicon women are shared by the men due to the scarcity of women. Neq and Vara even break up, in the most off-handed matter, because Vara too will be expected to, uh, screw every other guy in the place, and Neq doesn’t want to interfere with tradition. 

It’s only just occurred to me that Neq The Sword is a commentary on the turned-on ‘60s generation: the drugs, the rampant arguments against violence, the shared communal women, and of course the narcotic flowers. And let’s not forget the glockenspiel, shall we? I guess looked at from that perspective, Neq The Sword is a triumph. I can’t say I enjoyed reading it, though; the first part was good, yes, but once Neq has achieved his vengeance it’s as if Anthony finished his tale sooner than expected, and so he got some chemical inspiration on what to fill up the rest of the book with. 

All told, Battle Circle really does not work as a trilogy. There is too little connecting the three books, and too much repetition in the parts that do connect with each other. Piers Anthony would have done just as well to leave it at Sos The Rope; as it is, the following two books only served to dilute the mythic impact of that first book. 

Here’s the cover of the Battle Circle book I read, which contains all three volumes; it was published in 1978 by Avon Books. I picked this up around 8 years ago and completely forgot about it until I came across it in my garage, of all places! The cover for this one is also by Patrick Woodroffe, and is taken from the original UK paperback edition of Sos The Rope:

Doomsday Warrior #19: America’s Final Defense

Doomsday Warrior #19: America’s Final Defense, by Ryder Stacy

July, 1991  Zebra Books

Well friends, this is a bittersweet moment – it’s the final volume of Doomsday Warrior! I can’t believe it’s finally come to the end; this series has been part of my life for 14 years, now, and it’s hard to believe I’ve finally read the entire thing. 

Of course, it only took Ryder Syvertsen seven years to write the series, which is half the time it took me to read it, but honesty – as I’ve documented here again and again in the reviews – Syvertsen lost interest in Doomsday Warrior long before it ended. I’m happy to say that he drummed up his enthusiasm for America’s Final Defense; none of the “I’m sick of this” vibe is evident in this last book, and for once Syvertsen doesn’t rip off most recent volumes…instead, he gives a sort of microcosm of the series entire, serving up all the staples of previous installments in this final volume. 

Before writing this review, I went back and read my pedantic, overly-comprehensive reviews of the previous books in the series. And abruptly I remembered why I’d made them so comprehensive in the first place: because I knew the day would come when I got to this last volume of Doomsday Warrior, and I’d no doubt want to refresh my memory on the series before I wrote my review. The prophecy has been fulfilled! 

Seriously though, Ryder Syvertsen clearly intended this to be the finale, as he was gearing up for it in the final pages of the previous volume. Syvertsen has always played fast and loose with the chronology of the series; I see in my reviews that “2089 AD” was frequently mentioned as the date in the earliest books, and then later we were told that “2096 AD” was the date. We’re told in this final volume that the year is now “2099 AD,” and Ted “Doomsday Warrior” Rockson and his comrades often reflect on things that happened “ten years ago.” 

What’s curious is that Syvertsen frequently refers to those earliest books, but jettisons most all references to recent things – for example, in the previous volume we were told that Detroit Green was the official representative to the USSR, and Schertantsky had returned to live in the USSR. Also, Archer had retired to live in the countryside. All of that stuff is never mentioned once in America’s Final Defense; the “series reset” that ran through the series is here, too; when the novel starts, the entire Rock team is operating out of Century City, same as they were way back in the the first volume. No mention is made of Detroit having been a rep, or Archer having been retired. In other words, nothing has changed – even though everything changed in the most recent volumes. 

Well, one thing has stayed the same – Syvertsen, around the ninth volume, decided he was sick of the “USSR invading the USA” storyline of the earliest books and decided to focus on other things. Reading my reviews of the earliest volumes, I was surprised to see how many subplots were dropped as the series progressed, like for example the political stuff between Zhabnov, the depraved ruler of the conquered US, and Killov, the KGB personification of evil. All that stuff was brushed aside, as were the frequent cutovers to Russia where we could read about supreme ruler Vassily and his Ethiopian manservant/best friend. 

Another thing, which I copiously noted in my reviews, was the removal of all the goofy, purple-prosed (but exceedingly explicit) sexual material. The earliest Doomsday Warrior novels were ultra-detailed on both the sex and the violence fronts, but gradually both of these factors withered away…for reasons I’d love to know. I wonder if Syvertsen realized that kids were reading his series and purposely decided to make the books less explicit; or maybe he himself had a kid and didn’t want junior to start reading them and think his dad was a psychotic pervert. Or maybe the sex and violence had been forced on Syvertsen by the publisher and later on they had an editorial change…who knows. 

Whatever the reason, the removal of the dirty stuff is one of the things that remains consistent with this final volume; in other words, Syvertsen did not pay true hommage to his own series in that regard, as he did with practically every other aspect – seriously, America’s Final Defense is essentially every volume of Doomsday Warrior rolled into one, save for the lack of XXX sex, gory violence, and appearances by any Russian villains other than Killov. 

It also features a big return of the psychedelic aspect of the series; indeed, this is the most psychedelic volume since #3: The Last American, which I believe was my favorite volume of the series. As with that early volume, there are parts of America’s Final Defense that are like a blacklight poster in literary form – one can only imagine the incredible illustrations gifted modern-day artist Alexis Ziritt could do with this material. 

Another thing I noticed in my pendantic reviews is my frequent declaration that Doomsday Warrior was essentially an R-rated Saturday morning cartoon. Again, this is entirely true for America’s Final Defense, which brushes reality to the side with the same eagerness that previous volumes did. I mean folks in this one Rockson and team go up to space, again, and end up fighting ancient alien gods that have lurched out of Erich von Daniken, during the course of which Ted Rockson is imbued with ancient wisdom that makes him “a million times smarter than before.” 

As mentioned, Syvertsen only picks up a few things from the finale of the previous book – despite which we learn, fairly late in the game, that all this is occurring one year after the events of American Dream Machine. Otherwise the series reset is in full force, and after an incongruous prologue, in which the setting for the series is established for us – as if we haven’t been reading the previous 18 damn books – we have an action opening in which Rockson and his forces try to finally take out Killov in a running battle.  Another interesting thing is that Syvertsen describes all of the main characters, for the first time in who knows how long; topical details on what Rockson looks like, and etc.  Again, quite strange, given that this is the 19th volume! 

A lot of important series stuff is mentioned in passing – like how America has worked out an agreement with Vassilly in the USSR which sees both countries destroying all of their nuclear warhead stashes(!). In other words, the entire impetus of the series is over and done with, and Syvertsen didn’t even cover any of it in the narrative, which indicates how little invested he was in Doomsday Warrior at this point. Indeed, one gets the impression that he was more into his concurrent series Mystic Rebel (which I collected years ago but held off on reading until I finished this series), what with the focus on New Agey concepts. Oh and speaking of which, there are all these random asides in America’s Last Defense, like how shunning fat in your diet could have health implications, and also a big part of the finale involves Rockson’s understanding that both science and mysticism should be embraced – very, very New Age stuff, and I’m assuming the Mystic Rebel series is rife with that sort of thing. 

Rockson is nearly killed in this opening, and Killov wasn’t there anyway (it was an imposter!), and Rockson is flown back to Century City’s hospital…where Syvertsen introduces an entirely new character to the series, for some reason: Charity Birdell, a “buxom beautiful nurse” in Century City who hero-worships Rockson and sees this as her opportunity to screw him. We get a refreshing return of that ‘60s vibe, gone for so many volumes, when Charity has Rockson smoke a “chi-stick” as part of his healing process. Indeed, Rockson is instructed to take “two tokes twice a day!” 

But brace yourself: the Charity-Rockson conjugation happens off-page, despite Syvertsen dropping kinky details before it occurs, like for example “[Charity] nearly came in her panties” when Rockson smiles at her, and whatnot. (Also we get the goofy tidbit that Charity has tattoos of “all forty-six presidents” on her body, with one of them hidden, and of course Rockson finds it…!) Actually, Syvertsen was doing this in the most recent volumes, too, so it appears that he was fine with writing ribald dialog and such, but when it came to the actual tomfoolery he decided to cut to black…a decided change from the early books, which left nothing unexplored. 

This is especially strange as, again just like in the most recent books, Rockson gets laid a lot in America’s Final Defense. Shortly after being with Charity, Rockson hooks up with his “girlfriend” Rona, the statuesque mutant redhead babe who was the main female character in this series once upon a time, before being shunted off into the narrative woodwork. I think the last volume she actually featured in was #6: American Rebellion, where she was worshiped as a post-nuke Eva Braun, a sequence that is actually mentioned here in America’s Final Defense; again, Syvertsen (and his characters) frequently reminisce about previous volumes, all the sign you could need that the author intended this to be the final story of the saga. 

But ever since then, Rona has been shunted aside, only given a line or two of dialog and having off-page sex with Rockson…and the same is true, here. Rona has more off-page lovin’ with Rockson, then the two are dancing to Judas Priest in her room (we’re told a Judas Priest CD was “recently unearthed” and is now all the rage in Century City), but Dr. Schecter comes along to take Rockson away, and that’s all we see of Rona. 

As for Rockson’s other “girlfriend,” Kim, she doesn’t appear at all in America’s Final Defense. This is especially galling, as my fellow sleazebags will recall the awesome premise upon which previous volume American Dream Machine ended: Kim and Rona had agreed to “settle their petty jealous differences” and, just as the novel friggin’ ended, they went together to Rockson’s room to double-team him(!). Well, fellow sleazebags, this little incident is not mentioned at all in America’s Final Defense, and we are told that Kim is off in some other city, handling business for her father, the newly-elected president of the (Re)United States (and he doesn’t appear in this volume, either). 

I’ve long suspected that Syvertsen had no interest in Kim – perhaps she was a creation of Jan Stacy, Syvertsen’s writing partner on the first four volumes – and her lack of appearance in this book would indicate that. Looking back on my reviews, I see that, even in Kim’s infrequent appearances, she’s barely had any dialog and has not contributed much to the overall storyline. But at least she’s mentioned this time around. 

That’s it for Rockson’s love life – at least in Century City. As America’s Final Defense continues, he has sex with many other women, from an Amazonian queen (a recurring series staple character) to a French space-babe. This is all standard for the series; I only mention it so as to confirm that there is no resolution whatsoever to the Rockson-Rona-Kim love triangle, which was so important to the storyline many volumes ago. Again, Syvertsen has moved on and lost interest, so reading this 19-volume series in one go would no doubt make for a bumpy ride. 

Not to mention a repetitive one; it’s been clear for a long time that Syvertsen is totally aware that his books all follow a template, and by god he’s sticking to that template, and he does so here again in this final volume. So we have the inciting incident: Schecter informs Rockson that a massive asteroid was just discovered, and it’s headed right for Earth and will destroy Earth in three weeks…headed right into Earth’s orbit due to Earth’s orbit being affected by the nuke blasts a century before. 

There follows that annoying mainstay of Doomsday Warrior: the interminable “democracy in action” bit as the Century City council argues for and against Rockson and team going out to save the day. It’s all just so time-wasting, but Syvertsen goes on and on with it regardless, leading to the inevitable conclusion in which the vote is “No” (due to political infighting reasons), but Rockson goes off anyway. From there to the other staple: surviving the mutated flaura and fauna of this post-nuke world. 

It’s just as juvenile as previous volumes: there’s an unused spaceship not too far from Century City, so Rockson and his usual team plus a few redshirts are to go there, fly it into space, and then blast the asteroid so that its path is changed. So like I’ve said in every previous review, total cartoon type of stuff. And meanwhile Killov, in the Inca ruins where he’s worshipped as a god, comes across ancient documentation of this very asteroid, which once upon a time visited earth and imparted some of its alien knowledge here – there was a high-tech city on the asteroid – and he plans to go into space himself and get this ancient alien technology. All so he can kill Rockson, of course. 

The only loose ends Syvertsen is bothered with tying up concern the Glowers, those superbeings who have infrequently appeared in the series, most notably in the third volume. Rockson eventually learns that the “main” Glower, Turquoise Spectrum, has died, and after a very psychedelic “astral commune” bit, Rockson teams up with a new Glower pal, not to mention an “interdimensional being” named Pruzac Ephedrine, a “full-figured” and beautiful half human/half Glower hybrid. She features in a lot of very out-there, psychedelic stuff in the novel, particularly the finale. 

Rockson and team suffer one setback after another, with Syvertsen clearly just winging it as he goes along – I mean, the old NASA spaceship is surrounded by Amazons, who insist on the Rock team banging five women each in one night, but Rockson himself is chosen by the beautiful, green-haired Queen – cue more off-page sex. (“The green-head was hellfire in bed,” and etc.) But the spaceship is in poor state and can’t fly; no problem, because the Glowers whip up a new spaceship for Rockson, and with it they head into space! 

Syvertsen here really ties back to #14: American Death Orbit, with Rockson again hooking up with the “space Frenchies” he met in that earlier volume. And once again we get a lot of mention of those “space Nazis,” without actually seeing any of them. Rockson here gets laid again, courtesy a French space girl “barely out of her teens;” this is Rockson’s last conjugation in the entire series, and again Syvertsen leaves the sleaze vague: “[they] made passionate, gravity-free love” being the extent of it. 

The asteroid is called Karrak by Schecter, and Rockson lands on it in the finale, propelled by visions he’s been given by Turqoise Spectrum, who appears Obi-Wan Kenobi-style to Rockson when Rockson needs him. But Killov is here, too, leading to a bizarre bit where both Rockson and Killov deal with ancient alien technology, one of them to save Earth, the other to destroy it. In the process Killov transforms himself into a nine foot tall, three-eyed ancient alien warrior called Mu-Temm, and he also has an ancient alien device that allows him to “think away” any weapons that are used against him. 

There follows an endless battle between Rockson and “Mu-Temm” that just goes on and on, like the Rockson-Chrome battle back in volume #9. But Rockson gets the shit beaten out of him by this transformed Killov, to the point that Rockson actually weeps in frustration. It’s all very much in a Biblical motif, with Rockson the slingshot-baring David getting the better of Killov’s Goliath.  But it is clear again that Ryder Syvertsen was a fan of Total Recall; previous volumes indicated that he was inspired by the Schwarzenegger film, but this one really brings it home.  From visions involving a pyramid on an alien planet to even the image of Killov’s eyes bulging from their sockets due to the pressure of space, it is clear that Syvertsen was influenced by that movie. 

Then we get the most psychedelic sequence yet in the series, with Rockson going into an ancient pyramid, again following Glower visions, and being imparted with all that knowledge – his memory now even “going back billions of years.” When he comes out of it, he starts talking in mystical phrases that are so profound that Chen insists on recording them. It’s all kind of cool but just totally unlike what one might have expected this series to conclude on. SPOILER ALERT, but the finale of Doomsday Warrior sees Rockson, recovering from his sudden knowledge and intelligence increase, telling the others to leave the dead Killov on the asteroid (Rockson having strangled Killov to death)…and that’s it. We are not told of the voyage home; the story – and series – ends right there, with Rockson declaring that the asteroid is a dead place for dead things. 

Actually, it sort of ends there. We are treated to an epilogue in which Syvertsen strives for a sort of quasi-metaphysical vibe, but it instead comes off as vacuous. It’s a thousand years in the future and a nameless woman attempts to become one with an apple tree, then there’s some gibberish about “the man from the sea,” and the gist seems to be that the two characters are reborn, immortal enemies. It has nothing to do with anything that came in the series before, but then it’s possible I just missed the profundities Syvertsen was trying to bestow. 

And that, folks, is that – the 19-volume saga of Doomsday Warrior comes to a close. What a weird trip it was, too. To be honest, I’d forgotten most of the earlier volumes, so I’m glad my reviews were so pedantic. I can’t say I’ll ever read these books again, but you never know. In the end, I will think of this series in a positive light; it’s just too goofy – and the earliest volumes so outrageously violent and explicit – that you can’t help but like it. Yet at the same time, Ryder Syvertsen’s disinterest in the series was very pronounced in the later books, and one gets the feeling he should’ve ended it many volumes ago.  But clearly he realized that more effort was needed for this final volume; I particularly appreciated how he gave each member of the Rock Team a moment to shine. 

Next I need to get back to the C.A.D.S. series, another post-nuke pulp Syvertsen was writing at the same time. And also I’ll now get to his Mystic Rebel books, which judging from these final volumes of Doomsday Warrior, with their focus on New Age concepts, was probably more the sort of thing Syvertsen wanted to be writing. So maybe he was a little more invested in that series than he was in Doomsday Warrior.