The Penetrator #46: Terrorist Torment

The Penetrator #46: Terrorist Torment, by Lionel Derrick

June, 1982  Pinnacle Books

This altogether timely installment of The Penetrator concerns the fight for a Palestinian homeland, which of course entails terrorism, the loss of innocent life, and the violent abduction of western politicians to be used as hostages. Fortunately Mark “The Penetrator” Hardin exists in this fictional world and can bust up these Palestinian terrorist scumbags. 

I almost get the impression that this volume was written in reaction to the then-new Gold Eagle imprint, which took former Pinnacle stalwart The Executioner and turned him into a superhuman counter-terrorist, which is exactly what Chet Cunningham does to Mark Hardin in this one. I’m going to run with my theory, especially given that Cunningham even wrote a few volumes of The Executioner for Gold Eagle…though, curiously, fellow Penetrator series writer Mark Roberts did not. Maybe he just never got the invite. 

But regardless, I really had to drum up the enthusiasm to keep reading Terrorist Torment; it could almost be seen as a take on another Pinnacle series, Death Merchant, in how it’s essentially just one long action scene. The only problem is, Chet Cunningham has long ago toned down the spectacular gore he brought to the earliest volumes of this series, and is very much a “get shot and fall down” sort of writer at this point, meaning that the novel comes off more as a bore than a thrill. 

Cunningham is to be congratulated for perhaps the most convenient plotting in men’s adventure history; Mark becomes aware of the PLO threat simply because some terrorists happen to be performing target practice near the Penetrator’s desert stronghold, and Mark goes out to investigate, gets in a firefight with them, and then follows along after them in “The Brown Beast” (ie his augmented camper), eventually running into a PLO plot to capture several western politicians and hold them as hostages! As the Church Lady would say, “How convenient!” 

But man, it’s more tiresome than anything. On the positive side, there’s at least some action, and Mark does kill again – but we get another reminder that this isn’t like the books of the decade before, as the Penetrator waits until the PLO thugs shoot at him in the desert before he shoots to kill. He takes out a few of them, then radios the Professor back at the Stronghold to tell him he’s off in pursuit; and as I read this, it occurred to me only now, all these years later, how unimportant Professor Haskins is to the series. Given the setup of the series, you’d think the guy was the M to Mark’s Bond, but that’s not the case at all; I’m going to assume that Professor Haskins was something Pinnacle came up with for the series, back when they conceived it, but the two series writers did nothing to flesh out the character. 

I developed an almost compulsive need to see Terrorist Torment as a spoof of the Gold Eagle books; otherwise there was nothing to keep me reading the book. But still, Mark is very much in superhero mode this time; he just follows after the terrorists, figures out that they have a camp deep in the Nevada woods, and goes about the “simple task” of infiltrating their base and setting off C4 explosives. I mean, there’s nothing to it! 

The Brown Beast hasn’t factored in the series for many a volume, but Mark uses it this time throughout, taking guns from the vast arsenal he has hidden within it. But he does make tracking and taking down terrorists seem very easy; all it requires is trekking through the woods, knifing one of the terrorists in the back and taking his uniform, and then approaching the terrorist base and saying “Speak the English!” when you come across any other terrorists. I was reminded of that great scene in Team America where the main puppet went undercover as a terrorist. 

That said, Mark does get captured at one point, and is put in the most grim situation I think he’s ever faced in the series; they cut off his pants and tie a string around his scrotum, which a PLO thug uses to lead Mark around. Cunningham really lays it on with the misery Mark endures, often puking due to the intense pain. And yet he still manages to escape, courtesy a Jean Claude Van Damme-esque spinning back kick to the thug’s head – quite a feat for a guy with a rope tied around his balls. 

Things get even goofier when the PLO launches its assault and, off-page, captures a bunch of politicians. I forgot to mention, but the whole deal is that various western leaders are meeting in secret in Nevada to discuss alternatives to Middle East oil, and the PLO plans to capture them and hold them hostage, killing one leader per hour until their demands are met and Palestine is given to them. Among the captive world leaders is none other than Margaret Thatcher, who gets shot in the arm, no less (she doesn’t seem to mind much); she features in a short scene where Mark frees her and together they escape through the woods, Thatcher even taking up a .45 to help out the Penetrator. I should also mention that the US President is not at the meeting – and, given the few chapters in which he appears, he seems to be Ronald Reagan, though is never mentioned by name. 

Cunningham really tries the reader’s gullibility when Mark goes back to the secret PLO base to free the other captured leaders, and again goes undercover as an Arabic terrorist (“Speak the English, fool!”)…and somehow, apropos of nothing, deduces that the PLO will use two-man teams in the firing squad, so he comes up with the plan of putting blanks in the carbines that will be used for the executions! He even slips up to the captured leaders and whispers to them that he’s a friend and that they need to play dead when they’re shot by the firing squad! 

In this capacity Mark liberates the Canadian prime minister (who at the end of the novel asks the Penetrator to come up to Canada, to help out with a “big job,” presumably setting up a future Cunningham installment), and then things come to a head with another big attack on the place. But it’s all kind of listless, lacking the craziness one might wish for – the only memorable bit comes at the end, when Mark follows the escaping PLO “shariff,” who has a violent encounter with a mama Grizzly bear. After which the PLO boss clearly wants to die his own way, and one suspects this is foreshadowing of how The Penetrator series itself will end: 

One might notice that there are no women featured on the cover. But there are two hippie-type girls in the book, who appear for a total of five or six pages…long enough to enjoy some shenanigans with “the Penetrator!” Sure, it’s left off page, and it happens on the final page at that, but Mark midway through the book encounters a pair of twenty year-old gals in a “Volkswagen convertible” who give him a lift…and, after leaving a casino in Nevada at the very end of the book, Mark runs into them again! 

Sure, it’s ridiculous – as if the entire novel itself hasn’t been – but it is nice to see a little sleaze return to the series; the girls don’t have money to stay anywhere that night, so Mark takes them in, and soon enough he can tell they’re nervous about the sole little bed in the camper, and before you know it the girls are talking about a “three way” and pulling off their tops, revealing their “full breasts” for the Penetrator’s viewing pleasure. But then there’s a two line break of white space, after which Cunningham picks up the narrative a week later, letting us know how satisfied the Penetrator is after a week in the camper along Lake Tahoe with the two girls! 

Overall, Terrorist Torment was not a very good installment of The Penetrator, notable only for the “balls on a rope” bit and the “bonkers” finale with the two girls (lame pun alert). Oh, and we also got a return of AVA, Mark’s dart gun – which, for the first time in forever, is used to kill people in this one, instead of just knocking them out.

NYPD 2025: A Reappraisal

NYPD 2025, by Hal Stryker

May, 1985  Pinnacle Books

Back in April 2014 I first read and reviewed NYPD 2025, and at the time I declared that it was “either a work of warped genius or a bunch of fascist drivel.” Well, now that it is 2025, I thought I’d take another look and find out which one it was. 

I first thought of reading this book again back in 2021, back during the Covid pandemic, when wearing masks in public was a necessity – a sign, it occurred to me at the time, of this novel’s prescience. But then I decided to wait until the actual 2025 to read the novel again, just for the sake of completeness…and then 2025 came and went and I only just remembered to read the book again like a few days ago…so fittingly enough, this will be the last post of 2025. 

First of all, the main thing I want to state is that I enjoyed NYPD 2025 even more this time than I did when I first read it; this time I friggin’ loved it, and truly wished there had been a followup volume or series. For as I mentioned last time, this was clearly intended as the start of a series – author “Hal Stryker” (aka prolific genre writer George Henry Smith) even drops clues in the text of what the next volume(s) would entail, like for example a mention that the titular NYPD would go up against drug kingpins, or that there might be a traitor in their midst. 

I still greatly admire how George H. Smith so carefully treads the line between parody and seriousness; while there is a lot of intentional comedy in the narrative, the events are real as death to the characters themselves…which is just how I like my pulp. As I mentioned last time, there is some wildly exaggerated violence in the novel, complete with detailed descriptions of bodies being torn apart, chopped up, and in general mutilated – excessive carnage the equal of Phoenix. (Though no sex, which is plumb curious given Smith's background in sleaze paperbacks.) 

And, just as with that David Alexander series, the author’s tongue is clearly in cheek; for example, there’s a part where hero Captain Zack Ward is looking at a row of “smudge masks,” ie the rubbery full-face masks people must wear in this 2025 due to pollution (aka “smudge”), and we’re told that the masks are “replicas of great lovers of the past – Clark Gable, George Burns, men like that.” In 1985 the “George Burns” reference would’ve been seen as an obvious joke; today, in the actual 2025, many younger readers might not even know of that once-famous (and famously old) comedian. 

The same holds true of the fictional 2025 itself; Smith goes for wild exagerration, giving us a United States where all creativity is legal, even if it entails real murder, where “there are no immigrants” due to erased borders, where cops are criminals, and where war is shunned but the US is constantly in a state of war…not realizing how close he was to predicting the actual 2025. Whereas NYPD 2025 might have seemed absurd in 1985, likely selling in low numbers because readers thought it was too far-fetched, today there is a lot about the book that rings true. 

True, there is much that has not aged well: there’s no space exploration on the scale Smith mentions – we have minor tidbits of space voyages to Mars and beyond, and also cloning is to such an extent that one of the NYPD is a four-armed, two-headed “monster.” And snuff films are not mainstream entertainment as they are here in the novel: “solidios,” which are movies where viewers can have sex with actresses (or actors), and where the actresses can be killed – for real – in the viewing comfort of a person’s living room. And yet, this blurring of fantasy and reality is somewhat similar to our modern TikTok culture, if not with the snuff and the gore, but at least in how social media bleeds into the real world…if you don’t believe me, spend about five minutes with a kid and tell me how quickly you get sick of hearing them say “6-7.” 

Speaking of endless war, our hero Zack is a career soldier, having spent the past twenty-some years out of the country fighting wars. Lately he’s been in Mexico, helping that country “fight for its freedom,” in particular fighting the USSR (which still exists in this 2025). When I posted my original review of NYPD 2025 in 2014, a commenter named Halojones-fan mentioned that “It’s interesting how many of these stories assumed that the next big US military deployment was going to be in Central and South America.” Well, we see how that has changed in the past year.  Again, Smith’s prescience about the actual 2025 is sometimes uncanny. 

But then, his 2025 isn’t so much the one we got, but the one we could have gotten. This is demonstrated most clearly in the never-seen character that is President Buchanan, aka “The Mahatma,” a “Flower Child” who has erased all borders, declared there are “no immigrants,” and has rewritten the Constitution as he sees fit. Indeed, Zack at one point notes all the “brown people” on the streets, and comments “the Melting Pot seems to be overflowing.”  Portia informs Zack that “America is said to be the largest of the Third World countries, with immigrants making up at least half the population and illegals a third. But then the Mahatma ruled there were no illegals.” That’s right, folks; George H. Smith predicted the Great Replacement Theory, or whatever it's called.

It’s also interesting that Smith even predicts the tiresome “politics from the bench” of the real 2025, where circuit court judges think they can coutnermand the duly elected President of the United States with the bang of a gavel. But in NYPD 2025, it’s the good guys who push back against federal policy; Judge Portia van Wyck, the thigh-length robe-wearing hotstuff blonde who pulls Zack out of a fatal solidio shoot (and immediately thereafter tells him she’s putting him on trial for his life), takes it upon herself to declare “The Mahatma’s” various rulings unconstitutional; a prefigure of Extreme Federalism (from a New York City judge, no less!).  

President Buchanan certainly would have appeared in a future volume; in this one, the only one, it’s his daughter, Indira, who appears; she’s been abducted, and Portia suspects she’s about to become the unwitting star of a snuff solidio. But Buchanan is always on the periphery, always being mentioned; I got a big chuckle out of the off-hand comment that one of Zack’s (many) opponents is “probably one of the many immigrants who made up nearly a third of the President’s Green Party, which had elected him President-For-Life.” One wonders if any of them embezzled billions of dollars in childcare fraud or ate wildlife in the park... 

I went over the plot in my original review, so won’t go into detail this time. I did have the same issues as my first reading, though; NYPD 2025 starts off strong, if a little derailed by scenes that go on too long, but slightly loses its footing in the final quarter, when Smith throttles back on the gory action and instead turns in a sci-fi mystery sort of thing, with Zack trying to figure out who has kidnapped Indira Buchanan…and what the true identity of solidio star “The Slasher” might be. This latter element brought to mind nothing less than The Spider, with its similar red herrings and “you’d never guess it was this minor character who is really the main villain,” and given that Smith was born in the 1920s I’m going to go ahead and assume he was a young reader of the pulps. 

But then, even some of these too-long sequences struck more of a chord in my second reading of NYPD 2025. For example, the over-long bit early on where Zack has to climb across the face of a building, fifty floors up, to try to escape some goons who are closing in. Back when I first read the book, I surely skimmed this sequence. This time, however, I couldn’t help but notice the eerie foreshadowing of September 11, 2001, when people trapped in the Twin Towers attempted this very thing, to escape the burning buildings, many of them falling to their death (the most horrific images of a horrific day – and, curiously, something that has been whitewashed in 9/11 retrospectives). In fact I’m surprised I didn’t notice this when I first read the novel several years ago…at the time I also didn’t notice the curious fact that, despite many New York landmarks being referenced in NYPD 2025, the Twin Towers are never mentioned. 

I also wish more time was spent with the team Zack would lead in the future volumes that were never written; again given the book a pulp vibe, Zack is to become “Captain Death,” and wears a skull mask when in this guise. Or at least he’s supposed to; he never actually wears the damn thing in the book! Smith certainly would have brought the NYPD cops to life in future books; I hate to say it, but there’s even more unwitting presience here, as the NYPD must work undercover, operating out of a secret headquarters – because the police are so hated in this 2025. Talk about “defund the police!” 

In fact, there’s even more prescience, as the NYPD is defunded at the end of the novel, or at least we’re told it soon will be, thanks to an angry President Buchanan. I’d forgotten the end-of-the-novel gimmick that Foxxy van Pelt, twenty-two-year-old bimbo star of solidios, announces that she’s not only going to join the NYPD but also fund them with her billions of dollars. I wonder if Smith would have kept her in the books; Foxxy is not a memorable character, just the cliché of a dimwitted, big-boobed valley girl (in other words, a very ‘80s cliché), but yet at the same time she brings to mind the vapidity of the average social media-obsessed Millennial of today, so props to William Henry Smith for once again predicting the actual 2025. And I still think it’s curious that Smith put a “van” in the name of both female characters – Judge Portia van Wyckk and Foxxy van Pelt – and I wonder if this was a mistake or if he was going for some sort of trendy “future” naming convention. 

Speaking of the ‘80s, the gory and sex-filled snuff solidios are clearly a reference to the slasher flicks that were popular when Smith was writing the book; the villainous Slasher could come out of any of those movies, save for the fact that Smith really drops the ball with his character design (basically he’s a Muslim terrorist in purple tights who wields two swords). But the solidios are slasher flicks to an exaggerated degree; in technology that is never adequately described, the solidio actors actually appear in the living rooms with viewers…and you can have sex with them, if you want. This raises many questions, questions that Smith does not answer. Unfortunately, Zack is so disgusted by the charade that he pushes away the solidio actress who offers herself to him as part of the scripted movie. 

It was hard to buy the “real” killing of the snuff solidios, though; what I gathered was that the actors were killed on a studio somewhere but the death and ensuing gore would splatter the living rooms of the viewers in some sort of virtual reality bit (though to be sure, “virtual reality” is not a term Smith uses). This still begs the question of how viewers could have sex with the actors and actresses, but I guess I should stop thinking of that. 

I also got a chuckle out of how President Buchanan has declared all art to be a protected right, with no such thing as censorship, thus even snuff films are legal…Smith getting wild and absurd with his predictions of the future, of course, but again there’s a slight bit of the real 2025 here, at least in regards to the wonderful pushback our current administration is giving to the censorship efforts of hypocritical foreign tyrants. Sure, it’s not “actors getting gutted for real on screen,” but we’ll take it! And I also appreciated how Smith used Zack as a fish out of water, alternately shocked and disgusted by what the America of 2025 has become. 

Speaking of Zack, I realized this time we have no idea how old the guy is. Or at least if we are told, I didn’t catch it. Last time I assumed he was young, but this time I noticed that we are only told that Zack has been out of the country for the better part of the past twenty years, having gone off as “a fresh-faced recruit” to fight wars around the globe. This means that Zack would be in his late 30s or early 40s, which puts him more in-line with the average men’s adventure protagonist. And this is what he truly is, always rushing off to a fight and gorily dispatching his opponents; Smith makes it clear that there would be an ongoing bantering between Zack and Portia in future books, given the hotbodied blonde judge’s distaste for Zack’s “kill first” mentality, yet of course she is clearly attracted to him. In other words, Zack is a “toxic male,” a phrase Smith surely would have used if it had occurred to him. There’s no doubt there would be the ongoing gimmick that Zack and Portia might become an item in future installments. 

Overall, I think George Henry Smith got a lot of things right in NYPD 2025, and sometimes even inadvertently; for example, people fly “floaters” instead of driving cars, but there’s still a prediction of the electric cars of today when a character at one point says, “And where do you propose to find gasoline in this day and age?” Smith also did a good job of knowing what people would forget about in forty years; we’re told, for example, that President Buchanan is “a Flower Child in an era that has forgotten what a Flower Child is.” 

And need I elaborate on Portia’s off-hand comment that “although there are strict laws in this country, they apply only to police and security forces, not to criminals?” Let’s think back to the “Summer of Love,” shall we?  And speaking of social commentary, Sally Mondo, the rock-singing solidio newscaster with her perfect body that is covered in tattoos, almost seems like some wild take on a social media influencer – hell, there probably are TikTok influencers out there right now who are just like her.

So yeah, I’d say NYPD 2025 really is a “work of warped genius” – time has only proved that Smith was altogether too reserved in his predictions of an absurd future. And yes, it’s a damn shame we didn’t get more books in the series.

Rest In Agony

Rest In Agony, by Paul W. Fairman

No month stated, 1967  Lancer Books

(Original Monarch Books edition 1963)

A few years before he gave us the sleazy masterpiece that was the Coffy novelization (also published by Lancer Books), prolific author Paul W. Fairman turned out this novella-length horror yarn…which, per the copyright page, was first published in shorter form in 1963 by Monarch Books, under the pseudonym “Ivar Jorgensen.” Featuring a ridiculously naïve narrator, an evil Satanic cult, and a cameo by none other than Jesus Christ Himself, Rest In Agony couldn’t be better suited for this Very Special Glorious Trash Christmas Day Post. 

That original Monarch edition must’ve been real short, as this Lancer version is only 230 pages long, with some big ol’ print. Sorry, “Easy Eye” print. The novel is essentially a novella, featuring only a handful of characters and a basic plot that features good against evil. The only curious thing is when it takes place; narrator Hal buries a few clues here and there that the events he is about to tell us occurred a long time ago (“I still remember it clearly to this day,” etc), so either Hal’s in some fictional future and telling us about something that happened way back in 1967 (or 1963, if you’re going with the original Monarch edition), or the events of Rest In Agony occur much earlier in the Twentieth Century. 

To make this even more curious, Fairman gives us no topical details in the novel; it takes place in a bland “Smalltown, USA” setting with zero mentions of popular culture. About the most we learn is that people can take buses to a nearby city, and there are department stores to shop in, so the idea I got was that the novel occurred somewhere in the 1930s. But then, given the lack of any details, it could really take place at just about any time – this is not the Paul Fairman who gave us the no-sleazy-stone-unturned masterwork that was Coffy, unfortunately. This version of Fairman is a barebones, meat-and-potatoes writer at best. And whereas his Coffy was X rated, Rest In Agony would be rated PG at most. 

Further giving the impression that this takes place in a more innocent time than the swinging ‘60s, Rest In Agony is narrated by the most impossibly naïve and pearl-clutching protagonist, Hal, who is 21 in the story but acts more like he’s even younger…or perhaps even older, as he’s a total fusspot, morally outraged, and altogether prudish wuss. Worse yet, the dude’s in love with his sister, 18 year-old Lisa, and Hal informs us that he’s lately been trying to subdue the dawning realization that his feelings for Lisa are a little more than sibling-based. 

“My uncle died in agony.” So Hal opens his tale, dropping a few of those vague clues that all this was so long ago, and we learn that the uncle is Amby, a wealthy gaddabout who is screaming and dying on his deathbed as the novel begins, all while Hal and Lisa sit down below and listen, waiting for the agony to end. But on the day of the funeral, Hal is home alone and the phone rings – and it’s the voice of Uncle Amby, begging Hal for help. 

The supernatural aspect does not return for some time, and per the horror template Hal tries to shrug this off as a hallucination or whatnot – at least, no one will believe him. Then there’s this business about “The Book of Ambrose,” a book Uncle Amby supposedly wrote, at least according to a local sports reporter named Hugh Payson who keeps bugging Hal and telling him he’s doing a paper on the wealthy and famous Ambrose Sampson, and this book of his would sure be a big help for his research. 

There’s also a lot of stuff about dreams; folks, Hal sets a precendent for a narrator who sleeps the most in a book that I’ve yet read on here. No joke, practically ever chapter ends with Hal telling us he’s going to bed, or just about to fall asleep, or even being dosed into unconsciousness and voyaging again into the Satanic palace of pain (where pain is pleasure)…I mean the guy certainly gets his rest in the book. 

The dreams are also fueled by the wanton carnality to be found in the Book of Ambrose; Hal finds this handrwitten journal in Uncle Amby’s room, and reads it in a daze – it’s “filth,” is all our prudish narrator tells us, and it serves to make him realize that there was a wholly different side to the kindly, wealthy uncle Hal knew: in reality, Ambrose Sampson was a thrall of Satan, taking part in a host of vile and horrific rituals (none of which are described at all). 

Hal eventually lets Lisa read the diary, and she too is shocked by it, but she’s more understanding than Hal and suspects there might be more to the story than Hal thinks, and also Hal can’t help but noting how hot and beautiful she is and stuff. Just when the hints of incest become too much to bear, Hal and Lisa are informed that Lisa isn’t really Hal’s sister; she was really the unwanted child of some chick Uncle Amby knew, and Hal’s folks took the baby girl in and raised her as their own, never telling her or Hal…until now! 

Well, all that taken care of, Hal and Lisa are free to go at it…though, again, this is not the author who just a few years later would give us Coffy. There’s some kissing and heavy petting and zero description, and zero sex, but Hal and Lisa sure are hankering for it. All told, this entire revelation that Lisa isn’t really Hal’s sister is wonky at best, and given the brevity of the novel you wonder why the whole “I thought Lisa was my sister” scenario was even included. I mean it only serves to make the narrator look like a prudish wuss who has incestual designs on his sister. 

He’s also stupid; it wouldn’t take a genius to figure that this sports reporter guy might not be totally on the level. Anyway, Hal and his friend (who happens to be Lisa’s boyfriend, but the character is so laughably immaterial to the plot that you wonder why he was even included) hop on a bus to go to a neighboring town to check out a store that Uncle Amby did business with…a store where one of Satan’s minions works, a hotstuff babe who runs the cosmetics stand! 

I did appreciate how Fairman made it clear that Satan’s throngs aren’t always like bigwigs or famous people or whatnot, but come on! A sports reporter and a perfume sales lady; surely we are on the lower rungs of Satanic evil. It gets even lower than that; Fairman works in a “rats” angle, where red-eyed rats with keen intelligence begin to populate Hal’s nightmares and show up at odd times…this hit on a personal note because I’ve been drafted into part-time, unpaid rat catching this past year, thanks to my wife’s friggin’ garden. I catch them in a live bait cage, and they’ve ranged from “you’d be a cute little thing if it wasn’t for that damn long tail” to “Oh my living God I had no idea rats could get that big!” 

Well anyway, the way these things go, Lisa is captured, held as bait (perhaps in a live bait cage) until Hal turns over that damn Book of Amrbose. Oh, and the sports reporter reveals himself to be Satan’s Representative…sounds like an episode of Everybody Loves Raymond that never was. For once Hal shows some insight when he asks Hugh why he had to take Lisa, given that Hal had already agreed to hand over the damn book…well, it’s because ol’ Satan’s Representative got a look at young Lisa, and now has the hellish hots for her. 

Hal spends the final quarter either sleeping, being knocked out, or experiencing things is a drugged daze. And also, apparently, getting laid – courtesy hotstuff Margo Danning, Hugh Payson’s sort-of Satanic commander in chief. She lures the addle-headed Hal to the ways of the “Prince,” entailing slightly risque parts where Hal witnesses Satanists having orgies and whatnot…all of it written in a very vague, obsfucated style. 

Meanwhile Lisa is there, but to her this opulent place of decadence is really a tacky dump, with white walls and no furniture; the implication is that all Hal sees is only in his mind, and his mind has been subverted by the devil. And also Hal, we are incessantly informed, is too “weak” to fight back – and we’re told this by the friggin ghost of his uncle, who pops up infrequently to gab with Lisa about how pathetic and weak Hal is…all while Hal is lying right there and listening to them! Soon it becomes clear that Lisa is the true hero of the tale, but Hal is the one telling the story. It is Lisa who has the power of pure spirit that cannot be touched by Satan, as memorably demonstrated when Hugh Payson tries to tempt her during a Satanic orgy…and then the heavens open…and Jesus Himself comes down to announce to Lisa how proud He is of her! (And yes, Fairman follows tradition and capitalizes the “He,” and I’ve followed suit.) 

Now I was of course reminded of that part in The Mind Masters #3 where God answered the hero’s prayer…but, as it turns out, Fairman has more up his sleeve. (No spoilers, but Hal for once gets smart and realizes it’s all Satan’s last, most desperate trick.) There’s no action finale; indeed, the finale is pretty lame, with the villains vanishing and also a few of them turning into rats…because meanwhile we’ve learned those red-eyed rats are in reality Satanists who have displeased the Prince and thus have been turned into rodents. But otherwise it’s a great cult to join, I’m sure, with lots of fringe benefits. 

Here in the finale we get one, uh, final reminder that all this was long ago; Hal tells us that “in future” he would always see Lisa this way, as the proud young woman who literally stood up to Satan. Oh, and as for Lisa’s dimwitted boyfriend, the stooge is so immaterial to the plot that the book ends with him still not finding out that Hal and Lisa aren’t really siblings; indeed, the guy spends the entire final quarter off-page, and is only mentioned again because Fairman presumably remembers him at the last moment. 

All told, Rest In Agony is a somewhat fun if overly stilted and melodramatic bit of ‘60s Satanic Panic, not nearly as sleazy or lurid as it would have been if it had been published a decade later. I have no idea how this edition differs from the original 1963 printing, but overall I’d say the novel was passable if ultimately forgettable. And the cover art reminds me of the Berkley editions of Clive Barker’s Books Of Blood! 

Merry Christmas!

The Nature Of The Beast

The Nature Of The Beast, by Peter Menegas

December, 1975  Bantam Books

This horror PBO was clearly intended to be the next big thing – cue back cover comparisons to The Exorcist and whatnot – but The Nature Of The Beast was clearly a dud, going on to obscurity; I only learned about it when randomly coming across the cover online. 

Will at Too Much Horror Fiction reviewed this one many years ago, and he did not like it at all, but in one of my contrary moods I decided to seek the book out anyway and give it a shot. “Surely it can’t be that bad,” I foolishly thought…and then just as foolishly I attempted to read the book. 

No; it’s bad. It is very bad. Author Peter Menegas makes one poor decision after another, and The Nature Of The Beast soon becomes a tiring and trying chore of a read, and I can only agree with Will that the best thing about the book is, by far, the cover. 

However, unlike Will I was actually foolish enough to read the entire book! He wisely gave it up midway through. Like I said, I was in a contrary mood, even if it was my own best interests I was, uh, contrarying. At least the book was fairly short, coming in at 240 pages. 

If you are a cat lover in particular I would advise you steer clear of The Nature Of The Beast. The novel opens with the protagonist, Dee Dee Burke, discovering a crucified cat corpse in her NYC penthouse, and as the novel progresses more of the poor critters will be gutted and nailed to a cross. 

And yes, that’s the name of the book’s hero: Dee Dee. Clue number one that this book’s going to suck. Self-described as a “Vogue mother,” Dee Dee is insufferable, a decades-early version of an AWFL. But then unlikable protagonists seems to be common in horror fiction, so maybe author Peneter Menegas did not intend for us to root for her. He does however expect our imaginations to do all the heavy lifting, as the most description we get about Dee Dee is that she is, apparently, pretty, and that she has “dark and straight hair.” There is zero in the way of exploitation in the novel, and in fact I think the word “breasts” doesn’t even appear once – resulting of course in a heaping helping of demerits. 

At any rate, Dee Dee has two punk kids: Alun, 8, and Terry, 6. And yes, it’s “Alun” with a “u,” but anyway the two kids talk like they’re decades older (or maybe my own 8-year-old is just WAY underdeveloped in the speech department), and weird enough they’ve lately taken to talking about weird visions and whatnot, and sticking to themselves. 

New York City isn’t much brought to life, as Dee Dee is a “going to the salon for the afternoon” type of wealthy mother and about the most we get are vague mentions of “Puerto Rican kids” who have come from uptown and are stirring up trouble. But we aren’t in New York for long; Dee Dee’s husband, a disaffected business bigwig who is so immaterial to the plot that I didn’t even bother to write his name down in my notes, announces that the family is moving to England for his job. 

Menegas slowly plays up the “horror stuff” with the gradual revelation that Alun and Terry’s prophecies are coming true…for example, in New York they say something about seeing animals from their bedroom window, and then that night Dee Dee finds out the family is moving to England, and then they go to England and have to get a temporary house in London, and it just so happens that Alun’s and Terry’s bedroom happens to face a public park that has a zoo in it. Hence, they’re seeing animals from their bedroom, just like they said they would in New York. 

Only, all this is so slowly developed that it lacks any impact or urgency. Dee Dee has to explain it all to her dimwitted husband, and even she can barely grasp the import. Oh, and meanwhile the sitter they hire claims that the two kids killed and crucified a cat right before her terrified eyes, and she’ll no longer be working for the Burkes, thank you very much. Even here Dee Dee refuses to believe it’s true…I mean just on and on with the lameness. 

It gets even lamer with Mr. Tregeagle, the portly and prancing (if you get my drift) owner of a local antiques store. Yes, friends, many scenes of Dee Dee going to the antique store: the horror! Of course it eventually becomes clear that there is an evil luring behind the portly shop owner’s smile, particularly when he learns that Dee Dee’s mother was a minor poet of cult fame who turned out epics based on Celtic myth. I mean first he names his heroine “Dee Dee,” and then he makes the main villain a fat gay guy who owns an antique store – either Peter Menegas had no idea what he was doing, or maybe he intended it all as a spoof, who knows. 

More cats are killed, more antiques are bought. The knives come out when Tregeagle invites Dee Dee to a country manor where his fellow cultists congregate for the weekend, featuring portly Brits in robes trying to sacrifice animals and whatnot. I should mention here that these cultists are Celts, not Satanists, so again Menegas was attempting something different. Unfortunately, different doesn’t always equal good. 

And I mean “the knives come out” only in the figurative sense, as really Tregeagle just gets incredibly bitchy with Dee Dee, who goes back home to her disaffected husband and wonders if her two brat kids really are mutilating and crucifying cats. But having wasted so many pages, Menegas finally decides to get far out on the horror front in the final quarter. 

In what could be a delirium or a descent into madness or even a real, actual meeting of the supernatural, Dee Dee finds her punk kids missing and goes running for them, out to the beach (at this point they’ve moved to some estate in Cornwall, which per the annoying English tradition is given its own pretentious name), and as she runs her teeth start falling out and she looks like a hag(!?). 

As if that weren’t enough, she has an encounter with a deer-headed man, presumably a god of some sort, and he has his way with Dee Dee on the beach, but Dee Dee slowly begins to enjoy it; Menegas never gets outright sleazy, but the sequence isn’t fade to black, either. After it’s all over the deer-man leaves and Dee Dee comes back to reality, no longer a hag, and with all of her teeth back in her mouth – and her kids are there, too. 

There follows a laugh-out-loud bit where Dee Dee meets with a swami, who explains that the deer-man was likely the Celtic god Cerunnos…but then was it all a dream? Who knows, and who cares. The Nature Of The Beast ends with Dee Dee apparently just as Celtic-attuned as her two sons are (apparently they’ve been chosen by the Celtic gods or some shit due to their linneage, or something)….and the husband’s still as disaffected…and thankfully the novel is over. 

Sometimes it is clear why books are obscure, and why they stay that way. I cannot recommend The Nature Of The Beast, as Peter Menegas makes one poor choice after another – the work of an author trying to write a “horror novel,” but not having any idea how to go about it.

Traveler #11: The Children’s Crusade

Traveler #11: The Children’s Crusade, by D.B. Drumm

February, 1987  Dell Books

I get the impression that Ed Naha prepped for this volume of Traveler by reading the installments that were written by series co-author John Shirley. Instead of the spoofy banality that was #9: The Stalking Time or the parodic descent into Hell that was #10: Hell On Earth, Naha finally delivers exactly what this series needs: a fast-moving action thriller with a taciturn protagonist who despite his bad-assery always finds himself defending “the little guy.” 

Naha does pick up on elements from the previous volume; as we’ll recall, that one had an opening sequence in which Traveler, now dubbed “Storyteller,” was living on some pueblo where he’d tell stories to a pack of mutant children. Naha drops this in the opening chapter of The Children’s Crusade, with Traveler deciding to head back out onto the road. 

We are told that it’s been a year that Traveler has been living here in the pueblo, so at least this time around I’m not as confused by the dating of the series. Naha frequently states that the bombs dropped “two decades ago,” and there are a lot of references to how Traveler’s battles with roadrats and other post-nuke scumbags was “long ago,” in “the early days” after the war. 

It’s curious that Naha has introduced this “long time ago” scenario to Traveler, and my best guess is that he wanted to distance himself from Shirley’s installments, so he could write a series (and hero) that was slightly different than John Shirley’s version. 

In other words, Shirley’s volumes took place in those “early days,” and by setting them long ago in the past, Naha is free to refer to them, but without the emotional trauma that would be necessary if they were events that had occurred recently. Like in particular Jan, Traveler’s soul mate who went off with Traveler in a Happily Ever After in #6: Border War, before we found out at the start of #7: The Road Ghost that she’d been killed – Traveler thinks of Jan once or twice in The Children’s Crusade, but it’s more in a wistful, “she’s been gone a long time” sort of way. 

That said, Ed Naha brings a lot of “emotional content” (as Bruce Lee would say) to the series; for the first time ever, Traveler thinks of his lost wife and son…like throughout the book. Methinks Naha is setting up the final volume in some fashion, but it is otherwise curious that these two characters, who have never been seen in the series and only sporadically mentioned, are the focus of so many of Traveler’s thoughts this time around, up to and including an emotional dream sequence in which Traveler goes out shopping to buy his four year old son some Legos, only to come home and watch as the child and his mother are blasted away in nuclear hellfire, with Traveler unable to help and forced to watch. 

Also curiously, the “children” of the title are not the mutant kids “Storyteller” would entertain; it’s a new pack of kids, new to the series I mean, and Traveler runs into them in an abandoned shopping mall in California. Naha seems to do a Yojimbo riff here with Traveler the lone wolf heading into a town and helping one side while pretending to help the other; perhaps I make this connection because Naha specifically refers to Lone Wolf and Cub in the narrative, so it would seem he is a bit of a fan of samurai movies. 

Otherwise we are very much in John Shirley territory here, only minus the nuke-spawn mutant monsters Shirley would often bring to his tales. Instead of bogging things down into pseudo-epic or religious satire, Naha keeps things moving with Traveler getting in frequent scrapes while doling out action movie-esque one-liners. Traveler is once again a smart-ass, I mean to say, and he delivers a bunch of memorable lines throughout The Children’s Crusade. And unlike The Stalking Time, the action and storyline itself are never mocked; it’s merely Traveler mocking the people he goes up against. In other words, Ed Naha plays it on the level, just like John Shirley did. 

Traveler comes across a group of teens who are drinking beer and talking about a conspiracy back in their hometown, and Traveler immediately takes a liking to them and helps them hide from the mercenaries who come looking for them. Again Naha clearly has his series set in a different world than the earliest volumes; it is made clear to Traveler again and again that this is a “new America” and “his kind” – ie mercenaries and other men of violence – are no longer welcome or wanted. Naha even gets in a little Right Wing-mocking in an early scene where Traveler makes an impromptu stop at the Grand Canyon to see it for the first time in his life, and a local tells Traveler to get out or he’ll be shot dead: “After all, it’s the American way.” 

The changing of the times is especially pronounced when Traveler arrives in Bay City, on the Pacific; actually it’s more like pre-war times, as the little town is fully functioning and has everything from a police force to an amusement park for the kids. At this point Naha has retconned Traveler into essentially a standard men’s adventure series, without any of the post-nuke trappings of the earlier installments. 

Here the Yojimbo stuff arises, as Traveler discovers that something rotten is going on; the scar-faced but good-hearted mayor of the town is secretly being held prisoner, taken captive by a turncoat police chief (who looks like William Shatner, we’re told, in what appears to be intended as a joke that Naha loses interest in). Traveler poses as a guy just visiting town while helping the group of teens hide – their leader is the mayor’s grandson, and they too are wanted by the merciless cops and mercs who have taken over the town. 

It’s more of a long-simmer setup here as Traveler investigates and gets in occasional scrapes. Naha skirts some boundaries with Traveler finding himself attracted to a girl in the group of teens – she’s apparently only 15 or thereabouts – and developing a rapport with her, before Naha drops this as well. Indeed he even has Traveler briefly reflect on his passing fancy with the girl, at the end of the novel, and wonder what he was thinking! But at any rate this is the rare volume where Traveler does not enjoy any female companionship…which, now that I think of it, seems to be a recurring element of the Naha installments. 

That said, Naha does want to tie back to the earlier volumes, but often in unintentionally goofy ways…like when Traveler calls old buddy Orwell on a payphone, who is now working for the new CIA in Las Vegas(!). This sequence exists only to set up ensuing volumes, as Orwell relates that a civil war is brewing in the new United States, and rumor has it that none other than series villain President Andrew Frayling – presumably killed in earlier Shirley installment  Border War – is plotting to overthrow President Jefferson (himself a character in earlier installments). 

Frayling as we’ll recall is a wildly overdone Reagan caricature, but he was old even in the Shirley installments, which as we’ll further recall were two friggin’ decades ago. Naha has it that Frayling is now nearly a hundred years old and what’s more he’s wheelchair bound and with a fried face, so in other words like the original Enterprise captain on Star Trek. Traveler ultimately discovers that Frayling is behind the plotting in Bay City, which entails Frayling getting hold of a few nukes that have been deposited in the area. 

The gore has also been removed from the series, and the climax is mostly bloodless when compared to Shirley’s books. But Naha does set up the next volume; Frayling and his henchmen escape, headed for China (which it is rumored survived WWIII unscathed), and Traveler heads after him – along with a newly-introduced character named Persky. A female cop on the Bay City force, Persky is invariably described as “feline” or “small,” and otherwise is not exploited in any way whatsoever, but she does have a snappy rapport with Traveler, so one wonders if she will become Traveler’s new flame. 

Two more volumes were to follow, and hopefully they will be more like this one than the others Naha wrote for the series.

Black Angel: Dixie Death Hunt

Great news, everyone – a new volume of Black Angel has come out via Tocsin Press! It’s titled Dixie Death Hunt, and here’s the cover: 

It’s Hard Target as a ‘70s Blaxploitation movie starring Pam Grier (or perhaps Jayne Kennedy), as The Black Angel heads down to Georgia and takes on a group of bigots who hunt black men for sport. Along the way we get a naked chase through the woods, our heroine going undercover in a memorable fashion, and the return of the Black Angel’s leather catsuit – not to mention a monstrous mutant redneck freak. Plus all the sex and violence that is to be expected of a Men Of Violence Books publication! 

Head on over to Amazon, where you can preview the first several pages (on desktop only) and order a copy – the perfect stocking stuffer for any action junkie on your Xmas list! And grab copies of the first volume and The Doll Cage while you’re at it!

Satan’s Child

Satan’s Child, by Peter Saxon

No month stated, 1968  Magnum/Lancer Books

Peter Saxon was a house name used by several British authors; the name is most associated with The Guardians, a swinging ‘60s horror-action series that was much loved by Curt Purcell of The Groovy Age Of Horror. Twenty years ago when I was a regular reader of Curt’s site, I went out and picked up a few of those Guardians books, but boy it appears they have become quite scarce and pricey these days; the same goes for the non-series Peter Saxon books, of which Satan’s Child is one. 

According to the Vault of Evil forum, this version of Peter Saxon was an author named William McNeilly, who turned out a few horror paperbacks, all of which are well-regarded by the Vaulters, with this one in particular seeming to be their favorite. Now that I’ve read this fast-moving horror pulp, I can agree with them; Satan’s Child is a very entertaining read, hitting a lot of high points in its 200-page runtime. 

Seemingly taking place in the 1700s, Satan’s Child is a supernatural-themed revenge thriller, like a Hammer take on Death Wish. But this isn’t a simple “kill my enemies” type of revenge yarn; it’s a “I’ll turn myself into a bull and sodomize my enemy’s wife with my two-foot-long dick” type of yarn. So yeah, this one’s really out there – and seems even more so, given the formal, almost omniscient tone McNeilly tells the story in. 

The novel takes place in rural Scotland, for the most part, and one must be prepared to wade through a lot of painful “Scots” dialog that would even give Irvine Welsh pause. When I see stuff like this, I’m reminded why my ancestors came to America. (Or maybe it was Ireland they left; no one seems to know or care.) This is a Scotland just barely out of the Middle Ages, of backwards villagers and deep-rooted superstitions, the type of people who would eagerly burn a woman for being a “witch.” 

This is how the novel begins, with an attractive young woman named Elspet Malcolm being dragged naked to the fire pit, her husband Magnus dutifully whipping her as women watch from the windows of their homes, commenting on the young woman’s “diddies.” Also watching are Elspet’s children: Iain, 13, and Morag, 11. The man whipping Elspet is not their father; Magnus Malcolm is the bastard’s name, a local who has brought Elspet and her two children from a neighboring town, and now he’s about to burn her for being a witch. 

We are given vague detail that Elspet might have been a little “friendly” with some of the men in the village, and this has put her in the cross hairs of Magnus and the village women, who have used the handy ruse of accusing her of witchcraft to get rid of her. McNeilly does not shy in the gruesome details here, complete with the TMI note that Elspet soils herself in her fear, and the horrors continue when the shell-shocked children go home and decide to run away…only for Magnus to come home and stop them, attempting to rape young Morag…before Iain comes along to defend his little sister with an axe. 

A curious note is that Magnus calls Morag a “spawn of Satan,” but Morag soon drops out of the narrative and it is Iain who grows up to be an adept of the Left Hand Path. Presumably Iain is the titular Satan’s Child, not Morag, but methinks McNeilly knew what he was doing here. At any rate we flash forward some unspecified time – it’s many years later and Iain is now an adult, but he still is treated like a young man, so I’m assuming we’re like 15 years or so out. When we meet Iain again he’s in the Himalayas, in the presence of the Masters of the Cult, where he is about to become an Adept of the Eleventh Degree. 

After a druggy initiation ritual, in which Iain is to have sex with a girl and slice her throat during the act – a scene played more for shock than sleaze – Iain finds himself magically transported back to Scotland, where he now is a powerful mage. Whether Iain actually killed the girl – or even had sex with her – is something our hero debates for a hot second before getting on to the business at hand: doling out supernatural vengeance to the townspeople who killed his mother, “so many years ago.” 

From here Satan’s Child follows what the Vault of Evilers refer to as a “vignette approach,” which is in fact a great description of how McNeilly tells his tale. As I’ve found is common with horror fiction, Satan’s Child doesn’t so much follow a protagonist as he or she goes about his or her business, but instead goes from one character to another – more accurately, one victim to another – as he or she suffers his or her horrific fate. 

The problem is that McNeilly has not properly set up any of the townspeople in the opening sequence. We only meet a few of them – Magnus, of course, and the “pricker” (aka the witchfinder), and a few of the women – but none of them are really brought to life so that we may hate them as much as Iain Malcolm does, so that we may lust for their violent demise as much as he does. This I felt was the ultimate problem with Satan’s Child. 

Another thing is that the characters are fairly boring, because they’re all simple townsfolk living in backwards 1700s Scotland. Regardless, Mcneilly displays a vicious imagination that goes in really bizarre places; in the first “vignette,” Iain turns himself into a woman (how very modern!) so as to sow a jealous riff between a husband and wife, leading to an almost EC Comics denouement. 

Even crazier is next; as mentioned above, Iain turns himself into a bull, and allows himself to be “found” by one of his targets, a man who sells and breeds cows and whatnot. There’s a crazy bit of cow-sex-exploitation here that goes into the realms of bestiality because the reader knows the bull is really Iain, and he literally fucks a cow to death, first chasing the poor girl around the pen and then slamming his two-and-a-half-foot dick into her, to the extent that it ruptures the poor animal’s heart! 

As one will note, Iain’s goal isn’t just to kill his victims, but to make them suffer psychologically as well. And spiritually, too; the pricker suffers in this regard, as he’s moved on to Paris and has left behind his rural backwoods witchfinder days. This sequence is masterfully written because it’s another indication that our hero is a bit too driven; essentially Iain works with a lower-level left hand pather, and the two run a caper on the pricker, posing as government agents who need the man’s old skills to get a witch to confess – and of course, after the pricker has crushed the poor girl’s fingers and whatnot, he finds out who she really is. A nice twisting of the blade on Iain’s part, but again it lacks much kick because we weren’t given sufficient time to hate the pricker’s guts at the start of the book. 

But this “vignette approach” continues through the breezily-written book…breezily, that is, save for the painful “Scots” dialog we are occasionally assailed with, not to mention the author’s occasional tendency to lecture us from his high horse. But I guess that’s to be expected from a British pulp writer of yore; they just couldn’t help themselves. 

There’s a more elaborate setup where Iain returns to the village and starts up an actual coven, leading to a crazy bit of one guy wearing the skin of another, gradually being crushed to death by the drying skin, Iain killing two of his prey for the price of one. Here McNeilly brings in a new character, a woman who has also come to the village and stays to herself, but employs several of the locals. 

Meanwhile Iain shows off his occult mastery, transforming himself into various animals and killing off more targets, before ultimately setting his sights on his main goal: his stepfather, Magnus Malcolm, who is still alive – and who has remarried, his new wife about to have a child. Here the author leaves no question that Iain Malcolm has gone too far to the dark side, as he plots to kill the baby – only to find himself in a war of magic with a white witch who is determined to save the child’s life. 

As the Vaulters noted in the link above, the climax is somewhat expected, but nonetheless well delivered, and even touching in a way. I also felt certain that McNeilly knew what he was doing with Iain not being the person referred to as “spawn of Satan” by Magnus, but Iain’s sister, Morag, which nicely sets up the finale; Magnus turns out to be wrong in many ways. 

Overall Satan’s Child was a lot more entertaining than I expected it to be, and certainly went in wild directions – perhaps made even more wild given the overal staid approach of McNeilly’s narrative. Supernatural things happen without much fuss, giving the impression of a world much closer to the power of the occult than our own. Now it looks like one of these days I’ll need to check out the other “Peter Saxon” books I have.