The Penetrator #34: Death Ray Terror

The Penetrator #34: Death Ray Terror, by Lionel Derrick
December, 1979  Pinnacle Books

The Penetrator says goodbye to the ‘70s in yet another phoned-in installment courtesy Chet Cunningham. George Wilson’s cover again focuses on the few action scenes (though the bikini-clad babe only shows up on the last page), whereas the novel itself is mostly a slow-going affair of padded scenes and page-filling expository dialog. All of which to say Death Ray Terror is just business as usual for The Penetrator, further proving that the series should’ve been ended years before – or that a new “Lionel Derrick” should’ve been hired.

Wilson’s cover also doesn’t lie – that blond guy in the glasses wielding a carbine with an almost psychotically bland look on his face is indeed none other than Mark “The Penetrator” Hardin. He’s decided to bleach his hair blond and shave off his moustache in one of his arbitrary attempts at masking his identity. The real reason for this is that Cunningham finally brings FBI agent Howard Goodman back into the series – Goodman being the agent with a personal grudge against the elusive Penetrator. I can’t remember the last time we saw him, but here he has many conversations with Mark, of course not realizing that this blond-haired “Justice Department agent” is the person he’s been chasing.

Cunningham also brings back Justice agent Joanna Tabler, last seen in #24: Cryogenic Nightmare. She sends Mark a letter at the Stronghold letting him know she’s in New Mexico working on a case involving eco-radicals. We readers already see the situation in an opening segment that features a mentally-retarded guy who has been hypnotized into a suicide attack on the research labs in Los Alamos, New Mexico, where the top-secret Operation Long Reach project is being worked on. The hypnotizer is a guy named Harry Ackors, a ten-year resident in good standing of Los Alamos, a business owner and member of various boards, but in secret a KGB operative.

Curiously, Cunningham seems at great pains to bring sleaze back to the series, but mostly via outrageous dialog. Like in the opening sections in Los Alamos, in which we see Ackors’s main weapon – a busty blonde named Dawny – at work. She’s been through two of the top lab scientists, one of whom was killed in a car wreck she arranged and another who gave up the project in shame when his affair with her was discovered. Now she’s at work on number three, who goes on about various parts of her anatomy in dialog we’ve never before encountered in the series. No funny business, though. No, Dawna blows the dude’s brains out instead of screwing him, given that he finally cottoned to the fact that this girl was asking too many questions.

What’s funny is that Ackors tells Dawna she needs to scram, but she’s still in town when Mark Hardin shows up…and no one but him seems to think it’s screwy that the same woman was involved with three dead (or departed) scientists at the lab. It takes a while for her to return to the narrative, though. Instead Cunningham page-fills with Mark scoping out the town, watching a demonstration of the Star Wars-esque laser defense being built in the labs, and also sitting through a long speech on the economy of Los Alamos. Fun stuff is only sporadic, mostly through the limited conversations Mark has with Goodman, aka the Penetrator’s number-one enemy. Goodman resents being taken off the Penetrator case for this Long Reach business and spends his time going through his thick files on his quarry, all while Mark is standing in front of him.

As for the action, it’s very sporadic. Cunningham has shown less and less interest in action as the series has progressed, and this time he keeps Mark out of anything serious until nearly a hundred pages in, when he guns down one of the eco-terrorists. Oh, these characters take up their own goodly portion of the narrative; led by HR Rivers, a young lady with very small boobs (that’s how you know she’s evil – Men’s Adventure 101, folks), the greenpeace freaks seem to have stepped out of the previous decade, spouting “power to the people” babble that seems pretty dated given the ’79 publication date. Cunningham randomly includes a former professional basketball player named Clutch in their ranks.

Actually Clutch’s appearance leads to some of that “unacceptable in today’s world” stuff; Joanna Tabler has her own pages-filling subplot in which she goes undercover as a new member of the eco-terrorists, trying to gain the trust of Rivers. Clutch hits on her relentlessly, and Joanna lies to him that she’s gay so he’ll back off. But meanwhile Rivers is gay for real, and she calls Joanna to her room that very night. Here Joanna admits she fibbed to Clutch because “He’s so big and looked mean and he’s black.” This part also features some of that random raunch Cunningham has suddenly decided to add to the series; Clutch refers to Joanna, apropos of nothing, as a “honkey tight-twat.” Almost sounds like a country music dance craze – “Folks, it’s Merle Skrugg and his Pickin’ Grinners with their number-one hit, ‘Honkey Tight-Twat,’ tonight at the Opry!”

Speaking of random, later on we learn one of the lab techs is a guy named Dan Streib, but nothing much comes of it – he doesn’t even have any dialog. Anyway it all just sort of grinds along; Rivers’s terrorists attack the labs a few times, and only Mark can convince the heads to call in military support. It’s just sort of goofy and juvenile…the eco-terrorists hit the lab, then scramble back to their headquarters and sit around. And meanwhile Mark suspects someone’s behind them, using them as a diversion. He does at least take a few of them out, in another of their attacks on the labs, but Cunningham is very conservative with the violence this time.

And he’s conservative with the sex, too, despite the occasional dirty talking; for example, Mark and Joanna’s expected coupling occurs off-page at the very end of the novel. Mark doesn’t even have an encounter with sexy Dawna, who returns to the novel long enough to try to take out a few more lab scientists (one of them being the Streib character) all while still avoiding police suspicion. However Dawna does engage Mark in the longest and most entertaining action scene in the book; early on she makes a failed attempt on his life, and at the end of the book Mark finally goes back to her house for some payback. They engage in an almost Police Squad!-esque firefight, shooting at each other from behind furniture in her living room, mere feet apart. This fight involves hands, feet, and knives, but as usual with the genre Dawna meets her maker via her own accidental hand, tugging on a grenade handle a little too hard.

Actually the whole book is sort of cartoonish, or at least juvenile. Particularly given that Mark, toward the end, figures out that popular Los Alamos citizen Harry Ackors is really a Russian spy. But instead of driving over to Ackors’s place and blowing his brains out, Mark sits around and waits for the opportunity to arrest him. It’s all just so ridiculous; this was a series in which the protagonist used to kill even the most minor of villains with a sadistic glee. Now he seems to think of himself as an officer of the law, and apparently takes his fake Justice Dept creds as genuine.

The finale is also juvenile and lame – Ackors fakes everyone out with another suicide attack using yet another piece of cannon fodder, and when the place is again defenseless, only Mark is there to stave off Ackors’s grenade attack via helicopter. In the finale Mark himself suffers first-degree burns and must spend a few weeks off…of course on the beach with Joanna so they can have some of that hot off-page lovin’.

Humorously, Death Ray Terror ends with a survey, in which readers are asked how many books they read a month, what Pinnacle titles they like, etc. Hopefully Pinnacle got some feedback telling them that The Penetrator had gone to shit and needed work asap. Because it’s kind of surprising the series lasted almost another 20 volumes.