The Last Ranger #7: The Vile Village

The Last Ranger #7: The Vile Village, by Craig Sargent
April, 1988  Popular Library

The seventh volume of The Last Ranger as ever follows immediately after the previous volume; Martin Stone is just where we left him, caught in the middle of an acid rain thunderstorm. He crashes his Harley and he and his pit bull Excaliber are hammered by the rain into unconsciousness.

A near-dead Stone and Excaliber are found by a pair of redneck boys the next morning and hauled to a big farm owned by a bearish dude named “Undertaker” Hansen, who runs a profitable coffin-making business in this post-nuke world. I went overboard last time on my theories of how Jan Stacy (aka “Craig Sargent”) might’ve been aware of his impending death from AIDS and worked things out via his dark, ghoulish narrative. I won’t belabor the point this time other than that a good portion of the first quarter of The Vile Village is all about the funeral business. But this time the grim vibe is at least tempered with the goofy dark humor Stacy does so well:

Undertaking equipment stood everywhere, embalming fluids in ten-gallon glass bottles lined a whole wall, planking from local trees rough-hewn with bark and splinters erupting from them like a rash were piled up along one wall. Bandages, saws, needles, paint, everything that one might need to make corpses look friendly and happy for their bereaved families. Giving them the opportunity to say, “Doesn’t Tom look nice,” or, “How peaceful Fred went out,” when in fact Tom and Fred and Jervis and the whole bunch of them had gone out screaming and howling, had had to have their guts and noses and tongues sewn back on, or their blue skin painted with rouge and blush to make them look like they had just been out chopping wood in the yard when in fact they were already starting to rot, to stink up the place.

One thing gradually becomes clear, though. Stacy was struggling with the series at this point. Or at least with this installment. For one, he breaks away from the format of the preceding six volumes and has Stone engaged in an arbitrary storyline that has nothing to do with the grander scheme of Stone trying to find his perennially-kidnapped sister April. The back cover promises a Yojimbo riff of Stone putting two rival gangs against one another, but this doesn’t actually occur until the final several pages. In fact The Vile Village is a bit of a chore to get through and I suspect Stacy struggled with it.

Undertaker Hansen is one of those comically larger-than-life characters Stacy excels in, the sort of character you often see in the Doomsday Warrior series. He has a countless number of children – he can’t even remember their names – and rules them with an iron fist. Or actually a hickory cane, as he’s fond of whacking them when they get out of line. But he allows them their freedom, as Stone finds out during some hot and heavy sexual shenanigans with hotstuff blonde daughter Luann, in one of Stacy’s patented goofy-hardcore sequences:

If Stone thought he had made love with wild women before, they had been like Doris Day compared to the creature atop him. For she went wild. Her entire body jerked and bucked and twisted around him. Gritting her teeth hard, almost as if she were in pain, the woman ground around on Stone as if she were trying to grind his pelvis into flour. And Stone contributed his part too. As tired as he was. As much as his muscles just didn’t want to move – the instinct of desire was just too powerful to resist. After all, men with mortal wounds had been known to grab and “have knowledge of” field nurses in wartime. The most powerful instinct of all. To merge, to become one with the other in paroxysms of animal joy.

From Doris Day to philosophy, Stacy covers all the bases. Luann is Stone’s nurse over the course of a week, bringing him and Excalibur back to life thanks to some paste-like poultice she rubs on his acid rain-burned skin. But after this the egregious page-filling rears its head. We learn posthaste that two gangs rule nearby Cotopaxi, Colorado, the “Vile Village” of the title (Stacy must not’ve liked the place, that’s for sure): a biker gang and a redneck gang – this info relayed in a memorable bit where a Hispanic farmer comes into the Hansen clan dining room and displays the gory severed head of one of his kin, murdered by the gangs.

But after this insanity Stone spends pages learning the undertaker business from Hansen. This does include another humorous bit where we’re informed that the Undertaker’s funeral speeches are a combo of Billy Graham and a used car salesman. But it just kind of goes on, and also Stone’s impetus for even going into Cotopaxi is hard to buy. He recalls how he was referred to as a deliverer of death by the Indians “months ago” in the first volume, so he figures he’ll go into the vile village and kill some gang scum. There’s also the barely-explored motive that he’s pissed how the gang killed these farmers right in front of their wives and kids, and Stone wants revenge for them.

That’s all well and good, but the problem is he goes into town and just wastes time for the majority of the novel. Assuming the name Billy “Preacher Boy” Pinkus, Stone waltzes into the only bar in town that serves both the Head Stompers (the bikers) and the Strathers Brothers (the rednecks) and ends up blowing away a goon who works for the former gang – Stone’s first kill in the book, and his only one until near the very end. In fact The Vile Village is mostly bloodless, particularly when compared to the ultra-gory previous volumes.

But while the gore is minimized, the goofy humor is thankfully back – Stone takes a gander at herculean Head Stompers boss Bronson and reckons he “had hardly seen such muscles on anybody since he’d watched his Wrestlemania tapes on VHS back at the bunker.” Unfortunately the biker element is quickly dropped; Bronson and gang make threatening remarks to new guy “Billy” and take off, and Stone spends the majority of the novel ingratiating himself into the trust of the much-less-interesting Strathers Brothers.

The goofy vibe is what predominates. Stone makes pals with Vorstel Strathers, one of the three brothers who run the place, comparing war wounds. After this he’s given a job as a sidearm, Stone having presented himself as smarter than the redneck morons who serve the brothers, thus according more privilege. Vorstel puts him up in the local bordello, and get this, folks – even though he lives in a cathouse for the duration of the book, Stone doesn’t have sex with a single one of the women there! 

In fact the focus here again is on humor, particularly with hijinks concerning Excaliber, stuff which I think is getting to be a bit of a nuissance now. But it’s all “funny” as Excaliber keeps destroying the plush room every day when Stone leaves, and the old whore who runs the place complains about it, and Stone hands over a few silver coins for the troubles, and etc. That being said, there is some funny stuff here and there, like the unforgettable line that climaxes this paragraph:

Most of the early-morning staff hadn’t arrived yet, as it was only 6:48, so the place was nearly empty downstairs but for two old women who polished all the woodwork in the place, keeping it shining for the “gentlemen” customers. They looked at the savage-looking Stone and shuddered, looking away, wondering silently to themselves just how bad the place had gotten if it was taking in clients of such low repute. Perhaps they had better start looking for jobs elsewhere. The Hot Vagina might not be the kind of place they wanted to work anymore.

Things really don’t pick up until toward the very end, beginning with a wildly over-the-top July 4th celebration in which the bikers and rednecks have a truce to celebrate America in their own strange ways. But even here it comes off like page-filling, and for a lot of it Stone just stands around and monitors the proceedings. Finally things get real when he’s sent with a group of thugs to kill some of the local farmers who have been causing trouble for the gangs, and Stone ends up killing his own men to protect the farmers.

This proves to be the undoing of his cover, and thus Stone’s entire plan is blown – his goal is to set the gangs against each other, but it never happens. Instead he’s strung up and beaten and good as dead, but in a lame copout the Strathers Brothers decide to mess around with the just-abducted 8 year-old son of Bronson instead. Stone’s able to free himself and the boy in a hard-to-buy but still tense scene that has him employing the “push dagger” hidden in the heel of his boot.

Even worse, the finale still has Stone just standing around while the Head Stompers and the Strathers Brothers wipe each other out on the streets of Cotopaxi. That being said, Stone does blow up one of them with the missile launcher on his Harley, and Excaliber literally jumps to the rescue and takes on the Strathers Brothers’s pet lion.

But overall The Vile Village just comes off like an afterthought, as if Stacy was just churning something out quickly to meet a deadline. Which I’m assuming was the case, but still. At least the book ends with Stone deciding it’s time to get back on with his main mission and finding that damn sister of his.