Steele #3: Killer Steele

Steele #3: Killer Steele, by J.D. Masters

February, 1990  Charter Books

It’s been so long since I read a volume of Steele I almost forgot about the series. Actually I meant to return to it many years ago but just kept putting it off. I rank this one along with The Guardians: a series I have every volume of, but just can’t bring myself to actually read. Like that post-nuke series, Steele is just too ponderous for me, but it’s more frustrating here because ostensibly this series is just a ripoff of Robocop. Only with interminable “is the hero human?” pondering in place of all the dark humor and gore. 

And as it turns out, Steele has something in common with The Guardians: the author of the final few volumes of Steele was Victor Milan, who also wrote The Guardians. This does not instill me with much enthusiams for the later volumes, folks. At any rate, the first six volumes of Steele were penned by Simon Hawke, at least according to sometimes-reliable Wikipedia. And clearly Killer Steele has the same author as the previous two books, with the same writing style, the same focus on internal probing and character introspection at the expense of action – and the same outline-esque treatment of what action does occur. 

So it’s some time after the previous volume, and Steele’s hanging out in his loft penthouse in New York with his teenaged former prostitute girlfriend Raven. Steele’s plagued by a nightmare in which someone else’s memories seem to be mingling with his own; a mere foretaste of the interminable stuff Hawke will deliver in this regard, as once again his focus is on plumbing the metaphysics of whether an archived database of memories can have a soul and whatnot. To which I can only cry out, “Who cares?!” Steele wakes up to be informed of a double-whammy: One, his teen children Cory and Jason have run away from home in Boston, and Two, a fellow cyborg has run amok in the headquarters Steele operates out of and wiped out several of the scientists who created Steele himself. 

Steele’s choppered to the HQ, which is the former UN Building; here in this future, a “bio-war” has wiped out hummanity, thanks to an experimental virus some Muslim terrorists got their hands on.* Here we get backstory on the world in which Steele occurs, where the virus quickly mutated and spread across the population. Boy, I sure hope no one dared to question the government’s handling of the pandemic in this reality! But then there wasn’t a 99% survival rate for this particular lab-created virus, and thus huge chunks of the population died off. After which the US itself broke apart, with Texas forming its own separate republic. All this is relayed in backstory, and by the way we’ve already gotten egregious backstory on Steele’s origin as well. 

While Hawke isn’t much for action, he does have a lot of post-action gore; Steele’s shown around the building and sees the eviscerated remains of the various scientists from the project, their organs ripped out by the marauding cyborg. But this will become an unintentionally humorous scenario, as multiple times in the narrative Steele will just miss the enemy cyborg and come upon the gory aftermath of his destruction. It happens throughout the novel, Hawke clearly padding until having the single – and final – fight between the two cyborgs at novel’s end. Meanwhile Steele gets more bad news: the new cyborg, codenamed Stalker, is his old cop parter, who apparently was killed in Steele #1, but hell if I can remember it. 

So Hawke has the makings of an interesting thriller here. Steele is faced with two problems, both personal – his son and daughter, just finding out that their dad is alive, have come to New York to find him, and two, Steele’s old buddy has been reborn as a psycho cyborg out for revenge. And Hawke takes this setup and…delivers endless scenes in which Dev Cooper, the new doctor on the Steele team, sits around for hours pondering whether Steele’s database of memories has a soul or not. Folks I kid you not. This series is excruciating in that regard. It’s like I said last time – you look at those covers and they promise greatness. I mean they look like the VHS covers for some ‘80s Italian sci-fi action movies that never existed (ie Hands Of Steel). But when you read the books, that’s not what you get…and, as with the previous books, the cover for Killer Steele is something that only occurs at the very end of the novel…and is over in just a few sentences. 

As for the other plot, as these things happen, Steele’s daughter Cory came looking for Steele in the big city and ended up becoming a hooker. Raven, a former pro herself, handily spells out how such a thing could’ve happened, and her blasé attitude toward it all is pretty funny. When Steele finds his son, Jason, the kid’s beaten to a pulp, courtesy a run-in with his sister’s pimp. There’s extra stuff here with backstory on Steele’s wife; a hotstuff social-climber type, she dumped Steele and told the kids he was dead, but when they found out they left Boston to come look for him. There’s a bit of melodrama, again along the lines of Robocop, where Steele reflects back on his pre-cyborg life and marriage and whatnot. 

Hawke has established a small group of recurring characters, so there’s also Ice, hulking black criminal overlord who helped Steele in the previous volume. To continue with my ‘80s action movie comparisons, Ice is essentially Isaac Hayes in Escape From New York. And also there’s the Borodini mob family in play, and eventually they of course get hold of Steele’s daughter. Meanwhile Stalker continues to run roughshod over sundry victims, mauling and ripping with cybernetic aplomb…and Steele consistently shows up too late to catch him. This is the holding pattern that constitutes the meat of the novel – that and more “is Steele human” bullshit from Dev Cooper. Boooring!!! 

Steele’s poor daughter is passed around; she ends up working for one of the stables owned by the Borodini clan, who of course plan to use her as bait for their long-simmer vengeance on Steele. But then Stalker wipes out a bunch of the clan and takes the girl for himself. This leads to the long-delayed confrontation between the two cyborgs, which is of course the incident depicted on the cover. Which occurs over just a few pages. It follows the same outline-style treatment of action with minimal violence, Hawke even here going for “the humanity” of it all with Steele trying to reason with his dead cop friend. Oh and Stalker fires “plasma” beams, but even that’s not treated cool enough. 

Really Steele is just an exercise in tedium, and it befuddles me that something with such a great setup (and such great covers!) could be so boring. I mean just imagine if they’d hired someone like John Shirley or David Alexander to write this series. By far the best thing about Steele is the Brady Bunch parody graphic at Gellaho. 

*I imagine featuring villains like that could get you cancelled these days – today’s narrative is “They seem friendly,” even if they’re literally chanting “death to America” right behind you!