Overload #7: Rolling Vengeance

Overload #7: Rolling Vengeance, by Bob Ham

October, 1990  Bantam Books

“I love men’s adventure novels – and I love truckin’!” said no one ever, yet regardless the Overload series, which combined men’s adventure with trucking, ran for several volumes in the late ‘80s. I’ve only got three of those volumes, and the only other one I’ve read was #2: The Wrath, but this isn’t a series where I’m desperate to fill in the gaps in my colletion. In truth I found Rolling Vengeance tedious, “overloaded” with “gee-wiz” high-tech trivialities and way too many characters…and way too many pages. At 238 pages, the novel’s too damn long for a men’s adventure novel. But then per the cover it’s a “Super Edition,” which I assume was Bantam’s attempt at making the books stand out. 

Actually the marketing department at Bantam was on point with this one. Graphic Audio, which years later would do audio adaptaions of several men’s adventure novels, supposedly did very well with…truck drivers. So perhaps truckers made up a significant segment of men’s adventure readership in the ‘80s, too. Of course it would be hard to read and drive your truck, so maybe Graphic Audio does so well with truckers because all you have to do is listen as the miles roll by. Bantam at least tried to keep the men’s adventure flame burning in the late ‘80s, as the genre was dying out…though Rolling Vengeance itself points the way to the bloated “techno-thrillers” that would soon be occupying the bookstore shelves that men’s adventure novels once did. 

So I’m missing a bunch of volumes since the last one I read, but it’s no big deal. About the main development in the series is that co-protagonists Marc Lee and Carl Browne now work for the government…indeed, they work directly for the President of the United States! “Shall we send in the Marines, Mr. President?” “No – get me those two truckers!” As we’ll recall, Lee and Browne run Leeco, a bona fide trucking outfit…but now they also have an armada of souped-up rigs and whatnot. Their main one, at least this volume, is an “offroader” that’s completely bulletproof, run by a computer, and armed with a friggin’ rocket launcher. Not to mention the “HDTV videotape” it can record on its front-mounted high definition cameras. Author Bob Ham will demonstrate this and other souped-up vehicles in action throughout Rolling Vengeance, in dry copy that could just as easily have come out of Popular Mechanics. 

And see that’s the thing. Because folks we have here a novel about two former Delta Force commandos who have an armed and armored truck and go around the country busting up criminals for the President, but Ham writes the novel with his tongue nowhere in the vicinity of his cheek. In fact, he seems straight-up serious about the whole thing, and that seriousness extends to the narrative…which means that Rolling Vengeance isn’t much fun at all. It’s dry, saddled with too many characters and way too much exposition and technical detail, and again seems more like something that should have “Tom Clancy Presents” on the cover instead of a drawing of a guy and a girl blasting away. The novel is humorless, is what I’m trying to say, with Ham treating everything with a sort of gravitas. There’s none of the fun wildness you would expect given the setup. Perhaps this too is evidence of the change men’s adventure went through in its death-throes; no longer could the genre be the gory, sex-filled escapism it once was…now it must be “serious,” with characters more prone to ponder and much less prone to engage in sex…because there isn’t a single sex scene in the book, nor even any of the genre’s customary exploitation of the female characters. 

Because the female characters are empowered now – another indication of the way things would soon be going. Another change to the series since The Wrath is that Marc Lee’s girlfriend Jill is now a kick-ass commando herself, thanks to a “Federal training center in Georgia” which taught her how to handle combat and whatnot. She takes part in the climactic action sequence, but since she’s still a girl and stuff she does get a little upset over how she’s killed a few men. That presumably is her on the cover, but there’s another empowered babe in the pages of Rolling Vengeance: Allison Riker, “a highly attractive and feisty blond truck driver” who brings Lee and Browne onto this latest case. And note too the spelling of “blond,” which was spelled “blonde” in earlier, more testosterone-driven times; indeed, “blonde” is now considered an offensive spelling, along with about two billion other previously-acceptable words. 

Allison runs an outfit for independent truckers, and she comes to Leeco for help with a guy named Luis Partida, who is horning in on her outfit. Now the back cover has it that Luis Partida is a coke kingpin, but the novel itself makes more issue out of how Partida runs illegals up from Mexico. He is intended to be the villain of the piece, but for some curious reason Ham spends the entire novel showing Partida trying to save himself from a group of truckers who are trying to kill him. What I mean to say is, Partida is constantly being attacked and left for dead, and Ham will end the section on a cliffhanger, as if we readers are desperate to know whether Partida has survived. But he’s the villain, a guy who when we meet him has just got out of prison, and we also know he’s bad because in an early sequence, when Partida is running away from the first group of truckers who try to kill him, the bastard blows away a poor little black kid – for no other reason than the innocent kid helpfully picked up a suitcase filled with Partida’s money. 

That’s one thing that remains from the previous volume I read, the constant cutting to and fro. In my review of The Wrath I described this as “cinematic,” and that really seems to be the vibe Ham is going for. The entire book is like that…we’ll cut from scenes with Allison to ones with Partida to ones with Marc Lee or Carl Browne, to ones with the teenaged daughter of an FBI agent who is target number one in Partida’s revenge scheme. So much of this stuff could’ve been cut and the book would have benefitted. And yes, despite being under the gun literally from his introduction into the text, Partida himself is attempting revenge – on the FBI agent who sent him up the river years ago. This would be Harvey Harrison, presumably a series regular in that he is aware of Lee and Browne and has worked with them before. 

But it’s Harrison’s daughter Lisa who factors more into the narrative. In what is an unfathomable waste of pages, Lisa Harrison features in constant cutaway sequences in which we see her be abducted, escape, be chased, end up with another group of men who intend her harm, etc, etc. I had bad flashbacks to the second season of 24, which featured the same go-nowhere sort of subplot, with Jack Bauer’s busty blonde daughter being captured, chased, etc. But in its own way this tiresome material with Lisa Harrison is indicative of the problem overall with Rolling Vengeance: an overly “serious” attempt at suspense as the poor girl tries to get away from her various captors. Again, it’s the sort of thing that would be more at home in a padded-out thriller novel….not in the seventh installment of a series about “gun-totin’ truckers.” 

All these various characters and subplots gradually – very gradually – weave together. Partida carries the brunt of the action in the first half, seeing as how he dodges attempts by a group of truckers who want to kill him. This entire bit is ludicrous because Partida is supposed to be the villain! Yet we constantly see him in danger! Meanwhile Lee and Browne do their own research of Partida, running into various thugs and whatnot, in particular the street gang he has employed to do his dirty work. There’s only one somewhat badass part in the book, where Browne confronts some drug-dealing punks and makes one of them eat a fistful of “crack rocks.” Given that Browne’s the muscular black dude in the series, it almost has the vibe of Blaxploitation…but Ham doesn’t do much with it, as things devolve into a gunfight. And the gore is pretty much nonexistent. This is very much a “get shot and fall down” sort of novel, with the mandatory violence of the genre having been, uh, gutted. 

Instead, we get endless exposition detailing the capabilities of the various gizmos Lee and Browne’s trucks have been outfitted with. I don’t exaggerate when I say a lot of the book is given over to this sort of thing…I mean it’s like sleaze for people with a truck-tech fetish: 

This dry, tedious vibe extends to the action scenes: 

And yet for all this striving for a serious vibe, Ham still doles out lines like, “The Highway Warriors got up on their knees and turned to stand.” I don’t know why, but that line cracked me up. You could say it “crack rocked” me up, but that would be lame. But then “lame” would be the sole word I’d use to summarize Rolling Vengeance…a novel so misguided that the villain is constantly shown as being in jeopardy, and which features countless pages in which a 17 year-old girl, who has nothing to do with the series overall, runs and hides from various thugs. 

How Overload ran for 12 volumes is anyone’s guess. I’m sure there are those out there who might enjoy it – heck, people had to enjoy it for the series to run so long – but I can’t say I’m one of them.