July, 1983 Pinnacle Books
The second volume of The Terminator is similar to the first: a somewhat slow-moving piece that is more focused on building tension and suspense than it is to catering to Pinnacle’s almost desperate declaration that they (still) are “the number one action-adventure publisher.”
Dennis Rodriguez is again outed as the writer on the copyright page, which makes one wonder why the “John Quinn” by-line was even necessary. It’s not like Pinnacle’s contemporary Justin Perry series, where author Hal Bennett likely used a pseudonym (and didn’t put his name on the copyright page) so no one would think he was batshit crazy. As with the first book, Rodriguez turns in a book that’s very sedate and methodical in its delivery, at times more approaching the vibe of a hardboiled yarn than an action caper.
What I find most interesting about Silicon Valley Slaughter is that series protagonist Rod Gavin – who by the way is never reffered to as a “Terminator” in the entire book – is revealed here to basically be a drunk. This was already hinted at in the previous book, where Gavin “fortified” himself with a bottle of booze while lurking in the trunk of a car, feeling “good” and “loose” when he finally came out for the big finale.
Well, Rodriguez takes that and runs with it in this second volume. Gavin drinks his way through a lot of bottles in the course of the book, even recreating the previous volume’s bit by asking some goons to buy him a bottle of liquor so he can go to sleep and they won’t have to worry about him! I mean if this guy doesn’t have a problem, I don’t know what a problem would even be.
Rodriguez also follows the template of the previous book in that the majority of the tale is at a slow boil, cutting across a swathe of characters, until reaching a harried finale. A curious thing about Silicon Valley Slaughter is that Gavin has no personal impetus in the plot; he isn’t out for revenge, and indeed only gets into the fray so as to help his friend Duffy (returning from the previous volume). Otherwise Gavin has no personal stake in the proceedings; ostensibly his goal is to rescue Duffy’s hotstuff, 20-something niece, but Gavin’s never even met her.
The Terminator series is somewhat similar to the earlier Dakota in how Rod Gavin has a supporting group of characters, who appear in each volume. Actually, his “girlfriend” Kendall does not appear in Silicon Valley Slaughter, but she’s mentioned a lot. But there’s also Duffy, a Justice Dept. colleague of Gavin’s, and Dorn, a car mechanic who fixes up a beaten ’74 Trans Am for Gavin…even putting the very “1980s action” augmentation of an Uzi hidden inside of a center console. One can almost see Steven J. Cannell at his typewriter.
As mentioned, Rodriguez likes to jump around a large group of characters. So for Sicilian Valley Slaughter we have material with Duffy (who is knocked into a coma after his intro, where he will remain for the duration of the novel), material with Duffy’s niece, Susan, and then stuff with both a high-level Japanese gangster as well as the American-born Japanese thug who works for him, with other characters besides. There is a lot of cutting between perspectives – and Rodriguez is good because he gives us white space or a chapter break to warn us of the perspective hopping – which ultimately means that Gavin comes off like a guest star in his own book.
The plot concerns Duffy’s niece Susan being abducted, and the editors at Pinnacle do a great job of hyping the lurid aspects of this on the back cover, claiming that she’s about to be sent off into sexual servitude. However, author Dennis Rodriguez has much less lurid intentions. While it is mentioned, in passing, that the ultimate plan is to send her off into some sex slavery thing in Japan, for the most part Susan’s been kidnapped because she is working on some top-secret encryption device for an electronics firm in Silicon Valley.
The novel is quite prescient in its talk of encryption and data, yet at the same time it’s not really the subject I want to read about in a men’s adventure novel. That said, Gavin himself is blithely unaware of all this mumbo-jumbo and tells people gladly that it’s outside of his realm. Regardless, he acts as a private investigator for the most part, trying to find young Susan as a way to pay back his injured friend, Duffy.
Action is sporadic, and again has the vibe of a Gold Eagle novel from decades before; it’s mostly Gavin punching people. At one point an old Agency colleague gets him a P-38 pistol, a la the gun Gavin wields in the cover portrait on each volume – and also, the copyright page further states that the cover art is courtesy Bruce Minney. But honestly Gavin doesn’t use the gun much, and he’s more prone to hit the bottle than he is to shoot someone.
Gavin does find the opportunity to get laid, though. While searching Susan’s place he discovers an attractive young woman hididng, fully clothed, in Susan’s shower. This turns out to be Hillary, a friend of Susan’s – a pretty one, naturally, with “full, upswept breasts.” Hillary has no idea who Gavin is – he uses a fake name throughout, claiming he’s a reporter – and later on there’s this unintentionally hilarious part where an injured Gavin needs to hide…and he goes to Hillary’s place and insists that she let him in, then tells her to go take a bath while he prepares dinner! I’ve seen a couple episodes of Dateline with this setup.
But instead of telling Gavin to go away, Hillary opens the door and invites him in – this total stranger who is bleeding from an injury, who she met just a few days before, when he was snooping through her missing friend’s house. She even goes off to take a bath! Gavin makes a meal and the two eat and then they go to bed, but as with the previous book Rodriguez does not go into detail; indeed, the sex scenes seem to be incorporated merely so as to meet a publisher requirement.
It’s the drinking, though, that makes me question how serious Dennis Rodriguez was about this whole affair. There’s actually a part where Gavin thinks to himself, “You can’t be on duty twenty-four hours a day,” and proceeds to get drunk. By himself. Then Dorn drives to California with the rebuilt Trans Am and Gavin gets drunk with him, too. Then there’s the part I already mentioned, where Gavin is caught by these yakuza thugs and he tells them to buy him a bottle so he can get drunk and won’t be “much trouble” for them! And it isn’t even some clever ploy, like Gavin throwing the booze on them and then flinging a match on them (which would totally combust in an action novel, there’s no reason to question “the science”). No – Gavin really does just drink until he goes to sleep!
Another interesting thing is that Gavin keeps screwing up, thinking to himself that “the old Gavin would never have been caught” and that “the new Gavin [is] an amateur at this.” He’s an assassin – well, a Terminator, technically – and he’s been programmed to kill for the government. But acting on his own in a lone wolf capacity is outside of his experience, and he keeps messing things up and getting caught – even knocked out at one point, by nothing more than a bartender!
As with the previous installment there’s a lot of cutting across the group of people, from the yakuza thugs to the treacherous employees of Susan’s company. And speaking of which, Rodriguez fills up so many pages with his scene cutting that Susan’s surprising fate is almost anticlimactically rendered, and the reader thinks he’s missed something. The worse thing is that Gavin is reduced to a supporting status, and we waste our time reading about one-off characters.
But again it all is quickly wrapped up with an action scene that spans a few pages. And yes, Gavin does manage to get his Uzi out of his hidden Trans Am console, though the setup for this to happen is incredibly belabored and hard to buy. Rodriguez is again shy with the juicy details, though we do get occasional lines like, “One burst [from the Uzi] ruptured their chests, blowing pink meat against the walls.”
Otherwise it’s a quick wrap-up after this, with Gavin dispatching practically all of his foes in a page or two. There’s not much in the way of a setup for the next volume – in fact, Gavin is essentially listless and without any plans for the future at all – but I did get a chuckle out of how the back cover proclaims that The Terminator series is “taking America by storm!” If that’s not hyperbolic copy, I don’t know what is.
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