Mutants Amok #3: Rebel Attack

Mutants Amok #3: Rebel Attack, by Mark Grant
June, 1991  Avon Books

The Mutants Amok series continues to be a gross-out splatterfest of gore, projectile vomiting, explicit sex, and literal shit eating with this third volume, which once again sees author David Bischoff (ie “Mark Grant”) not taking his material seriously in the least.

Rebel Attack picks up soon after the previous volume, but a few questions from that one remain unanswered – like if BrainGeneral Torx, the main villain of the series, is truly dead. As we’ll recall, he had a climactic sword fight with loser hero Max Turkel in Mutant Hell, but we never saw the finale of it; instead, Turkel just informed the others that he’d chopped off Torx’s hands and the mutant sadist then plummeted to his doom.

Turkel’s sticking to his story this volume, with the added info that Torx apparently blabbed lots of info before falling off that mountain; like for example how he sold hotstuff blonde Jennifer Anderson to a mutant movie producer named Algernon Waugh. Jennifer is the true love of teenaged hero Jack Bender, who meanwhile has gotten serious with sexually-insatiable Jill Morningstar, the classic rock-listening, M-16 wielding American Indian beauty he met in the previous volume.

Jennifer Anderson, missing since the first volume, plays the central role in Rebel Attack, which makes for a problem, because she’s naïve, bland, and boring. Also, the material with her skirts too far over the line of satire and into slapstick, as Jennifer finds herself in Hollywood, now renamed “Hollyweird,” which has been taken over by mutants. It’s all just like the Hollywood of old, with despotic mutant moguls and lowly screenwriters who are treated like shit (even forced to eat it), and it’s all about as unhinged as a Looney Tunes cartoon.

Anyway, Jennifer is brought to the attention of famous mutant director Foxtrot Bennington-Spleen, who takes one look at Jennifer’s blonde hair and big breasts and announces that she’ll be perfect for his new film, Blade Babes of Babylon. Spleen is British, just like Waugh – for some reason Bischoff has the ruling elite of Hollyweird all be British mutants – but whereas Waugh is dandified and “cute,” Spleen is an overbearing drunk. Jennifer agrees to the film, caught up in the excitement of being a star, not realizing that this will be a snuff film and she, like all other human actors, will be killed for real in the finale.

Meanwhile, in one of the novel’s top gross-out moments, Max Turkel discovers that he now has a robotic liver. Secretly put in him in the previous volume by his “ally,” BrainGeneral Harten, the liver announces itself to Turkel in a gory Alien hommage as it pops out of his abdomen, stating that it does not like alcohol – which explains why Turkel’s been puking so much. The liver is also a conduit to Harten, who demands that Turkel head on into Hollywood and kill the mutants who have Jennifer Anderson.

It turns out that Foxtrot and Waugh are involved with mutant movie mogul Hairy Kahn (seriously) in a black market gene-splicing initiative. Their goal is harvesting the genes of famous celebrities of the past, mixing them with the genes of healthy modern humans, and whipping up perfect actors! (Don’t laugh, this is exactly how Serpentor was created.) But this gene-splicing deal is pretty dangerous, so far as Harten is concerned, and he explains to Turkel that it’s in Turkel’s best interest to do his request, mostly because it’ll give Turkel the chance to kill a bunch of mutants.

The gang appropriates a mutant “MV,” aka motorized vehicle, which is described as an “armored Winnebago.” Curiously, despite being built up so much, the MV doesn’t even feature it in the climactic assault on Kahn’s fortress, as Turkel et al must find a new ride when the MV’s wheels are stolen in LA. Bischoff does this throughout, building up characters/incidents and then brushing them aside, like the late introduction of a “halfsie” named Joe Brown who looks identical to Elvis (having been created by an Elvis-obsessed mad scientist), a character who seems like he’s going to be a lot more important than he actually turns out to be.

Action scenes are a little more limited this volume. More focus is placed on the surreal, violently slapstick world of Hollyweird, which comes off as a scatalogical spoof of the real Hollywood. We have Hairy Kahn walking around in his “sleazure suit,” making writers named after Ernest Hemmingway literally eat shit, as well as Kahn flunkies who do reenactments of Hollywood’s more sordid stories, like Herman Makiewicz puking at dinner and then delivering an immediate quip, or even more grisly bits like the Black Dahlia murder.

But it’s all just so intentionally goofy; I mean, Turkel’s robotic spleen, when it returns into his body, even bats its mechanical eyes and says “Th-that’s all, folks!” Even the minor details are goofy, with tidbits like “mutant Reebok shoes” and even “Mutant Top Forty” radio, which as described sounds a lot like modern death metal. (Jack becomes a huge fan of it during the long drive to LA.) While some of this is funny, ultimately it robs from the novel, as you can’t take it seriously. A little jokery is great, but too much and the entire edifice will collapse. That basically happens in Rebel Attack.

Oh, and meanwhile Jennifer falls in love with Algernon Waugh, the mutant. We never get a thorough description of Waugh, but apparently he’s “cute” and a pure gentleman, very refined and British – so refined in fact that his Hollyweird pals think he’s gay. But Waugh proves himself very much straight in the novel’s longest and most explicit sex scene, as Jennifer practically throws herself on him. We get thorough graphic detail here, just as in the sex scenes of previous installments.

To Bischoff’s credit, you can see where he understands that Jennifer is a boring character, and thus has come up with a good way to write her out of the series: have her fall in love with someone other than old sweetheart Jack Bender. Luckily, he has created a much more interesting female character in Jill Morningstar, who is every post-nuke male’s dream – and, in yet another of the novel’s many overtly comedic touches, declares herself as such.

Things ramp up as Hairy Kahn informs Foxtrot Bennington-Spleen that he’ll have to finish Blade Babes Of Babylon much earlier than expected. Poor Jennifer doesn’t realize that her hectic last day of filming will be her last day on earth. It all culminates in a huge massacre, the mutants killing one another in a fight for the cameras, and then a mutant Hitler is about to gut Jennifer on camera – that is, after he’s sung “Springtime for Hitler.” Then Waug swoops in on a jungle vine, wooping like Johnny Weismuller as he comes to Jennifer’s rescue.

So yeah, it’s all just really dumb. But it sure is gory, with heads juicily exploding, guts pouring out, and so forth. By the time Jack, Turkel, Jill, and geek Phil Potts arrive, all the mutants on the set are dead, and the four heroes now must hurry to the secret vat in which the gene-splicing experiments take place, Jennifer having been rushed there by Hairy Kahn. But it’s Waugh to the rescue again, fencing with Foxtrot and again saving Jennifer. In fact, the humans don’t do all that much.

Rebel Attack ends with Jennifer and Waugh now a couple, and the two planning to leave for New York, where Waugh has just gotten a job at “Evian Books,” which “even has its own cosmetics line.” (Note who publishes Mutants Amok…!) Bidding goodbye to his former sweetheart, Jack Bender resigns himself to a life of mutant killing and “raw sex” with Jill Morningstar…and meanwhile, none of the elements introduced in the previous two volumes are much explored in this one, so here’s hoping the next volume gets things back in focus.

Challenge At Le Mans (Don Miles #1)

Challenge At Le Mans, by Larry Kenyon
April, 1967  Avon Books

One of the more obscure series produced by Lyle Kenyon Engel, Don Miles only ran for four volumes, all of which were published by Avon in 1967. I’d never heard of it until I came across Will Murray’s 1981 interview with Engel, which was published in Paperback Parade #2 (1986), where Murray briefly mentioned “the Don Miles books.”

Engel’s response was that, at the time, he was into automative publications, and thus came up with an action hero/auto racer. However, in the interview Engel could no longer remember who had actually written the books. Thanks to James Reasoner, who posted here, we now know that the author was Lew Louderback, one of Engel’s writing stable who also wrote a volume or two of Nick Carter: Killmaster. I’m not familiar with Louderback, but it seems an article on fat acceptance he wrote back in 1967 is well-regarded today.

Anyway, as expected, Don Miles is basically like Nick Carter, only with an auto racer day job. Challenge At Le Mans, the first book of the series (none of the books were numbered), tells the tale of how Miles becomes an agent for SPEED, a highly-secret branch of US intelligence. Unusually enough for an early-model men’s adventure novel, this first volume takes the time to tell the origin story for our character, a gutsy 35 year-old Texan who, in addition to being mega-rich thanks to his oil prospecting father, is also a world famous racing champion.

Be prepared for lots of racing stuff; many, many paragraphs are devoted to how race cars run, the competitive circuit, pit crews, and the like. So then another series this is reminiscent of is The Mind Masters, only without the supernatural element or ultra-sleazy sex scenes – though, to be sure, there are many sex scenes in this novel. But, given the 1967 publication date, they aren’t all that raunchy. But at least they’re there.

In fact, we get one early on, as Don beds a hotstuff female reporter who has come down to Houston to check out the unveiling of Don’s new Panther racer, a car he himself has designed. Le Mans is coming up, and Don plans to unveil it there, winning with a US-built automobile. Lowderback proves himself a good pulp writer, with copious exploitation of the lady’s, uh, ample charms, though when it comes to the actual screwin’ he fades to black. So in other words, it’s about on par with what you’d read in a Killmaster novel from this time period.

But after he crashes the Panther in a test run for the journalists, Don’s life is changed forever. He wakes up in a hospital, where a man calling himself “Hedge” informs Don that he was not harmed in the wreck, but the accident could be used to cover a few months of secret training. Hedge, who wears a mask and distorts his voice, offers Don the opportunity to become a secret agent, using his globe-hopping, famous identity as the perfect cover story. Don, reflecting back on advice his dad once gave him(!), says “Sure.” Otherwise this series would’ve been even shorter.

Similar to Eric Saveman in The Smuggler, Don is taken through a few months of intense espionage training. After which he returns to his life as a race car driver, with two months of preparation before Le Mans; he’s informed he might never even be activated, but of course he promptly is, as soon as he arrives in France. Don’s first mission has him researching the mysterious death of a CIA operative, who was looking for a young German girl named Greta Thiess, a nuclear researcher who apparently murdered her mentor – a man who had just devised a new device that could make any nuclear device into a warhead.

Like Nick Carter, Don Miles has a trio of weapons he relies on, though he does not give them goofy names: a .25 magnum Sauer automatic, a ballpoint pen that fires poison-tipped needles, and a 16-inch piano wire which he uses as a garrotte, hiding it in specially-lined pockets of his pants. He also has a Mission: Impossible-style face mask, made of “Plastotex,” which turns him into “Mr. Nobody,” a face computer-designed to be forgotten as soon as it is seen. In addition to his gadgets, Don is also given new partners. First there’s Buck Garrett, a redneck engineer who speaks in the most painfully-rendered dialog ever.

In addition to being a super-skilled racing car engineer, Buck himself is a SPEED agent, and serves as Don’s conduit to another new partner, Sam Harris, who stays back in the US and acts officially as the CEO of Don’s racing enterprise. Harris, then, is like the David Hawk of the series, even though he doesn’t appear in this particular volume.

Similar to The Mind Masters, more focus is placed on the preparation for the race rather than the race itself (in fact, the novel ends just as the race begins). So then we get lots of scuttlebutt among the racers in Le Mans as they discuss the upcoming contest. The back cover mentions that Don will be going up against a gang of leather-clad biker women, and they show up promptly: they are the Devil Bombers, a gang of gorgeous German girls lead by Wilma Zeiss, an actress who recently appeared in a biker film. They terrorize Le Mans, driving on sidewalks and knocking aside pedestrians.

The gang is staying at a nearby chateau owned by Baroness Falkenhorst, aka Elga Winter, herself a once-famous actress who is apparently 30-something and of course stunningly beautiful, and a man-eater to boot. She is the villain of the piece, and she must be an unforgettable sight, with a magnificent body, red hair, silver nails, and white lipstick! She is infamous for tearing through professional racers, conveniently enough, but has yet to sink her hooks into Don Miles.

I found this “Baroness” stuff interesting, given Engel’s later Baroness series, which itself was credited to a “Kenyon” house name. Maybe this character provided some inspiration for the later Penelope St. John-Orsini? Baroness Falkenhorst is even once described as wearing the same outfit Penny wears on the Baroness covers, “a black outfit resembling a skin-tight track suit.” And as mentioned, she’s just as sexually-insatiable as the later Baroness.

As for Don Miles, he doesn’t come off so well on his first mission. He bumbles and stumbles throughout; first almost being crushed by a car that’s kicked on him. While investigating the car the CIA agent was driving when he had his fatal crash, Don is trapped when someone kicks the car off the cinder block that’s holding it up; he just manages to pull himself free. Later, he’s almost run over by a car. A later incident has him getting captured – while having sex with a woman who has clearly set him up for abduction. Later on, he’s captured yet again, and is only saved by a female accomplice.

Tracking the clues for the CIA agent’s murder leads Don to the chateau of the Baroness. It’s a pulpishly depraved place, with the Baroness entertaining the fifty-some biker chicks who are staying there with her, many of whom Don finds naked in the Baroness’s palatial-sized bedroom. There’s a fountain in there, an “opium lamp,” erotic posters, and a massive bed that has electronically controlled (and mirrored) floorboards and headboards. Would you be surprised that the Baroness promptly throws herself on Don?

A funny thing about the sex scenes is that Louderback will set us up with lots of anatomical detail, but then he’ll always fade to black with an ellipsis. However we are told enough to know that the Baroness is insatiable, doing Don “at least ten times” through the night, even waking him up for more. He finally beats a retreat, claiming exhaustion, only to get more German booty the next night, when he finds Ulla Kihss, daughter of another racer, waiting for him in his hotel bed.

We get another somewhat-explicit sex scene, followed by a quick ellipsis, as Don, despite suspecting something, quickly ravishes the hot blonde…only to realize at the last second it’s a trap. Louderback continues to make the plot overly complex; we learn Ulla is a secret agent for SD-3, the French version of the CIA, and her boss, a man named Dimanche, drugs Don in order to figure out if Don is really a secret agent. Thanks to his training, Don is able to fool Dimanche, who goes on to request that Don begin working for SD-3, given his “relationship” with the Baroness – as it turns out that the Baroness is aligned with an East German spy group called SPIDER, and likely has the nuclear McGuffin hidden in her chateau.

Have you noticed how busy all of this is getting? Louderback keeps piling on new plots and characters, and doing precious little to exploit that which he has already created. Like those biker chicks. Forget about them! They appear in maybe three scenes, and usually for only a few sentences. How a pulp author could write a book that features a gang of gorgeous female bikers and do nothing with them blows my mind. But there are no scenes where Don, uh, “consorts” with any of them, and when one of the biker girls is taken out, it’s not even by Don (Ulla does it), and it happens off-page.

In his review of Louderback’s Killmaster novel Danger Key, Kurt Reichenbaugh states that Louderback pretty much does the same thing in that Nick Carter novel; he just keeps piling on the characters and the subplots. This results in the fact that Challenge At Le Mans feels a lot longer than it really is – unlike the Killmaster novels of the era, which are quick reads, this one is at times an uphill struggle.

Louderback does try to factor Don Miles’s racing background into the climax, but still it’s a bit tepid because Don is such a waste of a spy – honestly, he’s knocked out, captured, and hoodwinked throughout the entire novel. But anyway he spends most of the finale driving back and forth from France to the Alps in a souped-up VW built for him by Buck Garrett. Here we learn that he does not have a “speed threshhold” and can go incredibly fast without fear.

Don’s racing around looking for the nuclear McGuffin, Ulla riding with him, as the Baroness has taken it to her castle in the Alps. Even here though we do not get much of an action scene, and Don’s kills are limited to three or four SPIDER agents back in France, in the very final pages. In fact, he does nothing to prove himself as a capable agent, even though the SD-3 guys gush all over him for “saving Europe.” But he’s a dolt, fooled throughout by the women of the tale – any idiot could easily figure out who Ulla Kihss really is.

Also, there really isn’t a memorable send-off for any of the villains; the Baroness, despite being built up as this man-eating tigress, is dispatched almost casually (and not even by Don), and when the real villain is uncovered, Don’s more shocked than spurred to action. What I’m saying is, he’s no Nick Carter. You’d think perhaps that was Louderback’s point, that Don is an untried agent, this being his first assignment, but instead he’s played up as a primo shit-kicker. So in other words it comes off as unintentionally humorous; Don Miles, in this adventure at least, is in the Mitchell class of heroes.

At 160 pages of small print, Challenge At Le Mans does not exactly “speed” by; in fact, it’s less like Don’s Panther and more like my old VW Rabbitt (which my friends and I always called “the Joe Weider car,” because it didn’t have power steering and you got one hell of a workout turning the steering wheel). But even still, it was enjoyable for the most part, just a little too harried with too many characters and plots, and too little action – not to mention a protagonist who came off as a bit ineffective.

Mystery

Mystery, by Matthew Paris
February, 1973  Avon Books

If you’ve ever wondered what it would’ve been like if Philip K. Dick had written a crime novel, wonder no longer; this obscure paperback original gives a good indication of the book that might have ensued. What’s funny is the back cover of Mystery proclaims “An ordinary cop on an extraordinary mission!”, which makes me think the copyist either A.) Never read the book; B.) Read the book and couldn’t figure out how to synopsize it; or C.) Figured the hell with it.

There is in fact nothing ordinary about Mystery. It’s one screwed-up, surreal novel, ostensibly a murder investigation set in New York City, but a New York that seems to be out of some psychedelic sci-fi nightmare. Our narrator is Lt. Salvador, a top New York cop who when we meet him is investigating a murder. Salvador’s white whale is the mysterious Farmer, owner of the infamous Rabbit Club, a shadowy underworld of pleasure palaces. Salvador’s major goal throughout the novel is bringing down Farmer – though first he has to find him, or for that matter discover if he even exists.

Mystery starts off as a typical crime novel, albeit one with a definite literary bent, as Salvador drives around New York City following up clues on a murdered money-runner before he’s tasked by the DA to look into the murder of a call girl who worked at one of the Rabbit Club’s bars. But then Salvador stops off at a suspect’s apartment, a gorgeous woman who throws herself at him, and before they make it the woman tells Salvador to take a look inside her bathroom – and here Matthew Paris lets you know what kind of novel you’re actually in for:

The bathroom door was open. A large cow was sprawled over the edge of the bathtub on its spine. Its black eyes stared at me, probably with more feeling than when they had been alive. Its gigantic head hung limply under the running water falling from the shower. Fluorescent lights streaming from above the mirror illuminated the blood that was running through the hot water onto the colored tile. The cow’s throat was slashed across the jugular vein. I shivered with terror.

Believe it or not, Mystery only proceeds to get stranger. (And this dead cow in the bathtub is never even explained!) In the twisted course of this twisted novel we have conundrum upon conundrum as our narrator encounters a host of bizarre characters, from a general who keeps a harem of young boys to a priest of filth who lives in a church filled with statues made of excrement. There are also “doubles” of virtually every character, including Salvador – who, by the way, isn’t an “ordinary” cop at all; throughout the novel he just blows people away for absolutely no reason, and commits a variety of criminal and murderous acts without any reprimand. I mean, I thought the guy was with the NYPD, not the LAPD!! (Okay, just kidding…)

The name of the murdered Rabbit Club hooker is Velma Roach, and her corpse lies in the Club’s plush Manhattan location. Even the poor murdered girl is strange, as Salvador notes that the corpse is bald; we’re informed this is so because the Rabbit Club girls must be able to change their looks to suit the whims of their current client. Calimyne, one of Farmer’s cronies and the runner of this particular Club location, trades cryptic banter with Salvador in what is a forshadowing of the rest of the novel – for the most part Mystery is comprised of Salvador going from one location to another and trading bizarre, cryptic dialog with bizarre and cryptic characters. While interesting at first it does get old.

You see, the problem with Mystery is the same problem that plagues any overly-literary tome that attempts to be surreal: eventually the reader realizes that there will be no resolution to anything, and what with all of the “weird” stuff the book soon lacks any emotional content. I don’t mean “emotional content” in today’s meaning of the phrase, ie the way everything from movies to commercials will try to milk emotions, pandering to the lowest common denominator – rather I mean you don’t care for anyone in this novel, because each of them is devoid of any human spark.

So then we read with more of an intellectual pleasure as Salvador tracks clues and, uh, randomly murders various people. Seriously, there will be parts where he’s talking to a suspect, and as the suspect walks off Salvador will whip out his gun and blow the person away. Paris works up a subtle subplot that Salvador might be on some psychedelic drug; there is often mention of a mysterious powder various Rabbit Club reps are snorting, and at one point a doctor briefly examines Salvador and asks him, “Are you taking any drugs?” (Salvador’s response is classic: “Should I be?”)

Eventually Salvador hooks up with Kelly Starr, gorgeous Rabbit Club VIP who is an intimate of Farmer but who wants to help Salvador find him…or at least, I think that’s how it goes. The book is very obscure at times. Paris even proves himself unconcerned with doling out regular novel stuff; for example in one scene Salvador heads into a bar to talk to a contact while Kelly waits for him in his car, and when Salvador comes out Kelly informs him that she just received a call from the DA, who asked her to inform Salvador that a host of minor characters were all just knocked off! It’s pretty ridiculous, but just another indication of the surreal world in which this occurs.

It also gradually becomes apparent that Paris is more concerned with word-painting than he is with telling a story with a plot. The murder investigation loses focus as the author spends more time serving up descriptions of his hellishly weird New York. Again, while the writing is good, plot development and any sort of meaning is lost. As mentioned, major events happen “off camera” and the cryptic dialog makes the reader feel as if he’s only getting half the story. Nothing is explained, not even the doubles. For example when Salvador first meets a double, it’s during an apocalyptic firefight, and rather than question the guy Salvador instead tries to kill him. Even when the two meet again in the finale Salvador never once asks who the double is, or even what he is.

Speaking of the finale, there isn’t much of one, but then this is expected given the increasingly surreal nature of the writing. Once again Paris is more content to word-paint rather than deliver a suspenseful climax, thrusting Salvador into a variety of arbitrary locations in which bizarre shit goes down, none of it explained. As for the book’s sleaze quotient, there isn’t much of one; the gunfights are minimally described, and the few sex scenes immediately fade to black. Overall the book has more in common with the self-indulgent hippie lit of the era; funny that it was packaged as a genre novel, complete with a lurid cover painting.

I can’t say I recommend Mystery, but it’s definitely an interesting read. Perhaps this is one of those novels that improves with a second reading, but the constant obsfucation and casual disregard for plot development, characterization, and reality served to turn me off in the long run.

The Big Enchilada

The Big Enchilada, by L.A. Morse
February, 1982  Avon Books

Mike Hammer lampooned to an absurd degree, Sam Hunter is a loudmouthed, arrogant, violent steamroller of a private eye. Unfortunately he’s also our protagonist and narrator. The Big Enchilada was the first of two novels L.A. Morse published about Hunter, and it drove a sharp divide among the critics, most of whom complained about the utter excess of it all, others who figured it was all a parody. Me, I fell in the middle – I enjoyed the over the top tone, but felt that it got old quick…pretty damning when you consider the novel’s undue length of 224 pages of small print.

Hunter is a P.I. in Los Angeles, and Morse does a good job bringing to life the city’s sleazier aspects. Hunter hates everyone and everything, and each chapter is a private eye novel spoof in miniature; each chapter opens with a hate-filled diatribe about L.A., after which Hunter will either get in a fight, track down a lead, or have sex, and then finishes up with another condemnation of the city. As I say, while it’s funny at first it gets to be a drag after a while, each chapter following this same repetitive format, and thus the novel becomes a bit of a slog.

The book opens with a bang, though. Hunter’s sitting at his desk, contemplating a vacation to Mexico with his sexy (and available) secretary, Maria, when a muscle-bound dude busts in, tears up Hunter’s office, tosses Hunter around, and warns him to stay away from “Domingo.” After this guy (who we eventually learn is a wrestler named Mountain) leaves, a crying Maria rushes in to check on Hunter, and Hunter does what any other guy would do in a situation like this – he pulls off her skirt, pushes her against the wall, and screws her! After which he zips up and heads out for a bite to eat…! This is just our first indicator of the kind of “hero” we’re in for. And as I say, while I found it all enjoyable and funny, it just lost its spark after a while.

And speaking of food, Hunter appears to be a gastronome (annoyingly referred to as a “foodie” these days…seriously, if you’re going to be snobbish about food, then describe yourself with a snobbish word, not something as fucking lame as “foodie!!”), so we get many scenes throughout the book where various meals are described, sometimes mouth-wateringly so. The only problem is, these segments are at odds with the otherwise-blunt tone of the novel itself; Hunter does not come off like the kind of guy who could write so eloquently about his meals.

Rather than being scared away, Hunter determines to figure out who Domingo is and why the ruffian was sent to threaten him. Hunter’s only working on a few cases, so he follows up on them. In the first he’s working for a wealthy Beverly Hills woman who has hired Hunter to figure out what’s going on with her husband (turns out the guy has a sadomasochistic streak and has an apartment where he whips hookers). In the second of many sex scenes, Hunter ends up getting lucky with the lady, and Morse gives the sex scenes nearly as much detail as he does Hunter’s meals.

Hunter’s also trying to track down a missing teenaged girl, and another case or two, and all of them seem to dovetail with a mysterious L.A. club called the Black Knight. Eventually Hunter discovers that this is a nasty place that serves to a sick clientele of society elite, involved in everything from child prostitution to snuff films. However the place is just one of the many money-making schemes of Domingo, who turns out to be an obese lecher who was famous a decade or so ago playing a TV detective, “Domingo” being the name of his character. The “big enchilada” of the title, Domingo is the bastard who sent Mountain after Hunter, and who proceeds to further throw Hunter’s life into chaos.

Hunter also runs afoul of the cops, mostly due to a crooked Vice cop who works with Domingo and tries to set Hunter up. True to genre form, the people in Hunter’s life suffer more than he himself does, from an old P.I. pal to a friendly cop on the force to most unfortunately Maria, who is raped, mutilated, and murdered by Mountain, Hunter discovering her mauled corpse in his office. These scenes however lack much resonance because Hunter is presented as so inhuman; for example after a sentence or two bemoaning Maria’s fate, Hunter is already eating at yet another diner, with the meal once again described in full.

There are a few action scenes, most of them featuring Hunter beating people up. One memorable sequence has him fighting a group of drug-addled punks in the back of a bar. Hunter carries a Magnum revolver that he doesn’t use all that much, though at the end he loads it with dum-dum shells for the final confronation with Domingo and Mountain. And speaking of which the climatic fight with Mountain is well done and gory, taking place in Domingo’s opulent home, and humorously enough making memorable use of Domingo’s just-introduced glass cage of poisonous snakes.

As for investigative work, there isn’t much: Hunter basically calls people on the phone and then bullies them in person, either with fists or threats. The sleaze level is sometimes through the roof (Sleaze being the title of the followup novel, by the way), with Hunter blithely recounting the whips-and-chains sex shows he witnesses in various bars to even the snuff films he watches. All of this stuff would no doubt be shocking in the world of regular private eye novels, but having read so much trash I was moreso like, “meh.” At any rate Hunter’s cynical, smart-ass tone robs the majority of these scenes of any emotional impact.

As for the cover of The Big Enchilada, I have to say Hunter looks a little like Armand Assante. What’s weird is that the year The Big Enchilada was published, the obscure and controversial movie I, The Jury also came out (big thanks to Marty McKee for introducing me to that one!!), based on Mickey Spillane’s novel and starring Assante as Mike Hammer. For that matter, the brunette on the bottom right of the cover sort of looks like Barbara Carrera, who was also in that film. So I wonder if the cover used for The Big Enchilada was a rejected cover for an I, The Jury reprint? (Signet Books did reprint the novel that year, but they used a photo of Assante for the cover.)

Mutants Amok #2: Mutant Hell

Mutants Amok #2: Mutant Hell, by Mark Grant
March, 1991  Avon Books

If ever there was a series aimed like a heatseeker for the minds of preteen boys, then Mutants Amok would be it. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not talking about neutered garbage like Harry Potter or Twilight or whatever other metrosexual banality that's currently hot in the teen fiction marketplace; I’m talking about books with graphic sex, violence, and juvenile prose. These would be the perfect books to give to some punk kid who claims to not be interested in reading. And no wonder he isn’t – the shit today sucks!!

Mutant Hell is even more brain-addled than its predecessor, and I mean that as a compliment. This is a book that leaves no lowbrow stone unturned, from characters puking and pissing on each other to hyper-explicit sex scenes to gutchurningly gory action sequences. And hell, buried beneath the extreme material there’s actually a theme, one any kid could get behind: rebellion, and learning to think for oneself.

But anyway, the Mutants Amok series is still pretty dumbheaded. It’s more cartoonish than serious, and what with its teenage protagonists (well, two of them are at least) and their naïve mindsets, it just seems to me that this series was really designed for and catered to preteen and teen males. I was around 16 years old when these novels were published, and I’m kicking myself that I didn’t know about them at the time, as doubtless I would’ve loved them.

This installment picks up immediately after the first, so you’d do well to read that one first, as Mutants Amok is a continuity-heavy series. Jack Bender and pal Phil Potts have escaped their human slave farm and Jack’s flying an airplane which belongs to Max Turkel, freedom fighter extraordinaire. Turkel has been captured, though, taken to mutant headquarters in the Rocky Mountains, and Jack and Phil are on the way to rescue him. Plus Jack is burning with rage because he wants vengeance for the murder last volume of his girlfriend Jenny – though Jack does not yet know that Jenny is in fact still alive.

Turkel meanwhile is in deep shit. He’s strapped to a colossal robot that tortures him for the amusement of a VIP audience, among them Emperor Charlemagne, ruler of the mutants. Charlemagne, relishing the long-awaited capture of the infamous Max Turkel, spits on him; here’s an example of the lowbrow, grossout mindset I mentioned above:

The Emperor hawked and hemmed noisily and then spat a voluminous quantity of lumpy phlegm into Max Turkel’s face.

It was like getting slapped with mucus pie. The malodorous stuff, chockful of noisome green and brown chunks of effluvia, slimed down Turkel’s face, rivered down his shirted chest and legs, and then hung like a mutated Christmas tree ornament to the ends of his shoes.

And check out how the still-bound Turkel, having managed to unzip his fly, gets his revenge:

The urine arced up, a fountain of gold, spilling down in a racehorse rush directly on the side of Emperor Charlemagne’s face.

“Ah,” said Max Turkel.

He directed the stream to make sure that he got the most out of this, probably his penultimate statement, knowing that his last would be a strangled death rattle.

The pee poured yellow and hot into the large, hideous face. Into the eyes it streamed, trickling down into the splayed nostrils and wide fish mouth.

The Emperor spluttered with astonishment and anger.

The room of mutant attendants was absolutely silent with horror and shock.

And the piss just kept on coming.

Of course Turkel isn’t killed outright; the mutants want to extract intel from his brain, like where the human rebels hide and etc. Here we get a few flashbacks into Turkel’s past, growing up with freedom fighters, falling in love, and losing his girl in a raid on a mutant camp. Jack and Phil meanwhile land the plane in the midwest, in need of fuel; they stop outside of a farm of “halfsies,” aka mutant/human hybrids who are not violently opposed to humans like the mutants are.

The halfsie family is the cliched farmland folk, and of course there’s the gorgeous farmer’s daughter, who you wouldn’t be surprised to know comes to Jack’s bed that night. We get the beginnings of a hot and heavy scene, but Jack suspects something’s up and turns the girl away. So she goes to Phil Potts’s room, and nearly screws the guy to death – turns out her goal is to zap men of all their sperm, which she stores in a special cavity, to later be sold for vast profits (mutants and halfsies being unable to reproduce, hence the reason why humans still exist).

After a gory battle Jack and Phil are on their way again, and in their next stop, outside the Rockies, they meet up with American Indians who live free from the mutant yoke. They play ‘60s rock and dole out hippie prattle, and among them is Jill Morningstar, a petite young woman whom Jack instantly falls for. And guess what, that night Jill comes to Jack’s bed! (If there’s one thing I learned from Mutant Hell, it’s that if you are a single guy traveling around and stay as a guest in some stranger’s house, a gorgeous woman will come into your room and offer herself to you that night…but then, I’ve learned this lesson many times over from personal experience.)

The goofy, juvenile tone extends to the (otherwise quite explicit) sex scenes as well:

Standing up from the bed, he slipped his pants off. His penis was already swollen and ready, and Jill Morningstar licked her lips as she reached out and slid her fingers gently up the scrotum and then along the length of the rod. “I can’t wait for you to put that in me,” she said enthusiastically.

“Neither can it!”

Meanwhile BrainGeneral Torx, the mutant sadist who adbucted Jenny in the previous volume, bides his time at mutant HQ, using human captives as moving targets for his new collection of firearms. Another BrainGeneral appears here, Harten, who is part of a plot with Torx to oust the insane Charlemagne. But for whatever reason Torx is delaying their plan, so Harten does the unexpected and reaches out to Max Turkel.

Here David Bischoff (aka “Mark Grant”) adds a new layer to the previously black-and-white series; Harten doesn’t hate humans, and in fact intimates that one day they should be free. In a neat bit he turns Turkel’s own racism back on him; after Turkel keeps arguing that humans should be free and rule the planet alone, Harten points out the hypocrisy of Turkel’s heavy-handed pleas for “freedom.” Anyway Turkel accepts the offer and beats a gory retreat from mutant HQ, thanks to some weapons Harten leaves for him.

Jenny’s fate remains a mystery, and Jack learns she’s still alive in the very last paragraph of the novel, which we are to understand will cause some trouble, given that he’s now also fallen in love with Jill Morningstar. Jack finds out about Jenny thanks to Turkel, who apparently got the information from Torx himself – the climatic action scene of the novel sees Torx and Turkel going mano e mutant with broadswords, and at great length (and page count) Turkel gets the better of Torx. Plus he chops off his hands, but whether Torx lives or dies is something else left a mystery.

Anyway, while this series isn’t great literature by any means, I still say it would be the perfect gateway drug for some kid to get into the world of men’s adventure. And even beyond that, it’s just a lot of dumb, gory, sex-filled fun.

The Martian Viking

The Martian Viking, by Tim Sullivan
May, 1991 Avon Books

The concept of this novel sounded too good to pass up – a Classics professor of 2070 or thereabouts is banned to a penal colony on Mars, where he gets hooked on psychedelic drugs that give him visions of ancient Vikings that surf the cosmos on their battle ships! It’s all very Philip K. Dick (whom author Sullivan even thanks in the dedication), combined with a definite sort of late ‘60s radical feel…I mean, there’s even a Patty Hearst analog here.

I get the feeling Sullivan must’ve seen the (awesome) 1990 film version of PK Dick’s Total Recall, which subdued Dick’s philosophies and replaced them with prime-era Arnold and Verhovian gore (not to mention triple-breasted mutant gals), and figured to himself, “Hey, I should do my own version of this, only more faithful to reality-questioning spirit of Dick’s original, a-and I’ll add lots of drugs! And vikings!” And somehow he pulled it off – this breezy novel, not even 300 pages, has all the signs of a late ‘60s slice of psychedelic sci-fi.

But the debt to PK Dick’s work is strongest; Sullivan even replicates the goofy names Dick would give his characters. To wit, our hero is Johnsmith Biberkopf, a professor of the Classics living in the Conglom world of the future, where Big Brother has taken over good and proper. Johnsmith actually reads the Classics, much to the puzzlement of his fellows. But such radical thinking raises eyebrows, and soon enough Johnsmith finds himself without a job – which is against the law in this grim future, one punishable by banishment, usually to the moon.

Johnsmith has also been left by his wife Ronindella, a thoroughly unlikable character who does nothing but instill reader animosity. Perhaps the biggest question is why a nice guy like Johnsmith would even get involved with her in the first place, but this is one of the many questions Sullivan leaves unanswered. Anyway, Ronindella, who wants more out of life, has contrived to get Johnsmith fired from his job so he can get banned to the lunar minepits, where Ronindella will be able to cushily live off of half of Johnsmith’s ensuing paychecks. Oh, and she’s secretly sleeping with Johnsmith’s best friend.

For a bit of a brighter note, there’s Smitty, Johnsmith’s 9 year-old son, who looks up to his dad and of course doesn’t want him to be banned to the moon. But Johnsmith has no choice and, the night before he’s to appear before a committee for his official banishment, he indulges in some illegal “onees” (pronounced “one-nees,” the narrative would imply): psychedelic drugs which look like ball bearings. Hold one of them and you’re off on a trip; hold three and you’re in another world.

Johnsmith, for his first time out, holds all three at once and suddenly finds himself in an ocean, a massive Viking ship coming at him. Johnsmith, who has a special fondness for Beowulf, spends the novel wondering if they’re really Geats – since he’s a professor he’s given to such pedantic concerns.

Another thing never properly explained is that Johnsmith is banned to Mars instead of the moon – actually, a better fate, as the Mars colony has it easy compared to the lot of prisoners on the moon. Along with him go Alderice, a heavyset gay black man who was actually employed as a government tail on Johnsmith, but who was so bad at his job that he too was fired, and Felica, the aforementioned Patty Hearst type, a radical devoted to ousting the Conglom, who in reality is the daughter of a mega-wealthy family and who was kidnapped by some anarchists and eventually turned over to their side.

The characters are basicaly two-dimensional, even Johnsmith himself. My assumption is that this is just due to the fact that Sullivan intends The Martian Viking as satire. There’s a lot of material in this book, a lot of subplots and characters, and a vast world with a history that’s untapped. What I mean to say is, the novel easily could’ve been twice its length, and this is both a strength and a weakness. I guess it’s a sign of the novel’s quality that I wished there was more of it.

Anyway, Johnsmith finally arrives on Mars, where he lives in a military complex overseen by the cliched sort of lieutenant you’d expect, who rules the prisoners with a steel fist. Johnsmith and his two friends (Felicia though soon becomes more than a friend) assume they’re here to help in the agricultural projects going on, terraforming the planet for eventual human colonization, but first they’re put through army training, firing guns and laser weapons and etc. Turns out there are “Arkies” here, aka anarchists, who rebel against the Conglom and attack the military base. How these Arkies got here is yet another unanswered question.

Eventually Johnsmith is told his true reason for being here – he’s supposed to take onees in a sort of controlled experiment. Turns out onees are developed here on Mars; some of them have been “archecoded” to give the Viking ship visions, and the government wants to find out how it’s happening. Gradually Johnsmith will learn that it’s the work of the Arkies, who have an insider agent who archecodes the onees as they are made; the Arkies, beyond their political beliefs, are also psuedo-religious, and believe the “Great Ship” will soon be coming to Mars to deliver them all. You guessed it – the Ship is the Viking ship Johnsmith and others see in their onee trips.

There’s more besides. Sullivan works in an elaborate subplot back on earth featuring the loathsome Ronindella and her manipulating of Johnsmith’s former best friend. There’s also another subplot about Johnsmith’s pal getting advice from a “cyber-therapist” (Madame Psychosis), and his goofy plot to get Ronindella away from what passes in this goofy future as the Christian church. All of this stuff had nothing to do with anything and just got annoying, mostly because the characters here were so self-involved and despicable.

The material on Mars is more interesting, and Sullivan keeps it moving, with Johnsmith caught up in an attack on the Arkie base, where he discovers who is the insider archecoding the onees; it’s a fellow prisoner, an attractive woman named Frankie, who too soon becomes involved with Johnsmith. Pretty soon Johnsmith is caught up in her plans to escape – plus there’s an Arkee deserter who stumbles onto the military complex, proclaiming that the Great Ship is soon to arrive. In fact, it might just appear at the site of the old Viking rover which trundled across Mars nearly a hundred years before, in 1976. Hmm...

Everything comes to a head with both Smitty and Ronindella on Mars (Smitty won a ticket for two there in an utter piece of deus ex machina), Johnsmith, Frankie, Alderice, and Felicia escaping, and the Vikings appearing in a sort of celestial whirlpool, sucking both Johnsmith and Smitty up into it so that pretty soon they’re traveling about the cosmos on the Viking ship, fighting sea monsters (!), before a strange sort of “was it all a dream?” kind of ending that seems tacked one because Sullivan couldn’t figure where else to go.

But then, the clues are there all along, and it’s not like Sullivan goes out of his way to make it subtle – one could easily see the entire book as nothing more than an onee trip on Johnsmith’s part. This is even hinted at in the finale, when Johnsmith finds himself on some barren plain, talking to his deceased father. To me the most interesting thing here is how the end of the novel prefrigures the sucktastic finale of the overpraised Lost series, with our hero not only finding himself in limbo, but also being given the scoop by the ghost of his father. And hell, the Arkies themselves come off very much like the Others on Lost, all of which makes me wonder if Sullivan ever watched that show and grit his teeth in rage.

Sullivan’s writing though is pretty good. The characters as stated don’t have much depth, and the goofy names get annoying (not to mention Sullivan’s strange decision to give two of his main female characters names that begin with an “F” – but then, that might be another clue that all of this is the product of Johnsmith’s limited imagination).

The action scenes aren’t very violent, and beyond the occasional curse word the novel’s almost prudish…save for an unexpected and somewhat-graphic sex scene late in the game, when Johnsmith beds Frankie – who, by the way, turns out to be more of a Conglom-fighting radical than Felicia ever could be. (Felicia herself meanwhile sort of drops into the background of the narrative...more sign that all of this is the product of Johnsmith’s hallucenogenic delusions, or just Sullivan’s inability to juggle all of his characters and plots?)

Sadly, the psychedelic stuff goes away as the novel proceeds, and despite being sent to Mars to test onees, we hardly get any more scenes of a drugged-out Johnsmith. However there’s a definite lysergic haze to the novel, particularly as it approaches its freeform ending, which takes it into the outer limits of fantasia. The reader expecting a pat ending will be frustrated, as Sullivan goes for more of a “Bobby in the shower” type of a Dallas ending. But really, such endings are never satisfactory for readers who have invested themselves in a novel.

Island Paradise

Island Paradise, by P.R. Pickney
August, 1973 Avon Books

My definition of “pure” trash fiction is simple: glamorous people, exotic setting, lots of sex. Island Paradise falls firmly into this mold, a novel very much like Fire Island (a hallmark of pure trash fiction) in that it’s such a beach read that it’s about people going to the beach. Unlike Burt Hirschfeld’s classic, though, Island Paradise doesn’t appear to have had much impact on readers, so obscure that I couldn’t even find a cover scan online, and had to make do with taking a photo on my work-issued “smart phone” (a ZTE Anthem, for those taking notes).

As is expected, the cover painting and back cover copy oversell the novel’s “sizzling” elements. In fact, Island Paradise is a pretty tame read, never graphic, never going beyond the constraints of the average romance novel of the time. And worst of all, it derails from the expected (and desired) plot about jetsetters frolicking in a posh island resort and instead becomes embroiled in a banal storyline about island politics and a brewing native revolt.

The book starts off capturing the feel of the jetsetting elite, circa summer 1973, as a bevy of people descend upon the resort of Shalimar, located on a fictional island in the Caribbean, for a weekend of sun and fun. Newly opened, Shalimar is trying to get its name made, and the opulent resort is managed by Grov, a former tennis pro, and his wife Denise, a swinging and insatiable French beauty who you’ll not be surprised to know was my favorite character in the book. (Unfortunately her collected scenes don’t amount to much.)

But man there are a lot of characters here to keep track of. It would be one thing if they weren’t all so similar. And it would be another if the majority of them weren’t so damn boring. Unbelievably, Pickney chooses to focus on the bland characters of the huge cast, given more-compelling characters like Denise short narrative shrift.

Even having read all 300-some pages of this thick book, I don’t think I could give a complete rundown of the cast. But the standouts, bland as they are, would be David, a famous author firmly in the Norman Mailer mode, who has come to Shalimar with his alcoholic wife. David becomes such an annoyance that the reader cannot stand him; so immersed in his own ego as to be infantile, he ignores his wife and instead begins to obsess over Emily, a former paramour who just happens to be here in Shalimar, where she is having an affair with the island’s mayor. (That the mayor is black is a huge cause of concern for David.)

There’s also a New York senator and his wife, and their plot is by far the worst, with lots of backstory and worrying over the political climate back in New York…stuff which, I have to tell you, has absolutely no bearing on the plot, let alone any resolution. Then there’s the couple’s mousy friend, Margaret, who finds herself in Shalimar, deciding after a lot of introspection that she should cave in and marry the millionaire who has been pursuing her, after all. Her storyline especially seems cribbed from the most chaste Harlequin romance imaginable.

On a more interesting note there’s Pammy and Buffy, young and beautiful siblings who gallivant about the globe from one hotspot to another, their little dog in tow. Fresh out of finishing school, they have no care in the world other than when the next lavish meal is coming and if they should smoke dope or not. (They do.) They also engage in one of the only two sex scenes in the book, where they take turns with studly Shalimar employee Rod while skinnydipping in the ocean. But even this scene is so prudishly-rendered as to be bland.

There are others…Simon, a British photojournalist who appears to be trying to make for Pammy and Buffy, but instead spends a lot of time researching the island’s politcal climate. Then there’s Duke, a gay member of the elite whose mere word can make or break one’s public image. Another character who could steal away scenes, Duke too is relegated to third-class status and is instead mocked by the others…not to mention suffering a horrible fate which is all the more horrible for how little attention or care Pickney gives it.

And now let’s get to the island political tale, which unfortunately takes up way too much of the book. For one, Pickney pulls a fast one on us; we assume this novel is about the jetsetters, and that’s how things go for about 70 fun pages. Then Pickney introduces Sebastian, the aforementioned mayor of the island…and he becomes basically the major protagonist of the tale. So we go from a book about the wealthy elite sunning and sinning in paradise to a boring, boring storyline about Sebastian and his problems with the locals, all of whom take umbrage at having to serve “whitey.”

There are several scenes of the jetsetters, in particular David, trying to get to the root of this, even talking to the leader of the rebels, who happens to be Sebastian’s cousin. You keep wanting the story to get back to Denise, who we’re told likes to sun each morning practically nude, her nipples covered by nothing more than tiny sea shells which all the guys keep standing around and watching in the hopes that one of them might slip off, though they never do.

A bit of narrative relief comes with the late arrival of a makeup tycoon who shows up with his own mousy and subservient wife; this guy sort of tramples over everyone, emotionally and verbally at least, and he also manages to score with Denise on his yacht in the book’s only other sex scene – but it’s over in a second (literally), and that’s that. (Denise is even more disappointed than the reader, I’m sure.) But for the most part, these characters are sort of put on hold so Pickney can focus on the storyline about island politics and a brewing native revolt.

And what’s funny is, Sebastian and the jetsetters are so damn stupid that, even when they’re practically told by the locals that they’re planning to revolt that night, they still don’t know what’s going on when it happens! And the revolt itself is so hamfisted and poorly-conceived…the locals converging on Shalimar, depositing the beaten and bloody body of Duke, whom they’ve captured and even friggin’ emasculated, and after a talk between Sebastian and the rebel leader it’s all over!

Part of the appeal about these classic trash fiction novels is the long-simmer nature of the plots…like in the best of Hirschfeld, where he takes various characters and puts them together in one location and lets them brew. That’s what I wanted here, and that’s what seemingly was promised…until the derailment into the storyline about Sebastian and the natives. Even the end is sort of hamfisted, everyone just leaving and Sebastian welcoming the next round of guests to his island, the majority of the various storylines not even wrapped up.

P.R. Pickney is a psuedonym of Patricia Tierney and Rita Rothschild Picker, who out themselves on the copyright page. I don’t see any other novels published by the latter, but it looks like Tierney moved into nonfiction after this. Of course I have no idea who wrote what on this collaboration, but I can say that these authors POV-hop on the level of another writing duo, Ryder Stacy. Also they seem to enjoy inserting commas into sentences with no rhyme or reason.

And by the way, check out my copy of the book in the photo above. The top half of the cover is loose from the spine, there are multiple tears and creases, the book itself is about to fall apart in the middle, and there’s even what appear to be burn marks on the cover. I mean, what the hell did this book go through? In a way it’s more interesting than its actual contents…

Mutants Amok #1

Mutants Amok #1, by Mark Grant
March, 1991 Avon Books

I was unfamiliar with this five-volume series until I read about it over on Zwolf's blog, The Mighty Blowhole. The concept sounded pretty goofy -- a future America where human-created mutants have enslaved the human population, all of it relayed in an appropriately over-the-top style.

"Just wacky," as Zwolf put it in his review. Which is exactly what the book turned out to be. To be sure, Mutants Amok is a violent, sex-filled trip into a funhouse future America, but it's told with a definite tongue in cheek vibe. I mean, there's a part in here where the main mutant villain stomps on (and crushes) the head of a baby, and it's played for laughs!

Before we get to the meat of the review, a bit of background: Mark Grant is a house name, and this first volume as well as the next three were written by David Bischoff, a noted sci-fi author with reams of books published under his own name and a variety of psuedonyms. The fifth and final volume, Christmas Slaughter, was written by Bruce King, though it too carried the "Mark Grant" by-line. (And speaking of which, Christmas Slaughter is by far the most rare and expensive volume in the series, so act now if you're interested, before it disappears -- or before online sellers jack up the prices of their copies to even more absurd levels.)

As mentioned, Mutants Amok occurs in a future America which is now enslaved by mutants. There are a variety of "muties," from Braingenerals to foot soldiers to even cybernetically-enhanced monstrosities (in the guise of Charlegmagne, ruler of America). There are mutants who have been created for specific and menial duties, others that are bred solely for war. Humankind has been reduced to slavery, working on farms or other areas, overseen constantly by mutant overlords who have total authority over their lives.

However, the mutants are complete idiots.

What on the surface sounds like a dystopian trawl into some hellish future world (which is how the back cover even tries to hype the novel) is really more akin to a fantasy sequence from The Simpsons or the average episode of Futurama. I'm not sure if Bischoff created the series concept or someone at Avon did, but at any rate when it came time to the actual execution of the tale, Bischoff must've thought to himself, "This is just goofy, and I'm gonna write it goofy."

So then the mutant rulers are incredibly cruel and vicious but in such an over-the-top, cliched way that it's all just a plain comedy. And yet, there's so much in-fighting among them, with bosses killing off their underlings for no reason, that one begins to wonder how in the hell the mutants were able to take over the world in the first place. From first page to last the mutants, even the ones bred for war, are presented as incompetents, bungling everything. They're incredibly stupid and lazy, unaware that their human captors are carrying on secret lives right beneath their noses.

Which again seems to indicate that the book, if not the entire series, is just a light-hearted spoof. But a spoof with a punch; the action scenes here, even though there are only a few of them, are filled with gore, and there are also a handful of purple-prosed sex scenes. In short, Mutants Amok seems designed to appeal to sex and action-obsessed teenage boys, and given that I was such a teenage boy when it was published, it saddens me that I wasn't aware of the series back then.

The "hero" of the tale is Max Turkel, a famed human rebel who, when we meet him, is in the process of escaping from his latest assault on mutantkind. Hacking up a few mutant soldiers in gory fashion, Max takes off in a plane, getting shot a few times for his troubles. He crashes in a forest near a mutant-controlled agricultural center, where young field-worker Jack Bender catches sight of Turkel's plane as it's going down. Convenientely enough, Bender has a veritable treehouse palace hidden out in that very same forest, where he goes to get away from his abusive mutant owner, and Turkel's plane has crashed near it.

The majority of the novel is given over to the awakening of Jack's rebel spirit as he cares for the stricken Turkel, whom he hides up in the treehouse. Jack likes his life on the farm, even if he is a slave; plus there's Jenny Anderson, a gorgeous blond Jack has frequent (and explicit) sex scenes with. Meanwhile he listens to Turkel's rants against mutantkind, also putting up with the man's cynical remarks, drunkeness, and sexual advice(!). (The scene where Turkel, hiding up on the treehouse roof, provides Jack with tips on cunnilingus -- while Jenny is downstairs waiting for him -- is especially priceless.) Turkel comes off more like the annoying neighbor in a sitcom, but he's presented to us as the stoic hero of the human freedom movement -- yet more indication that the entire book is just a goof.

In a sideplot we see the activities of Braingeneral Torx as he searches for Turkel. Emperor Charlegmagne has demanded Turkel's head, or else he will have Torx's, and to demonstrate this the emperor has a few mutants killed in front of Torx. (Not that it makes much of a difference, as Torx himself kills a few of his underlings as the novel proceeds.) Torx is the aforementioned baby-stomper, and it's another sign of the book's spirit that he comes off as the most memorable character in the cast. The very walking cliche of a jack-booted ruler, Torx storms and stomps through the novel, determined to capture Turkel. ("Braingenerals" by the way were the original line of human-created mutants, designed and bred for military strategy genius; Torx is yet more proof that the experiment was a grand failure.)

There's also a building subplot in which the mutants are harvesting humans and dissecting them, in the hopes that they can figure out how to create self-replicating mutants; the only reason the mutants keep humans around, despite the menial labor, is because the mutants themselves are sterile. This subplot builds up until it's the turning point in Jack's relation to Turkel and the movement, and appears to carry over into the next volume; this first one ends on a cliffhanger.

But it's all very sci-fi, if overly goofy. There are robots and cyborgs, even a friggin' race of hobbits which the mutants designed! (The hobbit though provides another fun opportunity for Torx to display his mercilessness.) Battles however are staged with the weapons of today, ie machine guns and pistols and Uzis, not to mention knives and even chainsaws. Bischoff takes special relish in describing the impact of each and every bullet into the hides of his mutant villains.

I've actually picked up the rest of the series, and I enjoyed this first volume enough that I'm looking forward to reading the rest.

Always

Always, by Trevor Meldal-Johnsen
March, 1979 Avon Books

This obscure paperback original concerns a screenwriter in 1979 Hollywood who falls in love with an actress named Brooke Ashley -- an actress who died in a mysterious fire in 1949. The screenwriter, Gregory Thomas, soon becomes convinced that he is the reincarnation of Brooke Ashley's lover, who died in that fire with her; further, he is convinced that Brooke Ashley is out there somewhere, reincarnated just as he is, and he determines to find her. So in other words it's like a trashy romance novel penned by Shirley MacLaine.

Gregory's fiance Sharon unwittingly gets it all started; she takes Gregory to see a showing of Brooke's final film, which for some unstated reason is playing again in 1979 theaters. Watching Brooke on the big screen, Gregory finds himself crying for some bizarre reason during the maudlin finale. Soon he can't get her out of his head. He feels that he somehow knows Brooke Ashley, despite the fact that previous to seeing the film with Sharon, he was only peripherally aware of the long-dead actress.

He comes up with the idea to do a script loosely based around Brooke's life; at first he thinks maybe he'll imply that she didn't die in a fire, but then he comes up with the reincarnation premise, that she is alive out there somewhere, reborn in new flesh, and her also-dead lover is also reborn and must find her. He pitches the idea to his agent who says it'll go over like gangbusters; the agent, obviously stoned, goes further to say that Gregory should first write the idea down as a novel. This strikes me as strange, as everyone knows that Hollywood agents don't read novels. Already the novel has gone into the realm of fantasy.

Past-life memories gradually come back to Gregory. He tells no one, especially his fiance Sharon, who has become increasingly distanced from him. Sharon is jealous of the decades-dead Brooke Ashley, of the attention Gregory is giving her, and wishes he would just drop his entire script/novel idea. But after researching Brooke's life, Gregory gets deeper into it, even meeting up with one of the actress's friends: a now-old mystic who goes by the handle Madame Olga Nabokov, who acts as the novel's version of Whoopie Goldberg in Ghost.

It gets goofy when Gregory finally remembers his past life -- it comes to him in a sudden rush, all of it. His name was Michael Richardson, and he was a screenwriter then as now; in fact he wrote Brooke's last film. Working with Olga to track down pieces of his past life, Gregory soon collects a ring he once gave Brooke (another goofy moment; when he touches the ring it burns him -- the ring survived the fire which killed Michael Richardson and Brooke Ashley, you see) and even visits his mother. Michael Richardson's mother, that is. It's to Meldal-Johnsen's credit that he doesn't sap up this scene.

A horror element sneaks in as Gregory soon finds himself under psychic attack in his dreams. For some strange reason, Olga proves unhelpful here; you'd figure she'd at least teach the guy some lucid dreaming techniques for self-defense. I mean, even the kids in Nightmare on Elm Street 3 learned how to become "dream warriors." Anyway the threats continue in the real world as well, with Gregory receiving threats in the mail, threats demanding that he "forget" about Brooke Ashley and etc.

More research and remembrance and Gregory discovers who the culprit is: Brooke Ashley's mother. What's creepy though is she too died in the fire that killed Michael and Brooke. So either Brooke's mom lives on in the astral realm or she too has been reincarnated, and has continued hating Michael Richardson for taking away her daughter, no matter what skin he's now wearing. These scenes, while at first grating, soon add a layer of tension and suspense to Always, as Gregory finds himself in several life-or-death situations. Hell, even his cat gets killed. However the horror element plays out in an unintentionally-hilarious scene as Gregory accidentally runs over his enemy.

Many sequences of the novel are given over to long chunks of Michael's life with Brooke, how he met her, their dates, how they promised to be together in this world and the next, no matter what happened. Meldal-Johnsen tries to make this a soul-match sort of love, but sadly I found Gregory's relationships with Sharon and Jenny (a bimbo young actress Gregory hooks up with during a spat with Sharon) more believable. Also, Meldal-Johnsen really missed the potential for some true drama. Gregory isn't even married; imagine how much more impact this novel would have had if Gregory was married with kids. Given that, would he still try to find the reincarnation of his past-life lover?

Thankfully, Always isn't all love-written-in-the-stars romantic glurge. As was the style of the time, Meldal-Johnsen finds opportunity to trash it up with some graphic sex scenes every once in a while. My favorite such moment is when Jenny, the aforementioned bimbo actress, takes hold of Gregory's "distended penis worshipfully," says to it "Oh, lovely, gorgeous thing," pops a few ice cubes in her mouth, and then sets to work. And mind you, this is only their first date! Now that's a woman you reincarnate for.

The Way We Are

The Way We Are, by William Bostock
December, 1970 Avon Books

You'd figure anything with "supersonic sex-odyssey" proclaimed on the cover would at least be interesting, right? Well, in the case of The Way We Are, first published in hardcover in '69 and then in the mass market paperback incarnation shown here in '70, you'd be wrong. This is one boooring novel, as vapid and listless as its forgettable protagonist.

Again the cover blurbs oversell the novel's sordid aspects. Reading the back cover copy you'd expect this book to detail the sex-crazed adventures of a depraved young woman. Instead the novel is more of a study of a small group of characters in the New York City of 1969, artists and writers and spoiled rich kids, the way they interract with one another and use one another. There's quite a bit of graphic sex on hand but to get there one must endure interminable conversations between said characters which are about...nothing. Seriously, this novel has the most inane dialog I've ever read. Characters talk about what they're going to do this weekend, or where they went on vacation last year, or the last person they slept with, for pages and pages.

Daphne Ashbaugh is the protagonist, a spoiled 27 year-old with bigtime mental problems. Her mother killed herself when Daphne was very young and Daphne has never gotten over it. She lashes out against her rich father and his "mistress" in ways both verbal and bizarre; the novel opens with one of Daphne's many ventures into self-abuse as she picks up a guy in Central Park and then takes him up to her apartment. The man proceeds to beat Daphne into a stupor and then takes some cash before leaving, telling her to be more careful next time she picks up someone in the park!

From there it gets more sordid -- Daphne leaves her boring fiancee for a man named Ransom, a good looking dude who likes women but sleeps with men for cash. The two become a pair and the main focus of the novel; there's also Lance, a young writer whom Daphne develops a thing for, and Lance's girlfriend Louanne, who refuses to sleep with Lance for some reason. Yes, this is another novel of characters with insufferable hangups.

The strangest thing about The Way We Are is its similarity to Burt Hirschfeld's Cindy On Fire. Both novels are about wealthy young women who lash out at their parents and have sex with as many men as they can (I think Cindy wins the competiton, though). Furthermore, both women are ostensible basket-cases, doing time with various therapists; both women also resort to heavy drinking quite often and try to kill themselves with an overdose of sleeping pills. And both novels feature the same ending for their respective heroines: both Daphne and Cindy become pregnant by one of their many suitors and decide to carry the child anyway, foisting it upon some poor rube they will marry, a poor rube who is not the child's father. Most incredibly, even the names of the two heroines are similar: Daphne Ashbaugh and Cindy Ashe. Since Cindy On Fire was published in 1971 and The Way We Are was published in 1969, you have to wonder...

At any rate at least Cindy On Fire was a zillion times more enjoyable, with better characters and better writing. The only good thing about The Way We Are is the cover photo, featuring some anonymous swinging '60s chick. Our swinging model appears again on the back cover, looking just as great -- love the boots!

Cindy On Fire

Cindy On Fire, by Burt Hirschfeld
April, 1971 Avon Books

As mentioned in my review of Fire Island, Cindy on Fire was my introduction to Burt Hirschfeld. I discovered the novel in the time-honored tradition: browsing the mass market paperback shelves at a local used books emporium. The title caught my eye, and I checked out the cover and its groovy illustration of partying people. But it was the back-cover copy that really drew me in:

Welcome to Cindy's world -- the decadent playground of society studs and jet-set perverts, of dirty old men out for naked young bodies and freaking hippies into acid-rock scenes. Follow her search for fulfillment -- out of her middle-class upbringing into the sordid glamour of international film making and on to a non-stop merry-go-round of exotic lovers. It's a trip too hot to forget!

By the time I got to "freaking hippies" I was already on my way to the register. The book seemed to offer all I demand in trash fiction: sex, drugs, rock, gorgeous gals. Globetrotting jet-setters living at the peak of mod fashion. But I soon discovered that Cindy On Fire was a psuedo-sequel to Fire Island, so I tracked that novel down and read it first. Really though, Cindy On Fire isn't much of a sequel and could be read completely separate from Fire Island. Though if features a few of the same characters, they don't impact the narrative at all; Cindy herself is the main character throughout, and she herself only received a few passing mentions in Fire Island. For whereas the former novel was a Harold Robbins-esque study of a large cast of characters and how they interracted with one another over the years, Cindy On Fire is a picaresque, following our bland heroine from one sexual misadventure to another.

But it's not as trashy as that back-cover blurb implies. Instead it appears that Hirschfeld here was attempting a sort of "commentary on the late 1960s" thing, and so the novel comes off like Candy meets Forrest Gump, with our heroine inadvertently encountering all of the countercultural milestones of the era while being chased by countless horny men.

Cindy Ashe is an 18 year-old knockout living in the New York City of 1968. The novel occurs at the same time as the final half of Fire Island: Cindy learns that her huckster father Roy has been arrested for murder. Cindy meanwhile is busy turning tricks for her heroin-addicted closet gay boyfriend BB (a great reverse image of Fire Island, where Cindy and BB appeared to us as wholesome teens). But after hearing of Robert Kennedy's death, Cindy freaks out and realizes she's wasting her life. She runs away from BB and his sordid life and vows to never prositute herself again. She finds herself in the artistic caul of downtown NYC, hanging out with artists and revolutionairies. Her closest friend here is Rafe, a strikingly handsome gay dude who serves throughout the novel as Cindy's surrogate brother/asexual lover.

After a brief lesbian fling with a female artist, Cindy hooks up with a young radical and goes with him and his pals to the Chicago Democratic convention. Anyone who knows their US history can suspect what's in store for her: after endless pages of hippie prattle, Cindy finds herself chased through the streets of Chicago by rabid cops who smash in hippie skulls with glee. Traumatized yet again by these events (Cindy is traumatized at least a dozen times in the novel), Cindy goes back to her home in New York where she convinces her mother to send her off to Europe.

Here the novel becomes a true picaresque. Over the course of a few hundred pages, Cindy goes from party-hopping with a pair of mod "birds" in London, where she falls in love with a deathly ill scion, to living in Paris with a French revolutionary who involves Cindy in the kidnapping of a former Nazi, to assisting Rafe (who pops in and out of the narrative with a complete disregard for deus ex machina) as an assistant photographer for a magazine pictorial on a big-budget Hollywood movie filming in Spain, where Cindy finds herself the sexual goal of the two male stars.

Yes, all of this really happens. It's like five books in one, and the depressing thing is that none of the segments have anything to do with each other. When Cindy finally returns to New York City around page 400 of this 515-page book, I realized with dismay that you could cut out the entire 300-page trip to Europe and it wouldn't make a difference. Cindy is unchanged by the events she endured, still as dumb and bland and naive as ever.

So, as usual, I have a theory. Before striking it big with Fire Island, Hirschfeld published a handful of novels under the name "Hugh Barron." These were moreso trash fiction than Fire Island, usually involving Hollywood harlots or depraved businessmen looking for new kicks. My suspicion is that the entire "Europe section" of Cindy On Fire is composed of material Hirschfeld planned to use for his Hugh Barron novels. I mean, what's more "trash fiction" than a group of French radicals kidnapping a former Nazi? But upon realizing that he could have a nice career publishing less trashy stuff under his own name, he just shoehorned this material into a quick and dirty sequel to Fire Island.

The problem is, the novel wants to be trashy but refuses to go all the way. Cindy is a bland and stupid character, never learning from her mistakes and living in a world of eternal naivete. She comes off like the protagonist of an R-rated Romance comic. And despite the cover blurb that Cindy is "a passionate young girl making all the scenes," Cindy throughout the novel is only searching for "true love;" she isn't some jet-setting nympho looking for the latest wild scene. Indeed, she runs from a few orgies in the novel -- and I'm not kidding, she actually runs from them. She goes to acid-drenched parties, strip clubs, meets all sorts of people who actually enjoy the ribald world in which they live, but Cindy herself pines and mopes her way through the novel, eternally picking one wrong guy after the next.

And the male characters on display are even worse, as impossible as that may sound. Each guy Cindy meets is a motormouthed asshole, going on and on about how great they are, how terrible the world is, and how they're going to change it. The French radicals are the worst. I can't tell you how numbing it is to read a hundred or so pages of one French revolutionary after another delivering endless banal speeches -- and they all sound the same! You could say this was Hirschfeld's commentary on the drone-like minds of the '60s radical set, but seriously, I could've picked up on the satire in about 10 pages or so. Every one of these guys is loathsome and despicable; at the top of the list would have to be Henri, the radical film-maker who blathers about "true art" for countless pages. It all drove me to drink.

The Hollywood film section in Spain is mildly better, but again it has nothing to do with the preceeding adventures. Adding further fuel to my theory is that Alain, the French radical who brought Cindy along on the Nazi-kidnapping scheme, here transforms into a fame-obsessed wanna-be actor, with no further mention of the revolutionary fervor which so consumed him in previous pages. It's as if Hirschfeld has made two separate characters into one. But the promise of an old-fashioned '60s/'70s Hollywood-sex trash fiction epic is denied as Cindy again buzzkills it for us; she falls of course for the meanest guy in the pack, a black American footballer who spends countless pages going on about being black in America. The novel, really, is just one speech after another, and it wears down your soul. But all of the speeches are so tiresomely dated. It's like the novel should've been published with an expiration date.

But then something magical happens. Around page 400 Cindy returns to New York and, after a few boring chapters of Cindy again resorting to a depression of pills and booze, traipsing from one 42nd Street grindhouse to another, it's as if Hirschfeld suddenly remembers who he is. For here he gives us some pure trash -- and if my theory is true then this section for sure was once a "Hugh Barron" novel-to-be. Cindy meets Adam Gilbert, a successful rock producer who throws orgies in his mansion and flies from one "recording crisis" to another. Cindy of course falls madly in love with the guy, but again here's another man who treats her like shit. Gilbert refuses to sleep with Cindy, and after she throws herself at him, begging, he orders her to pleasure him orally. For it turns out that this is all he wants her for, to make Cindy his "private sucking machine." And she goes for it, a willing slave, waiting for his command to drop to her knees at any time or place to blow him. Now that's trash fiction!!

It gets even trashier, too, and in a grand way: after ignoring Cindy for weeks, sleeping with various singers and movie queens, Gilbert finally has enough of Cindy's implorements for sex. "You want to get laid," he tells her. "Well, that's what you're going to get." After drugging her with some spiked booze, Gilbert plants Cindy in a sideroom and sends in four men who each have their way with her, one after another.

Cindy awakens to find herself in Bellevue, where she's been committed as a mental patient. After some banal parlaying with her shrink, she's discharged and lives again with her mother and stepfather. Bored with her meaningless existence, Cindy again plummets into a booze-and-pills depression, eventually becoming a world-class Easy Lay, sleeping with a succession of men. After a bizarre sequence where a guy on the street masturbates on her, Cindy breaks down yet again -- only a few pages after her previous breakdown! But this one finally has an effect on our girl's limited brainspan. And so, in the final pages of this endless novel, Cindy smartens up. She realizes she never has left the prostitution game, after all.

Throughout the novel Cindy has been courted by David Altman, a geeky guy her age who aspires to be a society-improving lawyer. Again, the bad Romance comic similarities -- Hirschfeld tries to "shock" us with this, as Cindy berates Altman when she first meets him in the opening pages, scoffing his advances, never responding to the letters he sends her during her European quest. But we all know where it's going. For, just like in those maudlin old comics like Teen Romance or Our Love Story, wholesome values prevail, and Cindy finds TRUE LOVE once and for all, in the last place she'd expect (the last place she would expect, that is...the girl's an idiot, you see).

Hirschfeld tied up this loose trilogy the following year with Fire In The Embers; this one featured Mike Birns, Hirschfeld's ostensible stand-in, and one of the main characters in Fire Island. Like Hirschfeld himself, Birns is a trash fiction author looking to publish "real novels" under his own name. I have Fire In The Embers but I've never finished it; rather than focusing on Birns's writing life it's about his gambling addiction. What's more boring to read about than gambling? And, like Cindy On Fire, it's too long for it's own good, coming it at nearly 600 pages. Several years later, in 1984, Hirschfeld capped the series with Return To Fire Island, another one I have but haven't read -- it appears to be about Cindy's old boyfriend BB.

Despite my qualms with Cindy On Fire, I still recommend Burt Hirschfeld's work -- there's something about his writing I find very appealing. He has a way to pull you into his narrative, to make his characters seem real. He's a definite craftsman and it's a shame he's been forgotten. But he left behind a huge body of work, one that's ripe for rediscovery.

Fire Island: Glorious '70s Trash

Fire Island, by Burt Hirschfeld

Avon Books, 1970

That novel, at last!

So proclaims the cover of one of the many mass market paperback incarnations of Burt Hirschfeld's now-forgotten 1970 blockbuster Fire Island. And that blurb isn't far off the mark; this is a true piece of Glorious Trash, a novel so designed to capitalize on the take-a-novel-to-the-beach market that it's actually about people going to the beach.

For a brief time last year I was obsessed with Burt Hirschfeld. I discovered him via the usual means; happening across one of his novels (Cindy On Fire, an indirect sequel to Fire Island) in the paperback section of a used bookstore. I bought the book because it promised all sorts of sordid fun: drugs, psychedelia, sex. (These are the things I demand in my trash fiction.) I looked up this author whom I'd never before heard of, only to discover that he'd published a plethora of novels over the years, all of them paperback originals, all of them steamy soap-operatic tales of beautiful people in beautiful places having beautiful sex. I also discovered that Fire Island was his first hit; before that he'd churned out a whole 'nother plethora of novels, these ones even trashier tales about jet-setting sex-maniacs which he published under the psuedonym Hugh Barron.

This is where the obsession kicked in, because the Barron titles were first released in the UK, under the wonderful New English Library banner. All were sex-and-drugs-filled tales with nude or mostly-nude women on the cover; I had to have them all!

One day I'll cover the Barron books, but today I'll start with Fire Island. It appears that after a somewhat-successful career churning out trash, Hirschfeld thought he'd strike out for the big leagues. Harold Robbins novels were all the rage, so Hirschfeld followed suit; take The Carpet-Baggers, set it in the late '60s, and place it in the New York island getaway of Fire Island, and you have this novel...er, Fire Island. Whereas the books he published under his Barron psuedonym traded on lurid plots or themes, this novel would be themeless; instead, it's a slice of life story of several friends who over the years vacation together in a beach-house on Fire Island. It spans the years, focusing on a large cast of intertwining characters, detailing their soap opera lives, their rises and falls, their trials and tribulations. And it is very, very good.

So what happened to Hirschfeld? Sorry to say, but I think he's dead. He published a steady flow of novels on through the '80s and early '90s; the last novel I can find published under his name is Daybreak, from 1992. Given his steady rate of output previous to this, I can't buy it that he ran out of ideas or retired from writing. The only answer is that he passed away. What's saddest about this is that no one seems to care; search online for Hirschfeld and, though you'll find plenty of sites which list his countless books for sale, you'll hardly find a review (or even a plot) for any of them, even Fire Island. And indeed, those reviews that you will find for his books are usually negative, because the reviewers just don't get Glorious Trash, man.

But you and I do. And I'm telling you, Burt Hirschfeld is in a class of trash fiction all his own. Find him. Read him.