The Fate Of The Phoenix

The Fate Of The Phoenix, by Sondra Marshak and Myrna Culbreath

May, 1979  Bantam Books

Way back in January of 2013 I read The Price Of The Phoenix, an ultra-weird Star Trek novel that introduced me to what is called “slash fiction,” that fan-fiction conceit in which homosexual relations are strongly implied – or downright depicted – between two male characters, in this case Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock. Why anyone would want to do such a thing is of course the mystery – I guess these original “shippers” just overlooked the fact that Kirk banged practically every space babe he encountered in the original TV series – but regardless, The Fate Of The Phoenix is the continuation of the story, and is just as reviled by modern-day Trek readers. Indeed, one is hard-pressed to find a positive review of either book. 

But here’s the crazy thing – I kind of liked this one! The first half, at least, which reminded me of Leigh Brackett more than Star Trek, concerning as it did a sort of fantasy-feudal world with masked Romulans wearing chain mail and wielding swords. But a big difference is that Brackett’s was a very masculine fiction, her protagonists most always men; Marshak and Culbreath are feminists, and throughout The Fate of The Phoenix they once again relish in stamping out the “toxic masculinity” of the TV show they claim to love. 

In that way the two women were ahead of the curve. In our post-modern era, in which “empowered women” like Kathleen Kennedy et al have taken the reigns of previously male-dominated properties and sucked the life out of them – removing all toxic masculinity, empowering all women…and, not-so-coincidentally, losing money and tanking the properties in the process – it is very evident that Marshak and Culbreath were doing the very same thing with Star Trek. 

Throughout this book, Captain Kirk – that “alpha male” of the series (the term isn’t as used as much in this book as the previous one, by the way) – is constantly shown as weak, or it’s hammered home that Spock is so much stronger than Kirk…or even how the clone of Kirk, introduced in The Price Of The Phoenix and now named simply “James,” could literally be crushed in the arms of the Romulan Commander, ie that somewhat-sexy female Romulan introduced in the TV series and who also appeared in the previous book. There are many scenes of Kirk (both of them) being knocked out, carried around in the arms of these Vulcans or Romulans, as weak as a kitten…again and again Kirk’s power is diminished so that the non-caucasian male characters can shine. 

Yes, for with even more prescience Marshak and Culbreath’s “toxic masculinity deconstruction” only extends to white males; just as black men and Muslim men are never demeaned nor criticized by the progressivist AWFLs of today (which occasionally leads to some humorous developments), so too is Spock safe from the “toxic male” tag…he’s the Star Trek version of a protected class, I guess. Sure he’s strong and smart and all, and also he’s straight, but he’s not a white male, you see – not a white human male – so our authors do not place their critical lens on him. 

No, as with the previous novel, The Fate Of The Phoenix seems to delight in inverting the charisma and strength that William Shatner brought to Captain Kirk…there is even a part toward the end where Kirk gets amnesia, and he’s fawning over the returning villain of the piece, Omne, basically acting like a loyal little lapdog as he follows him around on some planet, looking to Omne to make all the decisions and etc. Again, the prescience is off the charts…it’s a wonder these authors didn’t come up with some ultra-powerful Mary Sue female character a la Captain Marvel to inject into the toxically masculine Star Trek universe – but then again, they actually did do that, in 1983’s Triangle. 

What makes this all so strange is that Marshak and Culbreath claim in Jeff Ayers’ Voyages Of Imagination that none other than William Shatner himself loved The Price Of The Phoenix (and perhaps this sequel, they don’t really specify), and indeed they even go so far as to claim that, shortly before Star Trek: The Motion Picture got underway, Shatner told them he’d pushed Gene Roddenberry to use the Phoenix books as the plot for the movie(!). 

Of course, in Voyages of the Imagination the authors do not reveal that they’d also written a biography with Shatner around that time – Where No Man, which I picked up years ago and keep meaning to read – so I’m sure that had to play into it a bit…also, according to the About the Authors page at the end of The Fate Of The Phoenix, Marshak and Culbreath were working with Shatner on a non-Star Trek sci-fi project, which never came to pass…all of which is to say, perhaps Shatner had a vested interest in promoting their work. And also let’s face it, he was probably eager to get two roles in a film based on the Phoenix novels, playing two versions of Kirk…just like he had years before in White Comanche, which I once had on VHS and I’d get drunk and watch it and just laugh and laugh…really, why hasn’t that movie been better discovered today? 

Well anyway, the two novels are basically one; The Fate Of The Phoenix opens immediately after the end of The Price Of The Phoenix. So then, Omne returns, aka Omne the Black, aka Omnedon. The guy who died twice in the previous book, but we’ll recall the “Phoenix” is Omne’s invention, a sort of transporter that captures a soul and can make a duplicate out of it. In The Price Of The Phoenix, “James” was created, a perfect duplicate of Kirk. But Omne himself was killed, and we learn at the start of The Fate Of The Phoenix that Omne has duplicated himself…and also, since they had a duplicate Kirk in the previous book, this time the authors introduce a duplicate Spock, pretentiously referred to throughout as “The Other.” 

“Pretentious” is a fitting description of the writing style; there is a tendency to pad the pages with a lot of words, words that don’t say very much. Characters speak in obfuscations or riddles and there were a lot of times that I had no idea what was going on. Humorously, Marshak and Culbreath seem to understand this, as throughout the novel we will have periodic recaps of what has happened; seriously, characters will either remind themselves of what has happened so far in the narrative or some other character will come along and they’ll tell this person such and such happened, and it’s almost like the authors understood that their own book was practically impossible to follow. 

And while the slash fiction weirdness is mostly toned down for this sequel, the fan-fiction roots remain; once again only Kirk and Spock matter, the rest of the characters from the Enterprise not even really appearing. McCoy has one or two lines, and I think Scotty might as well, but otherwise the authors only focus on Kirk and Spock…and once again practically the entire universe knows about them, as if they were the stars of a TV show even in their own fictional world. 

But the opening is kind of cool, if for no other reason than the authors leave the regular characters alone. It features the Romulan Commander, with James in tow – and, picking up from the finale of the previous book, he’s been surgically augmented to look like a Romulan – taking care of a potential rebellion on some Romulan-owned world or something. It’s all very Amok Time, with pointy-eared Romulans in armor and this warrior-woman who has her own male consort, and there’s a lot of intended hanky-panky between the two women and two men. 

Indeed, the authors let us know in no uncertain terms that the Romulan Commander and James have been getting it on; there’s even a ridiculous bit where the Commander comes in on James when he’s gotten out of the shower and the authors note how only a towel covers him, which of course made me think of that time in Who’s The Boss when Tony Danza walked in on that blonde chick in the shower. More prescience, people!! 

Anyway, this will be it for the hanky-panky, and as you’ll note it is directed toward the male character (despite being feminists I assume the two authors are still attracted to men), so admittedly it wasn’t the sort of hanky-panky I look for in my fiction. And besides, it seems that Marshak and Culbreath focused more on this stuff in the aforementioned Triangle. 

But the slash stuff is here, if mainly due to the theme of possession – and I don’t mean in the supernatural horror-thriller sense. No, the gist is that Omne “owns” the first “Phoenix” (ie James, the clone of Kirk), and he keeps trying to claim him as his own…indeed, and spoiler alert, but the novel actually ends with Omne and James alone on a deserted planet, out of touch from the rest of the universe for like fifty-thousand years or something. In other words, an Adam and, uh, Adam sort of situation. 

Like Arsenio Hall would say, “Hmmmm.” I mean folks, if you have a goofy stipulation that you must own your first clone, then by god clone a porn actress or something! 

But it takes a goodly time to get to that finale; indeed, The Fate Of The Phoenix is similar to its predecessor in that it moves slowly and things take forever to happen. A commenter on my review of The Price Of The Phoenix noted that Omne was like Thanos, and that’s true…with the caveat that this is a Thanos that is all bark and no bite. In fact it is even specified in this novel that Omne never kills anyone, and he spends the entire novel making veiled threats and insinuations; but have no fear, we are assured again and again that he can tear Kirk apart and crush his limbs with absolutely no problem whatsoever. That weak little kitten Kirk; he couldn’t harm a fly! 

Oh and Marshak and Culbreath have this super bizarre viewpoint that I guess ties back to the “alpha male” bullshit of the previous book; so basically, we learn here that Omne has this huge grudge against Kirk because Kirk didn’t bow his head to Omne when they met! I mean, the entire thrust of the two-volume scenario is that Omne was not given his proper due, and he’s mad as hell about it, and there’s this simmering grudge between the two…and even I, a guy who to this day still has not seen every episode of the original TV series, even I am familiar with at least a few episodes where Kirk got on his knees, or showed proper deference to some alien king or whatnot (even if Kirk was just feigning it), so I kept wondering to myself what show these two “Star Trek experts” were even watching. 

So there’s this ridiculous bit where as mentioned Kirk has amnesia, and he bows his head to Omne, and this “touches Omne more than he thought it might,” and it’s just weird. Now that I think of it, the slash fiction shit didn’t go away; the authors just changed it from Kirk and Spock to Kirk and Omne, with “James” added in to make it a veritable three-way. 

But the opening is at least cool…we have not one but two Romulan babes: the Commander and the Doyen, a warrior-woman in armor who very much seems like a creation of the TV show; you could totally see a character like her in some third-season episode in a Rodenberry-approved revealing costume…something else that has been gutted from the franchise, or correct me if I’m wrong and there are scantily-clad space-babes in that “vintage-inspired” Star Trek: Strange New Worlds bullshit? 

The warrior-woman’s male consort also has a memorable costume that would’ve looked cool on the show: a cape and half-mask, which is how James dresses when he’s in public with the Commander. That is the two of them, by the way, James and the Commander, on the cover (courtesy Bob Larkin) – though we certainly are not informed that the Commander wears any such cleavage-baring outfit in the novel itself! 

Things derail when Omne returns and the empty boasting ensues – I mean things derail both for the characters and for the reader. And now there are two Omnes: the regular one and the Other, ie the Spock clone, who is supposedly the “more evil” version of Omne, not that you’d really guess it. Really the book is a lot of talk, a lot of speculation, a lot of internal turmoil and stressing out over things that the actual characters of the show wouldn’t even concern themselves with. 

As for action…there isn’t much. I think The Price Of The Phoenix actually had more. Kirk gets in a few fights with Omne (getting his ass handed to him, of course), and there’s one part where someone shoots a phaser (I think), but this is not an action-heavy novel at any means; it is even more probing and talky than the average episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. 

But at the same time, I kinda dug the ‘70s weirdness of it all. It’s for this reason that I suspect I will always be more interested in the 1970s Star Trek paperbacks by Bantam than the ‘80s ones by Pocket, as the former were just stranger, more off the beaten path…and were not at the mercy of Rodenberry and his arbiter of Star Trek continuity. That said, also according to Voyages of Imagination, Roddenberry did review The Fate Of The Phoenix, and his only stipulation was that there could not be two Kirks in the universe, hence the authors sending James to that impossible-to-reach planet with Omne at the end. 

As mentioned neither Phoenix novel is much regaled these days – seriously, just do a Google search and take a look at the scathing reviews – but they did well enough at the time that Marshak and Culbreath were able to write two more novels for Pocket: 1982’s The Prometheus Design and 1983’s Triangle. 

I’ve been on a bit of a Star Trek kick lately, mainly through watching the animated series every Saturday night on MeTV Toons, followed by the second half of the original-series episode over on MeTV (I don’t know why they don’t just program the shows so that the animated series is on first and the original series on next), so I’ve been in the mood for some vintage Star Trek fiction – and as ever I am only interested in the original crew/cast. 

As I mentioned in my review of The Price Of The Phoenix, a good thing about being interested in Star Trek fiction is that so much of it is available…and for cheap! One thing that has not changed since 2013 (when I last decided to pick up some Star Trek novels) is that used bookstores still stock tons and tons of Star Trek books, and unlike vintage men’s adventure novels and whatnot, they’re actually half-price! Just this past weekend I went to three different Half Price bookstores in the Dallas area and found all of the Star Trek novels I was interested in reading, and they only cost me a little over a dollar each. 

And being the glutton for punishment I am, I bought both of the Marshak and Culbreath novels for Pocket Books, and the next Star Trek novel I plan to read is…Triangle! Based on a quick flip-through it looks like the authors toned down on the slash kink and brought in a bit more of a standard kink, in the guise of a hotstuff alien chick called Sola Thane who manages to bang both Kirk and Spock (not at the same time). So hopefully – hopefully! – that one will be quicker-moving than The Price Of The Phoenix and The Fate Of The Phoenix.

Snowball In Hell (Dennison’s War #6)

Snowball In Hell, by Adam Lassiter

November, 1986  Bantam Books

It’s not a very auspicious end for the short-lived Dennison’s War; this final volume is more evidence that Steven “Adam Lassiter” Krauzer was attempting something other than the typical “mercs versus terrorists and/or KGB” storylines in the 1980s men’s adventure marketplace…but unfortunately the story is tepid, the writing is overdone, and there are annoying authorial quirks throughout. 

To recap, Dennison’s War is an unusual men’s adventure series in that it does not feature the same person or groups of people each volume. Krauzer introduces a concept that the titular Dennison is more like Charlie in Charlie’s Angels, and instead of Angels he has a bunch of hardbitten commando types at his disposal…the ex-mobster, the tough cop chick, etc. So each volume he sends out the operative he deems best suited for the mission at hand, meaning that there was no real consistency to the series. One volume might be about one guy, the next about another, etc. 

This volume features Conte, the ex-mobster, who featured in the earlier Conte’s Run (which I do not have). But Snowball In Hell also features…Dennison himself, as if Krauzer realized he should have the titular character doing something other than bossing people around. That something is taking care of the hit the Mafia has put on Conte for leaving the mob. 

Dennison is described as a forty-something former spook who started up his own operation ten years ago; he is slight of stature and has an easy-going smile, but we are to understand he’s a badass. However, the way the novel pans out, it’s actually Dennison’s hotstuff assistant, Miss Paradise, who does all the bad-assery. The only problem is, Krauzer manages to make her come off like a prototype AWFL, constantly mocking everyone, bullying everyone, and taunting people…the people who actually work for Dennison! I’m not sure what Krauzer was going for, but somehow he manages to make Miss Paradise thoroughly unlikable. 

And, more damningly, he makes Conte seem like a whimp. First of all, the dude has to be convinced by Dennison to take the job, then he worries about the danger, and then he goes through the book either getting captured or getting beaten up. Admittedly, he occasionally hits people with a “leather sap” he carries around, but this dude is nowhere near the upper echelon of 1980s men’s adventure heroes. 

As for the job, it takes place in Snowball Springs, somewhere in the Ozarks (Krauzer is not specific): a hayseed town that has been taken over by the duplicitous Bert Dolly. Oh, friends, be prepared to know that name well if you ever read Snowball In Hell. Krauzer writes “Bert Dolly” every single time the character appears or is mentioned. 

And not just him! Casey Weathers, Tommy Chin, and others besides – every time these minor characters are mentioned in the text, whether it be dialog or narrative, their full names are given; the annoying authorial quirk I mentioned. I mean, I know these men’s adventure novels were under the radar, but surely some editor at Bantam could’ve been bothered to tell Krauzer to knock it off? 

But then, Krauzer’s writing is so flowery and overcooked that he constantly stalls forward momentum. I had bad flashbacks to Stark; there is too much of a focus on word painting, and while that’s all well and good, it’s just the wrong genre for it. Especially given that so much focus is given to scenery description and character introspection that when the actual action happens, it’s rushed – and very bloodless. 

The story is essentially Buck Town: Casey Weathers, the towering ex-military girl from hayseed Snowball Springs who has become the local deputy, hires Dennison to help her take down Bert Dolly, a mobster who has taken over town and turned it over to the thieves. Meanwhile the real mob is moving in, so Dennison decides to send Conte, the former mobster, to pose as a mobster, and hopefully start a war between Dolly and the mob. 

A convoluted setup for sure, but really Conte just spends his time trading barbs with Dolly and his redneck thugs…or dodging their infrequent attacks on him. Meanwhile Dennison and Miss Paradise track down the New York mobster behind the hit, looking to lean on him and get the contract on Conte removed. 

I was not very entertained by the novel at all. It was slow and ponderous, and Krauzer seemed embarrassed by the stuff people want from the genre. When Conte and Casey have their expected conjugation, it happens so far off-page that I wasn’t even sure anything did happen. As for the action…Conte doesn’t even make his first kill until page 93, and after that we’re treated to an endless bit of exposition as he tells Casey about his past. 

Even the stuff with Dennison isn’t much fun; it mostly concerns them kidnapping a mobster and threatening him with torture (something Dennison hates but Miss Paradise takes to naturally). It’s all just kind of tepid and it comes off as if Krauzer has lost interest. Even the finale, with Conte and Casey getting into it with Bert Dolly’s men and some mobsters, lacks much spark, and could’ve been the climax of an average A-Team episode. 

As I mentioned in my review of the similarly-underwhelming Hell On Wheels (and the heroine of that one, by the way, isn’t even mentioned in this one), Krauzer also wrote a seventh volume of the series (title unknown), but it went unpublished. Snowball In Hell leaves little wonder why.  It is clear Bantam was cutting back on it; this volume does not feature a foldout cover, as the previous ones did.  I was heavily into men’s adventure novels in 1986 – I’d just discovered them the year before – and I was not aware of Dennison’s War at the time. So this is one instance where I can attest that the series wasn’t even well-received in the era it was published.

The Nature Of The Beast

The Nature Of The Beast, by Peter Menegas

December, 1975  Bantam Books

This horror PBO was clearly intended to be the next big thing – cue back cover comparisons to The Exorcist and whatnot – but The Nature Of The Beast was clearly a dud, going on to obscurity; I only learned about it when randomly coming across the cover online. 

Will at Too Much Horror Fiction reviewed this one many years ago, and he did not like it at all, but in one of my contrary moods I decided to seek the book out anyway and give it a shot. “Surely it can’t be that bad,” I foolishly thought…and then just as foolishly I attempted to read the book. 

No; it’s bad. It is very bad. Author Peter Menegas makes one poor decision after another, and The Nature Of The Beast soon becomes a tiring and trying chore of a read, and I can only agree with Will that the best thing about the book is, by far, the cover. 

However, unlike Will I was actually foolish enough to read the entire book! He wisely gave it up midway through. Like I said, I was in a contrary mood, even if it was my own best interests I was, uh, contrarying. At least the book was fairly short, coming in at 240 pages. 

If you are a cat lover in particular I would advise you steer clear of The Nature Of The Beast. The novel opens with the protagonist, Dee Dee Burke, discovering a crucified cat corpse in her NYC penthouse, and as the novel progresses more of the poor critters will be gutted and nailed to a cross. 

And yes, that’s the name of the book’s hero: Dee Dee. Clue number one that this book’s going to suck. Self-described as a “Vogue mother,” Dee Dee is insufferable, a decades-early version of an AWFL. But then unlikable protagonists seems to be common in horror fiction, so maybe author Peneter Menegas did not intend for us to root for her. He does however expect our imaginations to do all the heavy lifting, as the most description we get about Dee Dee is that she is, apparently, pretty, and that she has “dark and straight hair.” There is zero in the way of exploitation in the novel, and in fact I think the word “breasts” doesn’t even appear once – resulting of course in a heaping helping of demerits. 

At any rate, Dee Dee has two punk kids: Alun, 8, and Terry, 6. And yes, it’s “Alun” with a “u,” but anyway the two kids talk like they’re decades older (or maybe my own 8-year-old is just WAY underdeveloped in the speech department), and weird enough they’ve lately taken to talking about weird visions and whatnot, and sticking to themselves. 

New York City isn’t much brought to life, as Dee Dee is a “going to the salon for the afternoon” type of wealthy mother and about the most we get are vague mentions of “Puerto Rican kids” who have come from uptown and are stirring up trouble. But we aren’t in New York for long; Dee Dee’s husband, a disaffected business bigwig who is so immaterial to the plot that I didn’t even bother to write his name down in my notes, announces that the family is moving to England for his job. 

Menegas slowly plays up the “horror stuff” with the gradual revelation that Alun and Terry’s prophecies are coming true…for example, in New York they say something about seeing animals from their bedroom window, and then that night Dee Dee finds out the family is moving to England, and then they go to England and have to get a temporary house in London, and it just so happens that Alun’s and Terry’s bedroom happens to face a public park that has a zoo in it. Hence, they’re seeing animals from their bedroom, just like they said they would in New York. 

Only, all this is so slowly developed that it lacks any impact or urgency. Dee Dee has to explain it all to her dimwitted husband, and even she can barely grasp the import. Oh, and meanwhile the sitter they hire claims that the two kids killed and crucified a cat right before her terrified eyes, and she’ll no longer be working for the Burkes, thank you very much. Even here Dee Dee refuses to believe it’s true…I mean just on and on with the lameness. 

It gets even lamer with Mr. Tregeagle, the portly and prancing (if you get my drift) owner of a local antiques store. Yes, friends, many scenes of Dee Dee going to the antique store: the horror! Of course it eventually becomes clear that there is an evil luring behind the portly shop owner’s smile, particularly when he learns that Dee Dee’s mother was a minor poet of cult fame who turned out epics based on Celtic myth. I mean first he names his heroine “Dee Dee,” and then he makes the main villain a fat gay guy who owns an antique store – either Peter Menegas had no idea what he was doing, or maybe he intended it all as a spoof, who knows. 

More cats are killed, more antiques are bought. The knives come out when Tregeagle invites Dee Dee to a country manor where his fellow cultists congregate for the weekend, featuring portly Brits in robes trying to sacrifice animals and whatnot. I should mention here that these cultists are Celts, not Satanists, so again Menegas was attempting something different. Unfortunately, different doesn’t always equal good. 

And I mean “the knives come out” only in the figurative sense, as really Tregeagle just gets incredibly bitchy with Dee Dee, who goes back home to her disaffected husband and wonders if her two brat kids really are mutilating and crucifying cats. But having wasted so many pages, Menegas finally decides to get far out on the horror front in the final quarter. 

In what could be a delirium or a descent into madness or even a real, actual meeting of the supernatural, Dee Dee finds her punk kids missing and goes running for them, out to the beach (at this point they’ve moved to some estate in Cornwall, which per the annoying English tradition is given its own pretentious name), and as she runs her teeth start falling out and she looks like a hag(!?). 

As if that weren’t enough, she has an encounter with a deer-headed man, presumably a god of some sort, and he has his way with Dee Dee on the beach, but Dee Dee slowly begins to enjoy it; Menegas never gets outright sleazy, but the sequence isn’t fade to black, either. After it’s all over the deer-man leaves and Dee Dee comes back to reality, no longer a hag, and with all of her teeth back in her mouth – and her kids are there, too. 

There follows a laugh-out-loud bit where Dee Dee meets with a swami, who explains that the deer-man was likely the Celtic god Cerunnos…but then was it all a dream? Who knows, and who cares. The Nature Of The Beast ends with Dee Dee apparently just as Celtic-attuned as her two sons are (apparently they’ve been chosen by the Celtic gods or some shit due to their linneage, or something)….and the husband’s still as disaffected…and thankfully the novel is over. 

Sometimes it is clear why books are obscure, and why they stay that way. I cannot recommend The Nature Of The Beast, as Peter Menegas makes one poor choice after another – the work of an author trying to write a “horror novel,” but not having any idea how to go about it.

Candlemas Eve

Candlemas Eve, by Jeffrey Sackett

May, 1988  Bantam Books

A few years back I reviewed Mark Of The Werewolf by Jeffrey Sackett; checking my review, it seems I mostly had an issue with what seemed to be Sackett’s overly passive and casual narrative style, which did little to convey any sort of suspense, drama, or tension. Well, friends, it’s almost as if an entirely different Jeffrey Sackett wrote Candlemas Eve, as this earlier novel of his does not suffer from that humdrum writing style, and also features a lot more in the sex and violence departments. 

That said, at nearly 400 pages of small print, the book is still too long for its own good, but that’s common for ‘80s horror paperbacks. And yes, Sackett does dwell on lame stuff too frequently, and also commits the usual “1980s pulp horror novelist” mistake of making his “heroes” incredibly lame losers that you can’t stand and can’t wait to see gutted and sent off to hell, but then maybe that’s intentional. I’m willing to forgive these things, given that Sackett injects a bunch of explicit sexual material in Candlemas Eve, something that was sorely lacking in Mark Of The Werewolf. 

The plot is also more interesting: basically, a down on his luck rocker gets involved with a pair of witches, and fame and fortune ensues. The only problem is, one of the witches has a sort of “fatal attraction” for the rocker, and has a tendency to kill anyone who gets in his way. And then when the rocker turns on her, she really goes batshit crazy. 

The rocker is named Simon Proctor, in his “midforties,” a guy who has managed to barely hang on in the music biz since the ‘60s. Sackett is guilty of misleading the reader in Simon’s intro; Candlemas Eve actually has two fakeout openings. For one, we start off in the 1690s, as a pair of hot whores lure a guy to their place, have super explicit sex with him – complete with the detail of one of them taking his, er, essence in her mouth and then spitting it into a cup – and then the girls slit his throat, mix his blood with his essence, and commit his soul to Satan and whatnot. 

This sequence is more OTT than anything in Mark Of The Werewolf, and we’re only a handful of pages in! Then Sackett pulls back on the camera, as it were, and we discover that all of this is a movie, one that is being broadcast to a live studio audience(!!). I mean seriously, it’s straight-up hardcore, and we’re supposed to believe that not only was it shown to a TV audience, but also the filmmaker, rock star Simon Proctor, sunk a few million bucks into the movie and hopes to make a windfall upon its release in theaters. 

Okay, I know we must suspend belief when it comes to horror fiction, but come on! In what world would an adult movie get a theatrical release and be previewed for a studio audience? Sackett sort of brushes the movie under the narrative carpet – it’s only mentioned sporadically from here on out – but it’s really hard to believe. 

But Sackett commits an even greater sin immediately thereafter. Simon is on this talk show to debate a panel of fellow guests, among them a Tipper Gore type and also an old German guy who is a professor of comparative religion, and this guy mocks Simon’s “silly story” of 17th century witches that cannot be based on fact, despite what Simon insists. And Simon Proctor keeps demanding that he is indeed a witch, descended from a man named John Proctor who was hanged for witchcraft in the Salem Witch Trials of the 1690s. 

But here’s the thing: we readers will soon learn that Simon, who dyes his hair jet black and who paints his face with “ghoulish” makeup and wears pentagrams and whatnot, really is just a fraud, as the professor of religion accuses him of being; Simon does not believe in the devil, or any witch stuff; he’s just doing it for the money, because it’s what “the kids” are into these days. 

This I felt was a big misstep, one that Jeffrey Sackett is unable to get over in the ensuing novel. While it is fine as-is, Candlemas Eve would have been immeasurably superior if Simon Proctor was the character initially presented to us: a stern-faced practicioner of Satanism. But it’s just an act, and Simon will prove to be a total loser: neurotic about his failing fortunes and his growing age. 

It gets even worse: after the talk show, Simon performs for an audience of ten thousand in New York City – which sounds like a lot to me, but we’re to understand it’s nothing compared to the audiences Simon and his band, Witch’s Sabbath, used to pull in. But after the show, Simon wipes off his makeup and drives himself home to New Hampshire, moping all the way. I mean at this point I was wondering what the hell sort of “Rock Novel” I was reading…what self-respecting rocker drives himself home after a gig? 

It gets even worse (again): Not content to just write a rock novel, Sackett also wants to bring in the horror-mandatory “family and kids” aspect, so he can have more drama. Simon lives on the old family inn with his daughter, 16 year-old Rowena, his son, 22 year-old Lucas, and his father, old Floyd. (There’s no wife, and Lucas and Rowena have different mothers, both of whom are long out of the picture.) 

So yes, we also have this family drama dynamic, because in addition to Simon’s kids there’s also Lucas’s girlfriend, Karyn (who is pregnant), and Lucas’s best bud Jeremy, who is the nephew of the local minister and who also carries a torch for Rowena. These will be the characters Jeffrey Sackett focuses on in Candlemas Eve; the members of Simon’s band only appear infrequently in the narrative. 

The character of Floyd is especially hard to take. He’s an old prick who spends the narrative either berating Simon or mocking him, or telling him how disappointed he is in him. This only further serves to make our hero, who is supposed to be a Satanic rocker, seem like a chump. I mean honestly folks, it’s like Frasier, only with Kelsey Grammer replaced by Alice Cooper. 

Things improve greatly with the appearance of Gwendolyn and Adrienne, a pair of young witches who show up one night and tell Simon they’re going to make him a star for Satan. We readers however know these two are something else entirely: the spirits of two witches who were hanged back in the 1690s. One of them – the current Gwendolyn, formerly Abigail in the 17th Century – is in love with John Proctor, Simon Proctor’s ancestor (ie the man who was hanged for witchcraft), and the devil has brought her back to life so that she can be with him again; Simon, we are told, is the spitting image of his ancestor John. 

It all sounds muddled, and really it is, but Sackett does a good job of making it all sensible in the novel itself. The important thing is that Gwendolyn, who is a smokin’ hot brunette with an incredible body, says that Satan will make Simon Proctor a star; there will be no more of the fakery. So she and Adrienne – who is mousy and scrawny – take up their lutes and perform some 17th century tunes, and Simon can’t help but think how good they’d sound if they were rockified, sort of like “the Byrds used to do.” 

I have to give Jeffrey Sackett credit: by not giving a shit about what was going on with rock in the era in which he was writing (ie the late ‘80s), he managed to make Candlemas Eve come off as timeless. Indeed, the only rock groups Sackett mentions in the book are the Byrds, Jethro Tull, and Donovan(!). In other words this novel could just as easily take place in the 1970s; there are no topical ‘80s details, and the revamped Witch’s Sabbath, with the two actual witches Gwendolyn and Adrienne on “amplified lutes,” comes off more like Fleetwood Mac with Satanic overtones than any ‘80s metal band. 

I’m also happy to report that Sackett is a rock novelist who actually describes the music…at least he sort of does. There are several concert sequences, and we’re told that characters will play guitar solos or lute solos, and the lyrics are reprinted throughout…but otherwise it’s not properly conveyed what the music sounds like. We do know that it’s not heavy metal, per se. I think the implication is that it sounds wholly different from anything else going on at the time, and for that reason – not to mention the notoriety Gwendolyn generates – the band becomes a huge success. 

I had a hard time buying this; I mean the hardcore mainstream movie was one thing, but it’s entirely another to think that “the kids” of the late ‘80s (of whom I was one!) would go for the ornate lyrics-cum-poetry that Sackett strings through the novel. The most curious thing is that none of the lyrics rhyme, and there’s no hook to any of the songs; I also got a Comus vibe from how Sackett described Witch’s Sabbath, and Comus was a cult band at best. 

In this regard Candlemas Eve greatly resembles The Armageddon Rag, with Witch’s Sabbath becoming more and more popular as they go along, with the caveat that Sackett doesn’t work in a subplot that they are generating evil in their audience and threatening the status quo. Rather, Candlemas Eve revolves on more of a personal space, with Gwendolyn becoming increasingly evil and controlling and Simon becoming increasingly anxious about her. 

Well, sort of. It’s actually Simon’s daughter, Rowena, who distrusts Gwendolyn. Simon Proctor is more focused on the money and the fame; he’s such a dimwitted “protagonist” that you can’t help but root against him. With her penchant for wearing revealing clothes, proclaiming to all and sundry that she is a Satan-worshipping witch, and also giving Simon blowjobs right in front of his teenaged daughter, Gwendolyn easily steals the novel – and, what’s more, the reader sort of roots for her. Sure, she’s an agent of darkness, and murders several innocent people in the course of the book…but at the same time she died for love, and is reborn for love, and commits herself to Simon Proctor. 

In a way Candlemas Eve is like Bewitched; a mega powerful witch falls in love with a mortal man who doesn’t realize how lucky he has it. Just like Darrin would always shame Sam for using her witchcraft, so too does Simon Proctor constantly tell Gwendolyn that she’s not “really” a witch, that the Devil doesn’t exist, that it’s all fantasy. Yes, folks, it’s another of those horror novels where the characters don’t realize they’re in a horror novel. 

It must be stated that there isn’t much “horror” stuff per se for the majority of the novel. Other than a bit where Simon – this time with Gwendolyn – goes back on that talk show, and Gwendolyn kills the religion professor via witchcraft voodoo (of course people think the guy just had a heart attack, as no one else realizes this is a horror novel, either), Candlemas Eve is more of a rock novel, with Simon and Witch’s Sabbath practicing new songs and taking them on the road. 

As mentioned this time around Sackett doesn’t shirk on the juicy details; being a Satanic witch and all, Gwendolyn isn’t one to stand on ceremony, and gives herself to Simon on the night she meets him. First there’s a humorous bit where she smokes dope with him, uncertain what this “weed” is he’s referring to. Sackett does a good job of showing how out of time Gwendolyn is with the twentieth century, though her awkward, oldstyle English gets to be annoying after a while. Ie, “Know you not” and the like. But anyway, when Simon and Gwendolyn get down, Sackett leaves no juicy stone unturned – a marked difference from Mark Of The Werewolf. Yes, I realize I used “marked” and “Mark” in the same sentence. 

Sadly the sleaze is minimal after this, other than a bravura bit where Rowena, Simon’s killjoy daughter – who despite being a killjoy is always on the road with the band – comes in on an in-progress orgy, with all the Witch’s Sabbath guys banging various babes and her dad getting that aforementioned blowjob from Gwendolyn. Even the pregnant girl, Karyn, is in on the festivities! Sackett shows a dedication to sleaze that I would not have expected; he even opens the novel with a preface stating that readers who frown on sexual explicitness should not read the book!

But otherwise the novel is tame on that regard, and also the frequent cutaways to what really happened in the seventeenth century became obtrusive. I had no interest in Adrienne and was not eager to read about her sad sack life in the 1690s and how she ran afoul of jezebel Abigal, ie the future Gwendolyn. I also kept wondering what happened to the two “actresses” who played Abigail and Mary in the opening sequence of the novel, ie the full hardcore movie based on John Proctor’s life, but as mentioned Sackett sort of drops the movie angle. 

Instead, the focus is on the fame the band has generated, and this really brings in some similarities with The Armageddon Rag. Their audiences become bigger and bigger with each city, the fans really eating up their overly wordy Puritan-era lyrics and songs, praising Satan and whatnot, but if Gwendolyn’s goal was to spread the word of her “Master” through Simon’s music, Sackett drops this subplot, focusing more on Gwendolyn’s growing evilness. 

Now as I’ve said before, I love my hot Satanic chicks. Gwendolyn as presented is the ideal woman: a stacked beauty who is totally devoted to her man and, what’s more, is superhumanly powerful, and will use her superhuman power to protect and empower her man. But dullard Simon doesn’t appreciate this; again, it’s what I call the Bewitched Conundrum. And Gwendolyn is totally fun, other than her penchant for killing ministers, that is. 

She’s surely more fun than Simon’s deadbeat daughter, and she’s more fun than sad sack Adrienne, and she’s a helluva lot more fun than old pisspot Floyd Proctor. Either Sackett had so much fun writing Gwendolyn that he didn’t realize how likable he was making her, or his tongue was in his cheek and he knew exactly what he was doing. 

The horror element slowly creeps in, beginning in the final quarter when Gwendolyn finally tells Simon the truth – that she is the spirit of Abigail, a witch who has been dead for 300 years, and who is currently possessing the body of a modern girl thanks to her master, Satan. You win a no-prize if you guess that Simon doesn’t believe her. What’s more, he’s such a piece of shit that, when Gwendolyn begs to marry him, Simon agrees to go along with it…but secretly plans to just fake it, and also to secretly record it, to add it as a bonus to a video he’s making. Because “the kids” will love it. Now honestly, what kid in 1988 would “love” to see their rockstar idol get married at the end of the video? I mean it’s like if that longform 1990 Danzig video ended with a Satanic wedding ceremony…come on. 

Gwendolyn is truly the villain in the final chapters, as even she can no longer take Simon’s shit and thus vows to kill him – along with all the other Proctors. Sackett again proves his horror credentials by killing off characters the reader would think is safe; the finale is particularly gruesome, with eviscerated zombies shambling around under Gwendolyn’s control, people being turned into flame, and corpses who are invariably possessed by either Satan or by kindly ghosts. 

Given the plot, it’s not surprising that Sackett brings in a religious theme, and Candlemas Eve features a saccharine “you’ve proved the goodness of your soul” finale that isn’t too heavy on the treacle, much to Sackett’s credit. But man, given the people who are bloodily butchered in the finale, you wonder how any of the survivors are going to be able to cope. 

Overall I really enjoyed Candlemas Eve, with the caveat that all of the characters were for the most part unlikable, save for the friggin’ villain. But again, I like my hot Satanic pulp horror chicks, so it was only natural that Gwendolyn would be my favorite character. The novel was much, much better than Mark Of The Werewolf, and I’d recommend it if you are in the mood for some horror reading this Halloween season. 

That said, thanks to my son I myself am in a horror mood – he’s been bitten hard by the Halloween bug – so I’ll have more horror reviews up this month.

Raga Six (Doctor Orient #2)

Raga Six, by Frank Lauria

December, 1972  Bantam Books

The second volume of Doctor Orient picks up some time after the events of the first volume; indeed, it appears that a whole novel’s worth of stuff has occurred in the interim. When last we saw him, Dr. Owen Orient was taking down a Satanic cult in New York City, in between meditation sessions with his colleagues in his swank, three-floor townhome. But here in Raga Six, author Frank Lauria dispenses entirely with the setup of that first volume. 

But as mentioned, Orient has had another adventure since we last saw him; working with another doctor, one named Ferrari, Orient apparently cured the Vice President’s daughter of her lifelong paralysis of the legs and the girl can now walk again. But this is only infrequently mentioned in the narrative or in dialog; it all has happened after Doctor Orient ended and before Raga Six begins. Humorously, this material – which was never even covered in the first novel – is brought up more often than the actual plot of the first volume. In fact the events of Doctor Orient are only referred to once, in passing. 

The bigger focus here is that Dr. Orient has decided to let go of all of his worldly trappings: the three-floor home, the deluxe antique car, etc. Wanting to get back in touch with the world, Orient dispenses of all his wealth, as well as his retinue. In the previous book I remarked that there was certainly the vibe of a 1930s pulp to this series, with Orient the wealthy occultist leading a Doc Savage-esque team of followers. 

But that setup is now gone; Frank Lauria proves himself fearless of smashing apart what came before and starting anew. Which essentially is the vibe that drives this second volume of the series. I should note however that Dr. Owen Orient is not a driven protagonist, particularly not in this installment: his focus is more on “following his fate” and taking it one day at a time, with no exact goal or objective that he is working toward. 

This certainly lends Raga Six a laissez-faire vibe so far ast the plotting goes. After reading mostly men’s adventure novels for the past several years, it was a bit hard for me to adapt to a protagonist who was not driven to save people, or to get revenge, or who had some other goal he was working steadfastly to achieve; Owen Orient is driftless and aimless, and this extends to how the novel plays out. 

For example, even when he encounters evil, Orient is not driven to stop it. Like early in the book, he comes across a Satanic cult that operates out of the Lower East Side. Instead of smashing it, like your average men’s adventure protagonist would, Orient instead bides his time to figure out what is going on, and only gradually decides to perform an exorcism to save the two people who have been possessed by a demon. So yes, he does save these people, but what I mean to say is that he is not driven to do so; it takes him a while to figure out what is going on, mostly because Orient once again seems curiously incapable of noticing signs of the supernatural, a plot contrivance that stymied him in the first book. 

In a way Raga Six can almost be read as a standalone. Most of the characters who were so important in Doctor Orient aren’t even in this followup, and Orient himself is a different man. And as mentioned Lauria does not refer back to that previous book. Orient walks away from everything, and on a whim heads to the Lower East Side. It’s been five years since I read the first book, but I recall it did a phenomenal job of capturing all the details of the Groovy Age, complete with a psychedelic nightclub in Manhattan. 

In Raga Six, however, the Groovy Age is replaced by the Hippie Age; Orient, in his early 30s, spends the first quarter of the novel in the company of a group of Lower East Side hippies. Lauria really takes his time with the narrative – it runs to 277 pages of small, dense print, and is not a quick read by any means – and allows these characters to breathe. In many ways Raga Six has more in common with the low-simmer potboilers of Burt Hirschfeld and other contemporary popular authors than it does with horror; this is not a fast-moving horror tale in the least. 

While he might not be the most action-prone series protagonist, Dr. Orient still at least gets laid. This is courtesy Moon Girl, a sexy hippie chick Orient encounters during an East Side music festival that quickly devolves into a riot, with cops tear-gassing the hippies who refuse to leave the area. Curiously, Lauria makes it clear that the hippies are the ones who start the riot, refusing to comply with the police and then throwing things at them. I found this quite prescient in our post-“summer of mostly peaceful but fiery protests” world. 

Moon Girl has a five-year-old son named Julian, and soon enough the two are living with Orient. This seems to set up an entirely new cast for the series, but Lauria will change his mind and drop both Moon Girl and Julian for the majority of the text. More focus is placed on Cowboy, a drug dealer who puts Orient to work, having him manage the various deals and payoff schemes and whatnot. As mentioned, the plotting here would be more at home in a piece of hippie lit than a book with “horror” labelled on its spine. 

Through Moon Girl, Orient finds out about a strange group operating out of a storefront on the East Side. Moon Girl has a friend who has been acting weird lately, and Orient goes to visit her – and gradually suspects she is being inducted into a Satanic cult. He also meets the mysterious man who runs the place, a guy who goes around in a black rubber suit and carries a whip, along with the guy’s wife, a beautiful young woman who during seances will channel the voices of dead people for a paying clientele. 

There follows a great sequence where Orient gains the employ of an acquaintance, a heavyset woman who is famous for giving readings in the city, and the two contrive to perform an excorcism on the possessed husband and wife without their knowing it. Lauria has certainly done his occult rituals homework, and as with the first book, Raga Six is filled to the brim with arcane lore, particularly here where Orient banishes the demon that has possessed these two. 

But here’s the thing – what would have been enough for a single novel is over and done with in a few chapters, and never mentioned again! Instead the wily-nily plotting has it that Orient is soon off on a ten-day voyage via freighter to Tangier(!), sent off by Joker, who for plot-contrivance reasons has flown the coop and left Orient with a ticket for this ocean voyage. And, because he has nothing else to do, Orient just goes along with it. 

It’s quite brazen how Lauria jams so many separate plots together into the novel; soon enough the previous quarter of the novel is immaterial, as everything now focuses on Orient’s fellow passengers on the ship, in particular the mysterious Dr. Aleistar Six and his retinue. Among them is the titular Raga Six, Dr. Six’s wife: a lovely woman with pale skin, yellow eyes, silver hair, and “full breasts.” The latter concession surprised me, as Frank Lauria is not the most exploitative of authors; as with Doctor Orient, lurid and sensational details are minimal, the author going for more of a reserved tenor in his narrative. 

There’s also Pia, a beauty who seems to be a “potential,” meaning she harbors latent psychic abilities. Orient is interested in her, but the overbearing Dr. Six seems to have a firm grip on Pia. Regardless, Dr. Orient enjoys himself a good ol’ three-way; one night Pia calls him telepathically and Orient goes to her, but ends up in bed with both Pia and Raga. Again Lauria does not dwell on the sleaze, instead doling out lines like, “he sunk into her honeyed depths” and whatnot. (For some reason I’m suddenly hungry for Honey Nut Cheerios!) 

There is a great liberal vibe to Raga Six, and of course I mean the traditional definition of “liberal,” in that Orient approaches everything with an open mind and a lack of judgment. I miss liberals like that, don’t you?? So Orient’s three-way with Raga and Pia is just another event in his easy-going, wherever-fate-takes-me life, with no hangups or judgment or condemnation. This extends to Orient’s drug usage, but that is minimal in this volume. We do however get more scenes of Orient and others staring into the tips of their cigarettes as they smoke, something we were told incessantly in the previous book. 

Only gradually does Lauria bring any kind of tension or “horror” into this interminable sea voyage. It’s mostly centered around Dr. Six and his possessive attitude toward Pia. This comes to a head when Orient’s young cabin mate, Presto, runs off with Pia in Tangier, and Six goes off in rage-filled pursuit…and Orient shacks up with Raga for several days. Again we are more in Burt Hirschfeld territory, as Lauria focuses on their growing love and their plans to be together, once Raga divorces Dr. Six. 

Horror material does not return until Six comes back into the narrative and retrieves Raga, a submissive Pia in tow, and off they go to Six’s clinic in Italy. Now as we’ll recall, Orient is in love with Raga Six and knows something strange is going on with her husband. He also suspects some misdeed has happened with his young cabin mate; Dr. Six claims he left Presto in a drug coma in Marrakesh. So Orient goes there to check on him…and ends up spending a month working on his meditation skills and such with a guy there who is one of the Nine Unknown Men, and who trained with Orient’s own master, Ku. 

This is what I mean about the laissez-faire plotting. You’d expect Orient would be gung-ho to find out what the hell was going on with Dr. Six and to claim Raga as his own, but instead the next chapters are all focused on Orient astrally voyaging to find out what happened to Presto, who truly is in a coma, but one that does not seem to be drug induced. 

The plot changes again when Orient finally goes to Italy and hooks up with Sordi, his former chaffeur. A girl in Sordi’s village has come down with a “sleeping sickness,” which of course made me wonder if Stan The Man Lee read this novel and copped the idea for The Virtue Of Vera Valiant. Orient tries to figure out if this could be a supernatural menace, then at great page length tracks down Dr. Six’s clinic – and there’s a rushed action scene as Orient frees Pia and Raga from the now-maniacal Dr. Six. 

Again, a normal novel would end here, but instead Orient receives a telepathic message from one of his students, Argyle, a black American who factored into the previous book and is an actor; he’s in Rome shooting a cowboy movie, and what’s more Moon Girl and her son Julian are with him. Dr. Orient heads there…and learns that little Julian is lost, having disappeared a few days before while they were visiting the Coliseum. 

So what does Orient do? He starts meditating while Raga offers to make sandwiches. It’s kind of impressive how Lauria consistently refrains from injecting any kind of tension or drama into his tale. Instead of freaking out and canvassing the city, Moon Girl is content to wait while Argyle and Orient voyage to the astral plane to see if they can locate her son. There’s even a part where they discover they have more success in the morning, so they decide to break for the rest of the day and start again the next dawn! 

I admit, this leisurely approach to the plot can be a little wearying, especially if one wishes for a more proactive protagonist. Also, it must be mentioned that Orient is very much a master of the metaphysical; the extent of his physical abilities would be meditation, and it’s not like he happens to be a karate master on the side or anything. He’s not tough at all, is what I mean to say, and the finale is especially grating because it consists of Orient sleeping due to the psychic attacks of the monster who turns out to be behind everything. 

Yes, sleeping – Orient spends the final pages either in bed or struggling to keep his eyes open. That is when he isn’t turning on faucets or throwing around salt as banishing rituals to ward off the psychic attacks. It might be “legitimate” so far as the occult stuff goes, but it makes for a very lame “action finale.” Indeed when you visualize what Orient does in the finale – struggling not to sleep, even so lethargic at one point that he passes out while trying to chase a villain into the woods – it becomes quite clear why there was never a Doctor Orient movie. 

I won’t ruin the surprise finale, but it becomes clear who the main villain is, and Orient alone must face this villain. That said, the “thrilling conclusion” is again sort of uninententionally humorous, as it features Orient – again trying not to fall asleep – muttering some words as he stares at a ring on his finger. At least Bantam Books did not market Raga Six as an action thriller, but still. The reader kind of expects a little more. 

The leisurely plotting extends to the final pages, as despite the book ending, Lauria keeps writing, and eventually Orient heads back to New York, where it turns out he still owns his three-floor home. We’re told he spends “months” getting back into the swing of things, working at a hospital and opening up his own practice. Presumably this is all setup for the next volume, Lady Sativa, which came out the following year – and I’ll try to get to it sooner than I got to this second volume. 

Overall I enjoyed Raga Six, appreciating Frank Lauria’s strong writing and his determination to let the characters breathe, but at the same time the lethargic plotting got to be a drag. But then, if you want action with your ‘70s occult sleaze, you’d probably be more happy with the concurrent Mind Masters series (which I think I might read again one of these days).

Var The Stick (Battle Circle #2)

Var The Stick, by Piers Anthony

December, 1973  Bantam Books

I didn’t mean to read this second installment of the Battle Circle trilogy so soon; in fact I meant to post a review of a Sobs novel this week. But I started reading Var The Stick and ended up finishing it first. Piers Anthony continues on with his post-Blast storyline, world-building but at the same time moving away from the post-nuke Iliad vibe of the previous volume. 

It’s curious that the Battle Circle trilogy seemed to resonate more in the UK than here in the US; Var The Stick was first published there in hardcover in 1972, a year before this Bantam paberback original was published in the US. And final installment Neq The Sword (1975) was only published in the UK, not coming out in the US until it’s inclusion in the 1979 collection Battle Circle. 

It’s a year or so after the events of Sos The Rope and everything is essentially status quo; Sos, now known either as “The Master” or “The Weaponless” (and never referred to as “Sos” in the narrative) rules the empire he was supposed to dismantle in the previous book – the empire that was ruled by Sol, who went to suicide mountain with his daughter Soli at the climax of the previous book. Now Sos has everything he ever wanted, in particular Sola, the busty babe who married Sol in the previous book but really loved Sos (and also, uh, had a child with him), but a Piers Anthony protagonist can never be happy, and thus Sos finds his crown heavy. 

Piers Anthony has written Var The Stick so that it could be read as a standalone; reading it in the collection Battle Circle, immediately after Sos The Rope, one encounters a lot of repetition. This is because titular Var the Stick spends a lot of the narrative wondering over – and gradually learning – things we readers already learned in Sos The Rope. It does not add to the mythos nor inject any drama into the proceedings, and instead just comes off like a bunch of repetition of material that was handled better in the previous book. 

The shame of it is, Var The Stick has a wonderful opening. One of the tribes in Sos’s empire is under attack by a beast in the cornfields; The Master himself is called in to look into it. The cyborg master of karate soon deduces that the beast is really a mutant boy. There follows an unexpectedly touching (but in a masculine way, of course) scene in which man and mutant boy start off as hunter and prey before turning to each other for survival in the radioactive badlands. 

The effective opening only continues as we pick up four years later and the mutant boy – Var – heads back into that same tribe to test himself in the battle circle and thereby earn a name for himself. Despite winning, Var finds no willing women to take him, due to his mutant looks…until none other than Sola, “middle-aged” and “old” at 25, gives herself to Var that night in the tent they share; Sola, married to Sos but in love with his previous, pre-cyborg version and not the current model, reveals that the Master cannot have children, so once again the poor girl hasn’t gotten any in a while (a recurring theme for poor Sola, whose first husband, Sol, didn’t even have a dick). 

Anthony handles this sequence with more of a touching tone than a sleazy one, but we are told without getting too explicit of Sola’s ripe curves and whatnot; again we are firmly reminded that Sola has a kick-ass bod, but unfortunately she is barely in this novel. Same goes for Sos, and same goes even more so for Sol, who only shows up in passing. Even small-natured karate gal Sosa, whom Sos really loves, only appears in passing. As mentioned, Var The Stick is essentially a standalone tale. 

Instead of building on the storyline in the previous book, Anthony this time delivers a long chase sequence that encompasses the majority of the narrative. But still, it starts off seeming to pick up from the previous story; Sos, it develops, is planning to wage war on Helicon Mountain, aka the mountain he climbed to commit suicide but in reality is staffed with tech-loving “crazies” who live underground and who gave Sos his cyborg augmentations. Sos wants to wage war on them, certain that Sol and little Soli (who is actually Sos’s daughter, given Sol’s aforementioned lack of a dick) are being held captive there. He also wants to hook up with the little karate woman, Sosa. 

The only issue is, all this is relayed through the perspective of Var, a mutant kid of 15 or so who has no idea who any of these people are – and, what’s more, is so new to society that he has a hard time relating to anyone at all. This means there is a lot of obsfucation and vaguery, with Var only belatedly figuring out what is going on – figuring out stuff that would be dealt with posthaste if the tale had been told from Sos’s perspective, as the earlier book was. 

But Sos has become a remote figure now, and rarely do we enter his thoughts. It’s like the star of the trilogy has been reduced to a supporting character, and I can’t say we got a better character with Var. If I was prone to lame puns, I’d say we were given the short end of the stick. Well anyway, Var fights with sticks, and after a belabored battle sequence where Sos’s army attacks the mountain – a scene which is mostly told in summary, robbing it of any drama – it’s determined that Var will represent the empire and Hellicon will choose another hero to battle him, a hero-vs-hero match for control of the mountain. 

I’d write “spoiler alert,” but we’re still fairly early in the book; the champion turns out to be eight year-old Soli, aka the daughter of Sol (but really the daughter of Sos)…who, per tradition, fights in the nude. Not to sound like one of those perennially-aggrieved Goodreads reviewers, but this set off my “ick!” radar…only compounded by the fact that little Soli, who again is only eight years old, talks and acts like a regular adult. 

My son happens to be eight years old, and granted he’s a boy and also he wasn’t born after the nuclear Blast, and also he’s not a karate master, but still…I think from him I have a fairly good understanding of how well an eight year-old can communicate. Soli sounds nothing like this; she evidences logic and understanding well beyond her years, hell even at some points she’s beyond an adult of our own era (which, granted, isn’t really saying very much), to the point that it really drew me out of the book. I mean, I’m good with post-nuke pulp, and societies built around formalized battle in a circle, and even mutants…but too-intelligent and too-communicative eight year-olds is where I can no longer suspend my disbelief. 

It gets even harder to believe, as Soli is such a great fighter that her battle with Var, waged atop a cliff where hardly anyone can see them, goes on for hours, to the point that they call a temporary truce so they can each take a piss off the cliff! Then Soli – who, again, acts like the adult throughout – realizes that due to the fog no one can see them anyway, so they decide to sneak down the cliff and get some food. 

Anyway, let’s just cut to the chase…for “chase” is essentially all Var The Stick soon becomes. Piers Anthony jettisons the post-nuke love triangle meets Homer vibe of the previous book in favor of an endless sequence where Var and Soli head off together into post-blast America, with Sos chasing after them – and Sos is chasing them due to a harebrained subplot in which Var lies that he killed Soli on the clifftop, and thus has no idea why Sos would suddenly be so angry at him. Again, this novel is a very frustrating read for anyone who read the previous book, because the protagonist has no idea what happened in that previous book, while readers on the other hand do know, hence you spend the entire novel wishing Var the Stick had stayed in the cornfields and never gotten involved with the storyline in the first place. 

And this chase goes on for like a year or more, too! Things finally pick up when Var and Soli make it to the Pacific, where they run afoul of a Queen and her army of armored amazons, and here we have a strange bit where the mega-fat Queen wants to have sex with Var, given that all the men in her empire are eunnuchs. Fortunately, though, Anthony has refrained all this time from exploiting little Soli too much; my blog should be a testament to how much I love the lack of boundaries in ‘70s pulp fiction, but at the same time I believe that there are some boundaries that should not be crossed. 

Unfortunately, Anthony does cross those lines in the final quarter. Keeping up with the overall Greek myth vibe of the trilogy, Soli is at one point lashed up naked to a large rock by the ocean so as to be devoured by the god Minos. It’s all very Clash Of The Titans, and all this occurs on the island of New Crete after Var and Soli have been traveling together for some time; indeed, Soli is held captive in a temple for around two years while Var bides his time, working odd jobs and trying to figure out how to save her. 

There is, I’ve dicovered, always an oddball sort of vibe to a Piers Anthony novel, and such is certainly true in Var The Stick. I mean, it’s a post-apocalypse and the gal’s about to be sacrificed, but there’s literally a two-year interim where Var goes to work so as to make money for himself! Just not the sort of thing you’d expect to read in a post-nuke fantasy. Even odder, Minos is a bull-headed man who is capable of intelligent speech, as he’s been augmented by the crazies, same as Sos was, and he has a casual and friendly conversation with Var. 

Anyway, to keep Minos from ravishing Soli – we’re told the pseudo-god’s dick is so big it rips his victims apart – Var and Soli have sex on the rock, as Minos’s violent lust is only aroused by virgins. If my math is correct, Soli is only like twelve years old here. Anthony does not get explicit, leaving it as an “embrace” the two have, there on the rock, giving vent to their feelings for each other…but still. The “ick” factor returns in force when Minos comes back with a couple female corpses, girls “about the same age as Soli,” and it’s made clear that he’s raped them to death. 

And then we’re back to the oddball stuff; Var and Soli, pretending the moment on the rocks never happened, make it all the way to China, where Var suddenly decides Soli would be better off without him, and thus puts her in a “posh” school, paying her tuition by getting a job as a trash collector. I mean seriously, WTF? I’m not making any of this up. Two years pass, after which Soli is about to be given over to the emperor’s harem or somesuch, and Var has to act fast, as he’s finally realized he loves Soli…but how does she feel about him? 

At this point, the cool, “augmented warrior in a post-nuke wasteland” vibe of Sos The Rope is long, long gone. As even more of a slap to the face, we learn – in passing! – that Sos and Sol have been traveling together all these years, looking for Var and Soli. If you’re taking notes, this is the story we should’ve gotten in the sequel! But as mentioned, those two are supporting characters now – Sol, actually, is even less than that – and the reader can only wonder over the better novel this could have been. I mean we’re even told, again in passing, that Sol destroyed Helicon mountain in his wrath…like, couldn’t we have read about that instead of Var getting a job as a trash collector in China?? 

The finale sees Var and Soli (now named Vara, as she’s the wife of Var, even though she’s only like 14 or 15 now) heading back to America, to spread the word that “American society is the best.” Who would’ve expected a proto-MAGA sentiment at the end of a novel titled Var The Stick? 

I think this time I truly will take a bit of a break before finishing off the Battle Circle trilogy; next week I’ll have that Sobs review up. Actually one of these days I’d love to get back to a twice-weekly posting schedule…I’m working on it!

The Spook Who Sat By The Door

The Spook Who Sat By The Door, by Sam Greenlee

January, 1970  Bantam Books

(Original hardcover edition 1968)

Most likely known more for its film adaptation (below), The Spook Who Sat By The Door started life as this hardcover novel published by Sam Greenlee in 1968. According to the back cover of the 2020 edition published by Wayne State University Press, the novel has been “continuously available in print since 1968,” and what’s more it “has become embedded in progressive anti-racist culture.” Of course, “anti-racist” means the exact same thing as “racist,” but we’ll leave that alone for now. 

Actually, we won’t. The back cover of the Wayne State University Press edition also goes on to state, “As a tale of reaction to the forces of suppression, this book is universal.” To which, like pretty much all other “progressive” double-speak, I say bullshit. Indeed, the “hero” of this tale is such a craven, hate-filled bastard that I almost wondered if Sam Greenlee intended him as a lampoon of the whole “black rage” movement. But that might be giving more credit than is due, as there’s nothing to indicate Greenlee had any tricks up his sleeve; the novel is tiresomely serious, and the attempts at instilling a second-hand rage in the reader fails, mostly because the main character is such an iredeemable prick. He isn’t so much “reacting to the forces of suppression” as he is instigating a race war, for reasons that are decidedly self-centered. In fact the dude basically plans to have others do the fighting for him, while he lives in his bachelor pad sipping whiskey and listening to jazz on the hi-fi. 

The novel is also written in such a way that the reader must do all the heavy lifting; Greenlee has a tendency to write much of the narrative in summary, ie such and such happened, then such and such happened – like, it’s all nearly in outline format, with no drama or suspense to bring the characters or situations to life. And a lot of important stuff happens off-page, or isn’t exploited well enough to reap the full dramatic potential – something the filmmakers astutely corrected, as the movie is a lot better than the book, and not just because the soundtrack’s by Herbie Hancock. 

On the plus side, I was happy to discover that Greenlee wrote The Spook Who Sat By The Door in the style of the popular fiction of the era; this is not a “literary” novel, or something akin to Ishmael Reed. And at times Greenlee does capture a masculine vibe in his terse prose; I also appreciated the frequent mentions of music, with characters even visiting record stores. Jazz musicians are mentioned often, and particular albums are mentioned, but Greenlee, writing in the late ‘60s, has his characters listening to the pre-electric stuff. I mean, as I’ve said before, I like my jazz funky, electric, and from the ‘70s. In fact, I’m listening to Eddie Harris’s Bad Luck Is All I Have as I write this review. 

The novel is set in the same period in which it was published, though the action takes place over a few years, leading to the “it could happen!” sluglines that adorned paperback copies in the early ‘70s. Despite what the Wayne State University edition’s back cover wants you to believe (not to mention what a particular political party wants you to believe), the era in which The Spook Who Sat By The Door occurs is very different from our modern era. But then, that same political party stays in power by cultivating and harnessing race rage – or, really, any kind of rage – so on that note you could say the book is still timely. I guess rage just never goes out of fashion with the left. 

Confirming this, politics is not really a driver for our “hero,” Dan Freeman. Rage is. This is fine; I mean rage is the driver for most men’s adventure protagonists of the era. But at least with those characters, you can empathize with them. Freeman is kept at such a distance from the reader – and other characters – that it’s not until late in the novel that you even learn what drives him. This undermines the power of The Spook Who Sat By The Door, along with the passive, summary-style narrative approach. 

If anything, Freeman – which is to say, possibly, Greenlee – shows most rage for liberal whites. A disdain for “caring” whites runs through the novel, meaning those white people who pretend to care for the plight of the blacks but have ulterior motives. In other words, virtue-signallers as they would now be called. There are a lot of humorous parts where these hypocrites are called out for their hypocrisy. 

But then, just as much anger is directed at blacks. There is a lot of antagonism between Dan Freeman and other blacks; in his intro in the novel, he’s bickering and sniping at fellow blacks who have been chosen for a new CIA program. They don’t like Freeman because he doesn’t seem to fit in, and Freeman doesn’t like them because they all have Ivy League educations and fraternity pins. In other words, in Freeman’s mind they are pretend caucasians. 

Curiously, the one group Freeman – and, possibly, Greenlee – does not have a problem with is actual racist white people! Indeed, it’s subtly conveyed that Freeman respects these people for showing their true feelings…with the hidden inference that Freeman likes it because he himself is a racist. 

Unless I missed something, Dan Freeman is not the titular “spook” who sat by the door. Rather, it’s a black man who has been hired by a congressman as a sounding board for the black voting public, but who mostly “sits by the door.” He opens the novel, implying that he will be an integral character in the novel, but he disappears after this opening – and, what’s more, the idea that forms the plot of the novel doesn’t even come from him! 

Rather, it’s the congressman’s wife who proposes, apropos of nothing, that the congressman push for an integrated CIA as a way of currying support from “the Negroes.” I mean, the “spook who sits by the door” isn’t even the one who comes up with the idea! Perhaps this is Greenlee’s point, that even the “token negro” who has literally been hired to give the black viewpoint is ignored by the liberal whites who have employed him – rather, they listen to their fellow liberal whites instead. As I say, the book is downright timely in some regards. 

Nevertheless, the plan is put in motion, and thus we are introduced without much fanfare to our ostensible hero, Dan Freeman. We don’t learn much about him, only that he’s from Chicago and has gotten through the intense trials to become one of the few black men up for CIA membership. We learn that he harbors a lot of rage, and also that he has ulterior motives of his own – the implication is clear that he plans to use this CIA training to cause some hell. But Greenlee keeps him at such a distance from us that we don’t get a clear idea of what it is he plans. 

In the meantime, he fights with his black comrades as well as the racists in charge of CIA training. As I stated at the outset, The Spook Who Sat By The Door takes place in a different world, where “integration” was detested by the racist whites who ran everything. At least, according to this novel. As mentioned, the book itself is very racist: all whites here are bigots who harbor prejudices against black people and whatnot. But then again such fiction is taken as truth today. Personally I’ve learned after fifty years of life that skin color means not a thing – an asshole is an asshole, regardless of race. 

Greenlee occasionally veers outside of his summary approach and gives us actual tense scenes, like when Freeman takes on his racist judo instructor. This is a cool part and has that masculine, men’s adventure-type vibe; the instructor is a white man, the referee is Korean, and Freeman mops the floor with the bigot. But after which he scolds himself for letting his “mask” slip; again, Greenlee has this tendency to keep Freeman’s true inclinations hidden from not only other characters but the reader himself (or “themselves,” if you go that way), and this sort of neuters the impact of the narrative. 

The CIA is run by “The General,” another bigot who intends to drum out all of the blacks through rigorous training. But as expected, Freeman manages to pass until the end – and, instead of becoming a field agent, he’s given a desk job in DC. So essentially he too becomes “a spook who sits beside the door.” Over the next few years, Freeman becomes a key player for the Agency, traveling around the world with various politicians and learning to grease the wheels in other countries. 

Along the way he has some “side pieces,” like a black hooker in DC he retains over the years, and also an old flame who apparently is Freeman’s main girlfriend, though she’s thrust on readers so casually that at first I confused her for the hooker. The idea is that even from these women Freeman hides his true self, though via the hooker we learn of his revolutionary tendencies, in that he refers to her as a “Dahomey Queen,” a reference to Africa. 

But again, the reader must do a lot of the work to make the narrative come to life. In this way Greenlee is similar to author Cecelia Holland, who also refrains from providing the motivations for her characters; I’ve tried two times over the past six years to read her doorstep of a sci-fi novel, Floating Worlds, and have given up halfway through each time due to my frustration over not being told why characters were doing what they were doing. 

Anyway, the General gives a patronizing speech to Freeman over dinner one night, telling him how “you people…will take generations” to fully integrate, and etc, and Freeman keeps his “mask” on, only losing control when he excuses himself to the restroom, where he cries in rage – curiously, a scene that was left out of the movie. Again following his own unstated goal, Freeman abruptly quits the CIA and goes back home to Chicago, returning to his former job as a social worker; he sets up a nice bachelor pad and again integrates with the upper-crust (read: liberal) white society. And meanwhile he hobknobs with the Cobras, a Black Power guerrilla outfit (read: The Black Panthers). Freeman only now demonstrates his true goal: to instill his CIA training on these black freedom fighters, to start a war on whitey. 

Now, the cynic in me wants to accuse Dan Freeman of cultural appropriation. I mean, think of it – he’s been taught by white people, and now he wants to use their own stuff against them. It’s not like Dan Freeman is an originator. This is why I think Sam Greenlee might have had some tricks up his sleeve, as he constantly refers to jazz musicians – real ones, like Miles Davis and Sonny Stitt – and the implication is that these black Americans are originators, men who have broken away from their shackles (rather real or conceived) and have gone on to create instead of to destroy. 

But as we all know – and have learned – the left only knows how to destroy, not create. And this is what Freeman teaches the Cobras to do. All the hand-fighting, shooting, bomb-making, and etc tricks he learned in the Agency. As “Turk,” Freeman again wears a mask, not allowing himself to get too close to the Cobras, as he knows they’ll need to be expendable. Again, our hero is a prick. For Freeman plans to begin racial skirmishes across the country, his Cobras using all kinds of whitey’s tricks against them…while Freeman himself maintains his pose as the high-society “integrated negro” who lives in a cushy apartment, sipping whiskey and listening to jazz. 

Again, so much is told instead of shown. The Cobras hit a bank – we’re told about it. They dose a guy with LSD, we’re told about it. Indeed, for years I’ve had this jazz-funk DJ mix, which I blogged about on here many years ago: Pulp Fusion: Cheeba Cheeba Mix. Well there’s a sample in that mix, some guy saying, “I just met the most wonderful bunch of n—” (you of course know the word I mean), and I had no idea that line of dialog came from the movie version of The Spook Who Sat By The Door. And it’s in the novel, too – but unlike the film, it’s delievered in hindsight, capping off yet another summary-style excursion of “this happened, then hat happened,” so that, like virtually everything else in the novel, the line lacks any punch. 

Things come to a head in Chicago, where the riots begin, soon erupting across the country. And meanwhile Dan Freeman sits in his bachelor pad, posing as a member of integrated society. His “mask” is still firmly in place, as he lies to everyone – to the Cobras who serve him and look up to him, to the old girflriend who comes visiting. None of them know who the true Freeman is, and as mentioned even we readers never do, as his motivation is never satisfactorily delivered. Thus the novel’s intended downbeat ending – or happy ending, depending on your point of view – also lacks much punch.

In 1973 a film adaptation was released; I’ve come across speculation online that the CIA “yanked” the movie from theaters because it gave away too many secrets, and etc. Again: bullshit. This is a low-budget film, of a piece with the other independent Blaxploitation productions of the era, and I highly doubt the CIA was bothered by it at all. Episodes of Mission: Impossible gave away more “secrets.” 

The only things that elevate this film adaptation are Herbie Hancock’s soundtrack and the fact that protagonist Dan Freeman – as well as the other characters – is given a chance to breathe; we actually see things as they happen, and aren’t told everything in summary. If the Cobras – here named “The Black Cobras” in the movie – rob a bank, we see the bank robbery as it goes down, instead of reading a paragraph summary of the events. 

Also, Dan Freeman (portrayed by Lawrence Cook, who is very good in the role) is given the motivation he was denied in the novel. Indeed, the idea that he goes into Agency training precisely to start a race war is not evident in the film version; the idea is just as easily conveyed that his frustrations with lack of integration are what push him over the edge. As mentioned above, the part where the General gives his patronizing speech remains in the film version, but Freeman’s emotional breakdown after it has been removed from the adaptation, which I found curious. 

Sam Greenlee himself was a co-writer of the script, as well as a producer of the film, so one wonders if it was his attempt to rectify the passive tones of his original novel. Characters are still sort of thrust on us, like Freeman’s old girlfriend from Chicago who still throws him a casual lay every once in a while, but at least these characters are introduced more properly than in the book. Also the movie sports better characterizations for the Cobras, leading to memorable scenes – like the “yellow” Cobra (ie a light-skinned black) who chaffes that everyone thinks he’s white, leading to an emotional “I was born black, I’m gonna die black” speech – one that was sampled in yet another funk DJ mix I like a lot, Blaxploitation Mixtape by DJ EB. 

But as mentioned, the movie is clearly low-budget. The novel opens with a big cabinet meeting, but in the movie it’s three people in a small office. And hell, the titular “spook” who sits by the door has been turned into a woman in the movie, but even here it’s the politician’s wife who comes up with the “integrated CIA” idea. A lot of Freeman’s simmering schemes are left out of the movie, but the fight with the judo teacher remains. Overall, though, the feeling is that the producers were trying to make a legit movie, as The Spook Who Sat By The Door lacks much of what one thinks of when one thinks of a “Blaxploitation” movie. Indeed there isn’t even any nudity or much violence. 

One thing the film does have that is similar to other Blaxploitation flicks is a great soundtrack. Recorded right in the midst of his “Headhunters” phase, Herbie Hancock’s soundtrack features early versions of material that would come out on his Thrust LP. We’re talking jazz-funk with serious cosmic aspirations, courtesy far-out synth work with ring modulators and echoplex and a host of other sonic trickery. It’s a shame the soundtrack was never properly released, as what exists in the film sounds incredible, and for me the music was the highlight of the film. 

It’s taken me some weeks to write this review, mostly due to work and life commitments. In this time the race conflict has come even here to Frisco, Texas – on April 2nd of this year a seventeen-year-old boy was stabbed to death at a track meet by another boy of the same age. This garnered national coverage, but curiously race was never mentioned by the mainstream news outlets; the victim was white, the perpetrator was black.  Curious indeed that this racial element was not mentioned, given the corporate media’s obsession with “racial motivations” when it’s white-on-black crime.  (It was up to the “right-wing news outlets” to even mention the racial angle…which of course was yet more indication of their right-wingery, you shouldn’t be surprised to know.) 

Granted, race could very well have had nothing to do with the murder here in Frisco – it’s a horrific event regardless of motivation – but I bring it up because it illustrates, again, how different our world is from the 1968 of Sam Greenlee’s novel. How would the national media have responded if a black boy stabbed a white boy to death then? Indeed, per the incessantly-aggrieved pearl clutchers of social media, it’s racist to even consider that there was a racial motivation to the murder here in Frisco. Of course, these are the same people who took to the streets in “fiery, but mostly peaceful” protests in the summer of 2020.  Of course, race was never proven to be a motivation for the incident that sparked that particular outrage, either, but whatever.

Now that I’ve finally read The Spook Who Sat By The Door, I think it would only make sense to read Civil War II, written by Don Pendleton and published shortly after Greenlee’s novel came out; it appears to pick up where The Spook Who Sat By The Door left off.

UPDATE: I wrote this review over the weekend, and in that time the situation here in Frisco has quickly progressed.  Race has now been brought into it...but not by the side you might assume.  (Actually, if you have been paying any attention whatsoever to our collapsing modern world, you know exactly which side brought race into it).  That the murdered white kid has been demonized as a deserving victim says all that needs to be said about how far astray our society has gone.  But at least there are people out there like this young lady who see and speak the truth.