Ninja Master #2: Mountain Of Fear

Ninja Master #2: Mountain Of Fear, by Wade Barker
November, 1981 Warner Books

The Ninja Master series improves in a major way with this installment. After the tepid bore that was Vengeance Is His, Mountain Of Fear comes as a definite jolt and is great throughout. We have Ric Meyers to thank, making his debut here as “Wade Barker;” who knows whatever happened to the first dude who used the house name, but thankfully he’s gone, and he isn’t missed. Warner Books should’ve hired Meyers from the start.

As mentioned in my review of Vengeance Is His, Meyers was brought in after the original guy had already penned his second volume, but the publisher felt it wasn’t fit to print. The title and cover were already done, and it shows, as the cover for Mountain Of Fear doesn’t have much to do with the actual manuscript Meyers turned in. Which isn’t a complaint; take a look at that cover and you expect a tale of some bare-chested guy beating the shit out of pitchfork-wielding hicks in some mine shaft.

Instead, Meyers delivers a super lurid tale about a former Nazi concentration camp doctor who has bought out a town in rural Virginia, where he and his perverted son rule with complete control; wayward females and orphans are captured and brought here, where, after being raped by the town’s “police” (who are really just convicts in uniform), they are sent up the mountain which looms in the center of town, where they are further raped and tortured by the Nazi’s son…before moving on down the line to the doctor himself, who experiments on them.

So we have here, obviously, the making of some truly sick and warped stuff. Meyers doesn’t fail when it comes to making the villains thoroughly evil and deserving of grisly deaths, and then he sets our series hero, Brett Wallace, upon them, so that we actually cheer as he eviscerates cops and slices out their brains…even torturing some in such a fashion that they know they are dying, and who their killer is.

Brett is also changed to drastic effect. Meyers must’ve read Vengeance Is His and tossed it aside in anger (like I almost did), as he spends the first quarter of the novel quickly disposing of all of the characterizations and series set-up that the previous author introduced. For one, young martial artist Jeff Archer, who was geared toward being Brett’s acolyte in the final pages of Vengeance Is His, is basically removed from the narrative, as is Rhea, the Japanese-American beauty who served as Brett’s occasional girlfriend. They’re still there to aid Brett in his vow to protect the innocent, but in much reduced roles than what a reader of the previous volume might have expected.

Brett has no time for such niceties, given that Meyers has remolded him into a grim sort of killing machine who almost makes Richard Camellion look like Mister Rogers. In the opening of Mountain Of Fear, after Brett is already on the scene in Virginia, he flashes back to his recent re-training in the art of ninjutsu. Meyers obviously realized that the carefree Brett of Vengeance Is His was not suitable material for an action protagonist, and thus has Brett’s former ninja trainers realize the same thing. After calling him out on his apparent “desire for death,” they return him to Japan where Brett dives back into ninja training, emerging more deadly than ever.

But in addition to his new and refined deadliness he’s also cast aside any sort of humanity. Gone is the David Sanborn-listening, Absolut vodka-drinking rake of the previous book, always seen around town with the latest popular bimbo on his arm. Now Brett goes to extreme lengths to be “no man,” as he often refers to himself. A human shadow, melding into crowds, only seen when he wants to be seen.

All of which serves to recreate Brett Wallace into the most devestating and deadly protagonist I’ve yet encountered in a men’s adventure series. Anything he touches he can turn into a weapon, and his skill is such that he can even gain mental holds over his opponents. I guess the only problem then is the villains he fights throughout Mountain Of Fear are no match for him. Sure, they’re brawny thugs who have gone to prison for murders and rapes and etc, and they come bearing down on Brett with shotguns and Uzis, but still. It’s kind of like in Airwolf when that “high-tech helicopter” would go up against twenty year-old Hueys or whatever.

Meyers weaves in the lurid stuff by opening the novel from the perspectives of two young black ladies from New York who run into a roving patrol of “cops” here in Tylerville, Virginia. This is just the start of the degredations women endure throughout the novel…one of them is insantly raped and the other manages to run away, only to find the locals are just as sadistic as the police. The whole town is guilty, something Brett quicky deduces – he’s come here, by the way, after studying various data reports of rapes on the east coast, stumbling over the apparent fact that something strange is going on in Tylerville.

Mountain Of Fear is yet more proof that the shorter these books are, the better. At 156 pages, it moves at a steady clip, never once falling into repetition or dullness. This is the first Meyers novel I’ve read and I have to say I’m impressed. He has a definite knack for creating sordid atmospheres, warped villains, and gory action scenes; this book is more violent than most others of its ilk, up there with GH Frosts’s legendary Army Of Devils.

Meyers certainly knows his martial arts stuff. He namedrops various ninja moves and weapons with abandon, but unlike the execrable Mace series by Joseph Rosenberger, he actually bothers to explain each term. Brett is a living weapon, but he also uses a host of weaponry, ancient and modern; unlike the characters in most ninja pulp, Brett has no problem with picking up a dropped firearm and blowing away some thugs, but mostly he uses his katana sword and other exotic weaponry. There’s also a cool scene at the climax where he straps armor over his ninja costume.

Where Meyers really excels is the inventiveness of Brett’s many kills. In this novel he kills people with shards of an ice cube (!), a drumkit cymbal, and even the tripod that held up the cymbals. But he sows the most damage with his traditional weaponry, particularly in the climax, with an armored Brett infiltrating the Nazi’s mountain fortress and chopping the shit out of legions of armed goons -- another scene reminiscent of Army Of Darnkess, even complete with ankle-deep pools of blood and gore. It comes off like Die Hard if it had starred Sho Kosugi and been directed by Paul Verhoeven. (Now that would’ve been a movie…)

The action scenes, as mentioned, are plentiful and gory, but it bugged me a bit that Meyers would write a lot of them from the perspective of the cops as Brett was killing them. In other words, we're in the perspectives of these convict cops as they go about their latest atrocity, then suddenly they're being hit by something and not knowing what’s happening, and then they're seeing Brett’s masked face a second before they die. I prefer action scenes to be relayed from the protagonists’s point of view, so we see what he’s doing and to whom. To be fair, though, Meyers moves away from the thug-perspective as the novel continues, and the majority of the thrilling climax is solely from Brett’s point of view.

I really enjoyed the book, and it makes me happy that Meyers eventually became “the” Wade Barker, though there are a few more volumes in this initial series that he did not write. Meyers wrote the entirety of the ensuing Year of the Ninja Master and War of the Ninja Master series, but as for the Ninja Master series, he only wrote this volume, #4: Million Dollar Massacre, #6: Death’s Door, and #8: Only The Good Die. (Million Dollar Massacre was apparently another case where the author of the first volume had turned in a manuscript that was rejected, and Meyers had to fill in, catering to the title and the already-completed cover.)

Stony Man #83: Doom Prophecy

Stony Man #83: Doom Prophecy, by Douglas Wojtowicz
June, 2006 Gold Eagle Books

Able Team and Phoenix Force were canceled as individual series in the early 1990s, but lived on collectively as the Stony Man series, in which both teams would together take on the latest global or domestic threat. As of this writing there are a whopping 119 volumes of this series in print. Could you imagine reading all of them?? You'd probably put a bullet in your brain afterwards -- though, these being Gold Eagle books, by that time you'd be able to identify the bullet as say a 5.56x45mm NATO round with a 62 grain Steel Penetrator lead core full metal jacket.

Yes, friends, we are back in the world of Gold Eagle and its overwhelming love of gun-porn. Vast sections of this publisher's novels have often read like copy from a gun catalog. Gold Eagle is the last man standing in the world of men's adventure publishing, which is a shame, for in many ways their offerings are the worst of the genre. Whereas in my opinion these action series should offer escapism, Gold Eagle instead tries to make everything "realistic," with the end result being that their books are dour, bland, and boring affairs, filled with cipher-like "heroes" who, when they aren't killing people, just sit around and clean their guns.

The biggest surprise is that sometimes a Gold Eagle book offers a bit of promise, something different than the standard "terrorist of the month" gimmick. Doom Prophecy is a case in point. There are rave reviews for this novel over on mackbolan.com; the author, Douglas Wojtowicz, is a fan favorite. And to be sure he does seem to have fun with his novels, pulping them up with oddball villains and crazy threats. He's also relatively new to the Gold Eagle stable, but to date has already turned out 30-some books in various Gold Eagle series. He also has an obvious fondess for the characters and their world, so it's a good sign that there's at least one Gold Eagle writer who is willing to do something different than the norm. But to be sure, the reader must still be prepared for the Gold Eagle trademark of endless action sequences and weapons fetishizing.

The villains here are pretty great, the best part of the novel; they're much in the line of the sort of villains you would encounter in the pulpier 1970s examples of the genre. For one, there's a Vietnamese lady who, as a young girl, watched as her mother was murdered by a US soldier in 'Nam. Years later, attempting to gain vengeance, the girl was raped by the same man, now a high-ranking government official. And now, in the present, she is a self-styled "cyber prophetess" who has named herself Ka55andra, after the mythical oracle-spouting character Cassandra. She heads up a globe-spanning terrorist cell called AJAX, and is now finally bringing her plans of vengeance to fruition, while also sowing hell in general.

Even better are the various henchmen who work for AJAX. First and foremost there's Algul, a dude who not only wears a mask made of human skulls, but also a cape of human skin -- each patch of flesh adorned with a military tattoo, Algul having stitched it together from the hides of US soldiers he has killed. Oh, and he enjoys drinking blood. He also commands a legion of mud-encrusted zombies in all but name, shambling creatures who tear up out of the ground and attack en masse any who stand in their way, eating their flesh. Crazy stuff for sure. There's also a trio of assassins: one a dwarf, the other a tall and thin guy who compares himself to a boa constrictor, and finally a big biker dude whom Wojtowicz actually names "David Lee Haggar." And on top of that there's even a small army of ninjas, lead by a self-proclaimed "American Ninja" named Wilson Sere, who goes around with his gorgeous blonde Argentenian lover Terremota, an explosives expert.

I mean, all of these characters seem to have walked out of, say, Black Samurai #6: The Warlock. But for some strange reason, Wojtowicz does little to exploit the potential of the villains. All told, he only spends a handful of scenes with them, instead focusing the entirety of the tale on the bland and boring members of Phoenix Force and Able Team. I know this is a strange criticism, to blame an author for giving the focus to the stars of the book, but still. When your villains are this interesting -- and when there are so many of them -- I think it would be a bit more entertaining for the reader to actually read about them. Because as it is, the Phoenix Force and Able Team guys just put you right to sleep.

It's been about twenty-five years since I've read a Phoenix Force novel, so it was humorous to see that the same stock epithets are still employed -- Encizo is the "powerful Cuban," Calvin James is the "tall ex-Navy SEAL," Manning is the "big Canadian." Like we're reading the Iliad or something! Changes have occurred since my last encounter with the Force, though; Katz, the elderly Israeli leader of the team (who as I recall was a missing a hand, and, Army of Darkness style, would put various weapons in the empty socket), has apparently bought the farm and the team is now lead by McCarter, a former SAS soldier. A new character has been introduced in Katz's wake: TJ Hawkins, a vague nonentity who appears to be from Texas and is some sort of special forces type.

The guys from Able Team, as always, are a bit more colorful. Carl Lyons, the leader, is still prone to violent outbursts, and I know this is Lyons's "thing," but I wonder when this happened? In the Executioner novels I've read by creator Don Pendleton, Lyons is presented as a level-headed guy. But then, he also has a wife and kid in those early Pendleton books, and given that they're never mentioned in the Gold Eagle books, I'm guessing something must've happened to them, something that created the anger-prone Lyons of the Gold Eagle world. Anyway, throughout Doom Prophecy Wojtowicz keeps alive the Able Team tradition of witty banter amid the team members, showing their longstanding camaraderie, doing a great job of keeping the spirit of the characters alive.

Ka55andra initiates her mission and havoc breaks out across the globe. Able Team tracks down the aforementioned David Lee Haggar in the US and gets in some fights with bikers. Phoenix Force splits up, one half of the team going to Africa to take on Algul's zombie forces, the other half going to Hong Kong to take on Wilson Sere, Terremota, and the ninjas. And from there it's action, action, action.

That is, other than the scenes which take place in Stony Man headquarters, detailing the very 24-esque activities of the Stony Man "cyber team." It's like we're back in CTU and watching Chloe and the gang trace various threats while reporting on them to Jack Bauer in the field; my assumption is that Gold Eagle has added all of this tech warfare nonsense as a gambit to draw in the military fiction crowd. I mean, just look at that stupid damn cover Doom Prophecy is graced with. It might as well just be emblazoned with "Tom Clancy Presents."

But anyway, I do not exaggerate about the action onslaught. Every place Able Team or Phoenix Force goes, they are attacked. Over and over again. There's even a scene where Encizo and James catch a flight from Hong Kong to Tokyo, and even on the damn flight they are attacked by a team of ninjas! Wojtowicz can write a good action scene, and throughout he displays his knowledge of firearms and bladed weaponry. But after a while you want a little breather. And again, given that this is a Gold Eagle novel, the endless action scenes lack the nutzoid spark of a Joseph Rosenberger -- they are all relayed in a sort of real-world format, which I find strange in this post-9/11 world.

And now let's look at the gun-porn, a longstanding hallmark of Gold Eagle. Every time a person pulls out a gun, we get like four sentences describing it, no matter what's going on in the narrative. The characters themselves even discuss the various weapons, info-dumping blocks of detail about their rifles or knives or whatever. Hell, there are even scenes where, during combat, the heroes will taunt their opponents about their poor choices in weaponry -- in particular I'm thinking of a scene where a member of Able Team derides an opponent for using a gun "without a slide-action," or something to that effect.

Again, I realize it's stupid of me to complain about gun-porn in an action novel; it would be like buying a Harlequin Romance and complaining about all of the flowery dialog. But what has always most annoyed me about gun-porn is that it ruins any sort of tension or suspense. Just check out this scene, which occurs as a special forces soldier is attacked and overrun by Algul's zombies -- a tension-filled scene, mind you, which is suddenly ruined as Wojtowicz tells us all about the soldier's nifty gun:

Wild eyes rimmed with red focused on him and his team, and he brought up his Barrett M-486. The Barrett was an M-4 rifle that had been chambered for the new Special Forces 6.8 mm special purpose cartridge as an improvement over the smaller 5.56 mm NATO round. Grabbing the rail-mounted forward grip to stabilize it, he flipped the rifle to full-auto and fired through the gap between the door and frame of the downed aircraft, spitting a stream of SPC rounds.

Start taking notes, 'cause there's gonna be a quiz later:

Encizo backed his pair of Glocks with a 7.65 mm Walther PPK. While he was a fan of Heckler and Koch weapons, the excellent 9 mm USP wasn't as ubiquitous as the Glock, and finding spare magazines around the world would be more difficult. As well, the brand new P-2000 compact didn't share the Glock-26's record or reliability, nor the capability to use the larger USP's magazines.

And here's a third example, because everything comes in threes:

He picked up an M-3 submachine gun. In .45 ACP, the weapon was a standard with the US Army for a period of thirty-five years before being gradually phased out. However, being cheap and easy to build, it showed up in arsenals around the world.

There's stuff like this throughout the book. And again I realize, this sort of thing is not only expected but demanded by the core Gold Eagle readers. Wojtowicz proves himself a master of the craft, but it's just not a craft I'm crazy about. Actually the one thing I learned from Doom Prophecy is that I can't consider myself a "core" Gold Eagle reader. Elaborate gun and weapon detail just wears me down to the point where I start to hate life and just wish Flanders was dead. It's all just so blatant and annoying and, ultimately, pointless. I just kept wanting to shout, each time some dude would whip out a gun and we'd get endless detail about it: Who fucking cares??

But the hell of the thing is -- the core Gold Eagle readers do care. There are really people out there who want to read a few paragraphs explaining some Heckler & Koch submachine gun. And believe it or not, these people (whoever they are), will write angry letters when they see something incorrectly described about the gun. But for me this real-world focus just destroys the escapism, the lurid quotient, the fun of the genre. Rather than the fun pulp of say John Eagle Expeditor, most of these Gold Eagle books are just depressing, and ultimately forgettable.

That is, save for the ones by Wojtowicz. I have a few more of his books and they all look promising -- not to mention that they're all raved about over on mackbolan.com. As I say, he definitely knows what he's doing. He knows his core readers and he knows what they want, and he delivers. And as mentioned he has an obvious fondness for the characters. He also has a definite knack for coming up with memorable villains, as proven here with Doom Prophecy. Personally though I would've preferred more scenes from their perspective, or even more background on them. But I guess you can't blame the guy for making the stars of the book, you know, the stars of the book.

But then, I'm biased. I much prefer the original incarnations of the genre, from the '70s and '80s. And whereas I and other reviewers around the Web enjoy reading and writing about those men's adventure novels from 30 and 40 years ago, I'll bet you good money that no one will be writing about these current Gold Eagle books a few decades from now. They just aren't much fun. And I don't even blame the writers. All of the stock epithets, the gun references, the "real-world" attitude, all of that stuff I'm betting is mandated by the editors.

In a way, it's almost like Gold Eagle is committing willful suicide. Given the lack of marketing for the imprint, the minimal web presence, and the fact that the books are steadily disappearing from the shelves of bookstores and department stores (K-Mart, I've read, is just one such store that has stopped carrying Gold Eagle books), I'm guessing that parent company Worldwide Library is just letting these novels trickle out, doing little to improve or differentiate them, until the day comes when they can finally (and happily) announce that profits have dropped too much to continue publishing, and thus the adventures of "the Stony Man warriors" et al will come to a close.

Ninja Master #1: Vengeance Is His

Ninja Master #1: Vengeance Is His, by Wade Barker
November, 1981 Warner Books

In the 1980s we were ninja crazy, especially kids my age. Sho Kosugi films, American Ninja, even a TV show (in the craptastic form of Master Ninja, starring Lee Van Cleef!), we loved them all. I remember going to the mall and checking, every other month, for the latest issue of Ninja magazine -- which always had these kick-ass painted covers of some ninja about to waste an unsuspecting samurai or whatever, but the innards of the mag were given over to glossy color photos of dudes in ninja gis throwing each other around in the countryside.

Anyway, I think at the time I was aware of the Ninja Master series, but it was difficult to find. I think I also assumed it was based on the similarly-named Master Ninja TV show, but nothing could be further from the fact. Actually, the template of the series is similar to the show, in that it's about a ninja master traveling around the US and righting wrongs, but the protagonist and the way things go down are wildly different.

Our hero is Brett Wallace, who first appears in the novel with a different last name. He's home from studying philosophy and martial arts in Japan, and with him he's brought his gorgeous Japanese wife, who is pregnant. After a lavish party at his dad's mansion, Brett drives a drunk guest home, and returns to find his family slaughtered in gory fashion. It's eventually learned that a trio of bikers were behind it, high out of their minds and just looking for some fun. Brett tries to let the justice system do its job, but this being a men's adventure novel, Justice is portrayed as a two-dollar crack whore, useless and ineffective.

After a year of planning his attack and funneling his money into various accounts, as well as re-naming himself "Brett Wallace," Brett springs his trap on the bikers and kills 'em real good with some martial arts. After which he heads to Japan to take up this old master on an offer the man made to Brett years before: an offer to make Brett a ninja. Flash forward (literally) nine years later, and Brett is now a ninja badass, one of the "top five" ninjas in the world. This flash-forward is so goofy as to be hilarious, but to be honest the last thing I'd want to read is a long novel filled with ninja training techniques and etc.

Brett sets up a new life for himself in San Francisco, even scoring a new beautiful girl in his life: Rhea, a Japanese lady whose uncle was a ninja. In between frequent sexual escapades, Brett opens a SanFran restaurant and makes Rhea his chief cook, using the restaurant as a cover for his hidden wealth. Now he is free to do what he has returned to America for: to travel about and use his ninja skills to aid the weak!

But man, it's all so plodding and boring. This novel is filled to the brim with characters sitting around as they drink and talk about shit that has nothing to do with anything. Dialog about where they want to go eat dinner and what the place serves. It's obvious too that the author has no clear idea what a "ninja" is; reading Vengeance Is His, you'd get the idea that a ninja isn't much different from a karate master. Brett uses no weapons, no shadowy skills, and of course doesn't even wear a ninja gi.

There's a group of punks killing elderly residents of an inner-city borough in Los Angeles, and after hobknobbing with the residents Brett figures out who they are. Man, it takes a long time for this to happen. To get there you have to navigate through more chitchat, including an endless trip to a karate school run by some local elders. And of course more trips to various restaurants. Finally Brett closes in on the gang, but instead of the ninja massacre I wanted, with Brett killing hordes of the bastards with ninjutsu steel, he instead takes out the leaders one by one, the "action" scenes incredibly brief and hamfisted.

Reading this, you'd figure that the Ninja Master series would be dead in the water. And apparently it almost was. "Wade Barker" was a house name, one that eventually became associated solely with author Ric Meyers. But according to this post on VintageNinja.com, Meyers did not write Vengeance Is His or the seventh volume of the series, Skin Swindle. Meyers states in his post that the guy who did write Vengeance Is His also turned in a second volume, but Warner Books felt that it was "unpublishable." Hell, I think this one was unpublishable!

What's odd though is that parts of Vengeance Is His are well-written, but well-written in a style not beneficial to the men's adventure genre. What I'm saying is, the author was trying too hard to turn out a "regular" novel, not realizing the pulp nature of the genre. Also, this author name-drops more than any other men's adventure writer I've yet read: Brett listens to the jazz stylings of Keith Jarrett and David Sanborn, he drinks Absolut Vodka (a lot of it), the hooker who lives in the apartment beneath him wears Rolling Stone T-shirts, and on and on. There's even a veiled reference to then-popular Bo Derek ("the perfect ten herself").

The few action scenes, as mentioned, are brief. Brett usually uses some fast moves to take out his opponents, and in one cool sequence he wastes a dude with a pencil. But the book could've been so much better. There's a distinct lack of tension or drama, and a sort of pallid tone envelops it. There is though quite a bit of sex, which veers into the humorous purple-prosed territory. But anyway, the Ninja Master we meet here isn't all that tough, and would certainly get his ass handed to him by, say, Mondo.

MIA Hunter #4: Mountain Massacre

MIA Hunter #4: Mountain Massacre, by Jack Buchanan
October, 1985 Jove Books

Joe Lansdale turns in another volume of the MIA Hunter series, one that gives double bang for your men's adventure buck: in addition to the customary Rambosploitation of the series itself, you also get the added bonus of ninjas! Not only that, but Mountain Massacre even borrows a page from Apocalypse Now, in that hero Mark Stone's mission is to "exterminate with extreme prejudice" an American soldier, once an MIA himself, who's now a rogue psychopath who commands his own army in Vietnam...an army of ninjas.

Unfortunately the novelty soon wears thin. What could've been a cool bit of WTF? insanity instead turns quickly into tedium, with ninja battle after ninja battle after ninja battle. My understanding of this series is that it was overseen by Stephen Mertz, who a la Lyle Kenyon Engel would send his ghostwriters an outline of each book along with requirements. (For example, per Michael Newton, who penned the first two volumes of the series, each "Jack Buchanan" was always required to insert martial arts into the book). So I'm guessing then that Mertz's outline for this book must've been "Feature ninjas," and Lansdale, after belting back a shot or three of Jack Daniels, grumbled, "Fine. You want ninjas? You'll get 'em."

Anyway, we open with Mark Stone and his two-man team already on a mission in 'Nam, freeing a handful of MIAs. Strangely, Lansdale does not tie up any of the loose ends from his previous volume -- when last we saw Stone in the US, his files were nearly stolen by the CIA and his girlfriend was in hiding. This time out Lansdale doesn't cover any of that, and indeed Stone spends the duration of the novel in Vietnam. At any rate he frees this latest batch of MIAs, but while escaping through the jungle Stone's team is attacked by "bandits." Bandits who are covered head-to-toe in black, with only their eyes visible. Bandits who, despite being armed with assault weapons, choose instead to attack with swords and other bladed weaponry. In short, ninjas.

Stone returns to Bangkok, where he is again attacked, this time by CIA agents, who try to kill him. Of course they prove little match for Stone, who immediately thereafter is given his latest mission -- contacted by an elderly billionaire named Porter who has journeyed here from the US, having gotten wind through his own sources that the famous MIA Hunter Mark Stone is here. Porter's son was a high-ranking officer during the Vietnam war who was marked as an MIA, but was never freed. He also never appeared on any official registries and seems to have disappeared. However the old man believes that his son now commands his own army within Vietnam, one which he is using to cause much chaos and bloodshed.

Putting it all together, Stone suspects that Porter Jr. must be the mysterious leader of the "bandit army" which runs rampant through the jungles of 'Nam and Laos. Stone has seen their destruction first-hand; the ninjas attack villages and kill everyone, even the children and the elderly. Their leader is swathed in mystery, but it is believed he is a practicioner of the "dark arts," ie a ninja, and that he has taught his followers the same skills. Also, his army is quite large, and the leader himself is surrounded by "the two hundred," the top ninja fighters at his disposal, warriors who are claimed to be more demons than men.

Stone and his two stalwart companions (big bruiser Hog Wiley and the still-boring Terrance Loughlin) put together another team of Laotian freedom fighters and head once more into the jungle. Their guide is Kong Le, himself a martial arts swordsmaster; not only that, but his son happens to be one of the ninjas, and Kong Le has sworn to kill the boy, to purge the evil from him. So there's all sorts of stuff going on in Mountain Massacre, but it's soon lost in the shuffle of endless fight after endless fight.

In my opinion, there's only one author who can write endless action scenes and keep them entertaining, and that's David Alexander. Lansdale's action scenes get very boring after a while, the death knell for any action writer. Seriously, as soon as Stone and his team enter the jungle, it's like they're attacked by ninjas on practically every other page. And what makes it stupid is the ninjas keep coming at them with swords, running right into the blasting CAR-15 fire of Stone and his comrades. What makes it even more stupid is that the ninjas themselves carry firearms! But for reasons Lansdale skirts over -- something about a magic potion the ninjas drink, which they believe instills them with invincibility -- the ninjas just continue to run pell-mell right into blazing death, their swords obliviously held high.

The book's a bit over 190 pages, and I don't exaggerate when I say that about 150 of those pages are comprised of action scenes. Porter the insane commander doesn't appear until the final third; Stone and team, on their trek through the jungle, comes upon another village destroyed by Porter's bandit army. One of the men there is a young punk who hopes to join the bandits -- we learn that Porter boosts his army by regularly scouting the various villages and taking away those young men who show some fighting prowess. After getting his ass kicked by Loughlin, the kid agrees to show Stone and company where the hidden bandit retreat is located.

Lansdale brings the otherwise-idyllic retreat to life; in pure Kurtz fashion Porter lives in the ruins of an ancient Buddhist monastery deep in the jungles of 'Nam. Stone launches a dawn raid on the place, but he and his small squad of soldiers are no match for Porter's army of hundreds. Soon enough the whole lot of them is captured, and, in pure Willard fashion, Stone is eventually taken down from his chains for a one-on-one meeting with Porter. You can almost hear the Doors on the soundtrack as Porter tries to sway Stone over to his side -- there's even a swipe on the New Testament as Porter escorts Stone over to a window and gestures at the domain below, telling Stone that all of it could be his if he would just come over to his side.

We can all guess what Stone's answer is. This leads to the thankfully final action sequence in the novel, as he and his men are able to escape from their dank and rundown cell. Once more we're off into ninja-blasting carnage as hordes of the bastards race pell-mell to their doom, swords obvliviously held high. However the man-to-man fight between Stone and Porter is well done, devolving into a flat-out brawl amid the blazing ruins of the temple. It's all very cinematic and indeed the novel appropriates the feel of say Apocalypse Now as made by the Cannon Group, with action choreography by Sho Kosugi.

Curiously, the satirical touch of his previous installment is gone, and for the most part Lansdale plays it straight throughout Mountain Massacre. Also, it got annoying that every single character had to say Stone's full name nearly every time they spoke to him. I will agree that "Mark Stone" is a cool name, but seriously, do characters have to repeat it every other sentence? I figure this must've been another of the "requirements" for the ghostwriters of the series; Newton also poked fun at the tendency of repeating Stone's name in his 1989 book How to Write Action-Adventure Novels. Another funny thing is that Stone and his fellows are here reduced to the level of animals; I lost count of how many times he or his pals would "growl" something instead of just plain old saying it.

Tracker #2: Green Lightning

Tracker #2: Green Lightning, by Ron Stillman
December, 1990 Charter Books

Tracker #1 was one of the worst novels I've ever read. Luckily this second volume is a bit better, but to quote John Lennon, "It couldn't get much worse." It still has the same juvenile mindset and writing, with a too-perfect hero who manages to instill hatred in the reader, but gussies it up this time out with sadism, sex, and a bunch of dirty words. So in other words this one reads like the work of a 15 year-old instead of a 12 year-old.

To recap, our hero is Natty Tracker, an Air Force hotshot who was rendered blind in the first installment. But Tracker, a martial arts expert who gets all the gals, is also a genius, and soon devised a sort of SONAR for his eyes. By now however he's developed his own high-tech eyeballs which allow him to see not only normally, but Six Million Dollar Man-style, able to zoom in and out. Which means he's only become more perfect. You see, nothing fazes Tracker, no one can stop him or beat him, and he's capable of godlike acts. The novel, like its predecessor, has all of the insight and plot development of a coloring book, as Tracker finds out who the bad guys are and proceeds to beat them soundly, again and again.

Green Lightning attempts to go over the top, which is fine and would work, if only the book wasn't so goddamn stupid. We open with a scene in which a cross-dressing assassin attempts to kill the president of the US during a basketball game. However Tracker is on the court, impersonating a player (yep, he can contend with professional athletes as well), and manages to take out the killer, who turns out to be the same guy who killed Tracker's girlfriend in volume #1. Soon Tracker learns that a Japanese conglomerate wants to kill him: The Green Lightning, a COBRA-type army who send wave after wave of ninjas after him.

The head of this organization is a gorgeous Japanese gal named Jaki Kurakawa, a doctor who has sapphic tendencies; she employs an American sociopath named Henrietta "Hank" James to kill Tracker. This is the most sadistic section of the novel as we see Hank in action. A gorgeous lady herself, Hank likes to seduce men, take them back to her place, and then dismember them, even keeping their severed part in display cases. She then murders the poor sap, who nevertheless lives on in Hank's mind as part of a cheering throng, a throng which urges Hank on before each of her next kills. Hank was raped and tortured by her father as a child, which we are told is the cause of her insanity. Because, you know, everything can be blamed on our childhoods. To up the lurid quotient, we not only get to see snippets of Hank's childhood (during which she eventually murdered her father) but also see her as she dismembers and kills a guy.

You might remember the PC overtones of the previous novel; they're still here, if a bit subdued. However they come to the fore with the character of Hank, whom Tracker promptly begins to pity. Yes, this bloodlusting murder who tries to kill Tracker himself is a target of pity for our politically-correct protagonist, who arranges the woman's capture. He then sees that Hank is sent to a mental care facility, all the long regretting her fate and feeling sorry for the monster. (I wonder how Johnny Rock would've handled her?)

Undaunted, the Green Lightning sends teams of ninjas after Tracker. During a carchase Tracker, nude, hops in the car of an innocent passerby while trying to escape. The driver of course turns out to be a hot-as-hell lady named Dee, who despite being shot at and chased begins to flirt with this nude stranger who just jumped into her car. Pretty soon she's shacked up with Tracker in his home, for her "safety" of course. Here follows another OTT scene where a team of ninjas attack Tracker's house; at one point Tracker, again naked, dodges a sword-thrust by hopping up onto his chin-up bar and, since he's weaponless, pisses on the ninja's face. This is something I hope to never see in a kung-fu film.

But man, it just gets dumber and dumber. Tracker keeps pulling raids on the Green Lightning, taking on legions of ninjas and even their best fighter, hopping back and forth from Japan to Colorado as if they were next door to each other. Sometimes Dee is with him, sometimes she isn't. When she is they exchange incredibly horrible banter and dialog. In fact the dialog in this novel is some of the worst I've ever read, with exposition balder than Kojak. Check out this gem from Dee, as she informs Tracker toward the end that he doesn't have to worry about her falling in love with him:

"Tracker, I know what you're saying. Let me explain myself, though. I don't want kids or a white picket fence. I love my job and I make good money with it. I also enjoy spending the money on vacations and excitement. You bring excitement into my life, Natty Tracker. I know you meet beautiful women all over the world, and I know what your life is like, but your life is so exciting, I can only take it in small doses. I enjoy that and can still enjoy my work as well. I don't want to own you, brand you, or bear your children. I want to share some quiet times, exciting times, and romantic times with you, and that's it."

I mean, this shit makes Harold Robbins seem like Proust. There are better (by which I mean worse) examples I could've shown, but that one will have to do. It's all just so bad and so stupid that it makes me shake my head in regret. Again, this series could've been something, an OTT goof on the genre, but intead it's the worst of the genre, a men's adventure novel as neutered as one of Hank's victims, and what gets me the most is I'll have to soldier my way through the rest of the series, as I bought the entire run and don't want to have fully wasted my money.