As Evil Does

As Evil Does, by John Tigges
No month stated, 1987  Leisure Books

John Tigges strikes again with another super-fat ‘80s horror paperback complete with embossed cover. And this one’s much better than the previous one I read, The Immortal. I don’t think you can currently find the plot of As Evil Does mentioned anywhere online, so my friends, let me tell you what it’s about – a dude becomes possessed by the soul of a murdered biker and takes on a Satanic biker gang!

In a storyline very similar to Marvel’s ‘70s comic Ghost Rider (only without the flaming skull), As Evil Does mixes bikers with pulp horror in a tale that runs to nearly 400 pages of big print. Despite the plentiful sleaze and pulp, Tigges still manages to stall at times with go-nowhere digressions about boring minor characters and their humdrum lives. Luckily he doesn’t do this to the extent he did in The Immortal, so As Evil Does comes off as more of a satisfying read.

And you really know you’re in for a lurid time when the first fifty pages document the horrible rape and murder of a college-age girl and her friend by a gang of bikers. This is Cindy Wellington and Tammi, on break during Labor Day weekend (the novel appears to take place in Ohio). Walking through the woods they’re ambushed by The Light Bearer’s Chosen, a Satan-worshipping group of bikers lead by Bull, a mountain of a man who immediately announces that they’re about to have a little gang-bang.

But Buckshot, rotund and slovenly member of the gang, complains about Bull’s stalling – the leader wants to have various “games” to see who gets the girls first – and soon enough the two burly bikers are whipping at each other with chains. Buckshot manages to win through guile, and slits Bull’s throat. Now he’s become the leader of the gang, and has even taken Bull’s “mama,” a super-hot lady named Cow who wears a vest with nothing beneath it, thus showing off her massive melons with pierced nipples.

Cow is something else, my friends, and unfortunately Tigges takes too long to exploit his creation: we gradually learn that it was she who turned the gang on to Satanism, and also that she was raised in a coven. But here in the opening section she’s more so just a regular biker chick, stoically accepting that her man has been killed and then insisting they perform the proper Satanic rites over his corpse before burying him (and his Harley) in the woods. Meanwhile poor Cindy and Tami wait to be gang-raped.

And they are, the sequence harrowing but not as much as it would be in a “regular” novel – this is a cheesy ‘80s pulp horror paperback, you know, and so much the better. But it does get pretty horrible when Buckshot, after the entire gang (including some of the women!) have had their way with the girls, announces that he’s now going to slit their throats. As she dies Cindy keeps thinking about her brother Judd, a great guy who instead of marrying his college sweetheart Peggy has helped see Tami off to college, given that their folks were killed a few years before in a car wreck…

There’s something strange going on between Judd and Cindy, and the way Tigges writes about their love for one another it crosses all sibling boundaries. But anyway when Cindy doesn’t come home that night, Judd’s so frantic that he leaves his girlfriend’s place and rushes to the cops. Only late that night do they find the mauled remains of the two girls, and unsurprisingly the local cops are presented as such halfwits that it’s obvious the murderers will never be found. Even when they discover motorcycle tread nearby, they figure it could’ve been left at some previous time.

But Judd keeps hearing someone screaming for him, even leaving handwritten notes in his house. One night he’s drawn to the woods, to where his sister and her friend were murdered. There he starts digging…only to uncover the corpse of Bull and his Harley. And promptly Bull appears in Judd’s mind. Here begins the possession motif which is at the core of As Evil Does; Bull quickly learns that he can control Judd’s body, and thus swears to use it to gain vengeance upon the Light Bearer’s Chosen.

Tigges works in more supernatural stuff with Bull apparently able to imbue Judd’s scrawny frame with superhuman power; much is made over how the average-sized Judd is able to easily heft Bull’s 800-pound “hog.” Then he goes about the process of restoring it, even painting it with a big Maltese Cross, the sign of the Satanic gang. Judd however knows nothing about choppers, and his sudden personality change is the source of much confusion for his teeth-gnashing wallflower of a fiance, Peggy.

While Tigges makes their love too melodramatic, with lots of stuff from Peggy’s point of view over how she can’t handle this crazy personality switch, how Judd suddenly curses around her and treats her like dirt, how he would rather ride his “hog” than be with her, Tigges does salvage it all by delivering a pretty explicit sex sequence, a Bull-controlled Judd giving it to Peggy with an “animalistic urge.” And you guessed it, she has the biggest climax of her life!

But boy it just sort of stumbles along. Given the plot summary, I figured Judd would become this dark force of supernatural vengeance. Instead, he only has two meetings in total with the Light Bearers, and the climax of the tale doesn’t play out satisfactorily in the least. There is a bare minimum of action in the novel. I envisioned Judd/Bull blasting around in the Harley and mowing down his old partners. But nothing like that happens, other than a super-brief fistfight halfway through the tale.

As in The Immortal, Tigges also has no problems with wasting the reader’s time; this is mostly done through go-nowhere “subplots” about Peggy and Zelda, Judd’s elderly neighbor. The latter has ultimately nothing to do with anything, but the former succeeds in burning up more pages, with Peggy visiting a good-looking psychologist named Maceo Montgomery and telling him how weird Judd’s been acting lately.

Tigges works in an unexpected element where Bull’s possession of Judd begins to manifest on the physical level. When he drives out to the “state capital” to confront the Light Bearers, Judd finds it strange that people at the biker campsite begin calling him “Bull.” Gradually we learn that, during the drive, he’s begun to look like the dead biker. But still, Buckshot and Cow and the other Satanic bikers know it’s not their leader come back to life, and Buckshot has Judd thrown in a pitch-black cell while Cow does a Satanic rite to contact Bull’s spirit.

The scene could’ve had a much cooler outcome – maybe Bull’s spirit taking on Cow in the spirit realm – but instead Bull just hides from her. Tigges delivers another brief sex scene here, as the bikers have an orgy to fuel the “dark spirits,” but there’s not much to it, and plus it isn’t very fun to read because we’re often reminded how dirty the female bikers are! In particular Judd can’t get over how attractive Cow looks, even though she looks so dirty and smells so funky. This all just reminded me once again why I’ve never much cared for biker chicks. And plus, I want my super-hot Satanic chicks to have immaculate hygeine, you know?

Anyway, we do get that fistfight mentioned above, as Buckshot sends a biker named Snake down to kill Judd. Buckshot even gives him a weapon, his knife. Sadly, Buckshot’s damn knife appears to be the only weapon these bikers have ever heard of; we’re often told it’s not only the reason he was able to beat Bull, but it’s also the reason why he’s now the leader! Surely one of the gang could’ve bought a gun??

But the fight is quick and instead of killing Snake, Judd/Bull instead makes him go insane…followed by an unintentionally funny capoff where Judd has a face to face with Buckshot and speaks in Bull’s voice…and Buckshot faints. Instead of wiping out the gang, Judd gets back on his “hog” and heads back to constantly-worrying Peggy, who this time can’t take the suddenly-rude Judd. Bull once again in full control, he proceeds to slap Peggy and then rape her. Now we have more internal conflict as Peggy wonders if she was raped…and by who?

This incident does bring the whole “Judd’s possessed” cat out of the bag, and Peggy holds on for a few pages, listening to Bull’s voice coming from Judd’s body, before she passes out. Cute more time-wasting as we have these interminable sequences where she wonders if she’s losing her mind. Do you realize how stupid this is, given that we’re almost 300 pages into the book by this point? Yes, Judd is possessed! Get with the program already! But this is just a pulp writer at work, Tigges desperate to meet his word count. Why it never occurred to him to instead give us more action scenes escapes me.

Finally we’re wrapping up. While Judd, fully under Bull’s command, hops on his Harley and goes back to the “state capital” to kill Buckshot, we see that meanwhile the portly biker is about to be ousted, anyway. Cow and another member named Gordo are sick to death of Buckshot, and are just about to sacrifice him when Judd shows up. Even here, in the final pages, Tigges denies us a fiery climax, with Judd instead helping them tie Buckshot up to an altar. I mean, they were already going to kill him, anyway – Judd’s entire presence here is meaningless!

Speaking of meaningless, at the same time Peggy and Dr. Montgomery are high-tailing it to “the state capital” in the doc’s Trans Am, hoping to save Judd. They show up just in time to see Judd, fully looking like Bull now, slice Buckshot’s throat with a sacrificial dagger. Then Satan himself starts howling in the darkness, and the bikers fall to their knees, and Peggy pulls Judd/Bull away, and by the time they get back to the car, he looks like Judd again. And they drive off, and that’s that…Bull is gone.

But yeah…the finale sucks. There’s no resolution to any of the other bikers…the last we see of Cow, she’s on her knees, kissing the floor, thanking the devil for Bull’s return. There isn’t even any sense conveyed of Bull or Judd’s sated vengeance when they kill Buckshot. Nope, the novel just fizzles out, Judd back to normal and happy and content with Peggy, his memory of the past few days clouded. I don’t know, maybe I was just looking for something more…I mean, this is a pulp horror paperback.

But even considered thusly it’s kind of a failure. It occurred to me halfway through As Evil Does that John Tigges was just too “nice” of an author for the horror genre. There are paltry thrills here, and zero chills. The gore level is almost nonexistent, and other than the opening rape/murder, there’s no other violence in the entire novel. Rather, there’s a “safe” air that permeates the entire book, as if it were written for preteen girls.

Judging from my own memories of the ‘80s horror paperback boom, that was exactly the reading audience of these books, anyway, so who knows – maybe Tigges was just delivering the barebone thrills his juvenile readership demanded.

Body Rub

Body Rub, by Mark Andrews
No month stated, 1976  Leisure Books

Offering everything I wanted from The Savage Women and more, Body Rub is yet another Leisure paperback original that trades on sin and sleaze. “Massage parlors were a front for prostitution…and worse,” goes the blurry cover blurb, and you’ll never guess what that “worse” entails – that’s right, my friends, Satanism!!

Running to 237 pages of smallish print, Body Rub is more of a breathless cliffhanger than a well-crafted tale. Our hero is Ken Hawkins, young crime reporter for the New York Sun; he also happens to be the scion of the family that started the paper, generations before, and thus is a millionaire who will one day run the place. But he enjoys being a reporter, and the novel, despite taking place in the mid-‘70s, seems to exist in this 1930s-style world in which newspaper reporters are famous. Thus Hawkins is well-known throughout New York, a veritable celebrity.

Hawkins’s current assignment has him looking into the massage parlors that currently proliferate around Manhattan, in particular the dirty, mobbed-up origins of most of them. In particular there’s The Wild West, a parlor in lower Manhattan that employed a masseuse named Marcia, whose body was recently discovered by the cops. Before her disappearance Marcia was already in the headlines, as she was supposedly informing the cops about the truth of who was behind many New York massage parlors. Now, before she could spill the beans, she’s dead.

After breaking a dinner date with his girlfriend, the busty blonde TV newsreporter Vivian Power, Hawkins goes to The Wild West parlor in lower Manhattan with Joe Rainey, a Sun photographer notorious for getting into scruffles. The place turns out to be an ultramod pleasure palace, with breathtaking young women prancing around in revealing western costumes – unlike Len Levinson's more realistic Without Mercy, the masseuses in Body Rub are all young, well-built, and very into their work. In that respect the novel is more along the lines of Massage Parlor.

Only after arriving at the parlor does Hawkins realize his self-imposed “no sex” clause isn’t going to pan out. The women are just too hot and too nude, and after a few drinks in the lounge he’s already picked out the one for him: a petite blonde with a killer bod who sits there sewing(!?), wearing “grandma glasses!” This is Kathy, who as you’d expect is a good-natured, innocent young gal who just recently came to New York – and of course is already working in a massage parlor. Before he can go off in private with her, though, Hawkins watches another of the masseuses dance, and as she strips down to the skin he sees that she wears a devil-faced medallion on her waist, hanging right above her crotch, and the sight of it puts Hawkins in a momentary hypnosis.

Unlike The Savage Women, Body Rub doesn’t shirk on the sex scenes; Andrews serves up a hot and heavy one with Hawkins and Kathy that spares no details. But to continue with the goofy tone of the novel, the two fall into instant love after their mutual climaxes! The happy sentiments don’t last, because shortly thereafter Hawkins and Rainey discover a corpse in the parlor’s hot tub; floating there, her throat slashed, is another masseuse. Andrews here works in a locked room murder mystery, but it’s eventually lost in the novel’s frantic shuffle.

Things get even stranger when Rainey immediately thereafter disappears, he too down in the hot tub room (to take photos) while Hawkins has everyone else gathered together up in the lounge. When Hawkins discovers his pal is gone, he returns to the lounge to find everyone else has fled into the night, including his “new love” Kathy. Instead of calling the cops, Hawkins just takes off, phones 911, and goes back to the Sun offices, where he eventually receives a call from Kathy, who apologizes for deserting him.

Andrews ends each chapter with a cliffhanger, and the dumbest comes here, with Kathy and Hawkins going to bed together, and being woken up a few hours later by “a strange beeping”…that turns out to be Hawkins’s damn pager! Off Hawkins goes again – the novel by the way occurs over two frantic days – to meet up with yet another massage parlor masseuse, one who wants to meet with Hawkins at this ungodly hour to tell him the truth about Marcia’s death. Hawkins arrives just in time to see the girl get gunned down by a triggerman in a speeding car; clutched in the dead girl’s hand Hawkins finds the name of another parlor, The Love Rub, as well as a ring with that devil face on it. For no reason at all, Hawkins slips the ring on his own finger.

The Love Rub turns out to be a slum more in line with what these New York massage parlors were supposedly really like – an old lady at the front desk, dispirited men in the grungy waiting room, even more dispirited women who come out to greet them. Here Hawkins learns that his devil-faced ring is a sign of “The Society,” and wearing it apparently affords him extra privileges at these places. But after he’s stripped down in a cube with a hardbitten Love Rub masseuse – one he has definitely decided he won’t be having sex with – Hawkins is confronted by a “tall man” in a black coat, hat, and a scar on his face. This is the same man previously seen at the Wild West, who went into the hot tub with the girl before she died, but never came back out.

A nude Hawkins escapes, setting off a chase scene that goes all the way back to the Sun offices, where Hawkins gets hold of his gym clothes, left behind in his locker (a humorous scene which sees a gay staffer bringing the clothes to Hawkins, out in his car, and trying to get a good look at him), and then discovers that the tall man has followed him here as well. Andrews must’ve worked in a newspaper office or at least toured one, as Hawkins’s escape through the bowels of the place seems cut from reality, as he dodges the tall man on the noisy floor of the printing room, nearly getting killed by the thrashing machinery in the process. 

Covered in newsprint ink, Hawkins hops in his “custom-built red Lotus” and takes off, eventually getting chased by the cops on the snow-filled streets of early-morning Manhattan. The cops you see are after Hawkins too, his having run from two murder scenes. After crashing into a bank, Hawkins escapes on foot to Kathy’s conveniently-nearby apartment, only to discover that she too is now missing. His priorities in order, Hawkins takes a leisurely bath, dons a new set of clothes from the large assortment of men’s clothing left behind in her apartment(!), and takes some money from Kathy’s left-behind purse(!!).

As mentioned the novel works like a cliffhanger, with our hero dashing from one bizarre event to the next, slowly putting together clues. Around the midway point it becomes clear that Andrews is not going to be able to tie all the strings together; in fact, the final twenty or so pages are composed of nothing but expository dialog, detailing everything that happened and why! But at any rate, getting there is at least fun, with our author comfortably doling out background detail on the harried life of a newspaper reporter. He also doesn’t hold back on the sex and drugs angle; the only thing really missing is the violent action.

Eventually Hawkins pieces it together that “The Society” is a Satanic cult founded by Thomas Maloney, famous “acid guru” of the ‘60s, a one-time Ivy League professor who became notorious for his “tune in, drop out” comments. Gee, I wonder who he could be based on? After spending five years in prison for hauling cocaine across the Mexican border, Maloney has refashioned himself as an Anton LaVey type, preaching Satanic sin from his mansion in the posh countryside outside of New York City.

Hawkins discovers all of this after visiting yet another massage parlor: The Experience, one that runs out of an old church. Andrews by the way is a master of dropping hints and clues early in the novel and playing up on them later; Hawkins only visits the Experience because he recalls Kathy having mentioned it as a place where a friend of murdered masseuse Marcia’s once worked. This friend turns out to be another whore, one named Sherry, who happily takes Hawkins to a separate room for a private engagement.

The ‘70s are in full effect as Sherry reveals that Hawkins’s appropriated devil-ring has a coke spoon built within it, and thusly she breaks out a veritable cache of drugs. Hawkins insists he’s just a Jack Daniel’s man, though he does partake of a joint with her – cue another psychedelic scene of hypnosis. But Hawkins comes out of it, ready and raring to go at it with Sherry, even though the previous night he fell in love with another whore, Kathy, who as you’ll recall is missing and no doubt was violently abducted by whoever is chasing after Hawkins himself.

But before they can do the deed, Sherry collapses…mere moments after drinking the Jack Daniel’s that was brought for Hawkins! Yet another masseuse with answers to the puzzle now dead, Hawkins once again runs off. The novel barrels into the homestretch as Hawkins takes a train for upstate New York, zeroing in on the opulent domain of Thomas Maloney. Coincidence abounds throughout the novel, and bumming around at a bar Hawkins just happens to meet a cute young gal who herself is headed for the mansion – because, conveniently enough, a Mass is about to take place. And you won’t be surprised to know that the girl is super-eager to take Hawkins along with her.

The ensuing Black Mass is full-on Satanic Sleaze, though nothing as outrageous as that in The Mind Masters #2: Shamballah. But Hawkins is promptly exposed as an interloper, shambling around in a black robe with the others with no idea what he’s supposed to do. Here ensues the first of the expository info-dumps that make up the “climax,” with Maloney granting Hawkins “his final interview” – Hawkins’s, that is, as Maloney plans to kill him. Maloney unveils a long backstory about how he came to start the Society Of Life and how he’s branching out into massage parlors as a way to further insinuate himself into society. The murdered masseuses all were privy to information that could’ve undone his plans, so they had to die.

Actually the finale is just explanation after explanation – Hawkins is saved by the tall man, of all people, who identifies himself as a Fed, but Hawkins beats the shit out of him, and we don’t learn why until the endless dialog in the ensuing chapter. Hawkins, meeting the press at Kathy’s big art show (she’s quit being a masseuse, having just sold her first few paintings before meeting Hawkins), unfolds the tale that the tall man was a mobster. And Kathy and Rainey are also here at the art show, each relating their own stories of how they were abducted by mobsters and kept locked up until just a few hours before, having been saved by the cops following leads Hawkins provided!

Obviously our author is having fun with his sordid and sleazy tale – I mean, Hawkins’s girlfriend Vivian Power doesn’t even appear until the final few pages, where she announces at the art show that she’s now engaged to Hawkins’s editor! And Hawkins, flustered for a moment, starts to mentally compare Vivian to Kathy, realizing that in reality Vivian’s a “controlling bitch” and etc – just total character assassination, even though Vivian’s just shown up in the novel. But anyway all this serves to make Hawkins realize how much he loves Kathy, and how she loves him to; Andrews ends on a further goofy note, with the revelation that, every once in a while, Kathy and Hawkins will still play “masseuse and client” in the comfort of Hawkins’s swank penthouse apartment.

Writing-wise, the novel is better than it has any right to be; as mentioned Andrews has a particular gift for dropping seemingly-irrelevant details and then later picking up on them. He also captures that ‘70s vibe I so enjoy, from the massage parlor décor to the outrageous clothing his characters wear, though take note that Body Rub takes place in that era when the cool, funky-freaky early to mid 1970s was changing into the bland, disco-dancing late 1970s; in fact, Hawkins several times mentions that disco music is playing in various party scenes.

I assumed “Mark Andrews” was just a house name, given the handful of paperback originals Leisure published under this name in such a short span of time. To give further credence to this assumption, Body Rub is copyright Leisure. But I have another Mark Andrews novel, The Return Of Jack The Ripper, from 1977 (which I’ll soon read), and it’s copyright Mark Andrews, so who knows, maybe it was a real person.

The Satan Trap (aka Nick Carter: Killmaster #131)

The Satan Trap, by Nick Carter
No month stated, 1979  Charter Books

This installment of the Nick Carter: Killmaster series promises quite a lot – I mean the back cover blurb makes it sound like a bast of pure Satanic sleaze, which is my favorite kind of sleaze. And while The Satan Trap does occasionally veer in this direction, it is for the most part a bland sort of spy caper that goes in too many directions. That being said, in this volume Nick Carter poses as a demon, so at least it has that going for it.

Apparently written by Jack Canon (the same name, with one less "n," that Nelson DeMille would use for his Ryker reprints in the late ‘80s), this volume comes in at a too-long 223 pages of smallish print. Canon went on to write for the series on into its final stages a decade later, so I guess he eventually found his footing. His storytelling skills are pretty good, and he gives narrator Carter a few deadpan, hardboiled lines, but I just felt there was too much going on. If he’d stuck with the plot promised on the back cover, about a Satanist using his loyal women to blackmail political bigwigs, he would’ve had a much stronger (and more fun) novel.

After a disastrous mission in South America in the opening pages, in which Carter has to hide out while his comrades are torn apart, our narrator heads to Switzerland to meet with his boss, Hawk. From here Carter is briefed on the strange activities of the Draco cult, which is based outside of Monaco. A KGB agent was working undercover there before being found out, and now he wants to talk to Carter, whom he’s met with in the past. After a very James Bondish ski chase in the snow-swept forests, Carter learns from the dying agent that Draco is not only blackmailing influential people, but he’s apparently involved in something heavier.

The KGB man was about to bring in someone to help him: an occultist who works as a spy on the side, named Serena. (Definitely a Bewitched tribute, as later Canon even references an “Aunt Clara.”) Serena doesn’t know that her handler’s been made, and Carter doesn’t know what she looks like, but his job is to meet up with her in the predesignated location of London and go with her to Monaco. Here Canon proceeds to further muddy up what could otherwise be a lean, sleazy tale with the introduction of Komand, another dude from Carter’s past, who we learn via backstory once sold Carter out early in the Killmaster’s career.

Komand, who only works for the highest bidder and has no allegiances, is himself trying to get into Draco’s Monaco temple, called Pastoria. He has his own Serena, in an effort to hoodwink Carter, but our narrator quickly deduces this and heads off with the real one, who as expected is very attractive and lithely built. The two have a sparky relationship, constantly trading barbs, and Carter’s frustrated that he’s been hooked up with such an inexperienced agent.

Canon still denies us the sleazy stuff, with Serena instantly heading off for Pastoria – she’s been brought in by Draco to summon a demon or something – while Carter goes to nearby Monaco to get to the bottom of this blackmailing scheme. More characters are doled out. Most importantly there’s Gilda Morrow, a crone who was once a Theda Bara-style actress in the silent age; she is perhaps the most famous member of Draco’s cult, living in decadent splendor in Monaco and hosting various bigwigs who come down to check out the cult. One of her latest acquisitions is yet another actress, this one a young and uber-sexy Brigitte Bardot/Sophia Loren-type named Paulina Mendici.

Carter has further been informed that someone down here is also in intelligence; it’s not long before he learns it’s Paulina, who works for Interpol on the side. He learns this shortly before the expected sex scene; spotting each other in Monaco’s plush casinos, Carter and Paulina trade lascivious looks and flirt until it leads to the series-mandatory outcome. Canon goes more for the purple prose in the ensuing sex scene (the book definitely isn’t as explicit as the previous one I read, Target: Doomsday Island), with lots of talk of “cresting passion” and the like. We do learn though that Paulina has the greatest body Carter has ever seen, so given that the dude’s been with like a few hundred ladies by this point, she must certainly be something.

There’s a cool part where Carter joins a party hosted by Gilda Morrow at her estate, and here we see a bit of the Draco cult in action, though the man himself doesn’t appear. Instead the ceremony is hosted by LaFarge, Draco’s second-hand man, and from what Carter’s intel tells him apparently the one pulling the strings. Carter quickly notices how familiar the man seems – there follows this goofy bit where we learn that not only was LaFarge the guy who played Dracula in one of Gilda’s old films, but he’s also a gunrunner…and he was the leader of the sadistic terrorists in that opening section in South America! Talk about plot contrivances!

Anyway after getting randy from the (nondescribed) cult sex onstage, the audience is welcomed to make use of private rooms. Carter and Paulina head for one, but the Killmaster makes the poor girl moan and fake it in the dark room as he goes off into the tunnels hidden beyond. Here we learn that the rooms are monitored via infrared camera, recorded onto film for later blackmailing purposes. This apparently isn’t enough plot for Canon, though, as Carter also learns that LaFarge is trying to get into some heavy weapons selling, probably to foster a worldwide revolution or some shit.

Serena meanwhile poses as an exorcist for Draco, and Carter manages to score with her as well, Serena throwing herself at Carter during a clandestine meeting in a former brothel outside Nice. It had to be hard to write these books in first-person, because Canon has to let us know that Serena is acting suspicious here, yet due to the demands of the plot Carter comes off like an idiot because he doesn’t notice. Ie, Serena not only insists they have sex, but Carter is “pretty certain” that she keeps checking her watch throughout. And yet when Carter later goes out to his car and discovers it’s wired to blow, Serena is not the first person he suspects! 

Draco doesn’t even appear until the end, despite being the sole villain listed on the back cover. He’s a raving lunatic, expecting Serena to summon a demon (which he names “Nickrobus!”) from the pits of hell, so Draco can challenge it and thus claim dominance over it and hell itself. Carter ends up posing as the demon; using Scooby-Doo trickery and smoke bombs he appears in a mask and costume, taunting Draco. This leads into the finale, in which Carter deduces that the “Untouchable Monks” who patrol Pastoria are really soldiers, and that Komand is trying to take over LaFarge’s gunrunning scheme. Oh, and Komand has someone working for him undercover, but you’ll have long figured out who it is.

The Satan Trap is just underwhelming for the most part, despite the promise of Satanism and sleaze. The Draco cult is woefully unexplored and more focus is placed on the shady world of espionage, with Carter often reflecting back on people he’s worked with and how untrustworthy they are. There is however a nice touch in a minor character, named Andre, who supplies Carter with guns and intel. Andre is able to go into a trance mode and relay information, as if he’s a different person, which makes me wonder if Canon had read Walter Bowart’s recently-published book Operation Mind Control, which was all about how MK-Ultra was used to make real-life spies just like this.

I wasn’t blown away by this particular installment, but I still have a few more volumes of Nick Carter: Killmaster to check out. Hopefully they’ll be more entertaining.

Shannon #3: The Mindbenders

Shannon #3: The Mindbenders, by Jake Quinn
January, 1975  Leisure Books

As half-assed and leisurely-paced as its predecessors, the third and final installment of the Shannon series once again sees our titular hero more concerned with downing whiskey and scoring with his hooker girlfriend. Meanwhile an Anton LaVey-styled “medium” is implanting mind-control devices in the heads of UN employees in some unspecified plot to do something. And Shannon’s gonna stop him, even if it takes him the entire novel to get around to it.

Once again Jake Quinn (more on whom below) is more content to wheel-spin, casually doling out his lackluster tale with absolutely no sense of urgency. Well, anyway, here’s the story: Alexander Garth, the LaVey-type, is a famous medium with jet-set clients all over the world, and is now famous on his own. However, he uses his hypnotic powers to lull his unsuspecting clients into a trance, during which Garth implants them with a mind-controlling device. We learn this only gradually, the novel opening with the sudden “suicides” of two of Garth’s clients, both of them UN notables: Akasaka of Japan and Haslev of Denmark.

Shannon’s brought into it when he catches his latest girlfriend, a UN translator from Norway named Aurora, snooping around in Shannon’s penthouse study one night. When Shannon sees that the girl’s taking photos of Shannon’s top-secret MORITURI files (the top secret organization Shannon “works” for), he chases after her…and the girl willingly jumps off of the high rise, killing herself. (All this just a few pages after some explicit sexual shenanigans between the two.)

Well, you know it’s Shannon when his reaction is to… break open another bottle of Jameson’s whiskey. Yes, friends, Shannon the drunk is up to his usual page-filling tricks, biding his time throughout the narrative and not really doing much of anything. Hell, he doesn’t get in a single action scene in the entirey of The Mindbenders, at least of the fist-and-guns variety. Now as for sex action, Shannon’s got that covered, with this volume getting pretty down and dirty at times; it’s much more explicit than the previous two volumes.

But anyway, just a few minutes after some hot n’ heavy screwin’ in Shannon’s bedroom (a scene in which we’re graced with the unforgettable tidbit that Shannon “watched himself in the ceiling mirror as he entered Aurora” ), the poor girl’s become a human pancake on the sidewalk far below. And after his drink, Shannon eventually gets around to doing something about it…namely, pestering his boss, the unimaginatively-named Number One, who poses as a priest in a NYC Catholic church.

Here’s the funny thing, though, despite the fact that the two dead men and Aurora all worked at the UN, and the Number One-revealed info that there’s apparently a mole leaking important secrets at the UN, no one believes Shannon that all of it might be tied together! In one of the more preposterous page-filling gambits I’ve encountered, our author instead has Shannon constantly butting heads with Number One and everyone else, who tell Shannon he’s crazy to even suspect that these “random suicides” might be the work of some nefarious foe.

Not that Shannon does much about it. No, he’s more content to call up his hooker friend Lillian, the female lead of the previous two installments whose name I could never recall. Lillian, a stacked redhead who is in love with Shannon, once again serves as more of a star in Shannon’s own novel. However Joe-Dad, Shannon’s black/Chinese cook and best pal, plays a much smaller role, and his un-PC jive talk is also greatly reduced. But then in this particular installment all of the characters talk like automatons, doling out expository info or filling pages with blather about irrelevant stuff, like even Joe-Dad bitching about how literary critics “complain about everything these days”!

Alexander Garth receives an arbitrary background section in which Quinn provides lots of useless backstory – but at least it’s all nice and lurid, especially when Garth hooks up with another Anton LaVey type who introduces Garth to the wonders of Satanism, complete with a Black Mass that features a willing “virgin” and lots of explicit sex. However Garth’s mind control ability isn’t really elaborated on; we learn that some other dude came up with the technology, and after learning how to master it Garth killed him and began using it, so as to spread his own power base. But again, why exactly he’s focused on the UN is never explored. 

Shannon works (well, sort of) in private eye mode throughout, talking to those who knew the two murdered UN employees. One of them is Andrew Lee, a young actor who served as a “friend” for Akasaka, whom we learn was gay. Quinn does actually pepper the novel with goofy stuff, and the Andrew Lee subplot is the goofiest of all, for we learn that he acts in an all-nude, off-Broadway play based 100% on Hair. Quinn, clearly having fun with it, takes us through the show as Shannon watches, and the opening song is “Did You Ever See Anything Like It In Your Hole?” The humor also extends into a darker realm, when a Garth-brainwashed Andrew Lee actually guts himself live on stage. (And then later some dude in the audience complains about having paid for his ticket!)

But man it just kinda keeps on going. Shannon talks with his friends, goes to bars, screws Lillian, and then wonders when the case will wrap up. Even though it’s clear Alexander Garth is somehow connected to all this, Number One refuses to give Shannon permission to do anything. He does however approve Shannon and Lillian going to a party at Liz Manderson’s, a Southern belle who is responsible for spreading Garth’s fame. This middling sequence, which makes a big deal of Shannon dying his red hair brown, at least serves to up the ante, as Garth takes a sudden interest in Lillian, offering to give her a reading the next day.

After Lillian herself is “mindbent,” Shannon ensures the implant is successfully removed in the hospital and then finally gets Number One’s approval to friggin’ do something. This leads to a lackluster climax that plays out during the Macy’s parade on Thanksgiving Day. Even here Shannon doesn’t punch or shoot anyone, merely just running after Garth, who ends up doing in himself accidentally (and gorily). Quinn, not realizing he had an entire damn novel to do so, instead plays out a veritable last-second reveal that Garth was really getting his orders from elsewhere, bringing this up and closing it over the course of a single page.

So, a middling end for a middling series. I think Leisure was even sick of it; notice how the cover design is vastly different from the previous two installments. In fact I’m betting this art was commissioned for a different book, as it has nothing whatsoever to do with the contents of The Mindbenders. And for that matter, the back cover copy (which I’m betting was written by Leisure editor Peter McCurtin, as it’s very much in his style) also has nothing to do with the actual novel, spewing out vague hyperbole about how tough Shannon is – actually it occurs to me that it’s mostly just a summarization of the events shown in the cover painting!

A couple months ago I came across some eBay listings where a seller was auctioning off author copies of the Shannon books. (I can’t remember how much they were listed for, but I think they ended without any bids!) According to the listing, “Jake Quinn” was in reality J.C. Conaway, aka James Curry Conaway (1936-2012), a prolific pulpster who turned out a wealth of paperbacks in his day. The listing further stated that Conaway never learned to type, and thus dictated every word; further, he apparently wrote all three Shannon novels in a single month!

At any rate The Mindbenders was it for the adventures of Patrick Shannon, but much like the similarly-boring Joe Rigg series, one could argue that Shannon’s adventures never even really started.

The Immortal

The Immortal, by John Tigges
No month stated, 1986  Leisure Books

John Tigges published several horror paperbacks through Leisure Books in the ‘80s; I’ve picked up a few over the years, but this is the first I’ve read. Like most other Leisure horror novels The Immortal runs to a fat 400 pages, but it’s got super-big print and Tigges’s writing is so pulpy and melodramatic that you’ll finish the book in record time.

Thumbing through my other Tigges books, it looks like they’re all the same – big books, big print, and fairly lurid, with a strong focus on horror exploitation, pulpy thrills, and explicit sex. What more could you ask for? The Immortal concerns itself with a Satanic group -- not a cult, as the members stress -- whose leader turns out to be the titular “immortal,” granting himself this extended life through mysterious means.

It takes a while to get to the good stuff, though. Our hero is Riley Larson (misspelled “Laron” on the back cover), a freelance writer/high school janitor in his early 30s who lives outside of Chicago. His live-in girlfriend is stacked redhead Melanie, 24, a free spirit with the mouth of a truck driver; the couple are in an open relationship. Then there’s Vicki, Riley’s blonde and elfin ex-wife. The first hundred or so pages of The Immortal are really given over to detailing the melodrama of Riley’s life as Tigges takes his time getting to the plot. 

Riley writes articles for the local paper, and when in the opening pages he thinks he witnesses a late-night occult ritual out in the woods (complete with a topless woman with “large breasts” and what appears to be the sacrificial knifing of a man on an altar), Riley figures he’s got instant article material. The next day he finds a sacrificial knife near the grounds (with a goat’s head on it, as shown on the cover), as well as the burnt remains of a Bible. Riley keeps these things to himself, as well as the fact that he thinks he witnessed a murder, and just writes about the possibilities of cult activity in the area.

The article opens up doors for Riley, thanks to the apearance of Leeanah Thorndyke, a super-hot brunette who claims to be from the “group” Riley saw performing that rite in the woods; indeed, it was she with the large breasts Riley oggled from afar. (The way Tigges describes Leeanah, with her raven hair, pale skin, and enormous breastesses, it’s hard not to think of Elvira!) Leeanah invites Riley and Melanie to attend the group’s meeting later that night, and after being chaffeured to his mansion in a Rolls Royce, the couple are introduced to Sebastian Synn, the elderly leader of the group.

Truth be told the exploitative Satanism stuff gets off to a slow start; their first meeting with Synn entails Riley and Melanie disrobing in an egg-shaped temple in Synn’s mansion while the old man recants some Latin and ritualistically fondles each of them in turn. But by the next day the couple sees an upswing in their life; Riley’s offered a job as a full-time writer on the paper, and Melanie is commissioned to do some high-paying portraits. It’s all pretty humdrum. Only the next ceremony points to the direction things will go, as this time Riley gets to have sex with gorgeous Leannah on the altar while Synn chants a vengeance ritual against a gay sorceror who opposes him. Tigges spends about a paragraph on the ritual sex, and doesn’t make much of it. 

But in a precursor to Maury Terry’s The Ultimative Evil, Riley’s called by the cops next day as an “expert” on what appears to be a cult murder. Two headless bodies have been found, their severed heads crushed in the same manner as the wax dolls Synn mutilated during the previous night’s ritual. But as usual with a character in a horror novel, Riley refuses to believe that these two men are the “gay sorcerors” Synn was out to get, let alone that they’ve been supernaturally decapitated.

At least Riley and Melanie begin to suspect Synn enough that they refuse to come over again that night. Some of the lamest “threats” I’ve ever read ensue, as Leannah keeps calling to see if they’re going to come over, and Riley and Melanie tell her they’ve got the flu, and an increasingly-frustrated Leannah tells them she hopes nothing “bad” happens to them or whatever. Eventually this “bad” stuff emerges when Riley gets a call from his editor, who tells him that “the banker” said the paper can’t afford a new fulltime employee, and Melanie too finds out that her portraits have been cancelled. The horror!!

Things get a bit worse when the following morning Riley discovers his home office destroyed…and his poor old dog dead and crucified to the wall! Neither he nor Melanie heard anything all night, and as they’re puzzling over this, Riley receives another call from the cops…turns out his ex-wife, Vicki, has friggin’ internally combusted!

From one of the few scenes from Synn and Riley’s perspective, we see Synn do yet another ritual, this one entailing Melanie having sex on the altar with all six of Synn’s male acolytes. Synn’s aim is to kill Riley’s wife, who Synn believes was interfering with Riley’s desire to join the group, Synn under the impression that Melanie and Riley are married. But due to Synn’s vague wording, Vicki, Riley’s true wife, instead is the one who blows up real good. (At least Satanic prayer is effective!!) 

After Synn buys off Melanie with a palm-sized diamond, Melanie agrees to get Riley to go back to the mansion…for whatever it is Synn wants Riley for. It should be obvious they’re walking into a trap, but our protagonists blithely eat dinner with Synn and Leannah, and promptly head off to their appointed bedrooms, where they’re nonplussed to discover attire suited to them in the wardrobe. Turns out Synn plans for them to stay for the long haul. Oh, and Riley enjoys a long and explicit sex scene with what appears to be a succubus, a “Stygian form” which appears in his room that night and proceeds to screw his brains out – Tigges serving up all the details on how this mystery woman has such firm command of her “internal” muscles, if you catch my drift.

And yet for all that, the book’s kind of boring. I should mention by this point we’re 300 pages in; all this stuff could’ve happened 200 pages ago. But Tigges is in no hurry whatsoever to tell his tale, and is not above wasting your time with redundant and needless scenes. Characters endlessly ponder things that would be easily solved by glue-sniffing kids. And the sleaze quotient, while there, isn’t all that outrageous, limited to a few moments in the Satanic temple and Riley’s nightly visits from his “Stygian” guest, whose true identity turns out to be one of the novel’s few surprises.

Another positive thing to be said about The Immortal is that it doesn’t end on the happy note I expected. Tigges serves up a downer of a finale which, despite being memorable, does seem at odds with the rest of the book. And also as is to be expected from a piece of horror pulp, too many pages are wasted on inconsequential things and too few important things are explained or resolved. Also, too little is exploited; the novel could’ve been a lot better if Tigges had focused more on the Satanic sleaze and less on the mundanity of Riley and Melanie’s relationship.

In other words, The Immortal doesn’t have a thing on William W. Johnstone’s The Nursery. I’ve got more Tigges books, as mentioned, and I’ll surely read them, but here’s hoping they’re more along the lines of the lurid trash I demand in my horror fiction.

The Executioner #124: Night Kill

The Executioner #124: Night Kill, by Michael Newton
April, 1989  Gold Eagle Books

Yet another novel I learned about via Michael Newton’s How To Write Action-Adventure Novels, Night Kill is actually by Newton himself; in the how-to book he showed us the outline he used to pitch the novel to Gold Eagle. And just like Psycho Squad #1, this is another men’s adventure novel clearly inspired by Maury Terry’s The Ultimate Evil, which is even namedropped on the first page.

In fact Night Kill is basically the men’s adventure version of Terry’s true crime masterpiece, doling out the same lurid “Satanic crime” details through a character who himself seems to be based on Maury Terry. This is Dr. Amos Carr (the last name itself a tip-off to The Ultimate Evil), a former cop who now is an investigative journalist, one who is known for exposing cult crimes. Bolan is put in contact with Carr via Hal Brognola, who has Bolan meet the man in Denver, where Carr is currently staying during his latest research.

The novel also comes off like a men’s adventure variant of Skipp and Spector’s The Scream (which I haven’t yet read), as Carr’s certain that the recent string of “Satanic cult murders” across the US is connected to the thrash metal group Apocalypse. Wherever Apocalypse tours, cultlike murders follow in their wake, and already two such killings have occurred here in Denver, even though the band has just arrived for their two-day concert engagement. After showing Bolan a slideshow of cult crimes and giving him a whole bunch of background on them (the majority of course taken from The Ultimate Evil), Carr succeeds in making Bolan agree that something rotten is going on.

Ironically, Bolan himself is practically a supporting character in Night Kill. He barely appears throughout the first hundred pages, and when he does he’s relegated to standing around and listening to other characters talk. Amos Carr comes off like the true protagonist, the one who does all of the research and legwork, the one who has all of the connections and makes things happen. Also ironic is that there’s hardly any action in the novel. Other than an unrelated battle scene against Irish terrorists in the opening pages, the “action” is relegated to cult murders and a quick climatic fight in the very final pages as Bolan takes on the Satanists.

Night Kill like other Gold Eagle publications of the era is too long for its own good. It runs to 253 pages, and that’s small print, baby. So many, many pages are superfluous, and clear indication that Newton was hard-pressed to fill the word quota. As is customary for Gold Eagle books, a lot of this material is given over to various characters who are introduced in leisurely fashion, and who are then either promptly killed or turn out to not have much to do with anything.

For example, we get several scenes from the viewpoints of various teen girls as they sneak out of the house to attend the Apocalypse concert. Corralled by the “hunters” who are part of the Satanic cult that has worked itself around the band, the girls are then lured to a “party” which turns out to be their place of death: sacrificial altars set up around cemeteries where the girls are drugged, tied up, and murdered. The hell of it is, though, all of these sequences are basically the same, despite being different girls each time.

Amos Carr also takes up a lot of the narrative, and humorously enough his contacts in the “occult world” know all about the Chingons and the Children of the Flame (supposedly the true force behind the Son of Sam murders) and etc, as if there’s an occult newspaper they all read. One thing I’ve always loved about Christian paranoia tales is that people in the occult are always “in the know,” like there’s this Satanic grapevine that keeps them all up-to-date on everything in the occult world.

But anyway, one of Carr’s contacts turns out to be a very attractive witch named Cassandra “Cass” Poole who, as we learn in the many sequences from her viewpoint, soon develops certain thoughts about Bolan. These thoughts are actualized in a Wiccan ritual Bolan attends with her (for absolutely no reason); Cass asks Bolan if he will “assist” her in the last part of the ritual, which entails the two of them bumping uglies beneath a tree. The sex scene here is more explicit than I expected it to be – nothing outrageous or anything, but more than I figured Gold Eagle would allow. At any rate it was nice to know Bolan can still get lucky every once in a while.

Many pages are also given over to the cult of Satanists who have infiltrated Apocalypse’s camp; the group’s “spiritual adviser,” a longhaired occultist named Lucian Slate, is a full-on Satanist, and has ties with one of the more violent cults. Made up of a group of “hunters” who work for a leader who calls himself Scratch, the cult is clearly based on the Children of the Flame. And Scratch himself is clearly based on Manson II, Maury Terry’s name for a “superstar of the occult world” who was a professional hitman who pulled off at least one of the Son of Sam murders (per David Berkowitz). Manson II by the way was still a mystery when Night Kill was published, but when the paperback edition of The Ultimate Evil came out later in 1989, he was outed as William Mentzer…who apparently lived right down the road from me at the time, in Cumberland, Maryland!!

Newton to his credit doesn’t just rake the Satanists over the coals; he also pokes fun at the televangelist movement that was so popular at the time. This is courtesy Reverend Jordan Braithwaite, whose growing ministry is based on longwinded rants against Satan, heavy metal, and Apocalypse in particular. We get way too many pages with Braithwaite, in particular the sermons he delivers, one for example which Bolan watches on TV, as if Newton’s desperate to fill up the pages. Braithwaite we gradually learn has ulterior motives, and many more pages are devoted to his own squabblings with the cult.

Really, Night Kill is an exercise in patience. It’s comprised of too much inessential detail and too many inessential characters, and it just sort of drifts along. Even a lurid bit midway through, where Bolan takes out a kiddie porn producer with ties to the cult, lacks much punch. And the finale is anticlimactic, with Cass abducted by Scratch, who plans to make her the last sacrifice before Apocalypse splits Denver. Bolan, clad in blacksuit, races to save the day, taking on his outclassed opponents in one of the more perfunctory action scenes I’ve ever read.

So long story short, whereas this novel could’ve been a lurid, sensationlistic blitz of twisted action, like Able Team #8 but with Satanists instead of drug-zombified gangbangers, Newton has instead gone for a true crime approach, keeping it all realistic.

But as far as I’m concerned, if you’re writing the 124th installment of a series titled The Executioner, “realistic” shouldn’t even be a consideration.

The Nursery

The Nursery, by William W. Johnstone
No month stated, 1983  Zebra Books

As a men's adventure-reading kid, I was familiar with William W. Johnstone’s post-nuke pulp Ashes series, but there seemed to be like a hundred volumes and I could never find the first one, and once when I tried to start reading anyway with the earliest volume I could find, I was like, “Man, this writer sucks!", and mind you I was around 11 years old at the time.

But Johnstone was one prolific writer and turned out way too many novels before his death in 2004. His earliest ones (starting in 1980, with his first published novel The Devil’s Kiss), were mostly horror, published by the always-entertaining Zebra Books. After seeing Will Erickson’s post on some Johnstone paperbacks on Too Much Horror Fiction, I looked into the man’s work…only to discover that this guy put the “glorious” in “trash” (or vice versa). For here was an author who enjoyed going as far out as possible. The only unfortunate thing is that Johnstone’s horror novels are incredibly overpriced on the used books market.

In particular I saw some good things about The Nursery, how despite being a retread of practically ever other Johnstone horror novel (basically, Satan takes over some hamlet in the midwest and it’s up to some Right Wing former soldier to kill ‘em all in Jesus’s name) it was also brimming with all of the salacious stuff the man’s earliest novels were notorious for. Make no mistake, this is one profane novel, so lurid and exploitative as to be hilarious, filled with terms and phrases straight out of Penthouse Letters. There’s no way in hell a novel like this could be published in today’s Twilight world.

Anyway 43 year-old Mike Folsom is returning to the tiny town of Butler, Lousiana when we meet him; Mike has just retired from over 20 years in the army, where he kicked ass in 'Nam and later all over the world. He’s one of those types who could kill you with a newspaper or something. He hasn’t been home for a decade, coming here ten years before to handle his parents’s estate, as they’d both died rather suddenly. Mike is also wealthy, thanks to his dad’s various business efforts, and he’s pretty damn right-leaning in his views. However, as Johnstone reminds us again and again, Mike isn’t a redneck (or a Cajun) and also isn’t a hardcore Christian, rarely if ever going to church.

But something’s up in Butler, as Mike soon discovers. All of the main roads are closed off and people in town are just acting plain different. A few of them still seem normal, though, in particular Rana Drew, a super-hot 33 year-old blonde with a “sensational derriere” and “great breasts;” Rana has been in love with Mike since she was a little girl, and just happens to run into him shortly after he’s returned to Butler. She makes her interests immediately known, inviting Mike over for dinner. Meanwhile Rana’s daughter, 15 year-old Lisa (Rana’s ex-husband long out of the picture), is a wild child, as are all of the teens in Butler, and most of Rana and Mike’s initial conversations are given over to Rana explaining why she lets Lisa get away with how she acts and etc.

Johnstone is not the most competent of authors, and in fact you could even say he’s a lousy writer. He POV-hops, his characters are walking cliches, and at hardly any point does he show instead of tell. Indeed the majority of the novel is relayed through dialog, with Mike almost like some TV reporter as he goes around asking question after question. But then, when the dialog in this book contains lines like, “What is this preoccupation with anal sex?” the reader can hardly complain. But the Mike/Rana conversation goes on throughout the entire novel, with Mike barraging her with questions and Rana doling out huge blocks of expository background.

But anyway it develops that ol’ Satan himself has taken over Butler, in the personage of the reclusive and wealthy Becker, whose power and minions have firmly shut off the hamlet from the rest of the world. Through the front of a supposed church (run by the depraved satanic Reverend Ron Egan) Becker has taken over the children as well, with kids Lisa’s age and younger going there to engage in group sex and the like. The titular nursery, also known as “the womb room,” is where fetuses are kept in like storage containers in which they are fed 24/7 diatribes about Satan and etc; this element is really underdeveloped and in fact the nursery has hardly anything to do with the novel, maybe taking up 5% of the narrative.

Johnstone throws in so many characters and subplots that eventually he loses track of many of them. Central though is Mike and Rana, and Johnstone doesn’t hold back when it comes to their eventual sex scene – I’m talking full-on porn, here. But in addition we have Becker, who is apparently using Butler as the new resting place for The Old One, an ancient sort of demon which needs a few decades or so of sleep every once in a while, or something like that. To achieve this Becker has turned the town into Satansville, USA, and in addition to the brainwashed satanists we’ve got vampires and zombies running around.

There are also roving packs of teenagers, and here Johnstone really gets to unleash on the generation gap, serving up the greatest fears of the conservative middle class by making the teens literally soulless automatons of sadism and death. “Something to do, man,” is Johnstone’s hilarious recurring phrase to sum up the aimless yet merciless whims of these kids, who as the narrative ramps up go off on rape and killing sprees. In fact there’s so much rape in The Nursery that the reader soon becomes desensitized to it. But we get it in spades, complete with even fathers raping their daughters and sons raping their mothers – this last bit in an unforgettable scene where Mike, armed with a shotgun, watches in horror as his next door neighbors go at one another…Mike in shock, but Johnstone doling out the details, of course.

Mike, you see, gradually learns that he is “God’s Warrior,” divinely chosen to carry out the battle against Satan. One of the funniest things about The Nursery and most other “Christian paranoia” tales about the devil and the occult is that God rarely if ever speaks directly to his followers – and yet the followers of Satan are always directly in communion with their master. There are scenes where Becker will call up Ol’ Scratch, and other parts where Satan will send out telepathic messages to his servants. Yet God remains perennially silent. And on top of that, Satanism as presented here basically involves lots of sex and power…whereas the Christians are reduced to ramshackle packs. But then, this has been part and parcel of Christian fiction since the era of the Roman Empire – my own personal belief (as evidenced by the success of Left Behind et al) is that some Christians sort of get off on being persecuted.

But anyway, Mike has to discover for himself that he’s been chosen – and Johnstone really kills time until he goes into kill mode for God. The Nursery, like every other Zebra publication, is too long for its own good, coming in at nearly 400 pages. But it’s big print, and Johnstone’s writing is so simple yet fluid that you barrel right along…plus there’s all the dirty stuff. And Johnstone doesn’t shirk on the violence, either, with Mike either blowing mind-washed satanists away with his .41 mag revolver, a shotgun, or an AK-47, given to him by a mysterious and possibly divine intermediary who calls himself Ted Bernard.

The novel takes place over one harried weekend, and is jam-packed with lurid shenanigans. For one there’s teenager Lisa, who comes on to Mike with a mouth that would embarras a truck driver. One of the novel’s many highlights is when Mike pulls Lisa out of the satanic church and attempts to whip the devil out of the girl, only to find that Lisa royally gets off on it (easily the most outrageous scene in the entire novel). But God wins out and soon Lisa is renouncing her evil ways, though this doesn’t stop her from talking dirty or telling Mike that he’ll have to “fuck” her if Satan comes for her again, as that will be the only way to save her soul – though this is one of many subplots Johnstone completely forgets about.

There are so many jawdropping scenes that one doesn’t know where to start. From the corny to the depraved, Johnstone covers all the bases. I mean, how about when the Christians in Mike’s home feel the “thought-pushings” of Satan, which sounds as some unspecified music in their minds (I imagined it as something cool like Slayer’s “Hell Awaits”), calling them back to “The Master,” and Mike gets everyone to hold hands and sing Christian sermons to fight back? Or…how about when Mike feels a “dark presence,” and he reaches out for the Bible, and as soon as he touches it the presence fades away? There are many such scenes which, to me at least, are just plain laughable, but what’s awesome is you can tell Johnstone’s a True Believer…which makes his lurid stuff all the more impressive.

Everything finally builds to a thrilling climax, with Mike blitzing the town of Butler in a commandeered truck, blowing away teenagers and satanists with his AK-47. But Johnstone wraps up the Old One storyline very anticlimatically, with Satan realizing that God, acting through Mike, has won again, and thus pulls his forces out of Butler. You know how in most horror movies the credits roll after the villain has been killed? Johnstone proves why this is a smart idea, as for whatever reason he wastes our time with several pages of aftermath, where Mike, finally able to communicate with the outside world now that Becker’s forces have been defeated, calls in his old Army friends and they look over the destruction and try to make sense of it.

Back in my Phoenix reviews I wrote that the main thing I loved about David Alexander's style was how he came off like a sex and violence-obsessed 15 year-old with no conscience; well, Johnstone is in the same league, my friends. In fact, one could argue that he goes even further. This is a case where only quotes will give a full idea of what the reader is in for. From the bizarre to the just plain dirty, here are a few excerpts from The Nursery. Brace yourself!

Lisa put her head back and curled her toes, jerking in climax. Her sleek tanned legs were spread wide, trembling as the good doctor pulled out of her and reached for a towel. He cleaned himself and tossed another towel to Lisa, pointing toward the small bathroom.

“Go wipe your pussy,” he told her. “Get the smell of cum off you. And don’t forget your birth control pills.” -- pg. 31

“Lisa –” Mike managed to say, lips on hers.

“If she did come in – which she won’t – she’d probably ask you for some.”

Mike pulled back, shocked. “That’s a terrible thing to say about your daughter!”

“But true. Want to see the vibrator and King Dong dildo she thinks she keeps hidden from me?”

“Not particularly.”

“Good. Then shut up and make love to me.”

Mike could not imagine his own daughter shoving a rubber cock up in her. He hoped she didn’t, at least. -- pg. 74

Ava screamed hoarsely as pain lanced through her slender body. The crowd of men and women, all naked or clad in the barest of clothing, laughed at the girl’s wailings.

“Hurry up, Al,” a woman urged. “This has got me all sexed up. Let’s go to the barracks and fuck. I want you to fuck my ass.” -- pg. 87

"What is this preoccupation with anal sex?” Mike asked.

“Tight,” Lisa answered bluntly. She looked up at him. “I mean,” she shrugged, “so they tell me.”

Mike had grown accustomed to the teenager’s frankness. Familiarized to it, but not comfortable with it.

She said, “You mean, Mike, as worldly as you are, you’ve never gone in the back door of a woman?”

Her mother sighed and shook her head.

“No,” Mike replied, his face red.

“That’s really wild, man.” -- pg. 222

Nickie stood in confusion in the moonlight. She could not understand what had happened. Had she been screwed or was it all a dream? Yes, she thought, dipping her fingers into the fur between her legs, she had been well-screwed. But where did the men go?

So she had not been dreaming. Her asshole was sticky. No dream there, either. -- pg. 275

The Possession Of Jessica Young

The Possession Of Jessica Young, by Russ Martin
August, 1982  Tor Books

Another of those novels with so much potential but so little delivery, The Possession Of Jessica Young is the first of a trilogy of “erotic horror” novels about a global satanic “Organization” and its battles against a pair of sisters who are the only ones with the mental powers to fight them. But what could’ve been a twisted or even lurid thrill ride instead has about as much bite as an ABC After School Special.

I first learned about Russ Martin’s books thanks to Will Erickson’s post on Too Much Horror Fiction. Along with the covers for most of Martin’s paperbacks, Will included a link to JR Parz’s Erotic Mind Control Novels review site, in which Parz regaled Russ Martin’s novels as practically the ultimate in erotic horror. And others must agree, because strangely enough Martin’s novels aren’t easily come by, in particular the finale of this loose trilogy, 1984’s The Education Of Jennifer Parrish.

So all told I was really anticipating some lurid thrills, especially given the high recommendations of Parz, who one might say is a little enthusiastic about this particular horror subgenre of “erotic mind control.” But man, talk about underwhelming. As I read The Possession Of Jessica Young I kept wondering if I was just missing something, because rather than being “erotic horror” it was moreso tepid, padded, and uneventful. Plus the protagonist was an idiot, which didn’t help matters.

Long story short, The Possession Of Jessica Young is about the titular protagonist’s escape from the Organization, a globe-spanning consortium of satanists who use erotic mind control to enslave their victims. Jessica, we gradually learn, was born with psychic powers, able to control thoughts and to even hop into the brains of others and control their bodies. The tale is told in two ongoing segments, “Then” and “Now.” In the former we learn how, starting in 1980, Jessica first ran afoul of the Organization. In the latter we see that now, in 1983, she is on the run from them, having killed her husband and child while under the mental control of Organization bigwig Stephen Abbott, who by the way has now latched onto Jessica’s teenaged sister, Heather.

Martin walks a strange line here, for in the majority of the “Then” section (and the entirety of the “Now” section for Heather), Jessica is under erotic mind control. Even though she’s happily married (to a successful horror novelist!) and has a good life, Jessica finds herself compelled to seek out Abbott. As the novel progresses and she learns how evil Abbott is, she is still unable to break away from him, constantly running back to him and doing whatever he orders her to do. It becomes a very frustrating experience for the reader to endure.

What makes it worse is that young Heather’s story in the “Now” section is exactly the same as Jessica’s story in the “Then” section! So basically you read the same story twice, back to back. Just as Jessica is torn away from her family until she acts like some robot who can think only of Stephen Abbott, so too does Heather drop out of school and run away from home to become the willing slave of her master Stephen Abbott. And it’s all just so tediously told; over and over we are informed how Jessica and Heather are unable to cast the magnetic Stephen Abbott from their thoughts, how they are more than eager to do anything to please him.

This of course leads to all of that “erotic horror” stuff, as the Organization in general and Abbott in particular are fond of keeping women in sexual servitude in their mansions (of course, all high ranking members of the Organization are ultra-wealthy). But Martin never gives the details of this; instead we read as the female characters are degraded into prancing around in maid uniforms and being scolded and slapped for the most minor of infractions, yet always chomping at the bit to spend time with Abbott, just to be near him. On and on and on the whole thing goes, padding out its barebones storyline with needless exposition and introspection.

The book is almost as overwritten as Eric Lustbader’s The Ninja. Martin is very fond of adverbs and the words “rather” and “quite,” all of which serves to make the book feel as stuffy as something from the 19th century. This stuffiness sometimes leads to unintentionally hilarious lines, like, “After that horrid day when she had been kidnapped and raped, things had all turned lopsided.” And for a novel of “erotic horror,” where the hell’s the sex?? The book is more pseudo-literature than the lurid binge I wanted…and what few sex scenes that do occur are neutered by the fussy and stuffy prose. Look, here’s an example of what passes for a sex scene in The Possession Of Jessica Young:

If there were an Olympics for lovemaking, Jessica would think later, then Stephen Abbott would surely hold a dozen gold medals. A dozen times during their encounter she thought he had raised her to the highest pitch of physical awareness, and each time he brought her up another increment. When at last he was ready to enter her she opened her thighs wide, swallowing him hungrily. Her pleasure was astoundingly swift and intense. She had heard of multiple orgasms, but had never experienced them before. Now her capacity was inexhaustible. Even physical exhaustion did little to slake it.

I’ll give you all a few moments to cool off. Personally I think if you’re going to write a sex scene, you should go all out. I mean, there’s no way to write a sex scene and not have it come out as comical or purple-prosed at least to some degree, so why even bother with the pretensions? It’s for this reason that I’ll always prefer straight-up horror pulp like Shamballah, where the writer isn’t concerned at all about getting too extreme, and there are no delusions of being “respectable.”

But there’s a bigger problem with The Possession Of Jessica Young: its titular protagonist is a complete idiot. Let me ask you – if you had just escaped from a globe-spanning satanic organization that had previously kept you in mental bondage, and if you had also just learned that said organization has now discovered your whereabouts and sent an assassin after you, would you just chalk it off and figure “well, maybe now they’ll leave me alone?”

Or what if you had a sister who suddenly went missing, and you were informed that prior to her disappearance she was acting strange and flighty, displaying all the same symptons you yourself did when you were under the mental subjugation of the globe-spanning satanic organization – when “just happening” to run into your oddly-behaving sister a few days after learning of her disappearance, would you chalk off her odd behaivor as just “teenager stuff?”

And yet, that’s exactly the nonsensical story Martin doles out. We eventually (and I do mean “eventually”) learn that Jessica finally became so in Stephen Abbott’s thrall that she killed her own husband and child (long story short, after Jessica’s failed attempt at escape, Abbot punished her by forcing her into the deed). But after this she managed to escape, fleeing from New York to Los Angeles. Now, months later, she works as a waitress and has a romantic affair with a cop named Jake Whittinger, a total louse who still lusts after his ex-wife.

Jessica knows that a satanic organization is out there, and that it wants her, but even after she dispatches an assassin sent to get her (killing him telepathically a la Scanners), she basically just shrugs it off and hopes that maybe the Organization will get the message and leave her alone! And meanwhile back in New York Stephen Abbott oversees the mental enslavery of Heather, who is soon sent, brainwashed, to rope in her sister. And when Heather just happens to show up in LA, acting completely different, even coming on to Jessica’s boyfriend, Jessica still just shrugs it off as growing pains or whatever!

What’s worse is that it isn’t until she’s again ensnared by the Organization that it even dawns on Jessica that her sister is not only under their control, but also that she’s the one who set Jessica up! Do you see what I mean? It’s really, really hard to read a novel in which your protagonist is this stupid, not to mention under “erotic mind control.” It’s like you’re reading an entire novel about a puppet. (Actually two puppets, if you factor in Heather’s storyline.)

And you’d think after 316 pages of small print there would at least be some sort of resolution, but nope! Instead it all comes off like the first installment of a series, and if online reviews are any indication there never is any resolution, even after two more damn volumes. Nothing’s resolved, the Organization’s master plan isn’t unveiled, and most damnably of all Stephen Abbott doesn’t get his comeuppance and indeed is still alive and well at novel’s end.

The finale does at least end on an interesting note, with Jessica being lobotomized(!) by the Organization; astrally escaping from her corporeal form, Jessica ends up possessing the body of her own sister! I guess her logic is that since Heather’s already under mind control, this way at least the person controlling her body will have Heather’s best interests in mind. But anyway this is how the novel ends, Jessica now in Heather’s body (and thankfully here she kills at least one of the villains, the grating young Organization gigolo Ron), escaping Stephen Abbott’s mansion to plot her vengeance.

Like a fool I picked up all three volumes before reading a single one, so now, once I build up the stamina, I’ll need to move on to the second installment, The Obsession Of Sally Wing. Bizarrely enough, these books are collectibles, particularly the last one, The Education Of Jennifer Parrish, likely because that one only had the one printing. Luckily I got my copies for cheap, and I advise that if you do decide to seek these books out, see that you are able to do the same – don’t do anything crazy like pay a lot of money for them.

Behind The Door

Behind The Door, by Frank Lambirth
January, 1988  Popular Library

Like Firefight, this is another obscure novel I learned about via Michael Newton’s How To Write Action Adventure Novels. And also like Firefight, Newton discusses Behind The Door in a negative light; specifically, a “disgusting” scene where the female protagonist becomes sexually aroused while she watches someone getting raped.

Sadly, you probably won’t be surprised to learn that as soon as I read this, I made a note to self to get Behind The Door as soon as possible. Funnily enough, Newton failed to mention that the rape scene occurred between two female characters, and also that the aroused protagonist, Elizabeth Shea, was drugged out of her mind at the time. In other words, the scene was nowhere as lurid as Newton claimed it to be. Though don’t get me wrong, the novel is pretty lurid, however this aspect is a bit dilluted given author Frank Lambirth’s lofty tone and the deadbeat protagonist he gives us.

For me the biggest failing of this novel is Elizabeth Shea. Not that she’s necessarily a bad character, she’s just so blasé and boring. She’s like the heroine of a Gothic novel, forever gnashing her teeth in fear and confusion, but gullible and trusting to a fault. In other words, she’s too nice a person for the sadistic tale Lambirth has thrust her in, and maybe that’s the point, but after a while I wanted a character who would jump into the exploitative proceedings – and let me tell you, there’s some exploitative stuff here, from satanic black masses to drug-fueled orgies to murder on a mass scale. There’s even a psilocybin drug trip, like something out of a Terence McKenna lecture!

Then again, in a way Elizabeth is a welcome change from the now-mandatory “tough chick” you’ll encounter in books, movies, and tv. But still I feel a modern horror reader would get a little annoyed with Elizabeth, who spends the majority of Behind The Door cowering in her bedroom or running breathlessly from danger – that is, when she isn’t fondling herself and imagining what it would be like to be double-teamed by two men or to have sex with another woman. On second thought, Elizabeth Shea is awesome!

Anyway, we open with a random murder on a desolate Arkansas road, a sequence Lambirth will not refer back to until the very end of the novel. From there we are introduced to Elizabeth, who carries the brunt of the narrative. Long story short, Elizabeth is the admin for a somewhat-shady entreprenneur, and at this man’s behest Elizabeth is in a car speeding through the night roads of Arkansas on their way to square out a money-lending deal.

In addition to Elizabeth there’s Meredith, the entreprenneur’s coke-sniffing daughter, and Scott, the bodyguard. The group is rattled and exhausted, having endured a long plane ride here in bumpy weather. A thunderstorm rages as they barrel through the twisting mountain roads, and the car crashes; Elizabeth is the only uninjured passenger. The local cops arrive, including good-looking deputy Cobb Kendall, and get them an ambulance. But there’s no hospital nearby and due to the injuries of some of the passengers it’s decided to call local Skystone, which the cops describe to be a private clinic.

Skystone is more like a fortress, with massive gates (which are later revealed to be electrified) surrounding it. Elizabeth sits in shock in the emergency room as she watches the small group of doctors and nurses work over her injured companions. Here we meet Dr. Mainwaring, who comes off as the customary old and concerned doctor of tradition, as well as Mrs. Eddy, an older lady who wears lots of makeup and who apparently has a brick shithouse bod. Also there’s nurse Shane Covington, a gorgeous blonde with mesmerizing eyes.

Finally the fun begins, as Mainwaring insists on Elizabeth staying in a room to be monitored, in case she will suffer some post-crash trauma. Filled with drugs and left in a well-furnished room that doesn’t look like any hospital room she’s ever been in before, Elizabeth will spend the remainder of the novel in a perpetual state of drugged terror. Separated from her coworkers she’s left at the mercy of Mainwaring and staff, who don’t seem to be in a hurry to let her know what’s going on.

Mainwaring has her on some good shit, and Elizabeth wakes up on her first night completely out of it. She hears noises down the deserted hallway, no one will respond to her calls, and her phone doesn’t work. She stumbles down the hall, into another of the rooms…only to come across nurse Shane going down on another pretty young nurse! This is the scene Newton got so upset about; it ends with Elizabeth pawing herself as she stumbles back to her bedroom, wondering what it would be like to trade places with the pretty young nurse.

The first half of Behind The Door plays this slow game, of Elizabeth gradually realizing that something’s not right about Skystone, and then Mainwaring coming in to tell her everything’s fine before shooting her up with more drugs. Meanwhile we’re informed that Elizabeth’s boss has died, but still Elizabeth is kept from Scott and Meredith. It isn’t until the place almost burns down (due to a pyromaniac old lady) that things begin to kick into gear.

I mentioned how naïve Elizabeth is; even after waking up in another drugged stupor one night to discover her wing on fire and various psychos stumbling around and fighting each other, the next morning she still gives benefit the doubt as she wanders around the now-empty and trashed hospital, figuring some natural calamity or even a nuclear war might’ve happened. Then she finds Scott tied up and thrown in a corpse locker; he reveals he was thrown there by the inmates.

Previous to this the novel has been a quiet sort of horror, but now it plunges straight into terror. Scott and Elizabeth search the deserted hospital grounds, finding corpses everywhere. Trying to escape they discover that the fence is electrified and it fully surrounds Skystone. In another creepy sequence they come upon the old mansion on the grounds in which the hospital staff lives; Scott ventures in alone, finding about 30 or so corpses, the people murdered in their beds. There’s some unintentional humor though, for when they return to Skystone, all other avenues blocked, Scott and Meredith look through the files and discover that Skystone is really…an insane asylum!! Funnily enough, this gets more reaction from them than all of the hacked up corpses.

There’s a massive red door which is locked and splits off Elizabeth’s wing of Skystone to the other half; we learn that this is the violent ward. Lambirth runs a parallel storyline featuring Cobb Kendall, the local deputy, as he figures out that something’s wrong at Skystone. Despite pushback from his “stupid chief” sheriff, Cobb hooks up with Dr. Andy Witherspoon, a local doctor who worked at Skystone until quitting recently; the doctor informs Cobb that he quit because the head of Skystone decided to bring in more violent inmates, the last straw being Paul St. Denis, who apparently makes Ted Bundy look like Mr. Rogers. Denis is the one “behind the door,” and there’s an awesome reveal when Cobb tells Witherspoon that he spoke to a “Dr. Mainwaring” at Skystone, and Witherspoon tells Cobb that not only is Mainwaring not a doctor, he’s also an inmate!

Cobb now knows that the lunatics are truly running the asylum, but Lambirth stalls with lots of page-filler about the deputy trying to get into Skystone and eventually renting a helicopter. The more compelling stuff of course is in Skystone, but again the trash quotient is limited by Lambirth’s choice of a protagonist, as Elizabeth closes herself off in her room while Scott tries to find Meredith. In fact, most of the sordid stuff in Behind The Door happens “off screen,” relayed to Elizabeth through dialog or with her coming upon the aftermath.

The final quarter of the novel really ramps things up, and it’s a shame it didn’t happen sooner. Elizabeth is fully brought into the fold of Sykstone, and we see that Mainwaring has fought to keep her alive because he believes in his deluded mind that she’s his daughter. Nurse Eddy is revealed to be a wealthy matron named Tina Duchin, who was sent to Skystone due to her maddened descent into satanism – satanism of the sacrificing, bloodthirsty sort. She’s turned the hospital into her new temple, running black masses/orgies and sacrificing surviving nurses. The weird-eyed, lunatic lesbian Shane Covington is her henchwoman, notorious for slicing up any female who turns down her advances.

Lambirth works everything up to a feverish pitch with Cobb and his two-man team choppering in to Skystone for a daylight rescue, while Elizabeth meets up with a young man she assumes to be another survivor but who in reality is Paul St. Denis. For some reason though Lambirth keeps most of the violence and bloodshed in the background; even when Nurse Eddy/Tina comes after Paul, fresh from her latest black mass and armed with a knife, Lambirth denies us the outcome, having Elizabeth once again rush from the scene. Here we also get the psilocybin material, when one of the inmates forcibly injects Elizabeth with the drug and then delivers the unforgettable line, “I’m gonna fuck your stuff, baby.”

Have no fear, though, for Cobb and the good doctor finally arrive with guns blazing. At least here Lambirth gives us some action, though by this point most of the Skystone inmates have killed themselves off in various squabbles and disagreements gone bad. With one final reveal (well handled and foreshadowed at various points in the narrative), Lambirth brings the novel to a haunting close. Perhaps the craziest thing about the novel is that, for a girl driven to sexual madness via drugs and the wanton hedonism surrounding her, not to mention the crazed orderlies who chase after her in the denoument, not once does Elizabeth actually have sex in the novel!

In fact, Behind The Door somehow manages to walk the line between outright lurid material and prudish conservatism…there’s lots of weird stuff, creepy stuff, exploitative stuff, but the way Lambirth writes it, it comes off more like a “regular” novel instead of a total descent into depravity. And while I enjoyed his writing, I still think a crazier, more memorable novel could’ve been gleaned from the sensationalistic plot and characters he has given us. So wrapping up, I’d give the novel a recommendation, but one with reservations. Thanks again though to Michael Newton for letting us know about it!

Finally, this is one of those awesome paperback originals that has a fancy stepback cover; here’s the inner painting:

Psycho Squad #1: Execution Night

Psycho Squad #1: Execution Night, by Rick Dade
October, 1988  Berkley Books

Thanks to Mike Madonna for letting me know about this forgotten, two-volume series. Credited to “Rick Dade” but copyright Berkley Books, Psycho Squad capitalizes on the late ‘80s serial killer/satanic panic fad and melds it with the men’s adventure genre. But while this first volume has an interesting concept, it’s lost amid the plethora of characters and the lack of action scenes.

My bet is the author was inspired by Maury Terry’s awesome 1987 book The Ultimate Evil, a true crime publication which contested, with convincing evidence, that the Son of Sam murders were actually committed by a satanic cult which operated around Yonkers, New York and stretched all the way back to the Manson massacre. Whether Terry was correct or not, the fact remains that The Ultimate Evil features a fascinating concept, that of a sort of “satanic mafia” which operates in the underworld, and one of these days I’ll probably get around to reviewing the book itself.

Anyway, Dade (whoever he was) peppers Execution Night with enough clues to let one know he’s read Terry’s book. He too presents a satanic cult for the villains, one with criminal leanings…it just takes forever for him to get them all together. Sadly, rather than being a slam-bang action-meets-horror affair, the novel instead hopscotches all over the place, introducing one new character after another until there are way too many cultists in the kitchen – and worse yet, there are so many of them that the author loses control and is unable to present them as a viable threat.

The heroes suffer too; the back of the cover has it that Jack Flint, Larry Mace, and JJ Santiago are the titular Psycho Squad, but Flint takes up all of the “good guy” narrative, with Mace getting a very small portion of the text and Santiago relegated to what’s basically a cameo appearance. In fact the group doesn’t even become a group until the final page; like most other first volumes of a late-era men’s adventure series, Execution Night is heavily focused on story-building. If this book had been published in the ‘70s, the Squad would already be formed by page 1 and they’d be gorily blowing away a faux-Manson by page 2. But since it was published when the genre was attempting to be a bit more “respectable,” it’s all about plot and story development.

Flint then is the star, but even he is lost amid the author’s constant shuffling from one newly-introduced psychotic villain to the next. A sergeant in the NYPD’s Homicide department, Flint we learn has gotten a rep for bringing down serial killers. When we meet him he’s in the act of taking on the infamous Doctor Blood, a serial killer dentist(!). Flint blows him away in what will prove to be one of the novel’s scant action scenes; as he dies Blood warns Flint that the killings “are just beginning.”

Meanwhile the author begins to unveil the endless parade of psychos who make up the threat in this opening volume; lead by the bald and creepy Myron Nemo, it develops at great length that they are members of the Tribe, a Manson Family-esque cult which got together in the late ‘60s and hasn’t been seen since. Their Manson is a freak named Dean Bishop, aka The Source, who has been in an insane asylum for 15 years but is now, due to dimwitted psychiatrists, about to be released.

There are way too many members of the Tribe to get into in this review (honestly, the novel is mostly comprised of introducing each of them in various one-off scenarios as they leave the real world to return to the cultish fold), however one of the main members bears mentioning: Erwin Roth, a massive biker who leads the Wheels of Death, yet another satanic cult, this one made up of bikers who do jobs for organized crime; in addition to leading the Wheels Roth also serves as Myron and Bishop’s top enforcer.

Pissed off over the political red tape which allowed Doctor Blood to run amok for so long, Flint ends up punching out his captain and quitting the force. But when a “copycat killer” murders the woman Blood was after in the opening pages (the killer being Roth, who’s finishing Blood’s job), Flint vows to bring the killer in on his own. Humorously enough he illegally portrays himself as a cop throughout the book; having kept his badge Flint goes around showing it to people so they’ll let him in on crime scenes and whatnot.

Flint visits a gun store operated by an old friend to decide upon his new hardware. Interestingly, he settles upon a Charter Arms .44 Bulldog revolver, the same gun that was used in the Son of Sam murders. I take it this is yet another Ultimate Evil reference by the author, but still, wouldn’t it have made more sense to give this gun to one of the villains?? Anyway this scene also serves to introduce JJ Santiago, a pencil-moustached “dandy” who too was once an NYPD cop, one known for his sharpshooting skills, but who was kicked off the force five years ago. I figured from here Flint would form the titular squad, but Santiago disappears until the final pages of the novel.

Larry Mace serves as the NYPD Deputy Medical Examiner, and thus has an acquaintance with both Flint and Santiago. (The cover artist by the way provides accurate illustrations of the three heroes, Mace being the blonde, Santiago the moustached “dandy,” and Flint the gruff one who looks like he’s posing for, well, the cover of an action novel, even though he’s in the middle of what appears to be an insanely close-quarters firefight.) Neither Mace nor Santiago are given much depth or personality, and the author further shames them by delivering Mace a serious blow in the final pages, one that despite its viciousness lacks much impact. (Long story short, Roth blows away Mace’s pregnant wife – shocking and unsettling enough – but the hell of the thing is Dade doesn’t even bother informing us she exits until a page before she’s killed!)

The series concept is introduced very late in the game with the appearance of Anton Vraczek, a Donal Trump-like tycoon whose family was murdered by nutjobs years before; Vraczek uses his massive funds to aid police in catching criminals, and asks the now-unemployed Flint if he’d like to work for him. Flint tells Vraczek he’ll head up a force that goes after serial killers, using Vraczek’s vast resources. Bizarrely enough, this is Vraczek’s only appearance, the author immediately going back to his one-off introductions of various Tribe members.

As mentioned the Tribe is getting back together; we gradually learn that years ago they perpetrated the Montauk Massacre, where a few of Bishop’s followers killed a slew of people. As Nemo puts the old gang together again he intimates that “Execution Night” is coming again, prepping the reader for an apocalyptic finale. Strangely though Dade delivers an eleventh-hour reveal where Nemo and another Tribe leader are really putting everyone back together as a land-buying scheme! It’s their plan to have Bishop et al murder a whole bunch of people in a certain developing area so Nemo’s company can buy the land for cheap, their logical assumption being that no one will want to buy land where a massacre has occurred. Makes sense, but why sully up a pulpy plot with such a “real world” concept?

There are only a two real action scenes: one toward the end in which Flint and Santiago take on the Wheels of Death, and Flint and Santiago’s climatic attack on the docked ship in which the Tribe is hiding. Though the book is violent, at least so far as how many people are murdered by the Tribe, when it comes to the action Dade brushes over the gore for the most part, just writing that people get shot and fall down. On the plus side there isn’t much gun-porn, though. The characters mostly use pistols, save for Santiago, who goes for a Mac-10. Elements of sci-fi, or at least the old GI Joe cartoon, are introduced via the Eliminator Mark IV Ballistic Launcher, a “rocket gun” that’s the size of a machine pistol and fires miniature tail-finned rockets; Flint uses it in the finale to blow up a few people real good.

The novel runs at a dense 234 pages of small print, and what’s odd is how rushed the finale is. As mentioned Mace is dealt a crippling blow in the final pages, but this too is glossed over for the most part, the author quickly dispensing of the villains he’s been building up throughout the entire course of the novel. In other words, the conclusion is not very satisfying. I was expecting something more massive or tense; instead the Tribe begins to turn upon one another, and the three protagonists basically show up and blow the remaining ones away.

There was only one more volume in the series, The Torturer, which appears to be a bit more action-centric. No matter of searching has revealed who wrote this first volume, but “Rick Dade” was likely a house name. I’m also not sure yet if the same author wrote the second volume. Given the book’s focus on story and character, to the detriment of the violent action scenes, makes me suspect that Execution Night might’ve been the work of Simon Hawke, who wrote the similarly-structured Steele #1, which coincidentally or not was published around the same time.