Monday, May 24, 2021

Infinity Five


Infinity Five, edited by Robert Hoskins
No month stated, 1973  Lancer Books

This was the fifth and final Infinity collection Robert Hoskins edited; I don’t have the others, but it’s my understanding they all were along the same lines: forays into the “new wave” science fiction that was en vogue at the time. In other words, no space opera or pulp or anything, but lots of drugs and sex and four-letter words, the stories generally taking place in some perverted future (which is now the past in most cases). It doesn’t look like these five volumes have much clout in the sci-fi world – I mean you don’t see them namedropped like Ellison’s Dangerous Visions books – but my copy was so inexpensive I figured I had nothing to lose. 

Overall the stories are fairly weak; it seems that the various authors were so excited about the prospect of having curse words and “dirty stuff” in a sci-fi story that they forgot about little things like plot and character. Also too many of the stories veer into satire, trading on spoofy extrapolations of the era – in other words, futures with mass psychedelics, wanton free sex, new permissiveness, and other trends of the late ‘60s/early ‘70s. Also a lot of the writers don’t even bother with plots, going for stream-of-conscious exercises in the manner of William Burroughs. I mean I’m all for the “future ‘60s” or “future ‘70s” setups, but I’d like a little plot and story to go along with them, and for the most part the stories collected here fail to deliver. On the other hand, all of them are original to this book, so if they weren’t reprinted elsewhere this might be the only place to find some of them. 

“The Science Fiction Hall Of Fame” is by Robert Silverberg and starts off the collection. This one seems more of a writing exercise than a full-on story, yet regardless I still enjoyed it quite a bit. It alterntes between the viewpoint of an unnamed sci-fi fan in his 30s and excerpts from the various sci-fi stories and novels he’s read over his life, which range from psychedelic to space opera to pulp. Honestly I think this one would’ve worked better if it was a full-on novel, with more space to flesh out the narrator and maybe see how the story-snippets intertwine with his life story. At any rate he’s a lifelong sci-fi fan, with whole collections of magazines and novels; interestingly, all the novels and authors he refers to, at least the sci-fi ones, are fictional. The “A” story has it that the narrator worries over how he could still be a sci-fi fan at such an “old” age, and also how it gives him comfort in that he’s afraid of the future and looks to sci-fi for a “road-map” of how the future will pan out. The dude could’ve saved himself a lot of trouble and just bought a copy of Orwell’s 1984

Silverberg’s writing is good, especially in the excerpts from the fictional stories; he has a firm command of the various styles, and again some of them would’ve been fun to see fleshed out more, like the psychedelic take on two characters sharing a “thought-transference helmet.” But in this short story format the effect is sort of squandered, as the excerpts seem wily-nily and don’t have any bearing on the narrator’s plot, which gradually concerns his veering into science fiction realms during his waking moments, as if he were losing his mind. We also get a few LSD shoutouts, per the era. But I have to say, for a sci-fi geek the guy gets laid a lot; the story opens with the memorable moment of him picking up and screwing some blonde the night of the moon landing (complete with her “frenzied” climaxing as Neil Armstrong sets foot on the moon), and later we learn he’s having an affair with his friend’s wife. Otherwise though, I found this story thought-provoking, and wish there had been more of it. For as it turned out, this was my favorite story in the collection. 

“In Between Then And Now” by Arthur Bryon Cover is a short narrated by an alien in a never-ending war against another alien, which is female. This one is very much in the “art for art’s sake” department and came off as unreadable for me, for the most part. 

“Kelly, Frederic Michael: 1928 – 1987” by William F. Nolan continues the trend of stream-of-conscious gibberish. This one’s another short of featuring random events from some guy’s life, but as with Silverberg’s story it’s just wily-nily with nothing to hold it together. Only it’s much worse, here. At this point I was getting annoyed with the book. However, we have yet another scene where a narrator gets lucky while watching the moon landing on TV! (Or, “She twisted under me, doing a thing with her pelvis, and I came.”) The plot per se has to do with the narrator going into space in 1987 at age 59 to help with “a new system,” but the entire “story” turns out to be “thought transcripts” picked up by aliens who have captured him. Or some such shit. 

“Nostaliga Tripping” by Alan Brennert is more of the same, but slightly more focused. This one’s another short of some guy experiencing various past timelines, and as with Silverberg and Nolan’s stories it randomly jumps from era to era with no thread. It’s short, at least; late in the game we learn something happened in 2003 and either the world came to an end or some other event occurred. The most notable thing about this one is the past timelines are incorrect, and keep changing, like for example the Rolling Stones releasing albums in 1949. 

“She/Her” by Robert Thurston is yet another short narrated by an alien, a la Cover’s story. This one has a little more semblance of plot, but still is more opaque than one would like, as Thurston really tries to capture the viewpoint of an alien being. Basically the narrator now thinks of himself as a “he,” even though the aliens don’t have gender – it’s all due to “corruption” by the humans, who insist on thinking of the narrator being as “him” and another of the alien beings as “her.” Same as with the Cover story, this one has feelings developing between the two alien beings, with “she” wanting to travel off with the humans and “he” being against it. This story too left me dissatisfied, but I did appreciate Thurston’s attempts at capturing a truly alien viewpoint. 

“Trashing” is by Barry Malzberg, who around this time was penning the Lone Wolf series. This one’s as psychedelic as that Mystery novel I reviewed years ago, and so similar at points that I wondered if Malzberg was the “Matthew Paris” who wrote it. This short is also in first-person, as are the majority of the tales in Infinity Five, and concerns a professional assassin who works for “The Committee.” He’s after a “madman” politician who (apparently) has an army of killers he lets loose on the populace wherever he appears, or something. The LSD fumes were particularly thick with this one. 

“Hello, Walls and Fences” by Russell Bates really tried my patience. Another vague “weird future” story where a narrator, who is like a builder or engineer or something, is offered a job by a rich guy but is so offended by the job that he storms out of the office…dithers around at home with his girlfriend…then months later changes his mind about the job, only to be told it’s no longer available! We’re never even told what the job is nor what so offended him about it! 

“Free At Last” is by prolific Ron Goulart and reminded me why I have never been able to get into his work – for, like his other novels at the time, it is a satirical look at the near future, with overblown ‘70s concepts and whatnot. Told mostly via dialog, this one features a guy in a “Wide Open Marriage” in 1992; his sexy wife enjoys wearing “neotex skirts” and is apparently having multiple affairs, her lovers ranging from a cyborg to a warlock(!). Meanwhile the guy, Stu, is having an affair of his own; the belabored setup has it that his aunt is old and sick, but in reality she’s dead, and Stu is sleeping with her “nurse” while the corpse rests in cold storage nearby. Overall this one was another dud, an unfunny comedy, mostly comrpised of made-up “futurespeak” words. 

“Changing of the Gods” by ubiquitous sci-fi editor Terry Carr continues the “wacky future ‘70s” trend, only to more extreme and perverted lengths. This one’s about Sam Luckman, an agent at an advertising firm (just like Darrin in Bewitched!) whose latest job is to come up with the concept of “unselling children” for an order of religious “Pragmatists.” We learn Sam went to college in the ‘70s and is now 38, so once again we have another “future” that is long in our own past, but anyway the setup is that various religions collapsed in the ‘80s and new ones, like the Pragmatists (as well as monks who are “psychologically addicted to LSD”), have sprung up. 

Meanwhile the population is way overblown (Sam has to stand in a long line with other executives just to use one of the urinals), and so is crime – we learn that if Sam were to use the regular employee bathroom, he’d encounter the danger of “tough homosexual rapists” lurking about. But Sam has problems at home – an ultra-horny “youth-injected” wife who enjoys hitting on preteen boys…and might be in the midst of an affair with her own 13 year-old son! Carr pushes all the sleaze buttons in this one, with Sam catching his wife and son in the actual act (complete with the unforgettable phrase “his long pink incestuous dork”), after which Sam goes off the deep end in the ensuing commercials he devises for the Pragmatists, which make children look like everything from violent street punks to baby vampires. This one’s wild and wacky to be sure, but at the same time comes off as so satirical that the center just doesn’t hold. 

“Interpose” is by George Zebrowski and seems to be a take on Jesus and time travel, but at this point I just wanted the book to end so I skipped it. 

“Grayword” is by Dean Koontz and is clearly the centerpiece of the book, running to around 90 pages. This full-blown novella seems to have come out of the Lyke Kenyon Engel fiction factory, and is so close to the Richard Blade setup that you wonder why Koontz never became one of Engel’s stable. After all, around this time Koontz published Writing Popular Fiction. This is the sole story in the entire collection that follows a standard plot, and also whittles way down on the sex and kink factors. And the only drugs here are ones that have been devised for research purposes. While I appreciated having an actual plot and characterization, I have to say that ultimately “Grayworld” was as frustrating a read as the others, mostly because it just kept repeating itself. 

The opening is memorable, at least: a well-muscled naked dude wakes up in a sort of laboratory, one filled with strange computers and the like. Much like a reverse Richard Blade, with Blade waking up in the teleportation chamber instead of a new world in Dimension X. The guy has amnesia, and has no idea how or why he came here; he finds a skeleton in another chamber, and what appears to be cryogenic chambers – also with a skeleton in one. Eventually he pieces it together that his name must be “Joel,” given the name above the chamber he woke in, but before he can figure anything else out a “faceless man” with syringe-like needles on his palm comes out of nowhere and slaps at him, and Joel goes into darkness. 

From here “Grayworld” picks up its maddeningly repetitive plot; Joel continues to wake up in a sequence of realities, all of them always featuring the same three people: himself, a hotbod brunette usually named Allison, and an older guy usually named Henry Galling. In some “realities” Allison is Joel’s wife, in others she’s a nurse (with a different name) who claims Joel has tried to rape her. In some realities Galling is Allison’s uncle, and in others he’s running a research project into a new drug. It goes on and on, Joel passing out – or being knocked out by the ever-present faceless man – and coming to in some new reality or other, not knowing which is real…but certain that the initial one, of him waking up in the chamber, was the “real” one. 

Koontz drops some eerie foreshadowing in the opening sequences; in particular mentions of dust on everything and everyone, even how “dust lay between the full cones of [Allison’s] breasts.” (For some reason I suddenly want ice cream!) The reader can ascertain that we are in some dystopic future; nothing seems to exist except for the countryside mansion in which all this occurs. It’s also very heavy on the mindbender vibe, with Joel – in multiple realities – discovering that the scene outside the window is just a hologram; one can even reach out and touch the moon! But this forward momentum is lost as Joel is incessantly thrust into one new reality after another; in some he’ll have Allison on his side, ready to escape, then the faceless man will come around again and in the next “reality” Allison will be someone else…or even one of the people behind the mind games. 

So let me jump to the reveal here, SPOILER warning. “Grayworld” has the biggest copout ending ever. Joel has had one “flash” that something big happened at some point, something he glimpsed out the window, but he’s unable to remember it. And finally, after 80 or so pages of endless mysteries, he remembers everything immediately. So basically there was like an “eco disaster” which destroyed hummanity, and all this is occurring a thousand years later. Joel is the last human on the planet, part of a group of astronauts who were supposed to leave Earth but who never got off the ground due to various computer snafus or something. So Joel has created androids from “vats” (it sounds like an incredibly easy process, too), and over the years he fell in love with one of them (aka Allison). But he was so haunted by this “miscegenation” that he gave himself amnesia so that he’d forget everything and have the androids put him through various trials…so that he would be able to gravitate to Allison free of any guilt, unaware that she’s an android and all. 

I mean honestly I think I speak for everyone when I say, what the holy hell??? And Koontz isn’t done yet; in the very last pages he doles out this eleventh hour plot about these evil creatures that have been trying to break in for hundreds of years or something, and Joel marshalled the androids to stop them before, but now he’s still getting over the amnesia so they have to remind him, and etc…and here the story ends, with Joel about to lead his android pals in attack. Just the most mind-boggling finale ever, but humorous in how Koontz flat-out kills off all the suspense and psycho-sexual mystery he spent the majority of the novella building up. 

“Isaac Under Pressure” is by Scott Edelstein and seems to have been about genies in bottles or something – it’s another short one – but I was so turned off by “Grayworld” that I skipped it. 

And that’s all she wrote for Infinity Five. This one sounded a lot more promising than it turned out to be, so there’s no mystery at all why this series is relatively unknown.

Thursday, May 20, 2021

Mafia Death Watch (The Sharpshooter #16)


Mafia Death Watch, by Bruno Rossi
No month stated, 1975  Leisure Books

Well folks I can hardly believe it, but here we are: the final volume of The Sharpshooter. It’s taken me over ten years but I’ve now made my way through this entire series – a series which was published in the span of two years! – and I don’t know what I’m going to do with myself now that I have no further adventures of Johnny “The Sharpshooter” Rock to look forward to. 

But on the plus side, I’ve been looking forward to reading Mafia Death Watch since I started collecting the series all those years ago. Rayo Casablanca memorably declared “take a shower after this puppy,” noting the outrageous sleaze element of this final volume – something Lynn Munroe and Justin Marriott also pointed out. But if you all know anything about me from the reviews on here, you’ll know this one sounded right up my twisted alley! And I have to say, Mafia Death Watch certainly delivers on the sleaze angle: we’ve got copious female exploitation, several explicit sex scenes, gory firefights, and not one but three separate characters who receive their fates courtesy a bullet to their nether regions. Indeed there seems to be a sick fascination with shooting people in their bodily orifices. 

This final volume was courtesy a writer named Dan Reardon, of whom not much is known – save that, in 1980, he also published an installment of the Nick Carter: Killmaster series (Tarantula Strike, which I have but haven’t read). What makes this interesting is that there are a lot of Killmaster elements in Mafia Death Watch. “Johnny” (as Reardon refers to Rock) uses a “luger” as one of his favorite firearms, a la Nick Carter’s Luger, and Johnny also carries a “golf ball” that emits tear gas, similar to Carter’s mini-bomb “Pierre.” Johnny also carries a derringer in a “crotch holster,” which brings to mind where Carter generally stores Pierre. Anyway, I found all this interesting because it’s as if Reardon was already thinking of a Killmaster installment when he wrote this book. 

But folks there’s no volume of Killmaster as perverted and sleazy as Mafia Death Watch. We get our indication posthaste of what sort of novel we’re about to read: the novel opens with a chapter in which “Mafia chieftan” Joe Bartolo, in Detroit, meets with a lovely young girl named Nancy Jenkins; Nancy is a new hooker, you see, one who is part of the Mafia’s stable, and she’s had second thoughts. In fact her uncle down in Florida wants to pay for her to go to college. Bartolo is kind and understanding, telling her no problem – but first he’d like to try her out. This leads to a crazed moment rivalling the opening of Corporate Hooker, Inc.: Bartolo, having gotten Nancy naked on his pool table, whips out an automatic shotgun and has her fuck it while she blows him – and then pulls the trigger when he climaxes! 

Meanwhile Johnny Rock is visiting his parents’ gravesite in New York; we learn it’s four years after the first volume, and Johnny, despite his better interests, still visits this grave each year. We’re told the Mafia has yet to figure out that “Johnny Rock” is the son of this murdered couple, and interestingly Reardon does not make Rock the legendary figure he is in the other Sharpshooter novels. Indeed throughout the book Johnny refers to himself by a variety of sarcastic titles – ie “I’m just a citizen,” and etc – and there’s never a part where his Mafia prey realize he’s the same guy who has been raising hell for them for the past four years. 

Speaking of Johnny’s origins, I think it’s clear Reardon was brought into the series the same way earlier ghostwriter Len Levinson was: series editor Peter McCurtin gave Reardon a few Sharpshooter books and told him to read them. But in Reardon’s case I’m certain it was one of Len’s books he was given to read, for Mafia Death Watch is a direct sequel to Len’s second contribution to the series: Night Of The Assassins. Johnny is attacked at the gravesite by some men who overpower him; they knock him out and fly him to Miami, a city Johnny last visited “a few months ago” (later stated as being “last spring”). The captors turn out to be Miami cops, and the guy who put them on Johnny turns out to be Detective Jenkins of the Miami police force. 

I couldn’t recall if Jenkins had been in Night Of The Assassins, but I did remember that there had been a “Detective Jenkins” in Len’s Bronson novel, Streets Of Blood. I checked my copy of Night Of The Assassins and, sure enough, a “Detective Jenkins” appeared in it as well. So I went to the source: I told Len that Reardon’s Sharpshooter was a sequel to one of Len’s own, with Len’s character Detective Jenkins appearing, Jenkins even mentioning the “Peter Dominick” pseudonym Johnny had used in Len’s novel. However Len’s Bronson novel was set in New York, not Miami, so I asked Len about the Jenkins character, and if he was aware that this final Sharpshooter was a sequel to one of his own books: 

John Jenkins was my supervisor when I investigated child abuse in Dade County, Florida, which included Miami. He was a retired NYPD police officer. I have used his name in several of my novels. I never heard of Dan Reardon. 

So then my assumption is Night Of The Assassins was probably the most recently-published installment when Reardon started working on his manuscript (from Len I know it took “about a year” for these manuscripts to see print), thus Reardon used it as a springboard for his own novel. However Johnny doesn’t remain in Miami very long. Jenkins turns out to he the “uncle” who was going to fund Nany Jenkins’s college education, and he’s since found out that the girl was murdered – “shot through the genitals.” Jenkins wants to finance Johnny on a blitz campaign against the sadist who killed his niece. Jenkins doesn’t have the details, he just knows the Mafia was involved, and he also knows from the events here in Miami “last spring” that Johnny Rock is the number one killer of Mafia. 

It’s interesting to note that Johnny Rock is in no way, shape or form a hero in the hands of Reardon. Not that he ever has been in the hands of any of the series ghostwriters, but here he’s particularly crazed and sadistic. For example, he is in no way pleasant to Jenkins, and even takes the opportunity to punch him in the gut after they’ve eaten a lobster dinner. Granted, Jenkins hired some men to knock Johnny out, drug him, and take him to Miami. But through the course of the novel Johnny will show no heroic nature; there’s a shocking part midway through where he even shoots a dead girl in the head so as to taunt a mobster. The implication is he’s just as bad as the Mafia he’s sworn to kill, and the portrait is so crazed you wish there’d been more volumes of the series just to see how much crazier Reardon could’ve gotten. 

We get more rampant sleaze in a cutaway sequence in which we meet Tonia, yet another Mafia hooker; this one trainbound for Detroit with her pimp, Tony, as well as a Mafia stooge named Cardo. The implication is clear that Tony is going to give Tonia as a “gift” to Cardo once they get to the city. Or, as Cardo puts it, “I kept thinking about them nice tits of yours.” As with the opening chapter, we get a very explicit sequence told from the girl’s point of view as Cardo “eats it out of” her – despite her revulsion over the heavyset thug, Tonia’s body reacts to just about any sexual stimuli. There’s a big focus here on how Tonia’s body reacts to the various probings, that’s for sure. The scene has a nice conclusion, though, with Tonia getting hold of Cardo’s gun and blowing his guts out – after which Johnny Rock arrives on the scene. 

But for a character that is so built up, Tonia is almost casually dispensed with. She gives Johnny some info on the Detroit mob scene, engages him in the expected bedroom shenanigans (which unbelievably occur off-page), and then is almost shockingly removed from the narrative. Later Johnny will meet yet another hooker with a heart of gold, Anne, and she will turn out to be what passes for the main female character in Mafia Death Watch. But she’s so similar to Tonia – who gets more of an intro and more character development – that you wonder why Reardon didn’t just combine the two characters into one. 

At least Reardon keeps the focus on Johnny throughout, and doesn’t forget the action. He’s merciless in his attacks on the mob. There are frequent scenes in which he’ll take his Luger or .38 and go out blasting; an extended sequence in the final quarter has Johnny staging a series of lightning strikes on various Mafia bigwigs, blasting them away from afar with his rifle. But despite being prone to aggressive action, Reardon’s version of Johnny Rock still displays some of Len’s take on the character in that he’s a little too concerned with things at times. There’s a bit too much needless explanation on how such and such things happen, or what Johnny thinks might happen, or how certain things came to pass. What I mean to say is, Reardon often stops the narrative to explain too much, and sometimes Johnny comes off as too thoughtful, as did Len’s. But as we’ll recall, this was in Len’s first two installments; in his last one, Headcrusher, he delivered a Johnny Rock who had no anxiety hangups and, per the directive of McCurtin, “killed in cold hate.” 

Actually the occasional anxiety jibes against Johnny’s otherwise bullish behavior; he meets Anne by going into a mob bar and starting up a ruckus, setting his sights on Anne because she looks more sophisticated than the other hookers there. Johnny basically just follows a string of names to figure out who was behind the murder of Nancy Jenkins, and Anne helps him make a lot of connections. But there’s a fair bit of coincidence at play, too; Johnny will find someone in the chain, only to discover they are related to someone else in it, or what have you – what I mean to say is, we aren’t talking a highbrow mystery here. Oh and also I love it that Johnny specifically goes back to that bar to dish out bloody payback to the thugs who beat him up during the ruckus, even blowing out the knees of the bartender before killing him. 

And Johnny is certainly brutal in Reardon’s hands; I mentioned already the shocking part where he shoots a dead girl in the head. But later, when one of Johnny’s new friends is almost beaten to death, our hero finds out that Bartolo’s “main girl” was behind it – yet another hooker, one who has been elevated to becoming the top man’s mistress. Johnny breaks into Bartolo’s compound, kills a few guards, and surprises the girl in her bedroom (dressed in a negligee and reading a “paperback,” no less). Here Johnny does something not even Russell Smith would’ve come up with in his most fevered moment. Johnny plays a variation on “an eye for an eye” and treats the girl to the same death Nancy Jenkins experienced: “The .38 spat twice into the gaping orifice.” A “vicious rape” indeed, and well beyond any of the sadism Johnny Rock committed in any previous volume…which is really saying something. 

Surprisingly, Johnny isn’t done shooting into “gaping orifices.” The finale borrows from McCurtin and Russell Smith in that Bartolo and his various underlings conveniently gather together in one spot; this even takes place on a boat, same as the usual scenario courtesy those other two series writers. Instead of blowing the place up with a bazooka or whatever, Johnny gets on the boat and delivers Bartolo with a fitting sendoff – Bartolo by the way having disappeared from the narrative since the first chapter. SPOILER WARNING, but I mean come on we aren’t talking Citizen Kane here or anything. Johnny holds his rifle on Bartolo and has him stand in front of his underlings as a sign of what happens to men who shoot unarmed girls in the groin – and then jams his rifle up Bartolo’s ass and pulls the trigger! 

Indeed, Mafia Death Watch is so depraved and grimy that it equals other such lurid crime paperbacks of the era: Death List, The Savage Women, and even Bronson: Blind Rage. Sales must’ve been really low for the series not to have continued past this point; I can imagine Peter McCurtin was thrilled to discover a writer who could deliver such wanton sleaze and violence…with pretty good prose stylings, to boot! But this was it for The Sharpshooter; last we see of Johnny Rock he’s gotten out of the hospital, where he spent three weeks recuperating from injuries he received in the climax (Anne by his side the entire time, we’re informed). He heads down to Miami to meet again with Detective Jenkins – telling Jenkins that the money he was going to use to pay for Nancy Jenkins’s college education can now be used to pay for Anne’s. 

And that’s it for The Sharpshooter. I could re-read the series, as I’ve done with other series I’ve finished, like The Baroness, and have planned to do with TNT and John Eagle Expeditor. And maybe I will. But given the jumbled nature of this series, with manuscripts from The Marksman brought over and changed to Johnny Rock stories and etc, I don’t see how much reward there would be in the re-reading. Then again maybe I’ll change my mind in a couple years. In closing, The Sharpshooter was one of the series that inspired me to start this blog in the first place – I remember how excited I was to learn about it, and quickly went about collecting all the volumes. I know my reviews are overlong and pedantic, but I hope over the years I have inspired similar excitement in other readers.

Monday, May 17, 2021

Traveler #8: Terminal Road


Traveler #8: Terminal Road, by D.B. Drumm
February, 1986  Dell Books

I’ve been wondering how John Shirley would handle this eighth volume of Traveler, given that his previous contribution, #6: Border War, was basically a series finale, with Traveler literally sailing off into a Happily Ever After with his lady love Jan. But as we know from the previous volume, which was courtesy Ed Naha, Traveler’s HEA was short-lived: his boat was bombed out of the water, Jan lost, and Traveler returned to the weary, battle-hardened life of a post-nuke road warrior. 

So as it turns out, Shirley basically just ignores that previous book; other than a late, very brief recap of what happened after Border War, Terminal Road just picks up the pace from the earliest installments as if there’d been no change to the status quo. Traveler’s back in his armed and armored van, the “Meat Wagon,” playing tapes as he travels the road, his riding companion old Army pal Hill. Shirley has read Naha’s previous volume, as we do get a bit of detail on that one, and the fallout from it. Like for example that Traveler’s other old Army pal Orwell is still recovering from the wounds he endured, and thus decided to stay in Mexico a bit with new US “President” Jackson. And Shirley also answers one thing – while Naha left Jan’s fate a mystery, Shirley clearly informs us she was killed in that seaborne attack. Bummer! 

Shirley also answers another question I had – namely, when the series takes place. He makes it clear throughout that the year is 2005; the nuke war occurred “sixteen years ago,” which we’re informed was 1989. So this confirms my theory that the Dell editor who handled the back cover copy was just plain confused…because once again the back cover states that the book takes place “twenty-seven years after doomsday!” This would place the action in 2016, which is incorrect. Otherwise Shirley doesn’t dip into the subplots he introduced in previous books, ie Traveler being a supernaturally-chosen savior of post-nuke society or whatnot; in fact, I get the impression that Terminal Road was quickly churned out so as to fill a contract, or maybe because Naha needed help. 

Chief evidence of this is that Shirley, for the first time in the series, borrows a gimmick from William Gibson; each chapter alternates between two protagonists. It’s been decades since I read Gibson, but I recall this being a schtick of his in every post-Neuromancer novel. So one chapter will focus on Traveler, and the next will focus on a character new to the series, a bounty hunter named Hastur. And as with Gibson these concurring storylines slowly coalasce into one. Shirley’s never done this before; Traveler was always center stage from beginning to end, so this really gives the impression that Shirley had said all he wanted to say in Border War and was just churning this one out in a pinch. 

Which is not to say Terminal Road isn’t good. In fact it was one of my favorites in the series yet. Like all of Shirley’s Travelers, it’s essentially just a fast-moving action story, but what adds to it is the contrasting natures of Traveler and Hastur. While Shirley never outright states it, the implication is that Hastur is everything Traveler could have been: a Special Forces badass who has turned his back on any vestige of goodness and murders with impunity for money, fuel, or supplies. He’s a seven foot giant of black-American Indian heritage and built like a pro football linebacker. He carries a host of weaponry and rides an armored “trike” with a teardrop windshield. He takes glee in killing for profit, and is in every way the antithesis of Traveler, which makes for an entertaining read. 

The only problem is, Hastur seems like a poor man’s substitue for the Black Rider, that jet-black mutant biker villain who appeared in Shirley’s earliest installments. But unfortunately Shirley killed the Black Rider off, thus he had to come up with this new guy…who, despite lots of setup, turns out to be pretty much a dud in the supervillain sweepstakes. I mean when we meet Hastur he’s killing with ease – and we see how evil he is, as he wipes out his target’s entire family – but when he tries to take out Traveler later in the book he just makes one goof after another. Which makes the whole “alternating protagonist” chapter-switches all the more strange: are we supposed to be rooting for Hastur in his chapters? Hoping that he catches Traveler unawares? While it’s a neat narrative trick, it just comes off like it did in Gibson’s novels: an easy way to meet the word count. 

Another curious thing about Terminal Road is that the customary gore of Shirley’s previous books is mostly gone, and the sex almost nonexistent. I mean there’s a part where Traveler, as expected, gets busy with some post-nuke babe he meets along the road, and it fades to black! This from a series that would at least give a paragraph or two of lovably purple prose. Granted, Traveler and the lady’s second “bout” is slightly more, uh, fleshed out, but still it’s nothing compared with what, uh, came before. (My mind’s permanently in the gutter, in case there were any question.) So to recap – our hero is only in half the book, given the alternating chapters, and the sex and violence have been greatly reduced. Regardless, Terminal Road is still heads and tails better than the previous volume, which makes me sad that this was Shirley’s final installment. 

Shirley opens the book with what will be the only big action scene: Traveler and Hill, barreling through West Texas, take out a small army of Roadrats. After this they take on a job from a commune that’s been hit by Bubonic Plague; Traveler and Hill will do a “serum run” to a hospital in Utah in exchange for fuel and supplies. Traveler learns about the job opportunity via his short-wave radio; can’t recall if this aspect was much mentioned in previous novels, but here Shirley has a whole post-nuke radio society, with people on the various bands recreating old radio shows, just jabbering away, or calling out for aid. There’s a great part later on where Hastur gets hold of a shortwave radio and starts fucking with people, like a post-apocalyptic Jerky Boy or something – this could’ve gone on much longer, so far as I was concerned. 

Speaking of Hastur, in his sections we see him also offered a job: to bring Vice President Veronica Barlowe the head of Traveler. Barlowe I don’t believe has been mentioned before, but she is the VP of crazed President Frayling, who we learn is still recuperating from the previous book. In fact, Traveler is wanted dead because he nearly killed Frayling. Shirley excels in unexpected humorous bits; my favorite in this regard is when Hastur, who has never heard of Traveler, reads the dossier Barlowe provides on him – how he’s seen so much action that he’s become a legend – and bluntly declares, “Sounds like a nobody.” 

Hastur actually carries most of the narrative, shuttling around the South and trying to find Traveler. Most of the action takes place in New Mexico, by the way, and Shirley does a great job bringing the setting to life. Meanwhile Traveler just drives along, blissfully unaware he has a bounty on his head. Hill has suddenly developed a personality, so there’s a goodly bit of chatter between the two. Also this time Traveler’s listening to a “Coltrane tape” as the miles roll by, the music blotting out any thoughts. The cover depicts a random encounter with a “war mech;” for the first time Shirley introduces a sort of sci-fi element to the series, with these battle robots having been created shortly before WWIII and used to guard secret military installations. Most of them, we learn, were destroyed with the nukes, but a few survived and have gone solo, attacking people at random. 

The robot is described pretty much as it appears on the cover, and comes after Traveler and Hill while they’re fixing a flat tire. It’s a rolling tank with .90 caliber cannons and .80 caliber machine guns, as well as other stuff. Solar-powered, to boot. Traveler and Hill are only saved by the sudden appearance of two women in “powered gliders;” they swoop over the war mech and start dropping bombs on it. This is Vickie, a pretty blonde, and Dennie, an also-pretty redhead. Soon we learn their story: Mormons who have come from a high-tech sanctuary built beneath Salt Lake City before the war, so that a new generation could survive any nuclear calamity. 

Only the girls reveal that the men never showed up; while the women and kids made it down there before the nukes fell, the men didn’t. In the passing years a community has developed, with two warring factions: the “conservatives” who think religion should dictate all affairs, and the “liberals” who want to follow the Constitution. Vickie and Dennie are part of the latter group, and they’ve come up to the surface world to find a group of escaped conservatives – who have taken off with computer gear and other essentials that are necessary to maintain the underground society. Meanwhile Traveler and Hill have actually met these escaped women, not knowing who they were – early in the book they came across a bunch of smiling and polite blonde women who looked like “women from before the war;” their bus had been damaged and Traveler helped them repair it. 

It’s inevitable something will soon be happening with these couples – I mean Vickie and Dennie are presumably virgins, having grown up in a “matriarchal” society, both of them having been kids when they went to the sanctuary years ago. Shirley doesn’t elaborate much on this, but he does of course have Traveler hook up with Vickie (the hotter of the two, naturally). But as mentioned he doesn’t go into the full-bore sleaze details of past volumes, dammit. Instead Shirley goes another route – that Traveler, “despite himself,” starts to fall for Vickie. Even though he “promised himself he’d never love again,” yada yada yada. I mean you’d think Jan’s fate would give him a prefigure of what could happen, but nope. 

Hastur slowly makes his way to Traveler, using cunning to figure out where he’s headed. But as mentioned he’s a poor villain. He bungles chance after chance to take out his prey. But with this sole villain it’s clear Terminal Road isn’t headed for a big finale. Rather, Shirley goes for something that wouldn’t have been out of place in a Marvin Albert novel, with two men squaring off in the harsh elements. After a few firefights – some of which are rather costly to Traveler’s companions – Hastur holes up in a cliff and Traveler scales it to take him on man to man. The villain’s sendoff is memorable, but the climax seems more in tune with a suspense-thriller than a post-nuke pulp. 

And that’s it for John Shirley’s run on Traveler. We leave our hero as we met him, adrift in the post-apocalypse with the Meat Wagon his sole recurring companion. And also Shirley doesn’t plant any carrots for future volumes, unless Naha intends to do something with the newly-introduced Vice President. Otherwise Terminal Road is another entertaining installment of the series, though honestly the sixth volume came off like a more fitting conclusion. Here’s hoping Naha will take a few cues from Shirley in the following novels and deliver similarly fast-moving yarns.

Thursday, May 13, 2021

The World Inside


The World Inside, by Robert Silverberg
September, 1972  Signet Books

Robert Silverberg was very prolific in the early ’70s, especially in the short story market, and this is where The World Inside first took shape; the “novel” is really a fixup, as they’re called, of a handful of stories and novellas Silverberg published in various sci-fi magazines and anthologies in 1970 and 1971. It would appear that he wrote the stories with this very novel in mind, so in essence the book does come off more as a novel than as a short story collection, with the understanding that there isn’t a main plot that runs through it – other, that is, than the general overarching plot of the “horizontal” society of the year 2381. 

So the novel clearly delves into the overpopulation concerns of the era, a la Futureshock and the like (starring Orson Welles in the film adaptation!). Silverberg clearly seems to be satirizing it, though, as the Earth of his future is incredibly overpopulated, however the denizens are damned determined to keep adding to the number. We learn that, sometime in the 22nd century, the people of the Earth (now of course united in a sort of hive mind global community, per another recurring theme of the era) decided to take up the challenge to see how many human beings could actually live on Earth, and thus changed their society from “horizontal” to “vertical.” Ie instead of building out, they built up, erecting towering structures which could hold hundreds of thousands of people. And if you run out of space, why you just build another structure. 

These are the “urbmons,” aka “urban monad” dwellings; buildings that span nearly two miles high and have a thousand floors. The World Inside concerns Urbmon 116, which as the novel opens has a current population of 881,115 people. It’s in the “Chipitts” region, which gradually we learn is what was once known as the “Chicago-Pittsburgh” region of the US, however these names are mysterious to the people of 2381. As with most other sci-fi of the day, the story has dystopic roots, as we learn some great calamity in the past also befell the Earth, leading to this vertical approach. Also it’s worth noting that while the novel is entirely earthbound, mankind has ventured into the solar system, with colonies on Venus and likely elsewhere. It’s also worth noting that the offworld colonists live in places more like the “old” Earth than the people of Earth do. 

Another hallmark of the era is the psychedelic vibe that permeates the tale, with a “new morality” of open sex and wanton drug use. Society has completely changed in that there is no such thing as privacy, and people enter into marriage while in their preteens, the goal to have as many children as soon as possible. All this, including the rampant psychedelics, is very similar to Logan’s Run, even down to the fact that the majority of the characters are incredibly young. So while there is indeed a lot of somewhat-explicit sex in The World Inside, the characters engaged in the shenanigans are teenagers. So we’ll have stories concerning a 14 year-old boy who has “had hundreds of women” in his time, or about a fifteen year-old girl desperate to get pregnant, else she might be moved out of Urbmon 116. 

Personally this sort of killed my enjoyment level; I mean even when I was a teen I wanted to read about adult protagonists. A curious thing though is that these kids act and talk just like adults, to the extent that you could read the book and think it features 30 and 40 year olds. (Even more curiously, 30 and 40 year olds are rarely mentioned.) The implication here is that people in this future world have become so self-involved that they have grown exponentially more self-aware and wise than modern kids their age, to the extent that even a 14 year-old is so intelligent and observant that he’s being groomed for the highest echelons of Urbmon 116. However unlike Logan’s Run this “kid’s world” element isn’t due to a lifespan cutoff or anything; it’s just that Silverberg has decided to only focus on preteens and teens for his stories. 

That said, Silverberg has created an entire world in Urbmon 116, which really is the main character of the novel. Each Urbmon is essentially a country in itself, and there doesn’t even seem to be much communication between the various buildings; even though the other Urbmons are visible from the windows of Urbmon 116, they’re basically mysteries – mysteries that no one is interested in, at that. What I mean to say is, the hive mentality is so strong that people only care about the Urbmon they live in, with no desire to leave the place or see the world. In fact there is almost an air of desperation in how “happy” the occupants claim to be. At any rate, groups of floors are blocked together into separate “cities” named after cities of the past; for example, top floor Louisville is the pinnacle of Urbmon 116’s social and political order. 

Silverberg parcels out this info throughout the stories; the new social structures are shown rather than explained, which adds to the enjoyment. The only story that comes close to flat-out exposition is the first one, aka Chapter 1, which concers a visit to Urbmon 116 from “the Sociocomputator from Hell.” This turns out to be a literal title, not a facetious one; the guy in question is indeed from Hell, ie one of the moons of Venus. He is visiting Charles Mattern, a sociocomputator who lives in the Shanghai section of Urbmon 116, which is a little over halfway up the building – though Mattern feels he’d be even higher in the social order if he had more kids. The visitor, Nicanor Gortman, is shown around the building, and while this is a fine intro to the world it comes off more like heavy narrative lifting to set up the story. 

Given the short story origins, characters will come and go in the narrative; Mattern will be the first indication of this, as he drops from the “novel,” only to appear in passing once or twice more later on. But this does add a cool factor to the book, as you see how other characters feel about one another. (As for Gortman, he’s never mentioned again.) Mattern’s story is mostly there to show how Urbmon 116 works, and to explain this weird social structure: there’s no privacy (families even use the toilet in front of each other), there’s no sadness, there’s much pride in the Urbmon overall, and there are free drugs. Free sex, too; “nightwalking” is a facet of this society, with men and women free to roam at night, entering any door (none of which are locked), and requesting to have sex with the person who lives there – and it is socially taboo to turn down the request. 

This sounds like a rapist’s paradise, but we’re to understand that the people of this future are so “advanced” that there’s no such thing as rape or cheating or adultery. The joy is in sharing and giving; thus if someone came into your apartment to have sex with your wife, you would feel honored that he even chose her. Silverberg introduces a great bit midway through the book where an Urbmon couple manages to bring 20th century hangups into this society, with a wife who brings adultery back into a world where adultery no longer exists. This world is very hard for us to imagine, and Silverberg turns this concept on its head, too, with a section where another character tries to figure out the 20th Century and realizes it’s just too weird for him to grasp. 

Another thing I noticed is that, even though childbearing is of prime importance so as to raise yourself up in the social pecking order, the children really don’t seem to matter much to their parents. Again, this is not actually spelled out, but in all the stories the children are just wallpaper, and often just left to their own devices; there are at least a few parts where a “daywalking” character will go into someone’s home, only to find the babies there, unattended in their “slots.” Silverberg does not go for much description or detail, leaving the reader to do the heavy lifting on the whole imaginating department, but we do learn that these “slots” seem to actually nurture the babies, even up to putting a force field around them. We learn this latter tidbit in a part where someone tries to blow the drug of a smoke toward a sleeping baby, and the force field blocks it. 

Speaking of drugs, like Logan’s Run and After The Good War this is a very psychedelicized future. Drugs are available at kiosks on each floor, some of them with extraterrestrial origins; we learn of something called “tingle,” which comes from Venus and is shared in a communal bowl. There are also “multiplexer,” apparently a super-potent psychedelic, which so blows one’s mind that he or she shares a sort of mental link with everyone in the Urbmon. There are also darker drug-world elements; one story concerns a young girl who is unable to get pregnant and learns that she and her husband will be shuttled off to a new Urbmon. She fights against this to the point that she’s sent to a sort of reprogramming chamber, where she floats in serenity while being dosed with various psychedelics. When she comes out she’s happy and positive and seemingly a totally different person. 

Another dark element of this future world is when a person goes “flippo” and is sent “down the chute.” To go flippo means to bug out, specifically to rail against the Urbmon society. Initially I thought “going down the chute” meant being cast out of the Urbmon, but we soon learn that the chute pretty much vaporizes whoever goes down it, their body energies absorbed and funnelled back into the Urbmon. We see this process in action in a later story. But it’s rare that Silverberg actually describes or explains things to us, presenting everything matter of factly and letting us understand what’s what via dialog or action. Indeed, he goes for a “literary” style throughout, writing the novel in third-person present-tense and doling out huge blocks of narrative, to the extent that it sometimes comes off more like Cormac McCarthy than the typical science fiction novel.

I’ve talked about the drugs; now let’s talk about the sex. As mentioned, most of the time it concerns teens and pre-teens, so there’s that. (And plus we even learn that kids in the Urbmon start sexually experimenting when they’re nine years old – sometimes even younger!) There’s a lot of sex in The World Inside, but we aren’t talking paragraphs of boinking a la The Baroness. In fact there isn’t that much exploitation at all. We’ll get minor detail of the female characters – usually that they’re “shapely” or whatnot – but even here it’s not very exploitative. What I mean to say is, you won’t read about “upthrusting full breasts” or anything like that. More along the lines of, “…she shrieks and pumps her hips and makes hoarse animal noises as she claws as him. He is so astonished by the fury of her coming that he forgets to notice his own.” This sort of thing is what passes for the sexually-descriptive material, and again it has more of a literary vibe than an exploitative one. 

Okay so the sex and drugs are covered; now the rock and roll. One of the stories here is more “rock novel” than some of the actual rock novels I’ve reviewed on the blog. This one concerns Dillon Chrimes, a 17 year old “who plays the vibrastar in a cosmos group.” Oh, and his wife paints “psychedelic tapestries.” Clearly indebted to the era in which it was published, this one’s basically the late ‘60s psychedelic rock scene projected into the future; Chrimes even lives in the “San Francisco” section of Urbmon 116, an artist and musician section in the 370th floor region. As mentioned Silverberg doesn’t elaborate on much, presenting his future world in matter-of-fact terms: thus what a vibrastar even is remains a bit of a mystery. It seems to be a sort of audio-visual instrument, projecting displays of the galaxy and whatnot, and takes a lot of work to control. Chrimes’s story is one of the highlights of the novel, featuring his group playing a gig. Their music isn’t really described, but it’s clearly instrumental, and seems to have a prog rock-meets jazz fusion sound. After which Chrimes drops a multiplexer and psychedelically communes with the building (while having sex with some random babe, of course). 

I thought Chrimes’s story would be my favorite, but the one that I found most interesting concerned Jason Quevedo, a somewhat nebbish historian whose subject of study is the 20th Century. This chapter is not only entertaining due to Jason’s attempts to understand the alien world of the past, researching it via “cubes” he calls up from a data source, but also because he is slowly “contaminated” by the mindset of the 20th Century and begins feeling resentment and suspicion toward his wife. He’s certain she’s having an affair with her twin brother (incest is condoned so far as only children are involved, we’re told – but one must stop such stuff when he or she is an adult!), and Jason’s jealousies get the better of him. This story is darkly comic and definitely was my favorite of the novel, particularly the O. Henry-esque ending, in which Jason and his wife realize they are more similar than they thought. 

But I have to admit, after this story my interest started to wane. We have a somewhat-recurring character named Siegmund, the aforementioned 14 year-old headed for big things, and his story didn’t resonate with me; same goes for a very long story concerning Jason’s brother-in-law, Michael, who longs to see the outside world. This story in particular just seemed to drag on, with this guy venturing outside the Urbmon, meeting the strange communal humans who live outside them, making a fumbling pass at one of the women, and then foolishly returning to Urbmon 116. After this we return to Siegmund, who actually is the closest we get to a main character in the novel; his continuing story, which finishes off the novel, also displays that not all is happiness and joy in Urbmon 116. 

Overall though I really did enjoy The World Inside. It definitely has that psychedelic sci-fi vibe I enjoy so much, and Silverberg did a great job of projecting the early ‘70s into the future. If anything it’s made me decide to read more of his work, especially from this period of his career.

Monday, May 10, 2021

The Protector #2: The Porn Tapes


The Protector #2: The Porn Tapes, by Rich Rainey
June, 1983  Pinnacle Books

I went into this second volume of The Protector (I’m missing the first one) expecting a lurid thrill-ride. I mean with a title like The Porn Tapes – I just know that title’s gonna get me in trouble with search results and other spam filters – you’d at least expect something fairly sleazy. But author Rich Rainey goes for a very reserved approach throughout; a little too reserved, given the subject matter. And I don’t just mean the “adult film” stuff. There’s also a coke-snorting mega-pastor who employs a legion of armed thugs and a psychotic woman who literally gets off on murder…despite which, the book’s still too reserved. 

But let’s talk about Rich Rainey for a moment. All I know about him is that he penned the final volume of The Warlord, as well as several publications for Gold Eagle. So far as I know, Rainey was a real person – ie not a pseudonym – but man his style is suspiciously similar to David Alexander’s. At least here in this novel. Everything from dialog to sentence construction has the ring of Alexander to it; there’s even the same penchant for goofy descriptions of minor characters, a la “discount legionnaire” and etc. There’s also a villain here named Deacon Archer, bringing to mind “Deacon Johncock” from Alexander’s Swastika. The plot of The Porn Tapes is even similar to Swastika, concerning as it does a megalomaniac preacher with his own private army of crazed thugs. 

But I’m not going to go out on a limb that Rainey and Alexander are one and the same; if anything it’s probably just coincidence, and indeed the Alexander-isms aren’t that great, with nothing here even coming close to the over-the-topness of Phoenix. And nothing even close to the rampant sex and violence of that series; the violence is almost bloodless, and the sex is surprisingly nonexistent. Again, the title of this one’s a total sham; while it does feature a porn starlet as the main female character, our hero, Alex “The Protector” Dartanian, spends the entire novel fending off her advances and thinking of her as nothing more than a job. 

As mentioned I’m missing the first volume, but Rainey inserts the series setup early on in the book, clueing readers in. Basically The Protector is similar to Bodyguard, only in third-person instead of first-person and featuring a group of bodyguards, headed up by Dartanian. But the concept is the same: Dartanian offers protection to clientele. We learn in brief background that Dartanian, a slim blond-haired dude beloved by the press for his good looks, was a CIA contractor, let go along with many others in a purge in ’74. After this he started up his own security firm, making big impact early on when he protected a VIP from an assassination attempt. For this the press dubbed him “The Protector,” but truth is this title isn’t much used; instead it’s all about “ICE,” ie the inner wing of Dartanian’s security firm – the ultra-secret section known only to a very few. 

ICE stands for Inner Court Executions, and the main members are Dartanian, Mick Potter (a former pro footballer who served in Special Forces in ‘Nam) and Sin Simara (an Asian martial arts expert who sports a moustace, per George Wilson’s nice cover). There are also a couple other redshirts, and the setup is that Dartanian sometimes brings employees over from his “regular” security firm to handle the more commando-esque demands of ICE. Another gimmick of the series is that Dartanian maintains his espionage world relations, with some of his employees (especially Sin) often farmed out to the DEA…in exchange for the DEA serving up intel or whatnot to Dartanian. 

But the thing is, there isn’t much to Dartanian, and even after reading the novel he remained a cipher to me. Perhaps that was Rainey’s intent; Dartanian really is just a spook, after all – we even learn that he’s employeed hypnosis on agents in the field in ‘Nam, and is familiar with the CIA’s MK-ULTRA initiative. Even more strange, we learn he’s done hypnosis on “UFO witnesses!” (Quotation marks Dartanian’s.) This adds an extra layer to Dartanian, one that honestly makes him seem more of a villain than a hero. Coupled with his single-minded resolve throughout the book – he seems to only think about his job, 24 hours a day – this makes him too much of a cipher. 

Same goes for the co-stars; Potter himself fends off his own adult actress admirer (what is it with these guys??), and Sin Simara seems to have a penchant for sarcastic asides, but doesn’t do much else but kick ass and hurl throwing stars. That said, he does have a great (and Alexander-esque) line: “I can’t change your mind, but I can change your face.” But otherwise there’s not much vibe to this team, and it all comes down to Dartanian himself, who is one of the more bland protagonists I’ve ever encountered. There’s nothing that makes him tick, nothing that makes him stand out. Rainey has it that Dartanian likes to dress up and is a darling of the media, but this gives the impression he’s more of a prettyboy than a hardbitten merc for hire. 

The plot of this one is somewhat similar to the earlier Hard Core in that it involves “old” adult movies (ie “loops” from the ‘70s) being converted to VHS tape, ie the “porn tapes” of the title. A ringer for Marilyn Monroe named Melonie Grand (correction – she’s actually hotter than Marilyn, we’re informed) featured in many of these loops when she was in her early 20s, a decade ago. Now she is on the cusp of mega fame, about to star in a crossover XXX picture titled Starlet, a sex-focused expose on the life of, you guessed it, Marilyn Monroe. A movie that will be “the Deep Throat of the Eighties.” The only problem is, someone is trying to kill Melonie, which is how Dartanian and crew come into the picture. 

Now if this story had been published a decade before, it would’ve been more of a sleazy mystery yarn, heavier on the psycho-sexual subtexts, with a lot more focus on the adult stuff. The killer probably would’ve been some lone wolf whackjob. But it’s the ‘80s, baby, so the killers who come after Melonie are subgun-wielding goons – indeed, a practically limitless supply of them, meaning that we will have the running gun battles that were required in ‘80s men’s adventure. The focus is so much on the action that the entire “adult film” aspect is really just window dressing, and ultimately just a Maguffin. But then it’s impressive that Rainey even attempted to combine porn flicks with ‘80s-style commando action. 

After an opening action scene in which we see Dartanian and his two comrades wipe out a trio of street criminals, Dartanian fields an interview with Melonie and her sleazy manager, Drew Wilson. We’ve already seen some of Melonie’s adult film acquaintances get blown away in gory fashion, the killers vacant-eyed psychos. There’s a lot of talking here and pondering from Dartanian as he tries to figure out who would be willing to kill Melonie, particularly who could send brainwashed assassins after her, for the killers turn out to be almost robotic in their single-minded determination to kill her. He suggests that Starlet continue being filmed, which leads to one of the very few moments in which there’s any sleaze, as Dartanian and crew guard the set as Melonie shoots a scene – providing a BJ to a President Kennedy lookalike! 

But as mentioned action trumps the sleaze throughout; immediately after the scene wraps we have another attack on Melonie. Dartanian and team – including a bunch of other unamed employees out in the street – take out the attackers, though again the gore isn’t much dwelled upon. I forgot to mention, Dartanian’s custom weapon is a Skorpion M61, which he always carries around with him – I mean even while Melonie’s blowing her fellow actor, Dartanian’s lurking on the periphery of the set with the subgun under his coat, looking around for any possible attackes. He isn’t even fazed by the on-screen shenanigans, nor is Mick Porter…who by the way spends his own time fending off the “special effects girl” who tries to put the moves on him, telling her he’s more of a fan of “real” movies – like The Tenth Victim

Soon we learn that crazed preacher Luke Revere is behind the hits. The pulpiest character in the book, Revere is a former hardscrabble tent preacher who hit the big time and now has his own national TV show and legions of followers. Yet, wouldn’t you believe it, he’s also a coke-snorting psychopath who has his own goon squad and sits around watching old porn loops of Melonie Grand all day! It turns out that, a decade ago, Revere “co-starred” in a loop with Melonie; in the novel’s only other moment of sleaze, we flash back to “the waning days of flower power” when a young (and hippie) Melonie came on to Revere in his tent – saying she’d always wanted to screw a preacher. Soon enough Revere’s snorting coke with her fellow hippies and receiving an onscreen BJ from Melonie (there is a curious focus on oral sex in the book, as if Rainey were too skittish to feature any other acts). 

Now, with Melonie’s rising fame, collectors near and far are scouring the bins for her old porn loops to convert to VHS and rake in the bucks with. So this obviously could destroy Revere, and thus he’s out to kill Melonie…I forgot to mention, but Melonie’s also working on an autobiography(!), one where she’ll leave no stones unturned, and this too concerns Revere. Meanwhile of course Melonie has no memory of the preacher, and besides Revere went under a different name back then, but no matter. Revere has people out killing off loop collectors and trying to kill Melonie, thus he is our main villain. 

His chief henchman is Deacon Archer, a biker type who goes out and assembles recruits to get brainwashed and go on suicide runs for Revere. Oh and there’s also Revere’s wife, almost casually introduced by Rainey – a psycho job who gets off on making her victims think she’s about to screw them, then killing them before they do the deed. This lady’s so nuts she seems to have come in from another novel, but Rainey apparently has little interest in her; she’s introduced during one kill mission, then appears again when she tries to get her hooks in Dartanian. But the dude, we’ll recall, is about as much interested in sex as the average Terminator, so her plans don’t work out as intended. 

Cutting to the chase, we have intermittent action sequences followed by puzzling sessions from Dartanian as he tries to figure out who is behind the attempted murders. His certainty that it’s Revere is hard to buy; he hypnotizes Melonie and has her go through all her various sexual experiences – again Dartanian is all business as he listens to the endless juicy details – and then he latches onto Melonie’s memory of the preacher in the tent. Dartanian is certain that this is a prime suspect, and of course soon enough figures out the connection to Revere. Oh and just to get this out of the way – no, Dartanian and Melonie do not become an item in the course of the book. The one thing you’d think would be a given, but nope…again, it’s the ‘80s now, and the genre has changed significantly in such regards. 

The finale is a little OTT; Revere has a “Heaven on Earth” villa in Millbrook (we even get a Timothy Leary mention), and as he’s preaching to his congregation there Dartanian blasts onto the scene on a Harley – leading Revere, of course, to scream out “What the hell?” Rainey has his tongue firmly in cheek as he satirizes the entire mega-pastor scene of the ‘80s. But honestly Revere and Archer and the goons are no match for the high-powered warriors of ICE, thus the finale lacks much punch…which is a sentiment I’d say extends to the entirety of The Porn Tapes

A few more volumes followed, all of which I think I have; The Protector isn’t bad or anything, it just lacks a memorable protagonist or any other memorable elements. When I saw the cover and the title I was hoping for some crazed latter-day Pinnacle stuff along the lines of The Hitman or NYPD 2025, but unfortunately for the most part this one was much more reserved, along the lines of the average Gold Eagle publication of the day.

Thursday, May 6, 2021

Dead End (Kill Squad #4)


Dead End, by Mark Cruz
No month stated, 1975  Manor Books

Dan Streib returns as “Mark Cruz” for this fourth volume of Kill Squad (around this time Manor Books dropped the volume numbers from their series, but the Manor ID number at the top right of the cover indicates this one was published after Dead Wrong). He continues with the schtick of previous volumes: removing his titular trio from their San Diego stomping grounds and making them do stuff that falls outside the boundaries of police work. This time they serve as bodyguards for a wealthy Arab as he travels around Europe. 

But really it isn’t even much of a trio this time. Chet Tabor, blond-haired lunk with the scarred face, has always been the main character of Kill Squad, with co-cops Grant Lincoln and Maria Alvarez serving as supporting characters. But while those two have at least had some share of the plot in past, this time they’re really incidental, only there to occasionally trade dialog with Tabor and then disappear into the background again. In fact they’re only along on the Europe trip because Tabor demands that they come along to back him up. Otherwise Tabor is the star of the show, featuring in all the action scenes and calling all the shots. 

There is no continuity in the series, so no pickup from the previous volume nor any other volume. About the only “new” development we have is that Tabor now carries a .44 Auto Mag, meaning Streib must’ve been reading The Executioner. This gun is built up at great expense, used a few times, then lost in England (there is an apparent bitterness toward the British ban on guns – Streib rakes the Brits over the coals throughout the entire England portion of the narrative). Otherwise another change is that Tabor is even more uber-macho this time around, constantly thinking of sex (even during firefights) and planning to “get a woman in bed” no matter what. He also mouths off a lot, gets in people’s faces, and doesn’t listen to othes. It’s as if Streib wanted to go the exact opposite direction of the wussified Terry Bunker he delivered in the first two installments of Chopper Cop

Yet for that matter, we are often told how “afraid” Tabor is. This is so recurrent in Streib’s work that it doesn’t even come off like him adding characterization. Constantly Tabor will be ducking for cover and fighting down panic, then forcing himself to get up and fight back. Or just as often he’ll wonder why he’s even in the line of danger; there’s a part early on where thugs attack people at a park, and Tabor – a cop!! – wonders why he’s even risking his neck to save them, given that they’re all strangers! Of course all this is similar to Terry Bunker’s attitude, with the only difference that Tabor bullies through his fear and gets in a lot more fights, shootouts, and chases. He doesn’t come off as the most likable hero, though. I mean in that part where the thugs open fire at the park, Tabor hides in a gondolla and lets Grant and Maria handle the action, only coming out when they start screaming for his help! 

This opening action scene will be the only sequence in San Diego. Tabor, Grant, and Maria (we’re told only the press has dubbed them “The Kill Squad”) are serving as bodyguards for visiting Arab Ali Saud, an uber-wealthy oil guy who is here with his two daughters and half brothers. Of course the daughters are in their twenties and smokin’ hot; this is the pre-radicalized early ‘70s so the girls are very westernized, going around sans face coverings and wearing revealing clothes. In fact the youngest of them, Zainab, is a definite tease, and went to college in Berkley. Saud is “a billionaire with petrodollars burning holes in his robes,” and the city has rolled out the red carpet for him, hence the personal police protection – and much to the dismay of “stupid chief” Chief Jackson, Tabor and team have gotten the job. 

Turns out there’s a bounty on Saud’s head, and sure enough a group of would-be assassins hit the entourage during an idyllic gondolla ride. Here’s where Tabor hides, of course with the two girls, one of whom falls on him for cover – Tabor enjoying the “soft, full mounds” on his back and taking the opportunity to cop a feel! As I say he is particularly infantile in this one. In fact we’re informed he’s “thirty-one with two marriages behind him.” Tabor’s also a bit of a loser in the hero department. He finally gets out to fight, and one of the attackers takes a little girl hostage. Tabor chases after – again wondering why he’s even bothering to – and takes a darkened stairwell up the tower the attacker has fled, hoping to sneak attack him. But like a dumbass Tabor overlooks the fact that the bright sunlight will hurt his eyes, which have grown used to the dark, thus he’s temporarily blinded…and in the gunfight the little girl is killed. 

Streib has this weird schtick, in just about every book of his I’ve read, where he has a female character getting shot in the face and killed. Usually the eyeball is blown out, too. This happens here, but having it happen to a five year-old girl is a bit too much, I’d say. Chief Jackson yells at Tabor good and proper, and even Maria and Lincoln are upset he didn’t try harder to save the kid. When it turns out that Ali Saud wants Tabor to accompany him on the Europe – he was impressed with Tabor’s ass-kicking, we’re told – Tabor says the little girl’s memory will fuel him, as he wants to nail the bastard who hired those thugs. Ie, the person who hired them was responsible for the little girl’s death. As with the previous volumes, Chief Jackson is just happy that his three most problematic officers will be out of his hair for a few weeks. 

Also fueling Tabor is the opportunity to get in the pants of either or both of Saud’s daughters. Zainab is the saucy younger one and Hayat is the slightly more conservative older one. A running subplot is that Saud intends to take his daughters back to Saudi Arabia after this Europe-America jaunt and return them to “the old ways.” In particular he feels that Zainab is “disturbed,” her brain rotted by American decadence. There’s actually more meat here than you’d encounter in a book of today that might cover the same topics; I imagine most American authors of today would be afraid of being branded Islamophobic. But Tabor has no problem with chastising Saud that Muslim men “keep their women as virtual slaves,” and he also doles out such impossible-today gems as “You didn’t learn that behind a veil,” when Zainab gives him a sultry kiss. 

For Zainab, we learn, is the one who really hired Tabor – she wants a piece of that uber-macho hunk. When Tabor learns this he takes umbrage; he’s no “hired stud.” Indeed he goes out of his way to talk down to Zainab…and when she goes off in a huff he wonders if he should wake up Maria for some quick sex, given how turned on he is! (For those taking notes, Tabor and Maria are a nonevent this time; she really does nothing more than deliver a few lines and shoot a few people, more on which anon.) Tabor’s muleheadedness is especially hard to understand, given how determined he is to get either of the girls in bed; there’s a later part where Zainab comes to him again, this time in lingerie, and an angry Tabor gives her a paddling! “Here’s what I think of Women’s Rights,” he tells her before bending her over his knee, casting doubt on his entire anti-Muslim tirade. The funniest bit here is Tabor’s shock to discover that Zainab isn’t nearly as turned on by the paddling as he is! In fact she screams and fights him so crazily that she wakes up the entire hotel. 

Streib is fond of female villains – I think every book of his I’ve read has featured one – and Zainab’s anger at being forcibly returned to “the old ways” should set off alarms. Instead Tabor constantly rebuffs her…while he meanwhile wonders how he can get her in bed on his terms. Or better yet her sister, whom we’re told Tabor finds hotter. Meanwhile we get some of the England-bashing I mentioned above. Streib has practically every British character quake in fear at the sight of Tabor’s gun; even some guys from Scotland Yard come by and say that, if he were to use one of those guns, the full weight of the law would hit him. Of course he has to use it, most memorably in a long-running action sequence in Stonehenge, where more would-be assassins come after Saud’s party. 

During this battle Tabor learns that an infamous contract killer named Purcelli is behind all the attempted hits on Saud; this will be a character Streib doesn’t much build up. Streib attempts to develop tension later when the entourage is leaving the hotel and Tabor suspects Purcelli is going to spring an attack. This part sees more wussified Brits panicking as the action goes down, particularly when a bomb goes off on the premises. This part also has an unexpected outcome in that a character in the entourage is suprisingly killed off. The bigger outcome so far as Tabor is concerned is that he loses his Auto Mag, having to hand it over to the authorities. Unbelievably Saud continues on his European journey, despite his personal losses; turns out it’s really a business trip, as Saud is meeting in private with oil contacts at these locations, to talk away from spies. 

The action moves to Monaco, where Tabor finally has his way with Zainab…or, “entering that dark and welcoming place,” as Streib puts it in a fairly non-explicit sequence. After which the two go on a boat ride, where Purcelli tries to take out Tabor; an action scene that just keeps to go on and on, and ends with the infamous assassin again running off. This part sees another character outed as a villain – the reveal isn’t much of a surprise – and as Tabor struggles with her for control of a gun he grabs “the tender V between her legs” in a brutal move. This takes us into the climactic action scene, as Tabor races against time to stop Purcelli from killing Saud in a villa. 

Streib isn’t done killing kids, though; one of Purcelli’s men, we’re informed, is a “young boy” who comes at Tabor with a gun, and Tabor almost casually blows him away…only to later discover that the kid was merely holding a target pistol! This revelation doesn’t seem to faze our hero in the least. But then he and his comrades are particularly brutal in this finale; there’s a part where Maria “carefully” shoots another of Purcelli’s goons in the crotch, and if I had a fancy doctorate in literature I’d suggest that this might be due to residual hatred she has for all men, given her gang-rape in the first volume

The finale seems to come out of a Hollywood blockbuster, with Tabor and two of the villains on a runaway train. It occurs to me that Streib has a firm template for Kill Squad, as each volume features the trio outside of San Diego and each ends with Tabor recovering in the hospital, with Chief Jackson paying him a visit. So happens here, with Jackson again telling Tabor to take an extended vacation to stay out of his hair. Otherwise Dead End didn’t hit the lurid heights of the first volume, but it was definitely more entertaining than the third volume, which mostly featured Tabor and Lincoln sitting on an airplane. One more volume was to follow.

Monday, May 3, 2021

The Peacemaker #3: The Xander Pursuit


The Peacemaker #3: The Xander Pursuit, by Adam Hamilton
October, 1974  Berkley Medallion Books

The lackluster Peacemaker series continues with a third volume that once again is courtesy an author who does not understand the genre nor what is expected of it. If the previous two volumes were tepid non-events, The Xander Pursuit is even worse…192 small-print pages of tedium, only livened up by the incident depicted on the cover (once again courtesy Mel Crair); an incident that doesn’t even occur until the final few pages! 

It occurred to me as I read The Xander Pursuit that it provided an answer to that whole “name one thing a man can do that a woman can’t do” argument feminists love to dole out. Well I’ll tell you folks, here’s one thing women can’t do: write men’s adventure novels. The fact that there were so few female authors in the field should be clue enough; Marilyn Granbeck, who wrote The Peacemaker as “Adam Hamilton” and Blood as “Allan Morgan,” was one of those very few. And judging from her work on the two series, she was incapable of delivering on the lurid and violent demands of the genre. To be sure, her writing is fine, she’s just the wrong author for the genre, her style more suited to cozy mysteries…which is the genre she eventually worked in. 

The series premise itself doesn’t work. I mean for one it’s titled “The Peacemaker.” But even that wouldn’t be too much of a kiss of death. The major issue is that the hero, Barrington “Barry” Hewes-Bradford, is so wealthy that he employs legions of employees who do all the “action stuff” for him. As I’ve mentioned several times in the previous reviews, all he really does is just use the phone for the most part, putting in calls to various underlings or contacts to go out and do the work for him. This is so far removed from the action-centric nature of the men’s adventure genre as to be laughable. I mean there’s a part in the end where Barry’s latest girlfriend is taken captive, and even here all the guy does is make a call…and then goes to bed!! 

Over and over again Granbeck makes it clear that she has no understanding of what this genre needs. She piles on one-off characters, elaborately introduced, most of them doing all the heavy lifting, while her main character sits around in various opulent hotel rooms, smokes cigarettes, and goes “Hmmm.” This has the cumulative effect that The Xander Pursuit is a slog of a read. It’s much more of a mystery than a men’s adventure novel; for example, a minor character is killed in the opening pages, and a hundred pages later the reasons behind his murder are still being investigated! There’s absolutely no action, particularly for Barry; he gets in a car chase midway through, but other than the finale he sees no other action or danger. And he kills no one in the course of the novel. 

So here’s the plot: Barry is about to head off to Tarrago, an island kingdom in the Caribbean. He visited it as a boy, we’re told, and so loved the place that he’s been investing in it over the past few years, trying to help bring it into the modern era. In this regard President Aquino of Tarrago has erected several casinos, hoping to attract the luxury vacation market – something that much displeases Gabriel Lavorel, despotic ruler of San Sebastien, rival country which is on the same island as Tarrago. This brings to mind a trashy beach read of the era with the same sort of setup, Island Paradise, and initially Granbeck seems to be going in this direction, with description of Tarrago’s verdant countryside and mention of its various luxury hotels, but this is dropped. 

On the eve of leaving Barry receives a mysterious call with hot info about something happening in Tarrago. For once Barry handles this himself, going off to meet the caller at midnight. Even here though Barry is accompanied by a bodyguard: series regular Lobo, a former pro footballer who again comes off more like the hero of an action series than Barry himself does. Throughout the course of the book Lobo will be Barry’s yes-man, though, always with him and helping him suss out various mysteries. There’s also recurring character Trask, another of Barry’s crutches; Trask heads up security for Barry’s enterprise and once again serves him up with info, sending out various agents into the field to do the sort of thing an action series hero should be doing himself. 

Well the mysterious caller’s murdered before Barry and Lobo get to the meet, as are a few other people Barry was supposed to meet in Tarrago. The mystery behind their murders – indeed, whether they were even murdered, given that some of the kills were staged as natural occurrences – will play out through the seemingly-endless narrative. All Barry knows is something about “Xander” is involved, but he suspects Xander is a thing and not a person. He flies off to Tarrago and meets up with various people, making incessant calls to Trask and others to have agents sent out into the field to investigate for him. Our hero instead broods in his hotel (he’s got an entire floor to himself), smokes a lot, fields Lobo with endless questions, and doesn’t do much else. 

Granbeck does at least cater to one genre mainstay: a stunning female for our hero. But even here she doesn’t fully invest in it. This is how the female character is introduced: 

Barry was barely conscious of the continued introductions as he stared at the woman. For a moment his breath caught in his chest like a hot spark. The resemblance of the girl to Stephanie Haig was startling, at least at first. The soft, golden mist of hair around the small oval face, the green eyes that reflected light as though from some deep pool. 

And this comrades will be it for the description of the girl, whose name turns out to be Karel; even later, when the expected hanky-panky occurs, there is zero exploitation and zero mention of any anatomical details. The scant references to Karel all have to do with her similarity to Barry’s former love Stephanie, who “disappeared in the Amazon eight years ago.” Even someone completely new to the lurid world of men’s adventure would suspect there was something amiss about “Adam Hamilton.” 

Just for fun, let’s take a look at how a typically-horny male pulp writer might’ve handled the above:

Barry was barely conscious of the continued introductions as he stared at the blonde. For a moment his breath caught in his chest like a hot spark. Her breasts were so full and widely separated that their outer curves hid part of her upper arms. The nipples, plainly visible beneath the gauzy fabric of her revealing top, jutted forward proudly, almost defiantly, as if demanding attention. The girl smiled invitingly at Barry as she fixed him with her slut-green eyes. 

You won’t find anything like that in The Xander Pursuit. Even when Barry and Karel get down to it, many pages later, it’s basically rated G: 

[Barry] watched her undress as he removed his own clothes. She was incredibly beautiful, her tanned skin showing patches of white where a bikini had covered it when she sunbathed. 

Then they were on the bed, coming together in heat and need, searching each other and finding the hidden promises. The cool exterior Barry had glimpsed in the clinic was gone and a warm loving woman emerged. The passion that had begun with that first kiss on the beach came to a full flame, and their bodies met, gently at first then abandoning all hesitancy. They met and climbed the peaks together. In some deep part of his mind, Barry knew that Karel was finding the same kind of wonderful pleasure and relief as he. It was a long time before they were still. 

Hot stuff, huh!! Notice there’s still no exploitation. It’s about as chaste as a supposed “sex scene” can be. 

I’d quote some action scenes, but there aren’t any! Trask sends in two field agents, Radley and Underhill, who trek around Tarrago and do all the “action hero stuff” as they try to find out what’s going on with this whole “Xander” thing. Meanwhile Barry “swims a quick twenty laps” in the hotel pool and has some off-page sex with Karel. He also flies around on his private Lear jet, meeting with President Aquino and even Lavorel in San Sebastien; in all these scenes Granbeck piles on hordes of minor characters, ensuring that the reader will grow increasingly confused and bored. What’s worse is that so much of it is needless padding; Barry’s trip to San Sebastien is heavily built up, but over and done with in a few pages, Lavorel refusing to meet him. It’s like that again and again; any opportunity for action or excitement is quickly cast aside. 

Humorously the back cover ruins the mystery Granbeck spends the entire novel building; we’re told that “organized crime” threatens the economy of Tarrago. Well, this isn’t even revealed until near the very end. But Barry does meet an American here on business named Diego deLucca. Gee, I wonder if he’ll turn out to be Mafia? But it just goes on and on, with another “action highlight” a part where they’re having dinner on deLucca’s yacht and San Sebastien cannons open fire on the ship. But again Barry doesn’t see any action himself, everything handled by the crew. Ultimately he learns that “Xander” is a complicated plot to rob Tarrago’s gold coffers, a plot involving organized crime, and this takes us into the finale. 

As mentioned, Karel happens to get abducted here, though it’s so coincidental as to be ridiculous; some stooges heist a casino and grab her as collateral on the way out. She’s smuggled onto a boat and taken out to sea with the loot. When Barry learns of this he makes a few calls, figures he knows where the ship is headed, calls someone else to have a .50 caliber installed on his jet…and then goes to bed! Even Lobo is shocked at this, but Barry says “there’s nothing else” he can do at the moment. Yes, all this really happens. They wait till next morning, and Barry flies the plane over the ship (which is where he figured it would be) while some other guy handles the .50. Barry doesn’t even kill anyone, having the guy blast the ship to pieces after ensuring the occupants have escaped via lifeboat. 

And mercifully here The Xander Pursuit comes to a close. Granbeck tries to build this image that Barry might be more cruel than expected; when informed that Karel is onboard the ship he’s about to blast out of the water, Barry says he’s going to blast away regardless. At novel’s end he is questioned on this, and says he was only “bluffing.” But we’re to understand that his audience is unsure whether Barry is telling the truth. Honestly though at this point I couldn’t have cared less. This one was really dispirited and padded to the extreme, and speaking of mysteries, there’s no mystery why there was only one more volume of The Peacemaker.