February, 1982 Pinnacle Books
Boy, we’re getting into the homestretch of The Penetrator, aren’t we? At this point there are only a few instalments left until #53, the series finale. And I’m happy to say that Mark Roberts continues to show a new investment in the series, as Quaking Terror is for the most part a bunch of goofy fun, Roberts doling out juicy gore and explicit sex with aplomb – meaning there is none of the half-assedry of the past twenty-some (or more!) volumes.
I kind of hoped it would be the case when I saw the cover (credited to George Wilson on the copyright page), and I’m happy to report that Quaking Terror is indeed Mark “The Penetrator” Hardin versus a vampire! Not just any vampire, either, but Count Dracula! Granted, Roberts doesn’t go all the way with the setup, but it’s evident that he wanted to. Throughout the book he walks a thin line that the novel’s villain is either Dracula or just some nutjob Eastern European named Magarac who merely thinks he’s Dracula. Otherwise the horror-action hybrid you might be hoping for doesn’t really exist in the actual novel, as Mark Hardin spends the majority of the 200 pages gunning down technicians and guards who work for the would-be vampire. That said, Quaking Terror does at least end with a chainsaw-vs-chainsaw showdown between the Penetrator and Count Dracula!
There’s also some of Roberts’s typical continuity, as one of Magarac’s men worked on the vibrating “super gun” that Mark destroyed way back in #21: The Supergun Mission. This is what Magarac-Dracula is using to set off volcanoes around the United States, in order to get a ransom from the government. Roberts ties into the then-recent Mount St. Helens eruption, implying that Magarac was behind it, and is now looking to set off more volcanoes. Given that there are limited areas where Magarac can carry out this plan, the entirety of Quaking Terror occurs in Washington state.
Speaking of topical references, Mark Roberts even finds the opportunity to mention Mork & Mindy; Magarac breaks over the airwaves of the United States just as “Mork had climbed into his Orkan egg.” This line actually took me back; for no reason whatsoever, it made me remember a Mork & Mindy toy some kid in elementary school had at the time (I would’ve been seven years old when this book was published), and I really wanted one of my own, but I never got one. It was this cool little Mork action figure that came with an egg, and I’d completely forgotten about it over the past four friggin’ decades, until I read this line in Quaking Terror. I guess I must’ve really wanted the damn thing, as here I am 50 years old and I still remember it – well anyway, here is the toy.
Continuing on, Magarac breaks over the TV airwaves to make his threat – sort of how Max Headroom hijacked signals a few years later – and this causes panic across the US. In particular the Mafia gets involved, putting together a hit squad to take out Magarac, becase he’s infringing on their territory. Or something. It’s reasons like this that leads me to conclude that Roberts wanted to do a straight horror-action hybrid, but felt straitjacketed by the conventions of the series. So instead of vampires, the Penetrator fights mobsters and henchmen, and Magarac stays off-page for the majority of the text.
This is unfortunate, as Roberts really builds him up in the opening. For one, he looks more like Nosferatu than Dracula; Wilson’s cover art is great, but Roberts actually describes Magarac as being “egg-bald [with a] long, lobey head and over-large ears, all flour paste white so that the huge, smoke-gray eyes and nearly lipless gash of a mouth made stygian holes in a skeleton mask.” Ten points for the creation of the word “lobey,” by the way. Magarac also has a dwarf “familiar” named Koslov, who prepares Magarac’s victims – usually employees who have failed him in some way – for a “life bath.” Meaning, their veins are opened and Magarac does something with the blood, though it’s never outright stated if he drinks it. But boy, Mark Roberts ultimately drops all of this in the course of the novel; hell, the dwarf doesn’t even appear again, and there’s no part where Mark Hardin kicks him or anything. I mean, and spoiler alert, but Koslov the dwarf familiar is dead when the Penetrator comes upon him, at the very end of the novel!
Mark Hardin doesn’t appear in the book until page 28. Roberts spends the preceding pages in exposition overload; we have an overlong bit where a scientist goes on and on about volcanoes and what sets them off and etc…and then, humorously, the scientist is killed off like a page later. But this guy was friends with Professor Haskins, ie the Penetrator’s mentor, or whatever the Professor is to the Penetrator. I mean, it’s not like he’s the M to Mark’s Bond. He doesn’t give Mark orders, or do much else. Well anyway, who cares; the series is almost over, anyway.
So Mark heads to smalltown, Washington (he does not visit Seattle in the entirety of the book), Roberts of course taking the opportunity to engage in some of his flying fiction as he tells us about Mark’s plane and his flight. One thing to note though is that Mark comes fully stocked this time; in the course of Quaking Terror he uses a riot shotgun, a Mac-10 submachine gun (referred to as an “Ingram M-10”), various pistols, and even once again he uses Ava, his dart gun – with both the knockout pellets and the “instant kill” pellets. So again, the ferocity has somewhat returned to The Penetrator, and Mark avidly kills the majority of his opponents, instead of knocking them out like he was doing for a long, tepid stretch of the seeries.
This is displayed posthaste, as Mark when he first appears in the text gets in a big gunfight with some of Magarac’s men around the base of a volcano in Washington. Mark guns them down and then heads into a small town on his plane, where he soon hooks up with a small-breasted, “raven-haired” beauty named Carrie who waitresses at a local bar…but is also a college student who is studying the psychological aspects of vampires. Magarac has been seen in the vicinity, and Mark looks to Carrie for info on vampires…cue even more page-filling exposition, as Carrie goes on and on about historical “vampire” cases.
Here is where we learn of all the mysterious disappearances in the area, with blood-drained bodies showing up, and Mark will spend the time wondering if Magarac is really a vampire and if he’s really been drinking the blood of his victims. Meanwhile Mark gets it on with Carrie, though Roberts does not go for the full-bore exploitation as he would in the later Soldier For Hire. Or, for that matter, as he did in some of the earlier volumes of The Penetrator. But we do get a winner of a line when Carrie strokes Mark’s “pendulous, rising maleness…to fullness.” Sadly though Roberts denies us any similarly-goofy sleaze in the actual sex scene, with Mark castely “turning out the light” before he gets busy with the gal.
Roberts does deliver a fair bit of action throughout. Mark not only blows away scads of technicians and thugs who work for Magarac, but he also takes on the Mafia. This is courtesy Lucky Lou Battaglia, a gunner from Chicago who has been hired to wipe out Magarac, but instead finds himself running afoul of the Penetrator himself. As ever Mark makes short work of these goons, to the point that you figure if the Penetrator swapped places with The Executioner, the Mafia would be finished off in a few volumes. Roberts injects a fair bit of gore into the tale, though as ever he it as if he’s consulted a copy of Grey’s Anatomy:
For the most part, Mark Hardin spends the majority of the novel going around Washington, from one Magarac location to another, and shooting up his men – or shooting up the mobsters who are supposedly looking for Magarac. There’s a lot of repetition in the narrative, too; Carrie is abduced by the mobsters midway through the novel, and Mark rescues her humorously fast. But then, Carrie is abducted again later in the book! There’s also a page-filling bit where Mark has to quell a rebellion among the American Indians in town, who feel they are getting blamed for the earthquakes or somesuch. Honestly this part seemed grafted on.
Which again makes it a shame that so little time is spent with Magarac himself. It isn’t until the very end of the novel that Mark launches an assault on the villain and the two come face-to-face…or perhaps that should be chainsaw-to-chainsaw. Apropos of nothing, Magarac grabs one up when Mark is chasing him, and Mark picks up one of his own…it’s pretty wild, even if it’s just a goofy way for Mark Roberts to establish that a tree stump is conveniently chainsawed into a handy stake!
Overall, Quaking Terror is pretty entertaining, and it’s nice to see the Penetrator acting like his old self. But it’s a shame the “vampire” stuff isn’t more dwelt upon, so either Mark Roberts didn’t think he could make it work, or perhaps he didn’t get buy-in from series editor Andy Ettinger.
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