Showing posts with label Justin Perry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Justin Perry. Show all posts

Monday, April 5, 2021

Justin Perry: The Assassin #4: Death’s Running Mate


Justin Perry: The Assassin #4: Deaths Running Mate, by John D. Revere
January, 1985  Pinnacle Books

I meant to read this fourth volume of Justin Perry back in November, but I’m glad I didn’t; I don’t think I could’ve handled two fictitious elections at the time.* The plot of Death’s Running Mate concerns an evil organization’s scheme to get its female candidate into the White House, no matter the cost: election laws, the Constitution, and the will of the American people be damned. As if such a thing could happen in the real world! Luckily the Federal government is concerned about such things (in the book, I mean), thus the CIA calls in its top assassin to stop the scheme: Justin “I guess I’m a weirdo” Perry. 

As I mention every single time, I read the last volume first, which while not ideal has allowed me to see the story Hal “John D. Revere” seemingly had in mind from the first volume. Namely, that this is a deeply perverted satire of the men’s adventure or spy genre and also that it’s a psycho-sexual headfuck of the highest order. In fact some of it is downright creepy in the surreal textures Bennett adds to the narrative. But don’t get me wrong; this one’s a total failure as an “adventure novel,” as all the other volumes in the series are: action is practically nonexistent, there’s endless amounts of exposition and padding, and major events and plot developments occur off-page. But then it’s very clear by this point that the series doesn’t take place in any normal sort of reality. 

There’s no pickup from the previous volume, and in fact Bennett pulls all sorts of “literary” narrative tricks with this one so far as time goes. It opens toward the end, with Justin flashing back to a year ago, and from there the narrative will continue flashing back and forth to random points (including even to Justin’s childhood and to his first kill as a CIA assassin) before finally getting back to this opening section, which is actually the finale…which is then rendered in summary, Bennett having run out of pages given all his excessive padding. Anyway, we meet Justin Perry in November of 1983 (so then a month after the previous volume...yet the events of this novel actually occur before that volume, and thus would contradict its events!), with his erstwhile sidekick/demonic familiar Bob Dante; they’re in the small town of Carlton, Illinois, and Justin informs Bob they’re going to have to blow up the entire town – killing everyone in it. This leads into a discussion of how there are no children in the town – everyone here, Justin affirms, is depraved and evil, and deserving of death. 

From here we get into the typically-bizarre circumstances which set the scene. We flash back to February of ’83, in which two weird incidents occurred: SADIF, that SPECTRE-like evil organization dedicated to conquering the world (which will ultimately be cast aside in the following volume, to be revealed as a front for a Halley Comet-worshipping cult), has freed patients from several mental institutions around the country. On that same night, a ravishing brunette named Andrea McKay announces the start of the Federalist-Liberal Party (“a colorful coalition of dissident Democrats and Republicans, homosexuals, blacks, Hispanics, Jews, cripples, females, and the like”), which is determined to “throw the rats out” of DC (a sort of prefigure of “Drain the Swamp,” but then Bennett prefigures a lot of stuff here). To give evidence to this, McKay’s party is known for eating rat meat and drinking champagne. 

Justin’s CIA boss, the Old Man (who is revealed here to only be 40 years old!), is convinced these two incidents are connected. He’s truly presented as a sadist this time; he has “scripts” he prepares for his agents, complete with veritable stage directions they’re to follow when on assignment, with photos of “suspected SADIF agents” to look out for. Bennett especially rams home this whole “play” motif this time, with events happening on cue…just as predicted in the Old Man’s script, complete with even suspected SADIF agents making “dramatic” entries. And again this is all just foreshadowing for the following volume’s revelation that the Old Man is really boss of the Halley Society, and another person whose entire life has apparently been spent toying with Justin Perry like a puppet on strings. And again all of it adding to the surreal vibe of the entire series. 

So Justin’s sent to Chicago, where he’s to pose as a psychiatrist at Riverview, one of the sanitariums SADIF didn’t break anyone out of. Just to make things all the more weird, Justin sees a hot babe in a truck filled with pumpkins following behind him as he drives to the sanitarium; his thoughts here are so humorous I just had to share them: 


This leads into a super-freaky flashback to when Justin was 15 in Orlando, Florida, staying with his Aunt Eugenia. Now, Justin only thinks of Orlando because it’s the title of the assignment the Old Man has given him…and ultimately, wouldn’t you believe it, practically everything that happens in the novel turns out to have to do with people Justin knew when he was a teenager in Orlando. Again more subtext that every single thing in this series is some concoted scheme, put together for the benefit of Justin Perry…who would in the final volume be revealed to be the guy a secret society looks to to impregnate women for a thousand years. There’s almost a proto-Truman Show vibe to the series, with Justin being shuffled around by behind-the-scene sadists who move him like a chesspiece. The Old Man’s otherwise-pointless titling of this particular assignment “Operation Orlando” is really just another mindworm the boss has implanted in Justin’s head, to get him thinking back to Orlando twenty years ago. 

But anyway, Justin starts thinking about those days with his Aunt, and the horny little nympho named Thelma Carew who was 15 like Justin and who “taught him how to fuck.” There’s a lot of wild stuff here; Thelma, cliched Southern trash type, often goes on how Justin has “a dick just like a n –” And FYI later in the book we’ll be formed that Justin measures 9.5 inches on that particular scale. Well anyway, all this flashback stuff with Thelma goes on and on, and it’s as gutter-minded as can be, filled with lots of stuff about the “spilled come” of Justin and his pals in the various orgies Thelma would stage – again, the obsession with sperm, which would be played out in Stud Service. This sequence comes to a surreal head when Thelma announces one day that there’s going to be a “white sacrifice” (Thelma herself being white, by the way), and Justin’s been bestowed the honor; what he ultimately has to do is deflower another girl his age, one named Betty, on an altar. 

Which brings us back to the “present,” as it were, ie February of 1983 (but then all this too is part of the overall flashback setup that makes up the narrative). Justin, horny as ever – especially after reminiscing over all those tussles with Thelma – checks out the babe tailing him in the pumpkin truck, pulls over, and points for the girl to kneel on the ground before him and give him a (off-page) blowjob! They decide to go to a hotel and screw…then the girl tries to ram him from behind and her truck explodes, courtesy bombs SADIF implanted in the pumpkins. Justin literally just walks it off and catches a ride with someone who is heading by. And of course later – like toward the end of the novel – we’ll learn this girl was one of the “SADIF suspects” in the photo file the Old Man gave Justin in his script. But this is after an almost endless series of reversals and counter-reversals of who this girl (and so many others) really was. As I say, this series is almost baffling in how creepy-crawly weird it is. Every single thing that happens is part of some sadistic SADIF scheme, or something the Old Man cooked up, all the parts falling like clockwork…and all of them having something to do with Justin Perry. 

Even more freakish is Justin’s “interview” in the sanitarium. The head psychiatrist informs Justin that female patients are allowed to indulge in their “fantasies,” and that male psyciatrists treat them in “the most meaningful way.” “Fucking, you mean,” replies Justin, after which the head psych has Justin get naked so he can check out the size of his dick! The head doc approves, and Justin’s sent to his room…and who would’ve thought it, but it turns out that another psychiatrist working here is…none other than Dr. Thelma Carew! Yes, the same Southern gal who engaged in all sort of shenanigans with Justin when they were both 15, back in Orlando. But as you see, the surreal vibe of this series is through the roof…Justin was just flashing back to this girl some pages ago…and now here she is out of the blue, twenty years later. 

While Justin Perry is certainly weird and off-putting, I suspect Hal Bennett was rather proud of it. I say this because, for the first time in the series, Bennett refers to himself: when Justin unpacks his suitcase, among the items is “a completely innocent and gimmic-free copy of a novel by a writer named Hal Bennett.” This again leads me to believe that Justin Perry wasn’t so much contract work that Bennett “had” to do, but more of a literary experiment…the perverted, disturbed nature runs so deep that it can’t be anything but a calculated attempt at surreal satire. Even the metaphors and analogies are disturbed, ie, “…he said spitefully, as though he had caught a trusted friend crapping on a prized rug.” Speaking of which, one of the metaphors hints that “John D. Revere” is in fact black; at one point Justin looks at the moon, and it looks “like a white woman’s face, turning away.” Of course the moon is white, but specifically referring to a “white woman” implies that the author himself is not white. And also this could be another “tell” that the entire thing is just some author’s in-joke. 

We get another of those jarring time-switches; Justin settles into bed, his first night in the sanitarium, wondering if the entire thing is a SADIF trap and if everyone in the asylum is a SADIF agent. He hears someone at the door…and next chapter it’s four months later and Justin Perry is a battered mental wreck in the asylum, having been committed. One of the things used to commit him was the photo footage of him getting naked in the head psychiatrist’s office! All of it has been a setup, but even stranger is the revelation that the Old Man also played a part in having Justin committed. But even here we have more flashbacks within flashforwards – we go back to the night he was abducted, and it was four hot women who came to Justin’s room, engaging him in an all-night orgy: “Their pussies and lips wrapped around him like animated oysters.” 

As ever Bennett doesn’t go much for the actual graphic description, more so for crude after-the-fact statements like, “She was the one who had nearly sucked his asshole out through his dick, at the orgy.” I mean honestly you can almost sense the author cackling at the typewriter as he gives vent to every depraved teenaged fantasy he ever had. The “committed Justin” stuff goes on far too long, again coming off like a huge paranoid trip, as suddenly Justin doesn’t know who he can trust or why he’s been abandoned. Even Thelma, who knows Justin for who he is (ie Roger Johnson, Justin’s pre-CIA name), suddenly treats him like an inmate. Justin eventually marshalls himself back to sanity with the mantra “I have a son!,” which ultimately comes off as humorous…because once Justin does get out of the asylum, he doesn’t call or even mention his son! Instead the focus is on a bizarre interview (which goes on for pages and pages) in which four beautiful inmates – the very same foursome who engaged Justin in that orgy months ago – ask Justin questions on the economy, politics, and the like, as if this were a political debate. 

After the debate Justin’s drugged again, and has a “dream” in which a ravishing brunette has very explicity-rendered sex with him. Of course he wakes up to discover it wasn’t a dream at all. Next day Justin gets out of the asylum, saved by Bob Dante and Thelma Carew (who turns out to an undercover KGB agent, working with the CIA to stop SADIF), and we never do get acceptable explanation why the Old Man kept him there so long. For none of it was part of the Old Man’s assignment sheet, aka his “script.” Instead we go back down to Orlando, where Justin discovers that old Aunt Eugenia is dying, poisoned by some SADIF agent. Oh, and she’s his real mom; the woman who raised Justin, as revealed in volume 1, was also a SADIF agent – here we learn the pleasure the evil woman experienced when she finally got to tell young Justin she was not his real mother! Anyway aunt-mother Eugenia dies…and leaves Justin 8 million dollars in her will! “She was a very shrewd businesswoman,” a lawyer somewhat needlessly explains. 

Finally we get to the main plot per se, which continues with the entire depraved theme: Andrea McKay, the gorgeous rat-eating head of the new SADIF-aligned political party, is so famous with voters that she treatens the incumbent Republican President. (We’re informed the Democrat hopeful is such a loser he doesn’t have a chance!) Indeed, Andrea McKay hasn’t even given a single political speech, but she’s so popular with the rabble – merely appearing on talk shows and in magazines – that she could win the election as a write-in. Earlier I mentioned the prescience Bennett sometimes hits upon. We come to this here, as the Old Man gives a “blanket indictment of the American press” to Justin and the other CIA agents: 


This whole section really threw me for a loop; it’s like Bennett saw what passed for the mainstream media circa 2016-2020. The first paragraph alone sums up the COVID fear-porn that has served as headline news for the past fucking year. Especially notable is the Old Man’s comment that the people will vote for whoever the press is against.  His solution is for the media to proclaim bad people good, so that voters won’t vote for them, out of general contrariness. It’s for this bonkers reason that the CIA can’t go forward with the info that Andrea McKay is actually an agent for SADIF; if they were to do so, voters would disbelieve the press and vote for McKay anyway. 

But we’re not done with the prescience yet. Here’s another bit that I found very compelling, after our summer of “peaceful protests” and the situation it has led us to: 


And finally check this out…we learn that Andrea McKay might win because she encourages voters to stay home!  (Not to mention that she's a “fabrication of the American news media!”)  


But anyway the book is crazy enough without the predictions that came true: Justin finally sees Andrea McKay on TV (“She looked like a spectacular Dolly Parton with large breasts, black hair and green eyes” – and let’s not forget that memorable line “slut-green eyes” from Volume 1, yet another recurring Bennett motif). He is shocked to discover it is the very same ravishing brunette who had sex with him the night before he escaped the asylum! Even more surreal…when Andrea has her first political debate and is asked questions on the economy and politics and whatnot, the answers she gives are the exact same answers Justin gave to the four female invates in his own “debate” at the asylum! As I say, this entire series is just so weird, and made even more weird by Justin’s almost casual acceptance of how weird everything is. But any forward momentum is abruptly lost, as Justin next moves on to Carlton, Illinois, smalltown home of Andrea McKay, and proceeds to spend nine months there, posing as a journalist. This part just goes on and on and on and is mostly made up of blocks of narrative. 

Meanwhile Justin has energetic sex with Fran, the hot blonde receptionist at his hotel (and yet another SADIF agent); per the series template, there is a violent aspect to the relationship, with Justin enjoying the power he has over her, thanks to his massive member: “Perhaps he would kill her right now, with his dick.” Speaking of killing, Justin finally lives up to his “assassin” tag very late in the novel. Once again clad in the one-piece black nylon suit he sports on the covers, he knifes four SADIF agents to death in the dark, as ever getting all hot and bothered in the process. These men are security for Andrea McKay, who turns out to be a basketcase under the care of Dr. Thelma Carew…and further her full name happens to be Andrea Beth McKay…and yes, the very same “Betty” Justin deflowered in Orlando twenty years ago! Justin conjugates with her right here in the open showiness of nature: “His balls slapped like bell clappers against her ass, hurting him; but the pain felt good.” 

But even this will turn out to be an endless series of reversals and re-reversals. Perhaps Andrea McKay really isn’t Betty from Orlando…and maybe she’s just been programmed by a certain person, given the implant that’s embedded behind her left ear. Regardless, Andrea happens to win the election, even though she’s so mentally incompetent that she doesn’t know where she is half the time, and is only lucid when drugged up by her handlers. (No comment!) But even here in the homestretch it’s all about the exposition and the narrative padding; even worse is what seems to be the climactic moment, with Justin and Bob, both in those black commando suits, about to blow up Carlston (ie the incident which started off the friggin’ novel, 180 pages ago)…and then Bennet flash forwards yet again, to three months later and Justin hanging out in Jamaica! Even here the “climax” is relayed via backstory, Justin reflecting on the events of that night, in which friends turned out to be SADIF agents. This part does at least have a memorable moment where Justin blows away a shotgun-wielding old woman. 

And that’s it, really. Another recurring motif – and likely another in-joke – is how Justin’s always falling in “love” with some woman; it’s happened pretty much every volume. This time he thinks he’s falling in love with both Thelma and Andrea, but of course doesn’t know whether either (or both) of them is SADIF. Not that it matters; Death’s Running Mate ends with Justin happily reunited with one of the two, here in Jamaica, but we know she’ll be out of the picture soon, given Justin’s statement that she’ll be sent to South America to stay in a CIA safehouse so as to escape SADIF’s wrath. As for the other female character, Justin has dispatched her…unbelievably enough, off-page! One almost gets the impression that Bennett is so busy with all his psycho-sexual literary subtext that he’s overlooked how to tell a compelling story. 

Regardless, I really did enjoy Justin Perry. I think it would be rewarding to read the whole series at once; I bet that would really reveal how Bennett had the end game in mind from the start. But also at the same time your brain would truly be rotted after such an experience. I’m almost tempted to re-read Stud Service now that I’ve read the previous four books, just to catch all the stuff I missed that first time. And you know what, maybe I’ll do just that. 

*I am of course referring to the plot of The Penetrator #37: Candidates Blood, which I read in October. I hope you didn’t get the wrong impression, comrades!

Thursday, January 10, 2019

Justin Perry: The Assassin #3: Born To Kill


Justin Perry: The Assassin #3: Born To Kill, by John D. Revere
October, 1984  Pinnacle Books

I needed some weirdness in my life, so I decided it was finally time to get back to Justin Perry: The Assassin. And if anything Hal “John D. Revere” Bennett turns in an installment just as flat-out weird as the others, with the added bonus that in this one we get to see an 8 year-old Justin Perry screw a chicken!! Even crazier: the sequence is masterfully written, insofar as it plumbs into our protagonist’s twisted psyche!

It seems something was going on behind the scenes at Pinnacle; this volume was published a full year after the previous one, and this time it carries the short-lived “Pinnacle Crossfire” label. However the events take place in October of 1983, which leads me to believe that the manuscript was held from publication for whatever reason…either soon-to-collapse Pinnacle was struggling to stay afloat and didn’t have the resources to funnel into this strange series, or they just didn’t want to deal with it and thus put it off as long as possible.

It becomes more and more apparent to me that Bennett really had something up his sleeve with Justin Perry: The Assassin, particularly in how each book plants seeds for the final volume. In fact something jumped out at me this time and I’ve got a hunch I’m right…Justin Perry, as we’ll recall, reports to the “Old Man,” chief of the CIA’s Special Assignments Division. In other words, “SAD,” though Bennett never refers to it as such. And Justin’s recurring enemy throughout the series is SADIF, aka The “Sons And Daughters In Freedom,” a more twisted version of SPECTRE. But as we discover in the final volume, SADIF is just a cover for the Halley Society, which hopes to take over the world with the passing of Halley’s Comet in ’86, using Justin’s, uh, seed to impregnate their women through the millennia. Justin learns his entire life has been a lie – he’s been groomed from birth for this special destiny, and the Old Man himself is the “Grand Halley” who has orchestrated the grooming. So anyway, here’s what just occurred to me: perhaps “SADIF” really stands for “Special Assignments Division Is Fake,” or “False.” Possibly yet another clue Bennett has been planting from the first volume.

Another thing that quickly becomes apparent is that with Born To Kill Bennett is doing a riff on the James Bond film Dr. No (yes, the film and not the original novel). We’ve got a Jamaica setting, a native sidekick for Bond, a SPECTRE-like evil organization, a duplicitous but of course ultra-sexy villainess, and a plot that hinges on a US space launch. The only thing lacking is the colorful main villain, but Justin himself is so whacked-out that we don’t really need one…I mean folks this is a guy who screws a girl and then tosses her to a bunch of sharks, later musing over the fact that he’s “still hard” as he thinks of her body being ripped apart. And he’s the hero!!

If our protagonist is messed up, the so-called plot is even worse. Bennett jumps all over the place in this one, to the extent that Justin himself sits around and mulls over what the “real” threat is he’s supposed to be stopping. We get our first indication of this straight off the bat – not to mention a healthy reminder of how weird and lurid this series is – when in the opening pages a young opera usher in Germany gets so excited via his sexual fantasies that he rushes off to the restroom to jerk off! And just as he is “shooting his milk into the sink” he hears a scream out in the theater…to find a German government official has been beheaded in his private box. The first thirty pages continue this trend, with various government officials around Europe and the UK getting their heads cut off in mysterious circumstances, the killer or killers never apprehended.

When we finally meet him, Justin’s in Ocho Rios, Jamaica, checking out the “exquisite English breasts” of Dr. Janice Madison, a British specialist in chickens and other fowls who has been called here to help Justin on his latest case. Plus sleep with him a bunch – this installment is noteworthy in that the sex scenes are not only more explicit, but for once they are not focused on Justin having sex with unattractive women, as previous volumes have been. Justin needs Janice’s expertise due to the rash of chicken attacks which have recently occurred here in Jamaica, with another happening in Florida – perhaps not-so-coincidentally, not very far from Cape Canaveral. The Old Man is worried that all this might have something to do with the Challenger launch, coming up the next week. 

Justin’s certain the chicken attacks, random European beheadings, and space shuttle thing are all connected, though certainly some of them are red herrings. In the meantime Janice Madison is blown up by a bazooka on her way to the airport, and then a Jamaican cop tries to kill Justin. He’s yet another undercover SADIF operative, and fellow CIA agent Lucas Waugh shows up just in time to see Justin kill the man – who by the way has a somewhat feminine form and shrieks “sexually” as Justin strangles him, just so we don’t forget for one hot second how deeply perverted this series is. 

Very much a Fleming sort of character, Lucas Waugh is a black Jew a la Sammy Davis Jr, one who has his own harem in the Bahamas, but quickly rents some time at the local cathouse so he and Justin can engage in a days-long orgy while discussing this latest caper. Also throughout there is a lot of focus placed on sperm – “I’m filled with come” is a recurring phrase, believe it or not, from both Justin and Lucas – which is doubtless yet another uh, seed-planting for the revelations of the final volume, where Justin’s sperm is so important to the Halley freaks that they bottle it up for preservation through the ages. Personally though if I was hanging out with guys who randomly announced they were “full of come,” I’d think it was high time to get myself some new friends. 

Meanwhile, a blonde babe in a sports car takes pot shots at Justin, and he mulls over this a bit, then heads on to Florida; he’s decided that the space shuttle factor is the true threat, with the chicken attacks a sort of bizarre diversion. And speaking of bizarre, folks…well, we get a random flashback where eight year-old Justin Perry decides one day, apropos of nothing, to “screw a chicken.” This he does, and the chicken promptly dies as soon as Justin inserts himself. I stand by what I wrote above – this entire sequence is masterfully done, despite how sick it is, and it is yet another indication of Bennett’s strengths as a writer. For we read as an increasingly-uncomfortable Justin, who at this time is staying on the farm of his grandparents, is served chicken and dumplings that very night, and he’s of course frantic that this is the very same chicken he just fucked to death.

And Justin’s mom has just shown up to take him back home, openly cavorting with her studly chaffeur; Justin sees them rubbing legs beneath the dinner table. Then months later Justin, back home now, is woken by his mother in the middle of the night; she happily tells him she knows how that poor chicken died, and what’s more if Justin tells anyone that she’s sleeping with her chaffeur, she’ll tell Justin’s dad about the chicken incident. Weird scenes inside the goldmine, folks!! And as we learned in the first volume – and are briefly reminded here again – Justin’s mom (and dad) were secretly members of SADIF. Again, practically every single person Justin knows is a secret member of this organization, only adding to the general head-fuckery of the series.

And yet this chicken-screwing is itself a repeating motif of the series; I mean not the chicken stuff itself, but how some bizarre, ghoulish thing in Justin’s childhood will be trolled out as an augmentation of the main plot. Last time it was weird stuff about a bunch of massacred cows; this time it’s a screwed-to-death chicken. Which is to say it’s all very thematic, but “thematic” in a way that would send an AP professor screaming in panic – that a writer as gifted as Hal Bennett would write shit as sick as all this is kind of funny. I mean I think it’s pretty incredible he even decided to wade into the murky waters of the men’s adventure genre…let alone the fact that his stuff is even more outrageous than the stuff that less-“skilled” but equally-weird writers like Russell Smith or Joseph Rosenberger churned out. (Anyone who could follow that sentence gets a no-prize; I sort of lost it myself halfway through.)

This “literary” bent is further displayed in another seemingly-arbitrary bit; first Justin, with no reason why initially offered to the reader, decides to stop in a male stripper club near Cape Canaveral. Here he muses over the housewives who pack the place and gawk at a couple men onstage with “infant-sized” units; Bennett goes off on a pages-long diatribe on what happened to the American female, and how the Kennedy era unleashed their sexual inhibitions, given their rampant fantasies about JFK. I mean it’s all like something out of, I don’t know, John Updike or whatever, the last thing you’d expect in a book titled “Born To Kill” with a cover illustration of the main character shooting a black guy in the back.

But then it gets even more bizarre, as top male stripper Garth Durant waltzes out, showing off his massive wang; he dances for the feverish women and ejaculates on them for the, uh, climax. Eventually we’ll learn Justin hasn’t just randomly stopped in here; the stripper is the nephew of the lady who was killed by chickens here in Florida. Justin interviews the dude in the very shed in which the lady was killed – and the chickens surround them and go in for the kill. They’re mutant chickens, baby – as big as dogs and rabid as Cujo. This time Bennett appears to have finally bothered researching guns, so that Justin’s earlier revolver (you know, the one with a safety and a silencer) is gone, replaced by a nifty 9mm auto; with it he blows away a couple mutant chickens.

The cover art is again faithful to the events (and yes, Justin does shoot a black man in the back at one point), with Justin finding a Jamaican guy with a bazooka lurking behind the shed, about to shoot at the Challenger as it launches! There with him is the mysterious blonde who shot at Justin back in Jamaica; turns out her nickname is “Tillie the Turd,” despite which she’s one of the most attractive women Justin’s ever seen, and he can’t wait “to get his dick up inside her” before he kills her…and kill her he will, because the Old Man has issued specific orders on this mission: no SADIF prisoners.

Justin drugs and interrogates Tillie and Durant on a yacht surrounded by sharks in a sequence which almost casually demonstrates the sleazy sadism of the series (and hero). Increasingly turned on by Tillie as he questions her – and Tillie increasingly turned on as well – Justin ends up screwing her to get her to talk: she reveals SADIF’s true plan. All the other stuff has been distraction; SADIF really is using gene-manipulation chicanery to breed prepubescent assassins! They even have women that give birth to litters of ‘em, and a fast-growth serum results in junior-aged killers in a matter of weeks. Cold and emotionless, but with innocent faces, they will be SADIF’s new secret weapon, and were already employed in Europe, where they decapitated all those government officials. So Justin learns all this during sex, after which Tillie screams “I love you!,” Justin says, “I’m sorry,” and then he tosses her still-orgasming(!) body into the ocean:

The sharks tore into her like she was raw garbage. Justin turned away from the stern, feeling quite strange. The sharks were eating his sperm too.

Well, at least he’d told her he was sorry.

But Justin isn’t all “screw ‘em and chum ‘em” this time around…Bennett tries, and pretty much fails, to develop a romantic element with Janice Madison…who by the way urns out to have been a fake, the real Janice’s corpse having been discovered at Heathrow. And also this fake Janice with her “exquisite English breasts” didn’t die in that bazooka attack…turns out there was no female corpse in the car wreckage. The problem is, we only meet “Janice” before she exits the narrative, and she doesn’t return until the very end (where she is of course revealed to be a SADIF agent, I mean who would be surprised?). Thus the occasional soul-plumbing bit from Justin on his feelings toward her come off a bit lame. However we do get some choice lines in these soul-plumbing bits, such as: “But what had [Janice] gotten out of him of him except an awful lot of dick and enormous quantities of sperm? And what had he gotten out of her, except for probably some of the best pussy he’d had in recent memory?”

At any rate, the finale is a rushed action scene in which Justin and Lucas, both wearing form-fitting black combat suits (a recurring series element is that Justin wears such a suit, a la the cover, in the climax), stage an assault on a remote jungle hospital in Jamaica. Here Bennett delivers one of his customary uneventful action sequences, with Justin gunning down a few random guards while Lucas does all the heavy lifting, planting bombs and etc. Instead the big finale is given over to the fake Janice, who turns out to be the head of this bizarre bioscience affair in which protoplasmic things are grown into human children. Bennett even cops out of his own suspence, with Justin struggling with the fact that he’ll have to kill Janice, but then lamely having “fate” intervene thanks to a stray bullet. 

Overall though I found Born To Kill pretty entertaining, with the caveat that it doesn’t have much action, it features way too much random pontificating, and also it’s just twisted to the core. I mean folks this is a men’s adventure novel in which the hero fucks a chicken. That alone says pretty much all there is to say about Justin Perry: The Assassin. There is nothing stranger than this series in the entire men’s adventure genre…so you’re either on the bus or you aren’t.

Monday, December 7, 2015

Justin Perry: The Assassin #2: Vatican Kill


Justin Perry: The Assassin #2: Vatican Kill, by John D. Revere
October, 1983  Pinnacle Books

Just as twisted as the other books in the series, Vatican Kill is another disturbed, bizarre-o installment of Justin Perry: The Assassin, courtesy Hal “John D. Revere” Bennett, and once again I’m certain this series was some sort of experiment on the part of the author. But what exactly he was trying to prove with the experiment is anyone’s guess – personally, I think it was his attempt at sort of pulling the rug out from beneath the traditional square-jawed/white American hero edifice of action pulp, but who knows.

Because regardless, this series is fucked up to the core. This is displayed posthaste, as a mutilated scientist, having defected from evil terrorist organization SADIF, briefs the CIA in the opening pages on his former organization’s latest gambit. SADIF has armed a space rocket with a thermonculear warhead and aimed it for the planet Venus as a sign of their superiority…and also as a way to draw in new converts(!?). The scientist has defected as he is certain this warhead will cause the destruction of the galaxy. In his escape he was mauled by dogs, who also bit off his testicles – as ever it all comes down to the groin in the world of Justin Perry.

And speaking of our hero, a page or two later and Justin Perry is covered in cow shit, secretly watching as a former Nazi now posing as a Vatican City gardner is being bathed by a nun with a “prominent harelip.” The Nazi is Carl Werner, and he’s taken over the gardner position from none other than Joseph Mengele, infamous Nazi sadist who has been hiding here in the Vatican for decades, controlling the Italian division of SADIF. But Mengele’s too sick and has absconded to Paraguay (which, strangely enough, is where the real Mengele died…though in 1979), and now Werner, who was still a teenager when WWII ended, has assumed his command post.

Werner it gradually develops is runing “Project New Fire” (as the SADIF Venus warhead plot is called) from the Vatican. Justin scraps his assassination attempt when Werner is suddenly called away. Justin washes off the cow shit, appropriates a priest’s garb, and then heads outside the Vatican…where he’s picked up by a horny young Italian girl(?!). Her name is Angelica Montessori and she is a virgin, she announces. She needs Justin, whom she believes is a priest due to his appropriated clothing, for an experiment she wishes to try. So the two walk around Rome all afternoon, Werner and the rocket to Venus totally forgotten, before they go back to a hotel.

There Angelica strips Justin and then gets nude herself, but she makes Justin promise he won’t touch her. We’re treated to her long backstory, during which Justin keeps arbitrarily flashing back to when he was twelve years old and was sent to India by his military bigwig father. There young Justin had his first sexual encounter, with Mrs. Blossom Reed, the fat wife of one of his father’s subordinates in the army. Angelica brings Justin back to the present with a quick blowjob and then Bruno, proprietor of the hotel, storms in, saying Justin was supposed to die; Justin kills him, feels woozy, realizes the wine he’s been drinking was drugged. Angelica tells Justin it’s a trap but she’s “fallen in love” with him and begs him to flee.

It’s not weird enough yet, so then the door bangs open and in storms the “harelipped nun” from earlier, as well as a young German boy who is apparently Carl Werner’s prize possession, and wouldn’t you believe it none other than Blossom Reed, aka “Mrs. Reed,” aka the lady Justin was just thinking of for no reason, who has “lost a lot of weight” in the ensuing decades and who keeps screaming that Justin must be captured. But Justin runs away, escaping nude into the streets of Rome, before he passes out due to the drug, his last conscious image that of Mrs. Reed towering over him and hitting him with a broom.

Oh but meanwhile, all this is actually going according to plan – the “Old Man,” ie Justin’s CIA boss, has planned for all of this with his usual inhuman foresight. SADIF was aware of Justin all along, and thus had Angelica, forced into SADIF servitude, there waiting for him, but the Old Man’s plan was for it to appear that Justin was not aware that he’d already been made…or something.

The book you see is more focused on theological debates, particularly Justin’s own struggling with the concept of a “benevolent” god, which he thinks is an impossibilty. Throughout the novel he flashes back to his youth, particularly an instance in India where he saw a train conductor derail his train, casting himself and about a thousand passengers into an abyss, all so as to avoid hitting a sacred cow that was standing on the train tracks. Cows also thus play an important part in Vatican Kill, particularly cow dung, which is mentioned again and again, as well as Justin’s penchant for running around in shit. We also get frequent flashbacks to a strange incident in Justin’s youth in which his mother made him dress up like Donald Duck(!).

What I’m trying to say, friends, is that this is still one fucked up series, so damned weird that you start to worry about the author’s mental health. While it’s well-written – Hal Bennet is if anything a gifted word-spinner – it’s just so weird, so obsessed with bizarre and unsettling imagery. Characters will be talking and Justin’s mind will trail off and we’ll get these long, morbid digressions on death, complete with more disturbed imagery like an army of crows feasting on those train-passenger corpses back in India.

Mrs. Reed you won’t be surprised to learn is also a SADIF agent – as in the previous volume, it appears that every single person in Justin’s life has been a secret SADIF agent, preparing him from birth for some bizarre reason. The final volume revealed this reason – that Justin was intended to sow future generations after civilization was wiped out by Halley’s Comet – but for reasons I still haven’t figured out SADIF was dropped from the final volume and the main villains were revealed as “the Halley Society,” which doesn’t even exist in these early volumes. SADIF is Justin’s version of SPECTRE, not the Halley Society.

But as mentioned the Old Man (himself outed as the head of the Halley Society in that final volume) is like thirty steps ahead, so we learn in flashback that all this has been planned for. So when Carl Werner tells Justin that if Justin assassinates the king and queen of Spain(?!), the Venus rocket will be destroyed via remote control, Justin agrees to do it, having known all along that this is exactly what Werner would demand of him. Justin’s only request is that his CIA pal Bob Dante, returning from the previous volume, be allowed to go along with him. Werner consents to this. So Justin travels with Mrs. Reed and Bob Dante to Spain, where Justin carries out the assassination…only, in one of the novel’s few clever touches, it’s actually a pair of SADIF agents that Dante has captured and brainwashed off-page.

But wait – I forgot all about the part where Justin’s first captured by Carl Werner and stripped nude and then thrown in with a pack of rabid dogs, and the crazed, ferocious look in their eyes, coupled with his random flashbacks about that train wreck in India and those vultures gorging on the corpses, results in Justin getting a whopper of a hard-on, which he clutches desperately while he fights the dogs to death!! And then when he wakes up he’s greeted with a blowjob courtesy Mrs. Reed, or “taking his milk” as she always put it when he was twelve years old…and then later he takes Angelica’s virginity, after which she’s basically dropped from the narrative until the very end.

And I totally forgot to mention the part where Carl Werner, as some sort of message, ties the “harelipped nun” (who turns out to be Angelica’s aunt) to a big poplar tree, the top half of which is pinned to the ground, and then cuts the lashes loose so the poor nun is nearly decapitated by the thrashing tree as it flings back to its normal position.

But anyway, Justin kills the pseudo king and queen of Spain, fooling Mrs. Reed and thus SADIF, however it was just a lie…she happily reveals that the “New Fire” rocket’s real intention is to impact with the nuclear missile which the US has launched to stop the SADIF rocket; when the two rockets collide there in deep space, the resulting thermonuclear explosion will knock out communication in the west for several hours, during which SADIF will take over the world, or something. But forget that, the regicide has Mrs. Reed all hot and bothered, and here she is with these two good-looking young CIA studs, so what’s an old lady to do…

The sex, while frequent and, really, making up the core of the novel and the actions of the characters, isn’t very explicit. In fact it’s more off-putting than anything. The only “normal” sex scene is where Justin takes Angelica’s virginity, but it isn’t very detailed…more focus is placed on the sordid engagements, like when Justin and Bob Dante double-team Mrs. Reed, which Justin thinks to himself afterwards was like “fucking a bucket of guts”!! Bennett as usual excels in making the erotic disgusting, particularly when Justin peers at ol’ Mrs. Reed’s nether region and thinks that it looks like a bunch of ashes…

Yeah, man, this is one sick series. I should mention the novel ends with Carl Werner being fooled into thinking he’s going over to the CIA, but instead they’re just setting him up for a grand kill – Justin’s mission you see is to give Carl Werner a spectacularly gruesome death, so he spends the novel wondering what he’ll do (that is, when he isn’t thinking about that train crash or the vultures feeding on the corpses or the questionable reality of a “benevolent God”). So what he does end up doing is crucifying a nude Werner upside down, and then a CIA doctor cuts off the Nazi’s dick, stuffs it in Werner’s mouth and sews his lips shut, all while Werner has been dosed with “excitol,” an experimental drug which prevents him from fainting, so that he is super-aware of his misery until he finally dies.

I mentioned this is a twisted series, didn’t I?

Once again Hal Bennett isn’t much concerned with action scenes, nor realistic detail; Justin again uses a .38 revolver that both has a safety and can be equipped with a silencer. There’s hardly any action at all in the entire novel, and what passes for the climax has Justin and Bob Dante, suited up in one-piece black commando suits like the one Justin wore in the previous book, ambushing Werner and his SADIF agents in the caverns beneath Rome. But it’s all pretty dumb, as they just make all the SADIF freaks gather together in a dank well after shooting one or two of them. As usual, more focus is placed on twisted imagery and bizarre thoughts rather than action or thrills.

So anyway, Vatican Kill is strange, off-putting, slow-paced, and yet still well-written, and really just seems to come from some bizarre alternate reality.

Thursday, April 24, 2014

Justin Perry: The Assassin #1


Justin Perry: The Assassin #1, by John D. Revere
February, 1983  Pinnacle Books

With a first volume nearly as weird as the final one was, the Justin Perry series gets off to an expectedly-unsettling start, detailing the origin story of our unibrowed, curly-haired, sexually demented hero, who as we’ll recall is a top assassin for the CIA who gets off on killing people. This is surely one of the more unusual men’s adventure series to ever be published, which means of course that I like it.

As with the final installment, this one is heavy on the literary stuff, the word painting and the descriptive flourishes, and short on the action, thus belying Hal Bennett's (aka “John D. Revere”) literary background. In fact, Bennett isn’t at all concerned with the action aspects of men’s adventure fiction, still finding a way to focus on the psycho-sexual elements even when Justin gets into fights. Plus he could care less about realistic weapons description and the like. For example, Justin’s favored gun is a .38 revolver, which somehow not only has a safety, but can also be equipped with a silencer!

But as mentioned this first novel details Justin’s origin story. The book in fact opens with many pages of background detail, as Justin talks to an old man in Germany and flashes back to three years earlier, before he became “Justin Perry,” CIA assassin. We learn that his name was originally Roger Johnson, and he was a 31 year-old colonel in the Air Force, married for 11 years to a ravishing lady named Bambi; together they had a ten year-old son, also named Roger. This background gets a lot of fleshing out through the novel, with Bennett building up several long-simmer mysteries about what happened to Roger in Vietnam, how exactly his best friend died there, and who exactly Justin’s friend Bob Dante is.

All that’s the flashback; the central plot of Justin Perry #1 has our freakish “hero” in Germany, where he’s been summoned by the elderly Dr. Aaron Henkel, a Holocaust survivor who has a strange story to tell.  Henkel relays a horrible story of how his family and friends were killed by the Nazis during the war. Henkel describes how his longtime best friend, Heydrich Kroll, was also a prisoner at Belsen, and was publically strangled by the Nazis as an example to the other prisoners. But now, over 40 years later, Henkel has discovered that Kroll is still alive, going about under an assumed name and living in another part of Germany, and that Kroll was a Nazi collaborator.

Now Henkel, through Justin’s handler “The Old Man,” has contacted Justin Perry so as to offer him the job of assassinating Wilhelm Kappelheimer, aka Heydrich Kroll. I should mention that throughout Henkel’s long story, Justin has either been flashing back to his own past or checking out the hot blonde at the table behind him. We all remember how sex-obessed Justin Perry is, don’t we? And the woman only serves to encourage him, casting salacious looks at him with her “slut-green eyes.” (I admit, I never knew that green eyes denoted sluttishness, but I’ll be sure to keep it in mind!)

The lady asks Justin back to her hotel, where they go right at it. But she has a sadomasochistic streak, begging Justin to slap her and etc. It’s obviously a trap – and to his credit Justin himself knows this – but it gets even weirder when, right as he’s climaxing, Justin sees a knife-wielding attacker leap from the shadows. As Justin pulls away from the girl the assassin accidentally stabs the woman in the chest, and she gets off on it, jamming the knife deeper into herself as she orgasms and dies! Meanwhile Justin, upset over the fact that he’s spilled most of his seed on the carpet(!), merely clubs the now-frantic assassin in the head and ties him up, leaving the hotel room.

I still say this series was begun with the ending already in Bennett’s mind; as we’ll recall, #5: Stud Service featured the revelation that Justin Perry had been chosen by the Halley Society as a stud whose sperm would be cryogenically preserved to sow several generations of descendants. That book was filled with the importance of sperm in general and Justin’s in particular; this first installment too features that theme, with Justin thinking it’s “such a fucking waste” that his seed dribbles onto the floor as he pulls out of the woman immediately after orgasming, so as to fend off the attacker. Of course, this could all be moreso indication of Bennett’s own foibles, but given the revelations of the final volume it just seems like well-planned foreshadowing.

The twisted stuff dispensed with (for now), Bennett delivers yet more literary-heavy backstory, with a long sequence set three years before in which “Colonel Roger Johnson” lost both his wife, his parents, and his son on one crazy day. Actually all of them died except for the kid, who was reduced to a catatonic wreck, now ensconced in an upscale sanitarium in New York. Justin’s wife, a government systems analyst, was gunned down on the streets of Washington, D.C., immediately after discovering that the many recent “computer glitches” which almost started a nuclear war were in fact intentionally set to go off. This discovery lead to not only her murder, but the eradication of Justin’s entire family, and was the incentive which caused him to become a CIA assassin.

But again, all this stuff is playing out in Justin’s mind as he continues on with the Henkel job – the blonde and the would-be assassin were sent by Heydrich Kroll, something Justin is now certain of, given that the blonde turns out to be the much-younger wife of “Wilhelm Kappelheimer.” Flying on the dead woman’s ticket to Madrid, Justin finds himself on a plane filled with priests and nuns. And guess what, moments after arriving in Madrid he is knocked out and taken captive by those same priests and nuns, who turn out to be members of a SPECTRE-like organization of evil.

Here follows more sickly weird stuff where Justin is chained up while a bunch of nude and ugly women cavort around him, half-heartedly licking and sucking him in one of the strangest forms of “torture” you’ll ever read about. And meanwhile a nude Heydrich Kroll watches all while his simperingly gay chaffeur sits beneath him, licking his feet! Oh, and Justin’s pal Bob Dante is here, also tied up and being “pleasured” by these unattractive women; Dante informs Justin that these freaks are minions of SADIF (the Sons And Daughters In Freedom), a worldwide conspiracy with its roots in Nazi Germany.

The problem with Justin Perry #1 is that it’s just overwritten and ultimately dull. The belabored flashbacks hamper things, and Justin comes off like a fool – I mean, he gets picked up by some random chick while his wife is being murdered on the streets of DC, and Justin never once suspects her of anything. In fact we’re informed that this woman, Julie Greer, has in the past few years become the only person Justin trusts! However the “surprise” reveal of her membership in SADIF is so anticlimatically handled that you wish Bennett hadn’t even brought it up. For that matter, Bennett treads a very campish line here; throughout the novel, anytime a character is exposed as an agent of SADIF, he or she immediately becomes the cliched Bond-esque villain, spouting insane rhetoric and acting cartoonishly evil.

The novel limps to a close with Justin flying back and forth from the Bahamas to Madrid, desperately trying to deliver a document to SADIF in the allotted time, or else his son dies. Here we see that practically everyone Justin has ever met or known is secretly in SADIF, including Henkel, and oh, the dead sadomasochistic chick has a twin sister who’s just as beautiful and is also into getting beaten up during sex, something Justin discovers during an “interrogation” on an airplane. Clad in a skin-tight black commando outfit just like the one he wears on the series covers, Justin and a comrade storm the SADIF headquarters in Madrid in one of the more anticlimatic finales ever, Justin armed with something called a “Magnum .57 automatic pistol.” Bennett doesn’t do very well with the action scene, as ever focused more on the psycho-sexual aspects.

As expected, the book’s tone is just damn weird, both homoerotic and homophobic at the same time; Justin we’ll recall becomes sexually excited when killing, and throughout the novel he’s afraid men are about to hit on him (and they do, several times, including his pal back in ‘Nam, who hilariously enough hits on Justin seconds before he’s blown up by the VC). The few sex scenes are explicit, but moreso in a literary style, but still very weird. As Zwolf points out in his great review, one also can’t help but wonder over how all the women Justin meets want to get beaten up while having sex.

Justin Perry #1 builds to a happy ending, with Justin reunited with his son, his wife being avenged, and the current SADIF plot prevented. However judging from future volumes Justin will tangle with them again, SADIF becoming the recurring villains of the series. Strange, then, that they weren’t even featured in #5: Stud Service, in which the Halley Society was outed as Justin’s main enemy. Also, I don’t recall Justin’s son being mentioned in that final volume.

Anyway, while it wasn’t as twistedly enjoyable as Stud Service, Justin Perry #1 still had enough weird stuff going for it, even if most of it was obscured by the heavy-handed prose and psychological probing.

Thursday, September 5, 2013

Justin Perry: The Assassin #5: Stud Service


Justin Perry: The Assassin #5: Stud Service, by John D. Revere
May, 1985  Pinnacle Books

Certainly one of the more unusual series ever to be published in the men’s adventure genre, Justin Perry: The Assassin ran for five volumes from 1983 to 1985, one of the last gasps of Pinnacle Books. I’ve long been interested in checking out this series, mostly due to its reportedly bizarre and twisted sexual vibe. And make no mistake, having read this final volume I can confirm that this is one twisted series. But then I also detect something else is afoot, mostly due to who author “John D. Revere” really was, more of which below.

“Kinda disturbing one-fisted action” is how Zwolf summed up Justin Perry #1 on The Mighty Blowhole. And Mike Madonna had even more damning things to say about the series, in an email to me: Pinnacle had one series called The Assassin and the only book I started to read was so bad – had the hero recalling that as a kid he’d killed a chicken while trying to have sex with it – that not only did I not finish it, but I absolutely tore it up and threw it out. When I later talked to Michael Bradley, an editor then at Pinnacle, I told him how offensive this book was. He seemed to agree and told me that the only reason the series was launched was because someone there at Pinnacle owed the author a favor.

I’d love to know what that “favor” was, wouldn’t you?? But at any rate there’s no chicken-screwing in Stud Service, not that “hero” Justin Perry doesn’t get in enough sex. He’s in Spain researching the mysterious murders of around 30 men and women, whose corpses have recently been found deposited in caves, the women summarily shot in the head, the men dead from apparently being screwed to death. Checking various leads, Perry eventually discovers that all this is the work of the Halley Society, an underground organization of nutjobs who believe that Halley’s Comet is a god and that its forthcoming arrival (the novel occurs in early 1986) heralds a new dawn for man. (By the way, this is one of those novels where the back cover copy has nothing to do with the actual novel’s plot.)

First though Perry shags a woman on a plane en route…merely by getting up and stretching he gets her excited, and so promptly hops into the seat beside her and, after roughly feeling her up, orders her to blow him! Turns out though that the lady’s a KGB spy, which Perry was aware of; further, he was aware that she was a nympho who looked for any opportunity to have sex. But this is just the first of the many such curious incidents in which Perry has sex in the novel, and while the book is heavily sex-focused, the scenes themselves lack much description. They’re usually relegated to Perry thinking how he wants to “fuck” the woman in question (also curiously, this word is almost always used), and how the woman “takes his semen” (another recurring phrase).

But even this strange stuff apparently is there just to fit in with the author’s theme. For Stud Service is a very thematic book, and writing-wise it’s downright literary. It develops that the Halley Society has been around for centuries, and they’ve been trying to cultivate studly men to become sacrifices for their comet god; the sacrifice, chosen as a virile man with all sorts of masculine qualities, will be screwed to death by the Society’s women, who will collect his sperm…which will then be placed in special containers so that it can last 50,000 years, used to insiminate future generations of Halley Society descendants who will rule the world!

What’s crazy is that Stud Service is the author’s culmination of the series entire – it would appear that every previous volume has lead up to this one, with Perry’s twisted nature (ie his constant thoughts of sex, the fact that he gets sexually excited when he kills, and, uh, his chicken-screwing) all having been developed beforehand so that “John D. Revere” can drop the revelation here that all of this has been planned out because Justin Perry has been chosen to be the Society’s sacrifice! And what’s more, his CIA boss, the Old Man, is revealed to be the head of the Halley Society, and he specifically sought out Perry and offered him a job in Justin Perry #1 with the express purpose of grooming him for this “honor.”

These surprise reveals come up toward the middle of the novel. First though we see how creepy Justin Perry is. Every woman he meets he thinks about “fucking” (again, the word is always used), and in a few flashbacks we see how he’s always been messed up…there’s a completely bizarre bit where we learn that when Perry was a child an old black man taught him how to steal watermelons(!), and then years later while in Japan after interviewing some ‘Nam soldiers Perry decided to steal some watermelons again…we learn that at this time Japan would fertilize their crops with human excrement…and running out nude one night to steal a watermelon, Perry fell in a pit of human shit(!)…and this scene goes on and on, with Perry starting to enjoy the animalistic nature of it all, climbing out of the piles of shit…!

But there’s more. Going to meet with a contact, Perry is waylaid by an old woman, one whose seeming mounds of fat is really hard muscle. She beats up Perry, then runs away. This completely bugs Perry out, to the point where he constantly doubts his virility and manhood…so he decides to get his mojo back by killing someone. He decides to kill Willie the Rat, a CIA informant who is on the agency’s “slush pile,” ie the list of people an agent can murder if he happens to be in the area; not a major threat, but a person that should be liquidated if the opportunity arises.

So Perry starts to become sexually excited at the thought of killing Willie…murdering him will bring back his manhood, etc. I mean, it’s all really creepy, particularly given that Perry is the hero of the series! But then, he is nicknamed “The Assassin,” the agency’s top hitman, so granted the guy would be fucked up. However the author again has a trick up his sleeve – midway through the tale, along with the reveals listed above, Perry also himself realizes how disturbed and sick he is, even chastizes himself for the stupidity of his thoughts, how he believed murdering Willie would restore his “virility,” etc. He even reflects back on the stuff he did in previous volumes, further disgusted by his own thoughts and actions. (“I guess I am sort of a weirdo,” he admits.)

It would be apparent then that this author has a lot going on beneath the sordid surface of the tale. Meanwhile though Justin Perry has been captured by the Halley Society; he’s captive in a cell on Ibiza, prisoner of the Baroness, whose women are constantly “taking his semen” as he is strapped to a chair, bringing him to climax and then collecting his sperm in test tubes. Here Perry further reflects on the aptness of his being chosen as the sacrifice for the comet god, because he starts “actually liking the bondage, the many ejaculations.” But gradually Perry needs “to offset the trauma of repeatedly ejaculating into the air, as it were,” and begs for a woman.

The woman Perry is given turns out to be Leslie Stafford, the nympho KGB agent from above; she’s infiltrated the Halley Society so as to free Perry. Even here though the author does not render an actual sex scene between the two. Instead they manage to flee, saved by the Old Man of all people, who reveals to Perry that he is in fact the Grand Halley (as the Society leader is named) and has been rearing Perry to be the Society sacrifice, but only so far as the collecting of his semen goes. He never wanted Perry to be killed; that was the doing of the Baroness, the Old Man’s sister, who runs a more violent faction of the Society.

But meanwhile there’s Pedro Antonio, the self-appointed messiah of yet another faction of the Halley Society, once chosen to be the sacrifice himself but deciding instead to take over the organization and sell out to the Russians. The Old Man implores Perry to help him bring down Pedro, whose union with the Russians threatens the entire world. But after this Stud Service sort of stalls into the home stretch; there are no more action scenes, and the next 50 or so pages of denoument feature Perry and his comrades back in Mexico, where Perry basically just screws around while the Old Man, now released from the CIA, slowly goes insane.

There are many instances where the author will go into extended flights of character introspection, and we have lots of that here, from how Perry realizes that he is losing his insane, murderous nature to Willie the Rat, who is reborn as a more upstanding individual. And we have long sections from Leslie Stafford’s point of view; she’s a Russian-born agent who also thanks to Perry is now questioning her Commie devotion and decides maybe she’ll defect and marry Justin Perry.

Only at the very end does it approach boil, as Mario, one of Perry’s comrades and another character who’s apparently been around since volume #1, is also revealed to be a Halley devotee. And not only that but he’s also been posing as Pedro Antonio, who is dead. Mario and Perry fight to the death, and I should mention that both men have hardons during the battle, Mario who groans “I love you, Justin,” as Perry strangles him, and Perry all excited because, remember, he gets turned on by murder. And it’s all capped off by Perry blowing away the Old Man, who we learn has a brain tumor, and thus begs Perry to kill him.

Now, as for the author. Through a fluke I discovered that “John D. Revere” was actually a black author named Hal Bennett (1930-2004), whose biggest success came in the early 1970s with a handful of literary novels about the African-American experience. You won’t be surprised to know that his novels featured an exaggerated focus on explicit sex, to the point where critics either complained about the excess or figured that Bennett was going for satire. It would seem that the latter was the case, particularly for 1970’s Lord of Dark Places, “a satirical and all but scatological attack on the phallic myth,” per one critic.

Knowing this, it’s clear that Hal Bennett was using the Justin Perry series as a way to do the exact same thing, only in this case over the course of five volumes in the men’s adventure genre. This alone is enough for me to place Justin Perry in a high status; the only other series I know of where the author tried something similar would be The Enforcer, which Andrew Sugar used as a platform for his Objectivist/Libertarian views, and The Mind Masters, which John F. Rossmann/Ian Ross used to promulgate his parasychology views and mind control paranoia. Indeed the latter series is closest in spirit to Justin Perry; both works seem to come from a disturbed mind.

The parody/satire element extends to the few scenes in the novel with black characters. There are only two of them in Stud Service, a pair of black guards who work for the Halley Society. Bennett refers to this duo as “big blacks,” “negroes,” and even “bucks,” and plays up their animal-like nature. It seems like just another indication of the author’s spoofing of the action genre, playing up to the “jungle savage” stereotype that would threaten the white protagonists of pulp. And of course there’s old Willie, the black man who taught young Justin Perry to steal watermelons.

So it seems to me then that there’s an actual point to all of the disturbed stuff, and that Hal Bennett was trying to lampoon the cliched image of the studly white James Bond-esque man of adventure in his Justin Perry series, the same as he spoofed the superstud “black phallus” cliché in his novels of the 1970s. Personally this really gets my respect – I love to see when something different is done to a genre, and damn this is different. I mean, we have here the bizarre, disturbing sex-filled adventures of a unibrowed white American assassin who gets off on murder, as written by a black author.

And also quite clearly with this installment Justin Perry’s adventures came to a definite (and no doubt planned from the beginning) close, but I’m going to go back and start reading from the first volume, because something as twisted and strange as this series needs to be read and appreciated.