Showing posts with label Post-Nuke Pulps. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Post-Nuke Pulps. Show all posts

Monday, March 18, 2024

The Last Ranger #9: The Damned Disciples


The Last Ranger #9: The Damned Disciples, by Craig Sargent
October, 1988  Popular Library

Here’s a funny little “Glorious Trash behind the scenes” story: the reason it’s taken me so long to get back to The Last Ranger was that I couldn’t remember where I put my copy of this ninth volume! I have so many books in so many boxes that I put together a spreadsheet years ago to keep track of where everything is; geeky but necessary when you have thousands of books. I try to keep all volumes of a series together in the same box, but due to the nature of collecting that sometimes doesn’t happen – as apparently was the case with The Last Ranger. The only problem was, I failed to note which box The Damned Disciples was in, so for the past few years I’ve been sporadically searching for it. 

Anyway, that’s the slightly-interesting backstory. More importantly, this is the next-to-last volume of The Last Ranger, and one suspects Jan “Craig Sargent” Stacy knew it was, as the first page notes that the tenth volume, to be titled Is This The End?, is forthcoming. While it doesn’t state it will be the last volume, the title certainly indicates it will be. Also I’m happy to report that Stacy shows a renewed interest in the series this time, after the dud of the previous volume, perhaps because he did know the series was wrapping up. The Damned Disciples opens shortly after the previous volume, with Martin Stone still suffering from the bad leg wound he received “two weeks ago,” in the course of that book’s events, and trying to make his way back to his nuclear bunker in the Colorado mountains. 

As mentioned in my review of the first volume, when I read the first few volumes of The Last Ranger as a kid in the ‘80s, it was the scenes that took place here in this bunker that most resonated with me – something about the safe, high-tech paradise hidden in a post-nuke wasteland. But reading the series again, I see that Stacy doesn’t even spend much time in the place; even this time, after enduring the usual aggressive climate and mutated wildlife expected of the series, when Stone finally does make it to his hideaway safehouse, he only stays there for a few pages. Strange, especially given that it’s got all the comforts of home, and then some; you’d think the guy might at least take a few weeks off and enjoy a beer or two. The hidden subtext is that Stone is freaked by the “ghosts” who inhabit the place, ie his mother and father. Speaking of which, Stone still doesn’t seem to harbor much regret that it was he who caused his mother’s death in the first place – his bullish insistence to leave the bunker in the first volume causing his mother to be raped and killed and his sister to be abducted. 

It's due to Stone’s sister, the perennially-abducted April, that Stone leaves the bunker this time – in a bizarre subplot never broached again in the narrative, Stone receives a fax that “we” have your sister. But a fax machine is just one of the countless amenities here in this high-tech safehaven; Stone even has access to robotic gloves which he uses to operate on himself, while watching it all on a handy TV screen! To make it even crazier, Stone’s learned how to do the operation thanks to that data-dump his father left for him in the computer banks; a sort of self-contained internet that serves up info at the punch of a button. Stone’s wound has become infected, so he has to operate on himself with these “experimental” robotic hands that were designed for handling radioactive material or somesuch; tongue firmly in cheek, Stacy informs us that “it was a simple matter” for Stone’s father to get himself a pair of these robotic hands for his high-tech nuclear bunker. 

As if that weren’t enough, after fixing his own leg Stone then builds himself a new motorcycle, using yet more equipment he has stashed around the place, plus parts from different bikes and vehicles. Stacy doesn’t give a good idea of what the resulting motorcycle looks like, but we’re to understand it’s a Frankenstein sort of contraption that looks bizarre – but is even faster and more powerful than Stone’s previous bike, which was destroyed in the previous volume. Oh and I forgot – Stacy further explains it away with the offhand comment that Stone was the “top mechanic” at a bodyshop when he was younger, thus he’s capable of building a bike on his own. But with this one he also straps a .50-caliber gun to the handlebars, and stashes other weapons about the thing; we do indeed get to see these weapons put to use in the course of the novel, which I’m sure would have pleased Anton Chekhov if he’d ever read this novel. 

We know from the first pages that a blonde-haired young woman has been adbucted by a group calling themselves The Disciples of the Perfect Aura; only later will we realize that this is April Stone, and the Disciples have brainwashed her into their cult, which operates around the La Junta area of what was once California. In another of those synchronicities that would have Jung scratching his goattee, we learn that the leader of this cult, Guru Yasgur, idolized none other than Charles Manson as a child – I chuckled over this, given how I’ve been on such a Manson Family kick of late. Shockingly though, Jan Stacy will ultimately do very little with the Manson setup, with Guru Yasgur barely appearing in the novel. 

Instead, the brunt of The Damned Disciples is focused on the degradation of Martin Stone. For some inexplicable reason it’s as if Jan Stacy just wants to take his anger out on his protagonist, thus much of the book is focused on the breaking and brainwashing of Stone. After coming across some cripples who have been branded “Rejects” by the cult – helping them to regain some of their dignity and teaching them to defend themselves – Stone heads into La Junta…and is promptly captured. The city is comprised of smiling, overly-happy cultists and the black-robed rulers who report directly to Guru Yasgur and The Transformer, the sadist who is behind the brainwashing and torture – and who turns out to be the true villain of the piece, at least insofar as the amount of narrative Stacy devotes to him. 

Hell, even April is lost in the shuffle; the entire reason behind Stone’s presence here, April only appears for a few pages…but then, that’s typical of the series, too. It’s not like she’s ever been a major character. One wonders why Stone even cares anymore. But the poor guy sure does go through hell for her; the Transformer vows to break Stone, and the reader must infer that it was the Transformer who sent the fax in the first place, given an errant comment later on that Stone is strong and that is why the cult wanted him. But man, once again The Last Ranger descends into splatter fiction territory – like when Stone, who struggles against the drugs used to brainwash him, is given a “Death Lover,” which is literally a female corpse in a casket, and Stone is thrown in the casket with it, complete with gross-out details of worms coming out of the corpse-bride’s mouth to “kiss” Stone, and he’s locked in there all night to, uh, consecrate this ghoulish marriage. 

It's all pretty extreme, only made more so with the knowledge that Jan Stacy himself would soon die of AIDS – which as ever gives the ghoulish splatter elements of The Last Ranger an extra edge. But man, with dialog like “You must learn to dance with the monkey of death, with the gorilla of termination,” you just know that the guy isn’t taking it too seriously. Plus Stone has some funny smart-ass comments throughout; like when he gets out of the coffin with “the Death Lover” the morning after, his first line is, “I sure hope she don’t have nothing.” Regardless, he’s still brainwashed, thanks to “the Golden Elixir,” a sweet-tasting concoction made up of heroin, cocaine, LSD, and etc – and, further rendering the entire setup of the novel moot, the brainwashed Stone is tasked with stirring the “hot dry vat” in which the Golden Elixir is made! I mean, was this why the Transformer (or whoever?) sent the fax to the bunker? Because they needed a new guy to stir the vat and it just had to be Martin Stone? It’s just very clear that Stacy is winging his way through the narrative. 

Stacy does at least retain his focus on who Stone is, and what makes him special – namely, that he is a “bringer of death,” as his American Indian friends once proclaimed him. His strength is such that even a mind-blasting daily drug regimen can’t keep down his willpower. That said, the cult-killing retribution isn’t as satisfying as one might expect, with some of the villains disposed of almost perfunctorily. What’s more important is the surprise return appearance at novel’s end of a series villain previously thought dead – SPOILER ALERT: none other than “the Dwarf,” the deformed (plus armless and legless) villain last seen in the third volume, when Stone threw him out of a window. (We learn here that the Dwarf landed in a pool – and he tells Stone that he should have looked out the window to see where the Dwarf landed!) 

Hey and guess what? April is abducted yet again, a recurring joke in The Last Ranger if ever there was one, and by the end of The Damned Disciples Stone and his ever-faithful pitbull Excaliber are off in pursuit. And speaking of which, Stacy’s still capable of doling out scenes with unexpected emotional depth, like when Excaliber himself is dosed with the drugs and set off against Stone…but refuses to attack his beloved master. 

In one of those reading flukes, it turns out that I’m at the same point in both The Last Ranger and it’s sort-of sister series Doomsday Warrior (which Jan Stacy co-wrote the first four volumes of): I’m now at the final volume of each series. So what I think I’ll do is read them both soon, just to gauge how these two authors handled their respective series finales. Like they said in those ’80s NBC promos: “Be there!”

Monday, March 4, 2024

Doomsday Warrior #18: American Dream Machine


Doomsday Warrior #18: American Dream Machine, by Ryder Stacy
July, 1990  Zebra Books

What can I say about this penultimate volume of Doomsday Warrior? That it’s incredibly stupid? That it’s the worst volume of the series yet? That it’s a sort-of rip off of Total Recall with a little Dune thrown in? That Ryder Syvertsen has clearly stuck a fork in the series and has entirely lost all interest in it? No matter what I say, I won’t be able to properly convey how ultimately terrible American Dream Machine really is. 

Well, one positive thing I can say is that it doesn’t rip off the previous volume, which itself was a ripoff of the volume before that. For this one, Syvertsen goes way back to the tenth volume to rip himself off; for, just as that tenth volume was an “imaginary story” that had no bearing on the overarching storyline, so too is American Dream Machine an “imaginary story” that, for the most part, has nothing whatsoever to do with Doomsday Warrior. This volume also has the first real appearance of Kim Langford in the series since…well, since that imaginary story in #10: American Nightmare, I think, with the additional similarity that the “Kim” who shows up in American Dream Machine is also an imaginary figure, same as she was in that earlier “imaginary story.” 

Turns out I was correct when I guessed that there’d be no pickup from the closing events of the previous volume, which as we’ll recall ended with Rockson and his team still not having reached a neighboring city, where they hoped to gather resources needed to rebuild a ravaged Century City. There was also some stuff about a bunch of new recruits Rockson had to train. Absolutely none of that is even mentioned here. When we meet Rockson, he’s flying a commandeered “Sov” fighter jet, soaring west to meet up with pal Archer, whom Rockson hasn’t seen “in three years.” 

Yes, friends, three years have passed since the previous volume; it’s now “around 2096,” we’re told (Syvertsen has also thrown in the towel on pinning down when exactly the books take place), and boy it turns out a whole bunch of stuff has happened since last time. For one, the US and the USSR has entered a truce, with all occupying Soviet forces having withdrawn from the United States(!), though we’re informed that there are still guerrilla bands of Russian fighters out there who haven’t gotten the message. Chief among them would be Killov, who we are told without question is still alive (though he doesn’t appear this time), and also Zhabnov, onetime ruler of Moscow who hasn’t been seen for several volumes; both men have a mad-on hatred for Rockson and are determined to kill him. 

Not only that, but we’re told that President Langford is now the official, uh, President of the reformed US, but he’s so old and frail he’s in a wheelchair now…and gee, the reader must only assume it’s due to fallout from the brainwashing torture he endured back in #16: American Overthrow, a subplot Syvertsen never did follow up on. Also, we’re told that Kim, Langford’s hotstuff daughter, is in the reformed DC with her dad, where she plans parties and stuff – and Rockson figures he’ll “never see her again.” As for Rockson’s other “true love,” Amazonian redhead Rona, she too is out of the picture, off in some other liberated city. We also get the random note that Detroit, the black member of the Rock Squad, has been assigned by Langford to be the Ambassador to Russia, and given that Premiere Vassily is now so old and incompetent, the USSR is actually being run by his Ethiopian servant, Rahallah (who also doesn’t appear – we’re just told all this stuff). So, Rockson muses as he flies along in his fighter jet, the world is essentially run by two black men: Detroit and Rahallah. 

But man, all this is well established at the point that this story begins…it’s news to us readers, but it’s been Rockson’s world for the past three years. Indeed, things are so slow now that mountain man Archer plain left Century City three years ago, bored with the lack of fighting…and Rockson just heard from him for the first time, having received an urgent fax from Archer that Archer needs help! So there are a lot of problems here already…I mean, Archer has ever and always been an idiot, his bumbling stupidity a constant joke in the series. How the hell did this dude learn how to send a fax? And for that matter, since when did he even know how to write? 

Beyond that, though…I mean Rockson receives this urgent “Help!” message, and just all by himself hops in this “Sov” fighter and heads for Archer’s remote destination. No backup, no “new Rock Team” (we also learn Russian guy Sherasnksy has gone back to Russia…but Chen and McLaughlin are still in Century City, at least), just Rockson going solo for no other reason than plot convenience. And even here we get the series mandatory “man against nature” stuff, with Rockson crash landing in rough terrain and then having to escape a giant mutant spider…just “yawn” type stuff after 18 volumes of it. 

The entire concept of Archer having been gone for three years isn’t much followed up on; Rockson and the big mountain man are soon drinking beer and shooting the shit in the bowling alley Archer now calls home(!). There’s also a new character to the series – the absurdly-named Zydeco Realness, an elfin “Techno-survivor,” ie yet another new mutant race, this one having survived the past century in silos, hence their small nature and weird manner of speaking. Also, Ryder Syvertsen has discovered the word “diss,” which mustv’e come into the parlance around this time (I probably learned the word from the Beastie Boys at the time); Zydeco’s people are obsessed with being “dissed,” and will take affront if they even think they are being dissed. Rockson has never heard the word before, and Syvertsen has it that it’s a word the Tecno-survivors have created themselves. 

The titular “Dream Machine” is a device the Techno-survivors have created for people who are about to die…sort of like that bit in Soylent Green where you could have like a sensory experience on your way through the out door. So off the trio go, riding over 50 miles of rough terrain – but wait, I forgot! Rockson actually gets laid…indeed, quite a bit in this novel. But again demonstrating the marked difference between this and the earliest volumes, all the sex is off-page…well, most of it. The few tidbits we get here and there are so vague as to be laughable when compared to the juicy descriptions found many volumes ago. But Rockson makes his way through a few green-skinned wild women, of the same tribe he last, er, mated with back in…well, I think it was the ones way back in #3: The Last American

It's curious that Syvertsen often refers to earlier volumes in American Dream Machine, more so than in any past installment; we are reminded of how long ago certain events were. But then he goes and makes the rest of the novel completely unrelated from the series itself. Anyway, I realized toward the end of the book that Syvertsen was indulging in this reminiscence because he must have known the end was near, as by the end of the book you know we’re headed for a series resolution. However I’m getting ahead of myself. As mentioned instead of any series continuity, we instead get a bonkers plot that rips off Total Recall to a certain extent…which must’ve been quite a trick given that the movie hadn’t come out yet when Syvertsen was writing his manuscript. Or maybe it was the Total Recall novelization, published in hardcover in 1989, that inspired him. Or maybe it was just a coincidence. Or maybe it was just the original Philip K. Dick story. 

So Rockson gets in the Dream Machine, which looks like a big metal coffin, and sure enough as soon as he’s under none other than Zhabnov and his forces storm in – completely coincidentally! – and they take everyone prisoner. And when Zhabnov discovers Rockson in this machine, he has the Techo-survivors turn the dream into a nightmare. For the next hundred-plus pages we’ll be in this nightmare world, which is where the similarity to previous volume American Nightmare comes in…just as with that one, this one too will be a “nightmare” with no bearing on the main plot of the series, with even Rockson himself a completely different character. 

That’s because he’s now “Niles Rockson,” a wealthy playboy living in a penthouse in NYC in the pre-nuke 1980s, enjoying a romantic time with hotstuff blonde “Kimetta.” None other than the dream version of Kim Langford, with the curious tidbit that, despite having been plain ignored for the past several volumes, Kim is now presented as Rock’s soul mate, the love of his life. Well anyway when the nightmare begins…Kim suddenly becomes a mean-looking tough chick (still hot though, we’re informed – with, uh, big boobs despite her small stature!), and the action has been changed to…Venus

Suddenly Kimetta is angry at Rockson, meaning the dream has changed but Rockson of course is not aware he’s in a dream; reading the novel is a very frustrating experience. And it gets dumber. Some cops come in and haul Rockson off for the crime of being a “playboy!” He’s put on a “prisoner ship” and sent off into space, headed for the artificial planet Esmerelda, which is a prison colony. Yet, despite this being a nightmare, Rockson – in the narrative concocted by the Techno-survivors at the behest of Zhabnov – still gets laid. A lot. Hookers are sent into his room each night, a different one each night, and every time it’s fade to black. One of the gals happens to be from Esmerelda, the planet they’re headed for, and since Rockson’s so good in bed (we’re informed), she treats him to “the Esmereldan position.” Demonstrating how juvenile the tone of Doomsday Warrior has become, Syvertsen actually describes this screwing-in-a-weird-new-position thusly: “It would be difficult to explain.” And that’s all he writes about it. 

We’re in straight-up sci-fi territory as Rockson is taken to this planet Esmerelda…where he learns he’s going to become a gladiator. And at least sticking true to the series template he’ll need to fight a bloodthirsty monster in the arena. It’s all so dumb…and, well, at least it’s dreamlike, with non-sequitur stuff like Kimetta – who now has become the daughter of the prison warden on Esmerelda! – giving Rockson a talisman that will protect him against this monster. It just goes on and on, having nothing to do with Doomsday Warrior, yet not being strong enough to retain the reader’s interest; Syvertsen’s boredeom with it all is very apparent, and this feeling extends to the reader. 

At the very least I was impressed with how Syvertsen just wings it as he goes along…given that all this is a “dream,” he’s able to change the narrative as he sees fit. But gradually Rockson starts to figure something is amiss with this world, and begins to remember “The Doomsday Warrior.” But again it’s very juvenile, with Rockson suddenly certain that if he escapes Esmerelda, he will awaken into his real reality. The finale of the dream sequence features some unexpected emotional depth, when Rockson realizes that his beloved Kimetta is “just a dream, too.” This leads to a sequence where the series gets back to its New Agey roots; The Glowers, those godlike mutants also last seen in the third volume, show up to save Rockson – who is near death from his experience. This kind of goes on for a bit, with the Glowers and Rockson’s pals using a Medicine Wheel to put Rockson’s soul back together with his body. 

Here's where it becomes clear Ryder Syvertsen has the end of the series in mind. Well, first we get more juvenile stuff where the Glowers bring out a massive ship made of ice and snow and upon it floats Rockson and team back to Century City – where the Glowers have called ahead telepathically. Rockson is given a hero’s welcome, and what’s more Rona and Kim are there waiting for him, and we’re told they’ve “settled their jealous differences” about Rockson, and have decided what to do about him – but will tell him more later. The main Glower announces that Killov is alive, and only Rockson can stop him, thus setting the stage for the next (and final) volume. 

But man…here comes the scene we’ve waited so many volumes for: that night there’s a knock at Rockson’s door, and he opens it to find both Kim and Rona there in negligees, and they laugh and push Rockson back on his bed, and the reader is promised the Doomsday Warrior three-way to end all three-ways. But friggin’ Ryder Syvertsen ends the book right there!! (I’m currently working on my own 200-page fan novelization of this sex scene.) 

As mentioned, the next volume is to be the last…but the series has been over for Syvertsen for a long time, now. That said, I might get to the last one sooner rather than later, for American Dream Machine seems to be leading directly to that next novel – meaning, the next one shouldn’t open three years after this one. 

Wednesday, January 24, 2024

Traveler #10: Hell On Earth


Traveler #10: Hell On Earth, by D.B. Drumm
October, 1986  Dell Books

Ed “D.B. Drumm” Naha takes a page from the Doomsday Warrior series with this tenth installment of Traveler, which turns out to be a literal take on the title: In this one, Traveler actually finds hell on Earth, and ventures down into it like some post-nuke Orpheus to rescue his beloved, Jan. While Hell On Earth starts off with some actual “emotional content” (to quote Bruce Lee), it even gradually takes on the same “R-rated Saturday morning cartoon” vibe as Doomsday Warrior

This is unfortunate, as I was ready to declare Hell On Earth as one of the greatest volumes of Traveler ever (or any post-nuke pulp in general)…for the first twenty or so pages. But as the narrative went on it became clear that Naha was up to his usual tricks, spoofing his own content with lots of bantering and humorous asides – and really the entire setup is straight out of Ryder Stacy, with the titular hell being modelled after a 1980s shopping mall, complete with an escalator that takes one down the nine levels. I kept expecting Ted “Doomsday Warrior” Rockson and team to show up and lend Traveler a hand. 

Of course we know this would be impossible, given that Doomsday Warrior takes place a century after 1989 – one of the few things consistent about that series was the “hundred years after” setting. But friends there’s still a disconnect between Ed Naha and the guys in the office at Dell Books. Because they’ve yet to get their stories straight on when the hell Traveler takes place. The back cover threw me for a loop with its mention that it’s “nearly thirty years after doomsday,” and as we’ll recall the previous volume had back cover copy stating it was twenty-plus years after. 

And when the novel opens, we meet Traveler with a gray beard, living alone outside a pueblo in “the Southwest” and his traveling days apparently long behind him – the indication is clear that it’s a helluva long time since the previous volume. So I was like wow, this really is 30 years after the nuclear war, and Traveler’s basically retired from the, uh, “Traveler” business…but almost immediately after this evocative setup Naha informs us that Traveler is not old, despite looking old, and is only “in his midforties.” And also guess what…it’s only six months since the previous volume, and only three years since the events of #6: Border War! Also we are told, later in the novel, that without question the nuclear war was “two decades ago,” meaning that the novel takes place in 2009. Not 2019, as implied by the back cover. 

This sort of thing irritates me. 

But man, that opening. I’m going to go out on a limb and guess Naha was inspired by Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, which came out in 1985, ie right around when Naha was likely writing Hell On Earth. As with that film, Traveler when we meet him is alone and bitter and it seems much time has passed. And like Mad Max, Traveler here becomes a protector of children…for those first few pages, at least. Frustratingly, Naha has a perfectly fine setup at the start of the novel, but ditches it for the “hell on Earth” scenario…which is ultimately undone by Naha’s penchant for spoofing and mocking his own material. I mean I get it that he feels this sort of shit is beneath him, but still – couldn’t he have kept it to himself and not let his derision spill into the narrative? 

Traveler when we meet him isn’t even “Traveler” anymore (and, we’ll recall, his real name is Kiel Paxton, anyway): he’s now “The Storyteller,” and he’s living here in a shack or something outside of a pueblo that was untouched by the nukes. Naha pulls a double “background story” thing here: first we’re told that “Storyteller” got his name because each morning he tells stories to the mutant children that live in the pueblo. Then shortly after that we have yet another background story, detailing how Traveler got here in the first place: he came across a caravan of youth while he was headed South, six months ago, and sort of lost his mind after witnessing their grim fate – a grim fate Traveler himself unwittingly sent them off to. 

I was more moved than I thought I’d be by the opening of the book, which features “Storyteller” reading a book of nursery rhymes he has recently discovered in the post-nuke rubble; he can’t even get passed “once upon a time” without being hammered with questions by the mutant children, none of whom can grasp a “once upon a time” in which their weren’t mutant children like themselves. Naha pulls a double “rip the reader’s heart out” bang for his buck with the next chapter, in which he flashes back six months to when Traveler met that caravan of youth on their way out of the South; in this nuke-blasted world, they had “chosen to remain kids” instead of becoming the hard-edged survivors required in this new world, and Traveler mindlessly avoided the opportunity to provide them with some much-needed security. 

So the potential was there…Traveler, blaming himself for the death of one group of kids, now a sort of guardian for another group of kids; all kinds of potential for a redemptive storyline here, with roadrats or other post-nuke brigands descending on the pueblo and Traveler fighting to save the kids. But Naha skips this and instead sends Traveler to hell – literally. The surprise return of Link, Traveler’s companion last seen in Border War, sets the narrative wheel in motion. Traveler has assumed Link dead all these years, but here he is, ravaged and near death (for real this time), with a crazy story about having escaped from hell – where he’s been these past three years, along with Jan. 

As we’ll recall, Jan was the American Indian beauty who featured in the installments written by series co-author John Shirley; she and Traveler went off into a post-nuke Happily Ever After in the denoument of Border War, only for Naha to buzzkill that in the opening of #7: The Road Ghost, where we were bluntly informed that Jan had been killed almost immediately after heading off into that Happily Ever After! Naha has seldom referred to Jan since – naturally, given that Jan wasn’t one of the characters he created – but now we are reminded of how Traveler “loved her once.” So, if she’s still out there, off he’ll go, getting the Meat Wagon geared up and heading out. 

Naha has a knack for mystically-attuned guides for Traveler, and Hell On Earth has not one but two of them. First there’s Willy, who acts as the sort of shaman for Traveler/Storyteller, and in one of those typically-inexplicable events of the series was the one who prevented Traveler from killing himself six months ago: after discovering the grim fate of those kids, Traveler attempted to blow his brains out, only for the gun to be knocked out of his hand just as he pulled the trigger – knocked out of his hand by a friggin’ tomahawk! A tomahawk thrown by a punk-haired mystic by the name of Willy, who appeared just at that moment to tell Traveler it “wasn’t his time” to die…and as if that weren’t mystical enough, this dude even called Traveler by his real name, Kiel Paxton. 

But this will be yet more interesting material Naha will cast aside; Willy is soon gone from the text, having givenTraveler some arrows for his crossbow, the blades of which have been treated with Willy’s magical “herb.” Traveler accidentally knicks himself on one of the blades, immediately seeing LSD-style flashes of color; this will be Ed Naha’s way of having his cake and eating it too, with the overhanging possibility that the rest of the novel could be nothing more than the herb-caused hallucinations of Traveler. However Willy’s gone…to almost immediately be replaced by another “mystic guide” type, this one an older gentleman in a robe who insists he is Saint Michael, ie the actual angel himself. 

As we’ll also recall, Naha has no problems with taking Traveler outside of the already-wide boundaries of its internal post-nuke logic: previous installment The Stalking Time featured an alien, complete with spaceship, assisting Traveler. So the actual Saint Michael of the actual Bible appearing here doesn’t seem to out of place. What I found most interesting was reading this from a post-modern perspective; today belief in religion isn’t nearly as commonplace as it was in 1986 (it’s actually no longer the majority religion in England, with the US surely soon to follow), so I wonder how many modern readers would respond to the Biblical and religious overtones Naha sprinkles through Hell On Earth

The problem with this is that these spiritual and mystic guides only serve to lessen Traveler himself. Naha will build up a nice rapport between Saint Michael and Travel, with the “angel” often questioning Traveler’s lack of belief and sort of taunting him that he’s wrong, but at the same time it’s all so frustratingly similar to modern-day drek in which the male protagonist is constantly questioned, criticized, and belittled by a “strong empowered woman” who once upon a time would’ve been nothing more than a damsel in distress. But seriously, I’m not joking – not only does Saint Michael constantly question and criticize Traveler, but he’s always saving him! Indeed, Traveler hardly does anything in Hell On Earth; his bullets will have no affect on the demons and hell-beasts he and Saint Michael go up against. 

Otherwise Saint Michael isn’t that bad of a character; he claims without question he is the angel of myth, and what’s more has two big scars on his back, right where ripped-off wings would’ve gone. But then, he remembers nothing from before the war, so there is the possibility he’s just some guy who had a psychotic break after the collapse of society. Again, Naha wants his cake and to eat it too (and really, who doesn’t??), so throughout the novel he dangles the idea that all this could just be a big trip for Traveler. Regardless, Saint Michael is learned on mythology and the general outline of hell, and for the rest of the narrative will explain this or that to the constantly-befuddled Traveler. 

Again, this is a far cry from the confident and capable ass-kicker of the John Shirley installments. Naha’s Traveler is more prone to self-doubt and, most unforgivably, can’t even save himself, at least this time. Throughout Hell On Earth he totes an HK-91 or Uzi, blasting away, but his bullets don’t do anything, and Saint Michael will show up with a wand or even a bag of holy water to save Traveler’s ass. This is because the stuff Traveler fights this time is straight outta hell, with actual demons and the like walking on the Earth. But even here, Traveler will tell himself they might just be a type of mutant he’s never seen before, or perhaps “hell” was a top-secret genetics research lab before the war, and what’s been unleashed is a man-made hell. 

The caveat here is that these action scenes are more along the lines of a fantasy novel, and nothing like the post-nuke carnage of previous installments. There’s little in the gun-blazing gore one might reasonably expect, with instead Traveler getting his ass handed to him by a pterodactyl-type creature from hell and the like. Even the finale sees Traveler fighting a massive demon. And that’s another thing – Link tells Traveler that “Lucifer” reigns in this hell Link has just escaped, and for no reason Traveler immediately assumes that “Lucifer” is really President Frayling, ie Traveler’s arch-enemy of earlier volumes. The only problem here is that Traveler killed Frayling in Border War…which, again, was written by John Shirley, and for all intents and purposes was a volume that could have easily served as the final isntallment of Traveler

But we aren’t even reminded here that Traveler himself killed Frayling (perhaps Naha forgot, given that Shirley is the one who told us of this incident), and as Hell On Earth proceeds he becomes more and more confident that Lucifer is Frayling. Yes, cue more taunting from Saint Michael, who insists that Lucifer is really Lucifer, ie the devil himself, and that is who they will face in the center of hell. But still, it’s just another indication of how lessened Traveler is, given his muleheaded insistence, apropos of nothing whatsoever, that Frayling is the ruler of this hell, which has sprouted like a radioactive mountain out of the desert. 

The Doomsday Warrior parallels are strong as Traveler and Saint Michael take the escalator down into the shopping mall that is hell, with each level themed along the lines of Dante’s Inferno – the film version of which plays on TV screens on one of the first levels. Another level is given over to red light districts and cathouses (the horror!), and another level has victims lined up to be ground into bloody paste. Also I forgot, there’s a lake at the entrance complete with a Charon at the boat, which gave me bad flashbacks to Clash Of The Titans (truly not a movie that has aged well, but damn I loved it as a seven year old – I even had the toys!  And I recall shooting the Charon figure in the face with a BB gun when I was older for some mysterious reason!). 

You can skip this paragraph due to spoilers, but for those who don’t want to bother with reading the novel, Traveler does indeed find Jan, on the sixth level, but this too is a lessened Jan – she is zombielike, and barely has any dialog. Oh and I forgot, along the way Traveler and Saint Michael also pick up some other young woman, this one named Diana, who claims to be escaping from hell – but like everyone else here, she has no memory of how she even got here. Our heroes even meet a former lawyer turned “samurai for hire” named Patrick Goldsteen – “An Anglo samurai?” thinks a shocked Traveler, but this is just even more indication of Naha’s contempt for his own material. It’s all just spoofed throughout. But anyway, we can see where this is going – Jan, Goldsteen, the other “zombies” Traveler meets…hell even Link in the opening…all of them are dead, and this really is hell, folks, and it’s not President Frayling but the devil himself – a twenty-foot demon in a lake of fire – who runs the place. And once again Saint Michael saves the day while Traveler just stands there. 

Well, end spoilers. Hell On Earth even has a Doomsday Warrior-esque “reset” finale, with Traveler on his way back to the pueblo, wondering if all this has just been a dream courtesy that “herb” Willy spiked his arrows with. Here’s hoping that the next volume will pick up the thread Hell On Earth started off with, instead of detouring into satire and spoofery. 

Oh, and last note on the lameness – Traveler doesn’t even get laid this time. Now if that’s not a shocker I don’t know what is!

Monday, October 23, 2023

Slaughter Realms: The Post-Nuke Pulp Spoof That Never Was

 

Slaughter Realms: The Post-Nuke Pulp Spoof That Never Was 

Back in the early days of the blog I came across a website dedicated to “Slaughter Realms,” which was purported to be “a seminal pulp series during the heyday of post-apocalyptic fiction,” one that was “almost forgotten now.” Clearly a spoof of Gold Eagle’s Death Lands (which I so dislike I’ve never reviewed a single volume of it in the 13 years of this blog), Slaughter Realms was a facetious spoof of the pulp-fiction factory…courtesy a former Gold Eagle/Death Lands writer: Alan Philipson, whose work I mainly know from Gold Eagle series SOBs

The Slaughter Realms website was centered around a “lost” final manuscript for Slaughter Realms, written by the longest-running author on the series: Daniel Desipio. The schtick was that “newly-discovered” chapters would be published each site update, but only five chapters (plus a Prologue) were ever published. 

It was an interesting attempt on Philipson’s part, both satire and tribue to the genre that he’d worked in for decades. The series setup was incredibly busy, more fantasy than the post-nuke pulp one might expect, featuring “Martian Time King” villains, Runic weapons, an “Iroquois Ninja Princess” protagonist, and taking place in the future. The humorous background “history” for the series has it that Slaughter Realms was the work of “eight anoymous English Lit majors – hyper-caffeinated, half-starved, sans sleep for 36 hours and locked in a windowless, basement conference room,” who wrote the series “in return for five ‘Meat Lovers’ pizzas with double cheese, a six-pack of Olde English forties, and their promised eventual freedom.” 

In fact, I got more enjoyment out of this spoofy metatextual background than the “lost chapters” themselves – I never actually read them, and indeed forgot about the entire Slaughter Realms enterprise. (Fortunately, though, I saved the website to my Chrome favorites.) As I recall, there was also a forum on the site, and I remember going on there and seeing comments from readers, so hopefully some of you out there remember Slaughter Realms and we can get some kind of closure on what happened to it. 

It’s clear though that Alan Philipson shut it down some years ago – my assumption is he wasn’t making any money off it or he just lost interest. The site appears to have last been updated with a new chapter in 2009, and then was taken offline in 2013. The site is gone, but hey – that’s why god invented the Wayback Machine. Luckily I still had the old URL address! 

So, here is the website as it was last captured, where you can read the various background sections and the five completed chapters: 


On a bummer note, you can only read the first page of those five chapters…due to how Philipson created the site, the chapters are pop-ups, and the WayBack Machine is only showing the first page of each. And even worse the “plain text” link for the complete five chapters does not work in any of the site captures the WayBack Machine made of the website. Did anyone out there save the Prologue and five chapters as a text file? If so, please let us know! But it is kind of ironic, isn’t it – a pseudo “lost” novel has now really been lost. 

As I mentioned here before, Alan Philipson’s real name is Mark Mandell. He’s published men’s adventure novels under both names, but the About Alan Philipson page on the old Slaughter Realms site actually provided a very subtle clue that “Alan Philipson” was really Mark Mandell. There we read that Philipson “was waylaid by rock and roll…during his university years,” and “a song of his was released on a compilation CD set Love Is The Song We Sing by Rhino Records.” 

Off to Discogs.com I went to research this release – and there found “Mark Mandell” credited for lead vocals and rhythm guitar (as well as for writing the song) as a member of the group Notes From The Underground, on the 1968 track “Why Did You Put Me On:” 


Pretty cool – who would’ve thought this guy would go on to write violent action novels in the ‘80s??

Anyway, let me know what you all think of Slaughter Realms, and if anyone out there remembers it, or has the published chapters to share…and also if Mr. Alan Philipson is out there and would like to comment, that would be awesome, too! Maybe he could consider finishing the project and putting it out there for all to enjoy – I’m sure there are some modern pulp publishers that would be happy to talk to him about it!

Wednesday, July 26, 2023

Doomsday Warrior #17: America’s Sword


Doomsday Warrior #17: Americas Sword, by Ryder Stacy
January, 1990  Zebra Books

Boy, if you thought the previous volume of Doomsday Warrior was lame, just wait till you read this one! I’ve said before that Ryder Syvertsen was clearly phoning it in at this point; one can almost feel him hoping and praying that the series would get canceled so he could stop writing it. I mean all the dude does this time is basically re-write the previous book; America’s Sword is almost a carbon copy of American Overthrow, but again with the caveat that this one’s even worse. 

It’s a shame how Doomsday Warrior has experienced such a downward spiral. The first volumes were pretty cool, packed with gory violence and explicit sex. But around the midway point of the series Syvertsen must have lost interest or heart, as he began dialing back on all the craziness. At this point in the series the violence isn’t nearly as gory as before and the sex is all off-page. Even the goofy subplots have been dropped; for a while we had a lot of stuff about Ted “Doomsday Warrior” Rockson caught in a love triangle between Amazonian redhead Rona and lithe blonde Kim. All this is forgotten, with practically all female characters removed from the series – even the mandatory “native babe” Rockson will pick up on his post-nuke travels does not appear here in America’s Sword

But speaking of Syvertsen’s lack of interest…turns out I was right in my review for American Overthrow, where I guessed that none of that volume’s concluding incidents would be picked up in the next volume. I was more correct than I could’ve guessed. So as a recap, in the finale of the previous book Rockson had saved feeble old President Langford and his daughter Kim from the clutches of this sadist who was trying to brainwash them. Kim, once declared to be Rockson’s beloved, had disappeared from the series with nary a mention for the past several volumes, so this was the long-awaited reunion of the pair. But rather than build on this, Syvertsen never even gave Rockson and Kim a moment together; she was brain-fogged when Rockson saved her, then out cold later. As I recall, Rockson hoped Kim and her father would come out of it during the long trek back to Century City, and maybe they could talk then. 

But in true “series reset with each volume” fashion, America’s Sword takes place one month later and we don’t get one iota of info on what went down during that trek home…I mean, did President Langford regain his senses, something Rockson was worried about? Did Rockson and Kim rekindle their relationship? Folks, we still don’t know the answer to either of those questions. For indeed, America’s Sword opens with an overlong sequence in which an earthquake rocks Century City, and Rockson, sleeping in bed (alone for once!), is trapped in the rubble that was once his room, staving off rats and waiting to be rescued. 

We learn that a staggering twenty thousand people were killed in the quake and Century City is partially destroyed. But here’s how half-assed Syvertsen has become with his series: he never even tells us if Langford or his daughter Kim survived the quake! I mean of course they do, but still – he has Rockson desperately wondering if the two are among the victims, but Rockson leaves a few hours after the quake and never learns the answer. He doesn’t even ponder their fate during this latest trek outside of Century City. Hell, Syvertsen’s so half-assed that he also has Rockson concerned over Rona’s fate right after the quake …then Syvertsen makes the casual mention that, the night before leaving the city, Rona comes to Rockson’s bed and “they made love.” So, uh, I guess she did survive the quake! I mean, not only does Syvertsen neglect to even build up on any of his suspense, he casually dispenses info with nary a concern for drama – and Rona doesn’t even have any dialog! She’s literally mentioned in passing. 

So none of the questions concerning Langford or Kim from the previous volume are addressed or resolved. Instead, the big deal this time is that Rock and team must make an emergency journey to nearby Free City Pattonville (the setting of the previous volume, by the way) to get needed supplies to rebuild Century City. Even this plot will ultimately be dropped – spoiler alert, but we don’t even get to see Rockson and team getting the supplies, let alone returning home so Rockson can find out who survived the quake. Instead Syvertsen goes on two separate detours which make up the bulk of the novel. And my friends these detours are exact replicas of the incidents in the previous book! 

As we’ll recall American Overthrow featured this random part where Rockson and team came upon this volcano world filled with lava men, and many pages were devoted to the team learning the customs and etc…and then Rockson realized the entire damn thing had been a dream. Okay. In America’s Sword this scenario is repeated, except instead of a volcano world it’s a jungle world, randomly enough in the middle of the post-nuke US terrain, and Rockson and team marvel at the monkeys and other jungle animals here in the humid climate. They also meet up with the natives, though the difference here is that the natives are friendly…and also there’s no female dalliances for Rockson. I mean WTF? Syvertsen has so neutered his series that even the once-madatory “native gal sex” has been removed…Rockson and team merely eat and drink a lot as honored guests. 

But of course things take a more “thrilling” turn and they have to fight a giant rad-monster thing as part of the ceremony which is required to leave the jungle world. At the very least, this sequence doesn’t turn out to be a dream, but otherwise it is such a carbon copy of the lava world scenario in the previous book that I couldn’t believe it. I mean surely Syvertsen could have come up with something better than a lame ripoff of his own lame work? But he’s not done ripping himself off. Again as we’ll recall, American Overthrow proceeded to feature Rockson saving a city from a despot who was using a gas to control the minds of his subjects. 

Well…guess what happens in this one? Rockson comes across yet another city filled with seemingly-happy people, ones who are a little too enamored with politics, but of course it will turn out that they too are under a sort of mind control. And Rockson will have to save them. So yes, this book is a carbon copy of its predecessor. Anyway, the political activists here are “Republams,” and Syvertsen wears his politics on his sleeves in making fun of these latter-day Republicans…ones who worship Nixon and live for bureaucracy. But otherwise Syvertsen fails to exploit his own goofy concept; he doesn’t have the ability to bring it to life, or perhaps I should say the willingness. I mean he’s already written 16 of these goddamn books and he’s tired, folks. 

So we have weird goofy stuff like this radiated Nixon monument thing that glows in neon flashes and seems to have an animated Nixon statue inside it (Syvertsen is particularly dense in his descriptions here), and also Rockson himself is mind-controlled after being subjected to a Republam recruitment video. But it’s all just so goofy…I mean he and his fellows are brainwashed, but all they’re forced to do is file paperwork and type up paperwork. It’s just so ridiculous and G-rated, and Syvertsen’s so bored with it all that he has everyone saved by the deus ex machina appearance of other members of the Rock Squad. 

As mentioned, by the end of America’s Sword we have no resolution…to anything. Rockson and team continue on their trek for Century City supplies. No doubt next volume they’ll be back and the city will be completely rebuilt. Oh and I forgot to mention. In another elaborately built but unexploited subplot, Syvertsen has about thirty recruits being sent off with Rockson, to help with supply delivery…nothing is made of this and the recruits add nothing to the plot. Hell for that matter, Rockson breaks his ankle in the opening Earthquake section…and Syvertsen doesn’t even mention it again in the novel, with Rockson running and fighting and doing everything just as usual. 

Perhaps the only saving grace of America’s Sword is a cool bit early on where Rockson thinks back to his childhood days; we learn he’s from California, though he doesn’t know it by that name in this post-nuke US. If I recall correctly, this is the first we’ve had an actual flashback to Rockson’s youth, and we learn how his father taught him hunting and other skills. We’re also reminded how the Reds massacred his family, setting young Rockson off on the path of revenge. This latter is not developed in actual flashback narrative; we’re just informed that Rockson memorized the faces of the Reds who raped his mother and sisters and killed them and his father, and then hunted them down – this “Rockson’s revenge” scenario has never actually been fully told, so far as I can remember, but the story alone is more interesting than the majority of the actual novels.

Monday, January 23, 2023

Endworld #2: Thief River Falls Run


Endworld #2: Thief River Falls Run, by David Robbins
No month stated, 1986  Leisure Books

Man it’s been years since I read the first volume of Endworld – it was before my kid was even born, and he’s halfway through kindergarten already! Well anyway, I have many books in this series, as well as sister volume Blade, so it’s about time I get back to it. The only thing I could remember from my reading of the first volume back in 2016 was that the series seemed like a ripoff of Doomsday Warrior, only for the Young Adult market, and also that I didn’t like it very much. 

And this second volume just confirmed my feelings; Thief River Falls Run comes off like an edited-for-TV version of Doomsday Warrior, lacking the gore and purple-prosed sex of that superior series. Otherwise it has the same setup: one hundred years after a nuclear hell, and a cast of colorfully-named asskickers. But whereas Ted “The Ultimate American” Rockson and his pals act like true men’s adventure heroes, Blade and his fellow “warriors” are like innocent children. Part of the schtick of this series is how Blade and his “family” venture out of their safe space in Minnesota and encounter other people, and they’re just so innocent and unaware of everything. 

And whereas Doomsday Warrior had its cake and ate it, too, with Rockson and friends talking about 20th Century trivia (thanks to that “library” of videos and books in Century City, of course), Blade and his friends are confused about such mundane things as a car horn. Yes, friends, there is actually a part in Thief River Falls Run where Blade accidentally leans on the horn of their post-nuke all-terain vehicle, the SEAL, and they all wonder what that strange loud noise they just heard was. Did the vehicle make the noise?? So there is none of the winking-to-the-reader nutjob stuff like in Doomsday Warrior, and that even includes the sex material…Blade and his fellow warriors, you see, only get busy when they are married! WTF!! The whole damn thing is like a post-nuke Little House On The Prairie

This series is also starting to remind me of another Leisure post-nuke pulp series: Roadblaster. Not that it’s that bad, it’s just that, as with Roadblaster, our heroes takeforever to get anywhere. Last volume they wanted to go to Twin Cities, apparently the post-nuke Minneapolis. They didn’t make it. This volume they try to go to Twin Cities again. They don’t make it! Compare to Rockson and team, who would go to space and back in a single volume. 

Another annoyance is that we can’t just have a team of post-nuke shit-kickers. Instead, Robbins gussies up the plot with the unwanted presence of Joshua, a long-haired pacifist who is so naïve he seems to have walked out of a book written by Ned Flanders. And Plato, the leader of “Home,” insists that Joshua go with Blade and the Warriors on the Twin Cities run! You almost wonder if the guy’s an inside agent, setting Blade and the others up. 

Speaking of inside agents, David Robbins sets up several dangling subplots for future volumes. There is the threat of enemy agents within Home who plot to wrest control from Plato, and also the development that Blade’s father, the former leader of Home, was murdered years ago as part of a plot. Blade stumbles upon this info during events in Thief River Falls, mostly due to the presence of mutant “Brutes.” He learns via happenstance that Brutes, which are kept on leashes by Watchers, might have been used to kill his father. 

As for Blade, he’s still sick from infection as this one opens; it’s some unspecified time later. Robbins spends the initial pages introducing two new characters who will presumably factor into later novels: a young woman named Rainbow (who is comatose the entire time) and her precocious, twelve year-old daughter Star. They have escaped from somewhere, “hunters” after them, and Blade’s colleagues Hickock and Rikki-Tikki-Tavi save them. After this nothing more is said about the two, but the way they are introduced, Star asking tons of questions about Home, might indicate they will have bigger roles in future. This part furthers the Doomsday Warrior vibe, with the Warriors fighting a giant mutant spider. 

So anyway, once Blade is better old Plato tells him to try to get to Twin Cities again – but this time he’s taking along Joshua. Robbins uses this as a way to fill up the book’s unwieldy 256 pages: Joshua spends pages and pages defending his pacifism to Hickock. Now it would be one thing if Joshua were constantly being pressured by the Warriors, but instead it's Joshua who is constantly judging them and their “violent” ways. And folks it’s just no fun reading a post-nuke action thriller with a main character who keeps judging everyone for being “too violent.” 

There’s also a bit of a Guardians vibe with our heroes driving around in their customized vehicle. There’s only periodic action, like when a biker takes a shot at them and Hickock blows him away – cue more bitching from Joshua. Fortunately, Joshua goes through some character growth in Thief River Falls Run; a subplot concerns him being forced to kill to save his comrades, and Robbins seems to use Joshua as a stand-in for those who complain about the use of excessive force…you know, like brain-addled puppet politicians who wonder why cops can’t shoot violent perps in the shoulder or something. When it’s kill or be killed, you kill, and this is the lesson Joshua learns. 

And sadly this subplot turns out to be the “meat” of Thief River Falls Run. Because action-wise, again we aren’t talking Doomsday Warrior. The vibe’s actually more like a Western, with Blade et al coming across a saloon in the titular town and engaging with some redneck gunslingers. There is a lot of promise for Twin Cities here; we learn the place is overrun by rats and roving crime gangs. This info is courtesy Big Bertha, a pretty young black woman Blade and team rescue from the gunslingers; they were keeping her as a sex slave. 

One thing we learn is that there are no black people in Home; Blade muses that there was “one black family,” but they died long ago. Hence Big Bertha is the first black girl any of them have seen, and Bertha herself takes a shine to Hickock, whom she calls “White Meat.” As for “Big Bertha,” she informs us she got this name on account of her “boobs.” She also calls Hickock “honky,” and Robbins clearly wants us to understand that these two will become an item…which works out for Hickock, as his chosen mate was killed last volume. Which I admit I’d entirely forgotten about, but Robbins frequently reminds us. 

I also forget the gore quotient of The Fox Run, but it’s only minimal in Thief Falls Run. The Warriors shoot several people, but the violence is mostly PG-13 at best. There’s also a lot of hand-to-hand fighting, with Blade taking on a male-female pair of Brutes. We’ve been told in these first two volumes that “only animals” were mutated by the nukes, with the insistence that there are no human mutants, but the Brutes seem to disprove this. Joshua and Bertha take on one in the climax, and there’s also a cool part where an injured Blade is separated from his friends as hunters, Watchers, and a revenge-minded Brute come after him. 

But humorously it’s back to square one at the end of the novel; Blade decides to call off the “Twin Cities run” yet again, and the team gets in the SEAL and heads back for Home. Maybe next volume they’ll actually get there!

Thursday, September 29, 2022

Traveler #9: The Stalking Time


Traveler #9: The Stalking Time, by D.B. Drumm
June, 1986  Dell Books

Traveler takes on a new vibe with this ninth volume, which was written by Ed Naha (who will serve as “D.B. Drumm” for the rest of the series). Apparently feeling that the sub-Road Warrior theme of the previous books has worn thin, Naha introduces the concept that the titular Traveler is now basically a “diplomat” who serves the newly-formed U.S. government. This means that Traveler comes off a bit differently than he did in previous volumes, and truth be told his determination to represent the government seems a little forced. 

One thing that’s made clear is that some time has passed in the series. We’re often reminded that the nukes fell “twenty years ago,” whereas previous volumes had it as thirteen or even fifteen years ago. Not only that, but Traveler when we meet him this time is headed up into the mideast, his first time here since before the war, having undertaken a “year-long mission” for newly-elected President Jefferson. When Traveler tangles with a group of roadrats (ie the leather-garbed road scavengers “inspired” by the ones in the Mad Max films), we’re told that they are better-equipped than the ones Traveler fought “a half-dozen years ago” in the western portion of the US. In other words, we’re about five to six years out from the earliest books in the series, and the year – though it’s never outright stated – is now 2009. 

In a way The Stalking Time works as a series reset; in previous volumes Traveler always had someone with him, whether it was one of his old army buddies or Jan, the American Indian babe who was the love of Traveler’s life and whatnot. This time Traveler is truly alone, driving along in the Meat Wagon and listening to John Coltrane tapes, and there’s no mention of those earlier comrades. Other that is than a few sequences where Traveler dreams about them. So in a way Traveler lives up to his mantle this time, traveling the post-nuke roadways alone…save that is for the new motive Naha has given him. 

Traveler as a diplomat is one thing, but what’s worse is that in The Stalking Time he’s often getting saved by someone else. Traveler does not come off nearly as badass as he did in the superior volumes by John Shirley. And also, whereas Shirley’s installments were fast-moving slices of horror-tinged post-nuke pulp, Naha’s are often sluggish. Even though the novel’s the same short length as those earlier books, it feels a lot longer – the same sentiment I had about Naha’s previous installment The Road Ghost

I think the reason behind this is that Naha thinks the whole storyline is ridiculous, and one can sense his sneering through the pages. I never got that impression from Shirley’s books; he was clearly having fun with them. Naha on the other hand goes for a pseudo-“spoofy” vibe that’s almost as egregious as in The Destroyer. What I mean to say is, neither the author nor the characters seem to take anything seriously, and Naha is constantly making snarky asides via the narrative or the dialog. Now to be sure it’s not as bad as in The Destroyer, I mean things still matter here and not everything’s a joke, but the vibe is close. Actually if I want to stay within the post-nuke realm, The Last Ranger would be a good comparison, with the same dark humor. Only whereas The Last Ranger has a nihilistic streak, Naha’s Traveler has a satirical streak. 

So throughout Naha constantly undercuts the tension he himself creates in the plot with sarcastic rejoinders or snarky comments ridiculing the situation. It just gives the sense that it’s all a joke, and folks if you know anything about me you know I don’t like shit like this in my men’s adventure. I want it straight no chaser. Naha’s sarcastic fun-poking was fine in his Robocop novelization, as it matched the vibe of the movie itself, but here it gets in the way of the post-apocalyptic fun. At any rate, his books so far have suffered greatly in comparison to John Shirley’s; Shirley too might have thought the series was ridiculous, but the reader never got that impression. 

But seriously, you know you’re in trouble when Naha spends more time on the trashy décor of a hotel Traveler stays in than on the action scenes. This sequence too is evidence of the new starical vibe of the series; at one point Traveler ingratiates himself into the orbit of a post-nuke warlord who calls himself Dragon, and who has taken over a hotel for his headquarters – one that is done up with themes for various rooms, and Traveler gets one with an “Arabian Nights” theme. And rather than a hockeymasked Lord Humongous type, Dragon is a dapper black man who wears “Day-Glo pimp clothing” and patterns himself after a Blaxploitation character. 

However that’s not to say we don’t have any of the customary Traveler horror vibe. There’s a cool part where Traveler almost gets eaten by blind scar-faced ghouls who live underground, only to be saved by a hulking bounty hunter called Angel Eyes. The uncredited artist who did the cover must’ve read the book or gotten some seriously good art direction, as the depiction of Angel Eyes on the cover – iron helmet, flamethrower-esque attachment on his back – is exactly as he’s described in the book. (Though I’m not sure why the artist had to put so much focus on the guy’s ass!) But this is also part of the problem. Angel Eyes saves Traveler, and Traveler is saved a few other times in the book. It just seems at odds with previous installments. That said, Traveler does save Angel Eyes immediately after. 

Traveler also seems at odds with his past self in another way – he makes dumb choices. As part of that belabored “ingratiating into Dragon’s forces” scenario, Traveler finds himself sent off with two other stooges to create a diversion. Traveler ties these guys up and leaves them to an overly-complicated fate, driving off. It’s almost as if Naha is telegraphing what will happen next, and sure enough those two eventually show up to blow Traveler’s cover story. The Traveler of the Shirley installments would’ve seen this eventuality and would’ve just blown their brains out to save himself the trouble. 

One of the highlights of the novel is the town Traveler comes upon. It seems to have come out of a Norman Rockwell painting, mostly because it was designed before the war as a tourist attraction. There’s also an underground vault of goods that the mayor, a hotstuff blonde who was in kindergarten when the nukes fell, is desperate to keep secret. This underground vault is what Dragon wants, and what Traveler must stop him from getting. But it’s almost as if Naha changes his mind about this, as in the climax it’s the town’s kids who turn out to be Dragon’s target – which leads to a nice action hero-worthy bit of Traveler racing to save a schoolbus full of abducted kids. 

The focus on youth is another weird new element to the series. Quite frequently in The Stalking Time we’re reminded that WWIII was 20 years ago, and the young roadrats and such scurrying around were, like Mayor Emma Fowler, just kids when the bombs dropped. Yet they’ve grown up in a world of hate, which is all they know – and thus Traveler sometimes has a hard time shooting these roadrat punks who are trying to kill him. It’s an understandable sentiment on Traveler’s part, yet at the same time it’s nothing that has ever occurred to him in the previous volumes. One really gets the impression here that he’s an old man wandering around a world of angry youth. 

Speaking of which there’s a reveal on Angel Eyes that’s crazy but also sort of telegraphed, and also way out of the realm of previous installments. It does however have an unexpected emotional impact, given the reason behind Angel Eyes’s determination to kill Dragon. The problem though is that Traveler sort of sits on the sidelines in the climax, that is after he’s saved that schoolbus of kids. After this Traveler sits around – or perhaps that should be flies around – as Angel Eyes gets his revenge on Dragon. But it’s just another indication of the sort of weakened state Traveler has in this volume. 

Maybe it’s just something we’ll have to get used to, as Naha wrote the rest of the series. And given that he wrote the first volume, perhaps Naha’s Traveler can be considered the Traveler. Who knows; as usual I’m probably putting too much thought into it. All told, The Stalking Time was an entertaining installment of Traveler, maybe less violent than previous ones – and certainly less sexually-explicit, with Traveler’s one score occuring off-page at the very end of the novel – but entertaining nonetheless. I mean when it comes to post-nuke pulp, I’d certainly rather read this than Roadblaster.

Monday, June 27, 2022

Doomsday Warrior #16: American Overthrow


Doomsday Warrior #16: American Overthrow, by Ryder Stacy
August, 1989  Zebra Books

Well folks with this sixteenth volume of Doomsday Warrior author Ryder Syvertsen clearly doesn’t give a shit. I mean I haven’t seen such authorial disinterest since the latter days of The Penetrator. Syvertsen is going through the motions, likely breaking out in a flop sweat as he tries to pad out the pages of this overlong 223-page novel…the sixteenth damn installment of a series he’s been writing since 1984, but for some reason people keep buying it so he has to keep writing it! You can almost feel him longing for the sales to drop so he can just stop already. 

To wit, American Overthrow is by-the-numbers Doomsday Warrior, offering nothing new to the series and drifting along on its own tedium…so lame that there’s even a “Bobby in the shower” dream sequence fakeout that only serves to further pad out the pages. The colorful gore and unbridled sleaze of the earlier volumes is wholly absent; indeed, the dream sequence has what amounts to the only sex scene in the novel, but Syvertsen glosses over any of the explicit detail. The plot is a rehash of previous novels, further evidencing the author’s boredom. Even the promised setup – that this time Ted “Doomsday Warrior” Rockson will go up against fellow Americans – is given short shrift, Syvertsen focused more on trivial details like endless treks through the nuke-ravaged wastes and battles with nuke-creatures. 

Humorously, there’s no pickup from the previous volume, not even a cursory mention of its events nor of how long ago they occurred. As we’ll recall, that one ended with Rockson presumably dead(!) in the climactic battle in Egypt, once again fighting the sadistic Colonel Killov, but American Overthrow opens with Rockson in the woods near Century City in his homebase of Colorado, on a hunting trip with his best bud Detroit. No mention is made of the previous volume’s apocalyptic final battle, how Rockson survived, or even how he and his squad made it back to America. The entire novel simply isn’t mentioned, and American Overthrow is one of the first volumes of Doomsday Warrior in a long time that doesn’t require you to have read the previous installment to know what’s going on. 

The only installment that is referred to is #3: The Last American, but only vaguely; we learn here that it was “three years ago” that Rockson attended the signging of the Constitution of the Re-United States, and that occurred in the third volume (I think…it’s been over ten years since I read it). I don’t believe this “three years” dating jibes with the other dates Syvertsen has arbitrarily strewn throughout recent volumes, and it’s just more indication that the author isn’t very invested in his saga. The important thing is that American Overthrow sees the return of President Langford’s daughter Kim, that blonde goddess who was once proclaimed to be Rockson’s “true love” before being abruptly removed from the series without any explanation; the last time we saw her was in #9: America’s Zero Hour. Actually the last time we saw her was in #10: American Nightmare, but that one took place in an alternate reality, so it wasn’t the “real” Kim. 

So anyway we have an overlong opening in which Rockson and Detroit are out hunting and get attacked by this mutated lizard creature. After this a messenger from Century City finds them and requests their presence back in CC asap – word has come in that a fellow liberated city, Pattonville, has been overtaken by a military coup. Three hundred miles away, Pattonville is the chosen city of President Langford and Kim, and Rockson feels pangs of fear. We’re informed that Rockson and Kim “had been lovers once,” which is a WTF? moment if ever there was one, as in those earlier novels Syvertsen made it clear that Kim was Rockson’s soulmate. However, any hopes for a quick-moving tale of Rockson gaining revenge are quickly dashed, as Syvertsen proceeds to waste even more time with yet another overlong sequence of Rockson taking on the mutated flora and fauna of this radblasted future. In fact he won’t even get to Pattonville until toward the end of the novel, and his reunion with Kim lasts all but a page. 

But then the women have been gradually removed from the Doomsday Warrior narrative. Rona, Rock’s other true love, the redheaded beauty who was once “one of the boys” and went out on missions with the Rock Team, is now relegated to “woman at home” status, literally only there to have sex with Rockson on the rare occasions he’s in Century City. Off-page sex at that! Whereas earlier volumes went all-out with the crazed purple prose, these days Syvertsen merely writes, “They made love for half an hour,” and that’s literally all we get for the Rockson-Rona festivities. I mean he’s bored as hell, folks. He also seems to want to write something other than post-nuke pulp, as now Dr. Schecter, the resident genius of Century City, has become the Q to Rockson’s James Bond, providing him with a trio of gadgets for the mission (namely, a breathing device that fits in the nostrils, a foldable heat-shield suit, and most Bond-like of all a mini-gun shaped like a medallion). 

His usual team whittled down to just Archer, Detroit, and Chen, Rockson heads back out into the wild for the long trek to Pattonville…cue even more of those series-mandatory “mutated flora, fauna, and weather” sequences, this time with acid rain and other horrors. Syvertsen pads more pages with cutovers to Pattonville, where we are taken into the plight of one-off characters who are either gassed or killed by the new ruler: General Hanover. The villain of the piece, Hanover is a self-styled modern Hitler, even outfitting his men in Nazi-like uniforms. The fact that Rockson for once will be facing off against fellow Americans really troubles our hero’s heart; indeed, Rockson is filled “with a Kierkegaardian brooding” over the entire mission(!). But despite all the setup Syvertsen fumbles the ball, as the Americans Rockson eventually goes up against have been brainwashed into zombies (or “gasheads”) by Hanover’s gases. 

The most egregious part of American Overthrow is a long sequence in which Rockson and team, wearing those heat-shield uniforms, fall into a volcano…and find themselves in the domain of “lava men.” Doomsday Warrior is known for trampling over any sense of realism, but this sequence in particular is goofier than a 1980s Saturday morning cartoon. Led by King Sulphur, this “fucking colony of volcanic beings” puts Rockson and team through various trials and tribulations. Rockson somehow finds the opportunity to conjugate with the beautiful Shi’sa, an “angelic living sculpture” who makes her interest in flesh-man Rockson obvious. This part is super-weird; it’s not explicit, more just surreal, as Rockson marvels over the warmth and underlying softness of this lava woman’s hot bod. 

But get this…after Shi’sa helps them escape, Rockson’s riding on his mutant horse “hybrid” with the rest of the Rock Team, passing by the volcanic fields…and Detroit tells Rockson that he, Rockson, has been asleep all this time! And none of the team “remembers” the events with the lava men. In other words the entire sequence was just a damn dream! And Rockson basically just shrugs it off and gets on with the trek to Pattonville. I mean good grief! Just as ultra-lame as you can get. But then Syvertsen only livens up when he comes up with something that captures his goofy interest…like later in the book when we’re told that President Langford, who has been drugged regularly by General Hanover, looks “as drugged out as John Carradine in Atomic Vampire.” I mean we’re told this in the narrative, not in dialog, but again it’s another instance of obscure 20th century stuff being referred to in a novel that’s supposedly set in a post-nuke 2090s. 

Even General Hanover fails to meet expectations. He’s set up as suitably supervillain, but instead he comes off like a tool; in Kim’s few scenes in the novel, we see she’s kept locked up in a plush room, and Hanover will come in a few times a week to have dinner with her. The bastard!! But really he’s plotting to make Kim marry him, or somesuch…I mean the series is totally G-rated now, you see, so Kim is more bored than anything. In fact she stabs Hanover with a fork and throws food at him and whatnot, so she’s feisty as hell, but ultimately she too is drugged and kept on the periperhy of the narrative. She fights Hanover more than Rockson himself does; when our hero arrives in Pattonville and tries to disguise himself as a zombiefied “gashead,” he’s quickly outed and put through a sort of gladiatorial contest. His last challenge: Death-breath, a monstrous mutant even bigger than Archer. But even all this stuff is pretty bloodless and boring. 

The finale is goofy too, with Syvertsen so bored that he creates a fake Schecter here in Pattonville: Dr. Mason, yet another scientist able to whip up inventions, in this case a gas that counteracts Hanover’s gas. The finale sees zombie Pattonville residents stumbling around with weapons and taking on Hanover’s loyal soldiers. And of course Rockson’s medallion gun comes in at the last moment. At least this time we get a resolution, unlike the previous volume: Rockson when last we see him is about to embark on the 300-mile trip back to Century City with President Langford, Kim (both of them recuperating from the drugging), and Archer. Rockson’s ordered Chen and Detroit to stay in Pattonville to help with rebuilding; given that there are only a few volumes of the series left, I wonder if we will see either of them again. Who am I fooling…next volume they’ll both probably be back in Century City with nary an explanation. 

About the only interest I got out of American Overthrow was Syvertsen’s unwitting prescience. I mean the main plot has to do with an illegal coup that has taken away the rightful power of the American people. “We’re here to carry out the return to law under the US Constitution. There can be no higher goal than that,” Rockson informs his squad in the climax. Rockson, where are you when we need you now? And as if that wasn’t “ripped from today’s headlines” enough for you, check out this paragraph describing old President Langford, at the very end of the novel: 


Man, that last sentence says it all…it sure does, Rockson. It sure does.