Monday, April 20, 2015

SOBs #2: The Plains Of Fire


SOBs #2: The Plains Of Fire, by Jack Hild
February, 1984  Gold Eagle Books

The second volume of SOBs is much better than the first, and I’d recommend anyone new to this series to just skip Jack Canon’s first installment and start with this one, which was written by Alan Philipson, who would go on to become one of the regular authors on the series.

Philipson wisely avoids all of the scene-setting and character-building which stalled Canon’s first volume, doling out brief blocks of background for each of the Soldiers of Barrabas as he introduces them in action. He also gets to the good stuff much more quickly, and does a great job in killing off the despicable villains in memorable ways. Compare to Canon, who took forever to even get to any action, and then quickly dispensed with the villains in almost perfunctory fashion.

And the villains are quite despicable this time; they’re a legion of Islamic Revolutionary Guards, aka Pasdars, who when we meet them are in the process of torturing one of their own. The place is Iran, the man being tortured is a fervent Muslim who idolizes the Ayatollah, and the sadist in charge of the man’s torture is Razod, who has the scientist stripped down and then hammers the man’s balls to a chair, and then sets him on fire!! Why is Razod doing this? Because the scientists have discovered that the nukes they’ve been working feverishly on are going to be used in terrorist actions, and they’ve complained about it.

Well, what else can the US government do but call in the Soldiers of Barrabas? I mean, what with all those goddam liberals it isn’t like they can send in Delta Force or the Marines or whatever. So once again our mysterious Senator tasks Walker Jessup with the mission: for the SOBs to covertly venture into Iran, kill everyone, disarm the nuclear bombs, and make the whole thing look like a nuclear accident. Jessup, who has a much more contentious relationship with the Senator in Philipson’s hands, only agrees to the mission if the pay will be $200k per person, plus expenses.

The team this time is the same as the last, an unwieldy group of ten mercenaries, save for Lopez, who we are informed is still “recuperating” from the injuries he sustained last time. Barrabas is back in Amsterdam, hanging out in the heavy metal-playing nightclub of his friend/gun-runner Gunther Dykstra, the brother of Erika, Barrabas’s current woman. After meeting with Jessup Barrabas calls together his SOBs, and thankfully Philipson doesn’t make this “the” novel; within just a few pages he has them all in “The Bunker,” aka the rolling compound owned by Dr. Lee Sutton in Malaga.

Lee by the way has gotten tougher, something Philipson makes a point of calling out in the narrative. Since the previous mission, some time ago (months?), she’s continued to train, to the point where she’s in better shape than most of the other mercs, who have spent their time off laying around, getting drunk and getting laid. Philipson juggles the big group of characters around, but you can already tell in this earliest volume that there are certain favorites, besides Barrabas; namely, Lee, Billy Two, Nanos the Greek, and Liam O’Toole. The others sort of fade into the woodwork.

Barrabas lays down the dangers of the job, but the team’s all for it. They head to Bahrain in various groups, with Gunther using his gunrunning contacts to do the brunt of the cover story, using a shipment of helicopter gear shift boxes as a means to convey the team in-country. Philipson brings the local world to life with the team negotiating with the shady owner of a dhow, one which is powered by four big engines and will get them across into Iran, but they’re certain the dude is planning to kill them.

This is an almost First Blood Part II-esque scene, with the three smallest members of the team going down into the dhow to search for any hidden attackers. Lee of course is the first to find them, and when the dudes come out of the shadows and grab her, she proves herself again to be a completely different character than she was in the first book, killing one of them with a blow to the heart and then firing a gun point-blank into the crotch of the other! By the way, one thing to mention is that, while there’s plentiful violence, Philipson does not exploit the gore; usually, when someone is shot, we just read that he falls down.

The Pasdars are on a remote outpost that’s surrounded by electronic surveillance. The scientists, unbeknownst to the SOBs, are being driven to create four nukes; Razod, the sadist in charge of the place, makes off with one of them with the express purpose of bombing Haifa. Barrabas and team are not aware of this as they make their late-night attack on the base, which again is carried out with a great sense of tension and suspense and payoff – again, all of it so, so much better than the stuff we read back in the first volume.

Philipson displays what to me appears to be a bit of a military understanding, with the SOBs using knowledge and training to get past the surveillance devices, and then going for quiet kills or sniper shots to take out the various guards. But of course the way these things go, soon enough the cat’s out of the bag and it’s rock and roll on full auto. None of the SOBs really stand out in this sequence, even Billy Two, who eventually would become the most interesting character in the series (thanks to Philipson), starting with #6: Red Hammer Down.

And another big difference from Canon’s approach to the series is Philipson’s willingness to dispense with the SOBs themselves. While none of them were killed in the previous book, here three of them die in battle, and avoid this paragraph if you don’t want it to be spoiled. But Al Chen is the first to go, gunned down in a firefight; redneck Wiley Boone is next (and his passing barely registers on your consciousness), and finally Vince Biondi is the last to go. His death in particular is very well done, with race driver Biondi stealing away with the truck that holds the fourth nuke and barrelling toward the base for a fiery climax.

An even better send-off is delivered to Razod, who has hitched a ride on the back of that bomb-carrying truck, and hops off it a few miles outside of the base, realizing a madman’s behind the wheel – not understanding English, Razod has no idea that the SOBs have infiltrated his base, killed everyone, set the three nukes to blow, and have now set this last one to blow along with them in just a few minutes. But he doesn’t die in the catastrophic nuclear blast, instead rendered into what is for the most part is a mutant out of a post-nuke pulp, with his skin hanging from him like curtains and his tongue and face destroyed.

While it wasn’t the greatest men’s adventure novel I’ve ever read, The Plains Of Fire was still an entertaining, enjoyable read, and it makes me glad I picked up the entire SOBs series for a pittance the other year; I’ll look forward to reading more volumes.

Thursday, April 16, 2015

The Wereling


The Wereling, by David Robbins
No month stated, 1983  Leisure Books

David Robbins has published many, many novels over the past few decades; he’s probably most known for the ‘80s post-nuke pulp series Endworld, as well as its spin-off series Blade. Yet despite the guy’s prolificity in a genre I love, I’d never read any of his books, and rather than his men's adventure work I decided to start with one of his horror novels.

Beginning in the very early ‘80s Robbins published a handful of horror novels through Leisure Books, on up until the horror paperback crash of the mid-‘90s. It would appear that The Wereling is the most fondly remembered of these novels, and even received a “revised, updated, and expanded” reprinting through Mad Hornet Publications in 2013. But I’ve always been more a fan of the original issue, and so sought out the Leisure Books edition, which true to the label’s spirit has an embossed cover and lurid front and back cover copy.

I can see why The Wereling has its fans, as it’s pretty good. An old-fashioned creature feature with a new twist, it’s about a werewolf that tears apart Ocean City, New Jersey one summer season. But this isn’t your typical “changes with the full moon” sort of werewolf. Instead, muscle-bound, 19-year-old Harvey Painter, a mentally disturbed monster movie freak who lives with his domineering drunk of a mother, finds that when he wears an expensive werewolf costume he becomes possessed by the Spirit of the Wolf, which has chosen Harvey to be its current vessel on earth.

Harvey is a true ‘80s kid and parts of the book hit home for me, as I too grew up in that decade with a single mom and spent a lot of time alone reading or watching movies. Unlike Harvey though I wasn’t as much into the horror genre (and besides, I was long out of the house by the time I was 19), and I wasn’t as borderline psychotic as our villain is. Actually, Harvey Painter reminds me a lot of this creepy guy I was friends with in high school, a socially-awkward guy who was obsessed with gory horror movies. Like Harvey, my friend even had a dad who was a cop, though Harvey’s dad we learn was gunned down by a thug when Harvey was seven years old.

Now Harvey spends most of his days in his bedroom, which is adorned with monster movie posters, one wall dedicated to werewolves in particular. He reads monster mags, lifts weights, and when he doesn’t have to go to work at the local deli he likes to spend his evenings in the Dunes, a remote wastelands off of the beach where Harvey can be alone and think his morbid thoughts. But Harvey’s getting more and more pissed that others trespass on “his” domain; especially now that tourist season is in, more and more people are crashing his private fun at the Dunes.

Then in one of his beloved monster mags Harvey sees an ad for a “realistic” werewolf mask…even made with real wolf fur! At seventy-five bucks it’s pretty pricey for Harvey, who’s only managed so far to save less than two hundred bucks for his planned move out of the house. But when he sees that the mask also comes with werewolf hands and feet, both with realistic claws and also made with real wolf fur, he orders the costume. The novel opens with a prologue in which we see a werewolf tearing up the Eastern Europe countryside in the 1800s; from here we learn of the Spirit of the Wolf, and so we’re not surprised that Harvey is going to become its next vessel.

Meanwhile Robbins introduces us to a large group of characters. These will be the heroes of the tale, and Robbins is a good horror author in that he doesn’t show any favoritism when it comes to the killing. The Ocean City police force contributes the largest group of characters, in particular attractive, young Leta Ballinger, who is dating Earl Patterson, a sergeant on the force; Leta patrols with Charlene Winslow, the other hot cop on the force. Then there’s Lt. Russ Gilson, who twelve years before was the partner of Harvey Painter’s father (and who blames himself for not being there to save his friend – something for which Harvey blames “Uncle Russ,” as well).

There are other police characters to keep up with, like Chief Watson and Dr. Myrna Kraft (a consulting psychiatrist who coins the term “wereling,” which is a combo of “werewolf” and “changeling”), but outside of that world we have more characters besides. Like Allan Baxter, a 20-year-old tracker who reluctantly comes to Ocean City for one last vacation with his parents. There’s also Warren Mckeen, a radio reporter from Atlantic City who is looking for a ticket to the big leagues, and thinks he’s found it with this “Ocean City werewolf” story.

Robbins takes all these characters and more and lets them simmer – luckily, despite being 336 pages the novel doesn’t come off as very padded. And things get pretty fun when Harvey receives his werewolf costume. Having bought it just because he’s obsessed with werewolves, Harvey only later realizes that he can use the costume in a war of terror against the “trespassers” at the Dunes; he figures if he scares enough people, word will get out that a werewolf haunts the area, and people will stay away.

Given that Harvey’s costume only covers his head, hands, and feet, I guess we’re to take it that his werewolf look is more along the lines of Lon Chaney, Jr. in The Wolf Man or Michael Landon in I Was A Teenage Werewolf (or even Benicio Del Toro in the 2010 Wolfman). In other words, the werewolf of this novel isn’t the hulking, bear-like creature of An American Werewolf In London or the long-forgotten ‘80s Fox TV series Werewolf. Even when the Spirit of the Wolf fully takes over Harvey, later in the novel, he’s still just a human in a werewolf mask, gloves, and shoes.

Harvey’s initial acts are goofy fun, scaring random tourists and locals who pass by the Dunes at night. People call the cops to report the incidents, most of them flat-out calling the attacking thing a werewolf, but of course the cops don’t believe it. Gradually Harvey’s pranks become more violent, culminating in an attack on a gang of bikers who come by the Dunes after the brother of one of them was ambushed by Harvey one night. The werewolf hurls bikers left and right and ends up nearly killing one of them. Now the police are actively on the case.

A problem here is that Harvey becomes less of a presence in the novel. Robbins occasionally brings him back into the fold, but his possession by the Spirit of the Wolf could’ve been played out more, or at least more elaborated on. But it would’ve been nice to see him the morning after more of these attacks; as it is, Robbins keeps our glimpses into Harvey’s psyche rather limited, with him waking up in his room with no recollection of coming home, indeed remembering nothing after putting on his werewolf costume. We also learn that he suffers from bad headaches, and when brushing his teeth in the morning he spits out stuff that looks like meat.

When the cops get on the case, their solution is total ‘80s horror movie: have the two hot cops on the force waltz around the Dunes all night as bait! The novel kicks in gear at this point, with the werewolf ripping up Leta and killing Charlene. I should note here that The Wereling isn’t particularly gory; though Harvey the werewolf tears up several people, Robbins doesn’t provide too much graphic detail. It is though a disturbing touch when later the coroner reports that Charlene’s throat was torn open by human teeth!

While Leta recuperates, Robbins shifts focus over to reporter Warren Mckeen, who witnessed the attack on the bikers and broke the story, much to the chagrin of the Ocean City police force. Trying to get a job with a prestigous news corporation, Warren makes the werewolf story his life, and with a total lack of self-concern starts wandering around the Dunes each night. But the heat’s picked up and the werwolf isn’t coming around. But when Warren checks out similarly-remote areas of Ocean City, he runs into the creature, only saved when he falls into the water. For some reason the werewolf appears to fear the little lake, and runs away, and Robbins never explains why.

Warren strikes gold when he finds an abandoned checkbook in the field; he assumes it can only be the werewolf’s(!), and thus he is the first person to discover that the werewolf is Harvey Painter. Rather than report him to the police, Warren eventually decides he’d like to interview Harvey – and he gets his interview, though not in the way he’d expect. In one of those stupid moves only possible in the horror genre, Warren stakes out Harvey’s home and then enters it when he sees the muscle-bound recluse leave one afternoon.

I should mention that meanwhile we’ve finally gotten a few more glimpses into Harvey’s mind, in particular his revelation that something else is controlling him. However, he seems a little too blasé about it. Robbins does provide some melodramatic spark with the payoff of Harvey’s strange relationship with his mother; after taking enough of her shit, Harvey taunts her with her impending death, puts on the werewolf costume, and rips her throat out (another hallmark from the Chaney, Jr. Wolf Man, who too always went for the throats of his victims).

While the novel is a little busy with characters, as mentioned Robbins shows no reluctance in offing many of them. Some of these kills are fun in the hoped-for B movie sort of way, like Warren’s “interview with the werewolf,” in which our stubborn reporter gets more of a scoop than he bargained for. As the novel goes on, the werewolf sightings become more frequent, culminating in a July 4th assault on the Boardwalk, in which the monster runs amok, tearing apart tourists – another fun, B movie sort of scene, featuring a tourist family with a nervous wife and an overbearing husband who insists “the werewolf will never attack us!

In fact this stuff makes you wish the werewolf was more active earlier in the novel. But it isn’t until well past page 200 that Robbins really amps up the horror action. My favorite bit is the old widower who goes out on the now-deserted beach with his metal detector, and of course takes a nap! When the werewolf comes after him as expected, Robbins really plays it out, with the creature right at the old dude’s heels, and the guy refusing to turn around and look at it as he keeps hurrying away from the beach. But many of these kills aren’t just of random characters; another memorable incident has “Uncle Russ” visiting the Painter home to see what’s going on. Like Warren the reporter, he finds a lot more than he bargained for.

Things pick up more and more as the novel progresses, but Robbins is a little guilty of some repetition, with frequent scenes of Chief Watson sitting around with Officer Grout and discussing stuff we’ve already seen happen. Also, Leta sort of drops out of the narrative, only to be reinserted at the very end to play the hero (in what is admittedly a very fitting payoff). Same goes for young Allan Baxter, who shows up in the final twenty pages or so, offers Chief Watson his tracking abilities, and uses them to hunt the werewolf after his latest kill.

This is a fine finale, with the cops following along after Allan, who grows increasingly desperate as a storm closes in; once it hits, the fresh werewolf tracks will be lost. An unfortunate thing about The Wereling is that it doesn’t deliver on some of the payoffs you want to see, and also that Robbins decides to cut away from the action at times and stop right when things are picking up, only for the reader to find out what happened via dialog between characters after the event. The same sort of holds true for the finale, with Allan following the tracks to the Painter home, and Leta and a fellow cop rushing into the blackened house.

But Robbins doesn’t tell us what happens in there, leaving the perspective with Allan, who of course finds himself alone against the werewolf. As for Harvey himself, he’s long gone from the narrative at this point, and I guess we’re to assume that the Spirit of the Wolf is in full control of his body. Again, it would’ve been nice to have seen more of his inner turmoil, if there even was any – in other words, this is no An American Werewolf In London, with Harvey worrying over what he has become.

Despite not paying off several of the promised plot points, Robbins does deliver an effective finale, with the werewolf attacking Allan and Leta in the darkened Painter home, all while a storm rages outside. I’ve forgotten to mention that Harvey, early in the book, came across his dad’s old bulletproof vest, which somehow ends up protecting him from .357 Magnum rounds; however, the vest does not extend to his head, something which is displayed in a very satisfactory sendoff for the werewolf.

Robbins has a definite understanding of horror pulp writing; his prose is fast-moving and economical, and he doesn’t try to wow us with fancy word-spinning. If I had any criticism it would mainly be of his use of dialog modifiers; characters are always “quipping” or “stating,” with the much-better (and less distracting) “said” rarely being used. Also, per the genre norm, Robbins tends to POV-hop, with perspectives changing between paragraphs without any white space to notify the reader of this perspective switch, but what the hell; I’m getting used to it. And as mentioned, he could’ve exploited the sex and violence a little more; as it is, there’s none of the former and not enough of the latter.

But overall, I found The Wereling to be very entertaining; I blew through it in no time. It’s a very readable tale, and Robbins keeps you wanting to know what happens next. I’ve picked up more of his horror novels, and will likely make Spectre the next one I read; that one in particular is supposed to be quite gory, which is always a good thing so far as ‘80s horror paperbacks are concerned.

Monday, April 13, 2015

Ninja Master #5: Black Magician


Ninja Master #5: Black Magician, by Wade Barker
September, 1982  Warner Books

Given that the Ninja Master series was an obvious cash-in on the success of Eric Van Lustbader’s The Ninja, I guess it was only a matter of time before an installment of the series ripped off the novel itself. If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like if someone took Lustbader’s book and trimmed off all the fat, then you should check out Black Magician.

Here’s my understanding of the Ninja Master series: Stephen Smoke wrote the first volume, and then turned in a manuscript for the second volume. But Warner Books rejected Smoke’s manuscript and hired Ric Meyers to write a new novel based on the already-created cover art; they then hired Meyers to do the same thing for the fourth volume. Meanwhile, Warner hired some other author to write the third volume, and this person went on to trade off with Meyers, with Meyers writing the even volumes and the mystery author writing the odd volumes.

I’d love to know who this guy (or girl?) was, because he’s pretty good. My assumption going in was that Meyers’s novels would be superior, but that might not be the case; the quality of these two authors is about the same. They both know how to write good pulp, they both deliver the martial arts violence, and they both enjoy doling out the sleaze; so far, neither is more outrageous than the other, though Meyers appears to offer a bit more gore. However, this author features more lurid and kinky sex, usually involving Japanese women being debased and tortured.

There are other differences between the two authors. Meyers appears more knowledgeable about ninjutsu, and has hero Brett Wallace using a host of exotic ninja weaponry with which he skewers his opponents in bloody fashion. Meyers’s version of Brett also often dons a ninja costume in his battles. The mystery author’s version of Brett Wallace is more of a martial arts superman, capable of inhuman feats, and he not only doesn’t wear a costume but seldom if ever uses any ninja weapons. In fact, he’s more fond of turning everyday objects into weapons, like shoelaces.

Also, this author delivers a more human Brett – he occasionally drinks, he jokes, and he swears a lot. Compare to Meyers’s almost robotic force of vengeance, who sometimes comes off like Richard Camellion on a bad day. Finally, the mystery author is much more concerned with staying true to Stephen Smoke’s first volume, often referring back to the events that happened therein; he also employs Kung Fu inspired sequences where Brett will flash back his days of ninja training and the bursts of wisdom he received from Master Yamaguchi. Meyers never does this; his version of Brett Wallace has advanced far beyond the need to reflect on past training.

Anyway, Black Magician. Take the plot of Lustbader’s The Ninja, add a little more sex and violence, change the names of the characters, make it a lot shorter and a whole lot more entertaining, and you’ll come up with this book. An evil ninja is afoot in San Francisco, killing off older men who were part of a commission that was tasked with rebuilding Japan after World War II. Meanwhile, this same evil ninja is getting his rocks off murdering Japanese hookers in SanFran massage parlors.

The commission members are dying of natural causes, but it’s obvious they are being murdered in some unknown way. Also, they each receive death threats shortly before meeting their end, and the threats are accompanied with strange Japanese characters. The cops hire a Japanese professor at Berkley who eventually determines that these characters are obscure ninja symbols. Gradually Lt. Bill Wright, who has been put in charge of the investigation, is put in touch with Brett Wallace, who decides to help the cops bring in the evil ninja – just like Nicholas Linnear agreed to help Lt. Croaker in Lustbader’s book.

The sleaze is afoot as “The Oriental” (ie, how our author constantly refers to our mysterious evil ninja, who eventually is revealed to be named Seikiei Kojiro) visits various massage parlors, always demanding a Japanese whore. He turns down the constant offers of an “Oriental” girl (the word “Oriental” is used about a zillion times in the novel, by the way); he wants a Japanese girl only. And when he gets her, he will offer her money and then debase her, demanding she repeat the words “I am a Japanese woman without honor” as he sodomizes her – killing her once he’s finished!

Meanwhile Brett himself is getting some good Japanese lovin’ via Rhea, his “no commitments” bedmate who owns the Rhea Dawn restaurant. Unlike in Meyers’s installments, this version of Rhea isn’t as involved in Brett’s war upon crime and injustice; nor this time is Jeff Archer, Brett’s younger pupil who is slowly learning the ways of the ninja. Once Brett realizes that an evil ninja is in town, he tells Jeff to stay away from him – for, Star Wars style, Brett fears that the evil ninja will tap into some sort of force and realize that there’s another ninja here in San Francisco…!

This author’s previous installment, Borderland Of Hell, clouded the sleaze element and slowed the pace by having Brett go into investigator mode through most of the novel, going around and asking one-off characters various questions. Luckily there’s none of that this time, and the author keeps things moving throughout, with more members of the seven-man commission dying “naturally” just hours after receiving their death threats. They’re all in town, by the way, as they’ve been invited by David Watanabe, a 60 year-old billionaire who became rich decades ago due to his bribing of the commission.

Obviously, these murders are payback; the commission was notorious for taking funds away from established, already-wealthy people and corporations in Japan and turning the money over to upstarts like David Watanabe. So, just as in The Ninja, these modern murders are rightings of wrongs made back in the years immediately after WWII. And just as in Lustbader’s novel, Brett gradually realizes that the evil ninja is a legendary figure he’s run into before, a man who killed off a few members of Brett’s ninja clan back in the day, including Brett’s best friend there.

Brett and Lt. Wright develop a relationship clearly “inspired” by that between Linnear and Croaker, with Brett even working for the cops only if they promise never to look into his background or attempt to find out what his real name is (apparently he’s afraid of the ramifications if they discover that he’s the guy who killed all those bikers back in the first volume, or something). Not until the cops deduce that the recent hooker murders might be by the same guy killing the commission members does Brett put two and two together and realize that the killer is none other than Seikiei, a legendary ninja who is more myth than man.

In fact Brett isn’t much help to the cops, and can only stand by as another commission member dies; meanwhile, Seikiei shows up in David Watanabe’s penthouse and sodomizes the dude’s Japanese mistress, forcing him to watch! Later Watanabe too is killed, with Brett not there in time to save him – however, in the meantime, Brett has saved the final two members of the commission, using an acupressure massage to ward off what he’s discovered is behind the murders: the legendary “touch of death.”

The story climaxes with a Brett/Seikiei match on top of Mount Tamplais at midnight; the Black Magician briefly kidnapped Rhea (she assures Brett that she wasn’t raped) to have her issue the summons to Brett. Instead of going straight into an action scene, the author instead doles out blocks of exposition, as Seikiei reveals that he was the son of David Watanabe’s partner, a man Watanabe murdered many years ago while he was bribing the commission. The two ninjas just stand there talking until they finally get to the fighting.

Again, this is nothing like the Meyers presentation of the character and his skills, with Brett basically flipping around and doing karate moves instead of decimating Seikiei with exotic weapons. He doesn’t even dispatch the villain in a novel way, instead thrusting himself and Seikiei off the mountain and grabbing hold of his sword (which he’s wedged into the earth) at the last second, to dangle there as Seikiei plunges to his death on the rocks hundreds of feet below. And that’s that; Brett happily returns home to Rhea, telling Lt. Wright it’s all “finally over.”

Like I said, this mystery author isn’t bad when it comes to pulp writing. The action scenes are pretty well done, usually featuring Seikiei taking out his opponents before they can even blink. The author retains his fondness for having characters employ everyday items in deadly ways, most notably when Seikiei takes out a cordon of police with nothing more than coins, burying them in their foreheads with a savage flick of his wrist. The author also incorporates a supernatural bent with the revelation that Seikiei can even spit fire out of his mouth, something depicted on the plot-faithful cover.

Also the dialog is good, with colorful cursing from the various cops. A downside is the author’s tendency to spin wheels with repetition, again usually via dialog, and also the fact that his version of Brett Wallace sort of comes off like a well-dressed flake who seems to enjoy drinking Perrier a little too much. In this author’s hands, the series loses the savagery it has under Meyers’s authorship, so I have to say I still prefer that author’s contributions.

Thursday, April 9, 2015

Z-Comm #4: Blood Storm


Z-Comm #4: Blood Storm, by Kyle Maning
No month stated, 1990  BMI/Leisure Books

One immediately notices a few differences about this fourth and final installment of David Alexander's Z-Comm series; not only are both the series title and volume numbering gone, but so is the inner cover artwork which graced the previous three volumes. Also, Blood Storm is published by BMI,* whereas the previous books bore the Leisure imprint.

Other than a brief reference late in the novel to the events that occurred in #2: Killpoint, there’s really no continuity at all to worry about in Blood Storm; like the other books in the series, this one appears to take place at some random point in the hectic lives of the five titular mercenaries. In fact as we meet them they’re on another mission, parachuting into Libya and blowing away a faction of the Apocalypse Battalion, a coalition of Muslim terrorists which operates out of “Colonel Daffy” Qaddafi’s country.

Alexander must’ve learned a new acronym shortly before penning this one: SLAM, which is repeated throughout, and which stands for Search, Locate, and Annihalate Missions. This has become Z-Comm’s new modus operandi and indeed Alexander must’ve liked the term so much that he even used it for a later series he published through Gold Eagle Books. But anyway, Z-Comm is here to “SLAM” some terrorists, and they do so with the trademark gore you expect of Alexander, though it’s not to the extent of his almighty Phoenix series.

While the reader might expect that the Apocalypse Battalion will be the central villains this time, they really don’t appear much; instead, the villains turn out to be Nazis! So then Z-Comm ends where it began, for just as in #1: Swastika they go up against a bunch of “vomit Vikings.” But whereas Deacon Johncock’s minions in that first volume were neo-Nazis, the ones in Blood Storm are the original issue, former Werewolf SS commandos who were mere teenagers in the waning days of WWII.

They’re lead by a sadist named Hans Kleist, known as “The Ghoul.” Decades ago Kleist hid the Proteus Chain, a Nazi-created chemical-biological weapon (or CBW; as is usual with Alexander the novel is filled with acronyms) that he’s now sold to the highest bidder – namely, Colonel Qaddafi, who plans to use the nerve gas on America posthaste. Z-Comm, who is tasked by their contact, Peter Quartermaine, will of course have to destroy both the CBW and Kleists’s Nazi underlings.

Before they can get to that, though, Z-Comm themselves are under attack. Here Alexander gives us brief glimpses into the private lives of each member of the team, something he did to greater extent in Swastika. First we have Sam Proffit, the lethal weapon of the squad, unveiling his artwork in a museum in Portland; we learn that Proffit is now a famous artist, known for his sculptures of scrap metal. The museum is attacked and Proffit uses his deadly hands and feet to take out a squad of Arab attackers.

Meanwhile Domino, the female member of the team (who does not, despite the cover art on each volume of the series, wear an eyepatch) is taking a vacation in Paris. In a subplot that is never again mentioned in the novel, Domino we learn is having second thoughts about her life as a mercenary, and wonders if she should quit. Here we finally learn about the woman’s background: once married to a Miami cop whom she had a daugter with, Domino lost her family to “savages.” Domino then went undercover, eventually becoming the mistress of the drug kingpin who had killed her husband and child. She killed the guy with her bare hands, and from there hooked up with Z-Comm.

But now Domino is “tormented by memories of the bloody tasks she had performed,” in particular the devastated look in the eyes of a Battalion terrorist she blew away in the opening sequence of the novel. Zabriskie, Z-Comm’s tech guru, surprises the gal before she can ruminate much more; they’re both here in Paris for a weapons convention, and Zabriskie wants Domino to go with him. Throughout the series Alexander has snuck in implications that these two might be an item, but he never elaborates. Anyway, they too are attacked, by terrorists who storm the convention in “duck masks!”

Finally there’s Logan Cage, the leader of the team, and Bear MacBeth, getting drunk and oggling the local gals down in Rio De Janeiro during Mardi Gras. They too are attacked, by a group of “scum sheiks” in masks who are no doubt part of the same network that’s attempting to waste the rest of Z-Comm. We learn later that this is a vengeance scheme initiated by “Colonel Daffy” himself, though Alexander doesn’t do much with it; instead, more focus is placed on the fact that the Libyans, via Hans Kleist, will soon get hold of the Proteus Chain.

Alexander provides his trademarked running action sequences as the members of Z-Comm take on their attackers. This part includes many memorable moments, like Zabriskie and Domino escaping the weapons convention ambush in a commandeered HUMVEE. But after the dust settles the team gets back together in Paris, where Quartermaine tells them about the Nazi germ warfare. Somehow they already know where it’s being held in Paris, but instead of sending in the Marines it’s up to Z-Comm alone, who hope to capture the CBW material before it can be transported to Libya.

Another action sequence ensues, as Z-Comm first blows away a ton of former Werewolf SS Nazis before they themselves are caught. In this volume Alexander inserts lots of horror-novel stuff, in particular through the guise of “soul-suckers,” ie the psycho-pharmacological experts of the intelligence world. In other words, the guys who drug you up to get the truth out of you. The opening section features a few CIA “doctors” on the job (one of whom we’re informed was a former Nazi himself), but here Kleist calls in one of his own, a sadist who shows up and immediately choses Domino as his first victim.

Meanwhile Sam Proffit, who not only appears to be Alexander’s favorite character but also appears to be the most capable member of the team, acts as a one-man rescue squad as he gets an M-60 from the Z-Comm van and goes in blasting. This scene features the debut of Kleist’s henchman, a hulking Nazi brute called “The Hook” due to his prosthetic right arm, which has a razor-sharp claw on it. He and Bear are of equal size and take an instant hatred toward one another, Alexander delivering several knock-down, drag-out fights between the two.

But despite their best efforts, including a long chase sequence in which they go after the escaping semi with the Proteus Chain on it, Z-Comm fails, and the CBW ends up making it to Libya after all. Now it’s time for Plan B: going undercover. Just as in the first volume, Cage takes the point, pretending to be an arms smuggler; he goes to Libya to sell missiles to Miles O’Bannion, Qaddafi’s top weapons buyer and a former US intelligence agent who has gone turncoat. Domino goes along as Cage’s escort, vamping it up, though she doesn’t engage in any sexual shenanigans like she did in Killpoint. In fact, there’s no sex at all in Blood Storm. Bummer!

Meanwhile, Proffit goes undercover as a globe-wandering Canadian, eventually getting a job as a dishwasher near the government mansion in which Cage and Domino are staying as valued VIPs. Macbeth and Zabriskie bide their time over in Chad, where they wait with some of that country’s military personnel for the green light to go in and kill. Speaking of which, these two characters don’t get much print in Blood Storm, but then again Alexander has focused on different members in each volume.

In addition to lurid sex, another thing lacking this time is Alexander’s patented over-the-top gore. While many, many characters die spectacularly, Alexander doesn’t dwell on the splashing brains and exploding guts as he did in the insane Phoenix books, nor does he deliver any of his goofy “vicious prick to Moby Dick” type of death descriptions. There is though a heavy sardonic vibe throughout the novel, with the dark humor extending even to Alexander’s narrative. There is also a total disdain for anything remotely politically correct, with all Libyans, even innocent bystanders, referred to as “ragheads” or “camel-fuckers.”

And just like in that first volume, Cage is of course uncovered, but Proffit shows up just in time to once again save him and Domino. Seriously, Proffit should’ve been the star of his own series; he’s very much in the Mel “Lethal Weapon” Gibson mode. After another running chase, this time over the desert surrounding Tripoli, Z-Comm escapes to Chad, where they then launch a full-scale attack on the base Cage suspects of holding the Proteus Chain.

Handily enough, all of the villains have congregated here, save for Miles O’Bannion, who turns out to be a plot thread Alexander fails to tie up (Cage swears to kill the turncoat, but it never happens, and O’Bannion isn’t mentioned again once Cage and Domino escape Tripoli). However both Kleist and The Hook are there, the former suffering an entertaining if expected end when he himself is subjected to the full effects of the Proteus Chain. Another horror-esque moment, which sees the flesh melting off the bastard’s face and body, until he’s a ravening, skull-faced freak who dies screaming!

Alexander might’ve shirked on the Cage/O’Bannion payoff, but he doesn’t on the final Bear/Hook matchup, with the two going mano e mano in a brutal handfight. Guess who wins? We get another movie-esque sendoff for a villain as The Hook is crushed by ten thousand pounds of rubble, his prosthetic arm popping off from the impact. From here it’s just a bunch of Libyan soldiers getting gunned down as Z-Comm again attempts to make their escape before the air strike comes in.

And that’s that – the team looks back at the conflagration that was once a military base and then hops back into their HUMVEE and heads over for Chad, riding off into the dawn and never seen again…in print, at least. Here endeth the saga of Z-Comm, and while it wasn’t nearly the equal of Phoenix, it was still a gory thriller of a series that I’ll miss. It looks like after this Alexander wrote a pair of standalone novels for Leisure (Hitler’s Legacy and Angel Of Death), and I’ll be checking those out next.

*I’d like to know more about BMI. Yet another variant of Leisure Books (aka Dorchester Publishing), my assumption is that BMI (Book Margins International, I believe?) is the imprint through which the publisher got rid of books that had been in the pipeline for some time. I say this because I have a few BMI books, and all of them seem to have been hastily published, Bood Storm no different, with grammatical errors even on the back cover copy.

More curiously, while the book is copyright 1990 (by David Alexander), the last page of the book features an advertisement for a new Leisure Romance books hotline which will go live in June, 1995. This is five years after the copyright date, and I can find no indication of any other printing of Blood Storm other than this one. So…was it written in 1990 and not published until 1995, when Leisure chucked it out under the BMI imprint?

Monday, April 6, 2015

The Spider #7: Serpent Of Destruction


The Spider #7: Serpent Of Destruction, by Grant Stockbridge
April, 1934  Popular Publications

Norvell “Grant Stockbridge” Page continues to impress with yet another high-velocity installment of the Spider series. This time our fanged hero takes on a nationwide criminal syndicate which seeks to subdue the populace via cocaine and heroin, the first wave of their assault focused on the upper crust of society. Richard Wentworth, the Spider, will of course kill as many of the bastards as he can.

Using the awesomely-goofy slogan “It’s smart to be dopey,” the Bloody Serpent gang has practically ensnared the elite, once Serpent Of Destruction opens; as usual with this series, society is already on the brink of collapse before page one. And as usual, the Spider is already on the scene, sneaking into a New York penthouse in his mask and cape just as a pretty woman named Alice Cashew has been stabbed in the back, and not in the figurative sense.

She’s been killed by her boyfriend, notorious crook Big Mick Harrigan, who at the moment is assisted by another gorgeous moll, Tess Goodleigh, a sexy blonde who serves as this installment’s hot evil woman. We get another of those trademark Norvell Page opening action scenes as Wentworth blows away several crooks, Harrigan and Tess escaping; Alice’s dying words are about the “bloody serpent” and “coke.” Wentworth also saves a bound and drugged girl named Alice Puystan, whom Harrigan and Tess were also about to murder, and further planned to frame for some plot.

With its cocaine paranoia, and even a few trips to Washington, DC, Serpent Of Destruction is eerie in how it prefigures the 1980s. Wentworth is alert to the growing “dope menace,” and informs his fiance Nita van Sloan about all sorts of horrors he’s recently heard about, including a young female dope addict who became a hemophile, so enamored with the sight of blood that she sliced up a little dog! But the Bloody Serpent gang is preying on the glamorous elite of New York (and the rest of the country), and bootleggers have turned to coke and heroin now that booze is legal.

Off to DC Wentworth flies, trying to figure out who is behind the ring. Here through a government contact he learns how dire the situation is; only 160 narcotics agents are employed by the government, and 100 of them have been murdered! In another action sequence Wentworth rescues one of them, an agent who is almost dipped in lime by the sadistic members of the Bloody Serpent gang. Meanwhile, Wentworth suspects that Senator Tarleton Bragg may be the secret “chief” of the Serpent gang, but has no proof. He returns to New York.

Events continue to spiral out of control without the reader being given a pause for rest. Quickly we learn that Commissioner Kirkpatrick, not featured in the narrative as much as usual this time, has been framed on a bribery charge; the Serpent gang is so insidious and powerful that they have succeeded in setting up one of the few men who could actually stand against them. As per the series standard, Wentworth must therefore stand alone against a veritable army.  Meanwhile, the “middle class” has now fallen for the dope menace as well, Wentworth in disguise watching in horror as cab drivers and the like congregate at a bar and openly snort coke.

Amid all the chaos Wentworth decides he needs two things – one, a cane with a hidden nozzle that shoots out spider venom(!), and two, a bullet-proof metal mask. In fact, he needs a bunch of bullet-proof stuff, and after tasking his pal Professor Brownlee with working on the cane, he spends an all night session creating the armor. The mask is a metallic version of his Tito Calliepi guise, ie the look that would eventually become “the” Spider look – the hawklike nose, the lank hair, the fangs. Thusly armed and armored, Wentworth is ready to kick some true ass.

Serpent Of Destruction is even more action-packed than previous volumes I’ve read, which is really saying something; this time Page himself seems unable to keep up. Apparently Brownlee’s house in Yonkers is destroyed by the gang, but the kindly old professor only thinks to inform Wentworth of this the next day (even Wentworth asks, “Why didn’t you tell me earlier?”). To keep his comrades safe, Wentworth presses a button and his posh Fifth Avenue penthouse is encased in steel; this too is but a moment’s detail that’s quickly forgotten in the ensuing maelstrom of action.

Another memorable sequence soon follows in the Rhumbana club, a Caribbean-themed nightclub recently overtaken by Big Mick Harrigan. Wentworth, as the Spider, has proclaimed that a certain crook, one he’s identified as part of the Bloody Serpent gang, will die that night. Disguised as a member of the band, Wentworth pulls on his metal mask, hits the dude in the forehead with his poisonous cane in front of the entire club (enduring a hellstorm of lead – which naturally is deflected by his armor), and escapes in the chaos!

But why the poison? Because Wentworth has realized that the only thing that truly gets through to people is the threat of torture; it’s the only thing even a hardened criminal might fear. Thus when this crook takes a full day of torment to die, the Spider is even more feared. And while Nita van Sloan continues not to be much involved (the supporting characters were apparently given much more focus once Page returned from his six-month sabbatical in 1937), off Wentworth again goes to DC.

Another confrontation with Senator Bragg, who professes to know nothing of any Bloody Serpent gang. But is it an act? Before he can decide, Wentworth is ambushed by sexpot Tess Goodleigh (what a name!), a known Serpent member, and one who has lead many narcotics agents to their doom. The woman proves to be an eternal thorn in the Spider’s side, even magically appearing in another sequence, in New York, as Wentworth in the Spider guise confronts Harrigan in his office at the Rhumbana.

Wentworth returns to New York. More action, particularly in a nice sequence where Kirkpatrick himself helps out, the two men ambushing a convoy bringing drugs into the city. Here Wentworth does not wear a disguise, but it’s obvious Kirkpatrick knows he’s the Spider; the top cop even taunts Wentworth that there’s no Spider seal left on the gangsters he’s killed in the firefight. But off Wentworth rushes to another big setpiece, and right on cue Nita is kidnapped. Per the norm in these early books, she serves no more purpose than to be abducted and eventually saved.

But the doom Nita is threatened with is pretty entertaining; the Bloody Serpent Chief, that dastard, calls Wentworth and tells him that, if the Spider does not join the gang (all criminal masterminds are aware that Wentworth is the Spider, you see), then Nita will be forcibly hooked on dope! To prove his threat, the Chief sends Wentworth the next day a photo of an obviously-drugged Nita, with her “hot mouth” and “half-closed eyes” betraying her possible wantonization – the Chief alludes to the fact that, once hooked on the drug, Nita will be much less “exclusive” and open to “the casual friendship of other men.”

Now our hero is on a rampage; crooks are killed right and left, sometimes so quickly that the reader doesn’t even have a chance to register it, like when Wentworth hits Big Mick Harrigan with his venom-filled cane. But it all leads to a somewhat-muddled finale where Wentworth pretends to agree to join the Bloody Serpent gang, and he and the Chief arrange to meet at Wentworth’s Long Island estate (which also factored into the finale of #3: Wings Of The Black Death). There, in a meeting with all of the Chief’s minions, Wentworth will openly join the gang, and Nita will be returned to him.

When the expected trap is sprung, the Chief blithely telling his people to gun Wentworth down, our hero is saved by a hidden sniper, who shoots at vials of nitrogylcerin Wentworth has hidden about his large study. (We learn later that Kirkpatrick is the hidden marksman.) Here in the chaos Page delivers one of those nonsensical “big reveals” where it turns out the Chief isn’t Senator Bragg at all, but some dude pretending to be him – oh, and Tess Goodleigh turns out to be a deep-undercover secret agent!

What’s missing from Serpent Of Destruction is the usual hyperkinetic violence of the Spider series, as the Bloody Serpent plot doesn’t reach the catastrophic levels of the typical villains this series was known for. Indeed, their “victims” seem rather happy, as Wentworth notices while in disguise in a club, watching in disgust as members of the middle class happily snort cocaine! Also, the supporting characters are given short shrift, particularly Nita van Sloan.

But that’s not to say it isn’t an enjoyable installment. In fact, I haven’t read a bad Spider novel yet!

Saturday, April 4, 2015

Ryder Syvertsen, R.I.P.


I’m currently reading the 10th volume of the Doomsday Warrior series, and just came across the sad news (here and here) that author Ryder Syvertsen recently passed away, on February 24th of this year. He was 73 years old and a life-long New Yorker. Syvertsen was of course one half of “Ryder Stacy,” and wrote the majority of the 19-volume series, with Jan Stacy (who died in 1989) only co-writing the first four volumes.

Over the years I’ve tried to find a way to get in touch with Syvertsen; even David Alexander attempted to track him down for me, but had no luck – and if Alexander couldn’t find him, I certainly didn’t have a chance, given that Alexander was the person who took over Syvertsen’s C.A.D.S. series. I hoped to interview him and get his thoughts on the Doomsday Warrior series as well as his other men’s adventure books.

So then this is as good a place as any to post something I’d meant to include in one of my earlier Doomsday Warrior reviews: an audio interview with Ryder Syvertsen that Graphic Audio conducted in January of 2008. (Note: The interview takes place between 2:30 and 12:30 of the 20-minute audio file.) Syvertsen sounds like a native New Yorker for sure – interesting, too, that he never once mentions co-author Jan Stacy.

Syvertsen’s last words in the interview are “send me some letters,” so let’s hope some of his fans took him up on his request and contacted him through Graphic Audio. Even though I never met him, I will definitely miss Syvertsen; once you’ve read so many books by a writer you start to feel like you know him, and I regret that I never got to tell Ryder Syvertsen how much I enjoy his books.

Thursday, April 2, 2015

SOBs #1: The Barrabas Run


SOBs #1: The Barrabas Run, by Jack Hild
September, 1983  Gold Eagle Books

The SOBs series gets off to a rocky start with a first volume that comes off more like a standalone novel than the beginning of an ongoing series. The copyright page credits a whopping three authors: Jack Canon, Robin Hardy, and Alan Bomack.

Hardy became one of the main writers of the series, and “Bomack” was the pseudonym of an author who mostly worked on Gold Eagle’s Executioner and SuperBolan novels (humorously, his name was an anagram of “Mack Bolan;” according to William H. Young in A Study Of Action-Adventure Fiction, the author’s real name was David Wade). Canon though spent the late ‘70s on through to the early ‘90s writing the Nick Carter: Killmaster series, and my theory is that he did most of the writing of The Barrabas Run; the book reads almost identically to Canon’s “realistic” vibe as shown in such Killmaster novels as Blood Raid.

Like that novel, The Barrabas Run is a rather dour, unenjoyable affair, too focused on scene setting and character building. It lacks the action one would want from a men’s adventure novel, and, like Mark Roberts's Hanoi Hellground, is more along the lines of a Dirty Dozen ripoff, spending much too much time putting together the daredevil group who must see through this particular mission – namely, rescuing a Nelson Mandela-type African politician from a group of left-wing terrorists.

But instead of getting to the action straightaway, we must instead endure, for over a third of the 195-page narrative, the looong tale of how the Soldiers of Barrabas come to be, and then how they train for the mission. I mean, shit – Z-Comm would’ve saved the guy by page five!! It boggles my mind that some of these men’s adventure authors thought their readers would want to read “realistic” takes on how a mercenary army is put together, and how it trains for an impossible mission. And who knows, maybe some readers did. But what I want from this genre is violent escapism.

Rather, we get lots of character background concerning one Nile Barrabas, in his early 40s when the novel opens and a blood-soaked veteran of ‘Nam; indeed, on the veritable last chopper out as Saigon fell. These days Barrabas makes his living as a merc, but he’s currently in a rat-infested prison in some South American hellhole, having fought for the wrong side. Then a CIA “spook” named Walker Jessup shows up; the two met in ‘Nam, as we have seen in the prologue. Now Jessup reports to some mysterious senator, who has funded an off-the-books mercenary strike squad to take on terrorism around the world.

Jessup springs Barrabas from his cell (not via fireworks – yet another indication of Canon’s authorship – but through political maneuvering), and now our white-haired hero is free to go about the world to recruit his army. An interesting note: Barrabas’s team (and likely Canon’s manuscript) is frequently referred to as “Eagle Squad;” this is even how they eventually refer to themselves. My guess is this was Canon’s title for his original manuscript, which perhaps Gold Eagle then farmed out into a series, under the much better title SOBs.

The series was known for killing off team members, but don’t worry about that happening here. Canon spends so much time putting together his massive team that you can tell he has no plans to kill off any of them. But damn they could’ve been whittled down: we’ve got Liam O’Toole on explosives, Emilio Lopez as a general commando, Wiley Drew Boone as a sailor, Vince Biondi as a professional race car driver/top gun pilot, and in various general capacities we have Nate Beck, Claude Hayes, Al Chen, Alex Nanos, Lee Hatton, and Billy Starfoot.

Probably the last three will be most familiar to casual readers of the series, as they appeared throughout. But those fans of Billy Starfoot, in particular due to the psychedelic turn his character took in #6: Red Hammer Down, will be in for disappointment with this first volume, as Billy is a cipher of the character he would gradually become. Of them all Canon spends the most print on Lee Hatton; Dr. Lee Hatton that is, the Smurfette of the SOBs. Barrabas hand-picks his vast team (at exorbitant page count), with the exception of Lee Hatton, who is thrust on him as a surprise by Walker Jessup.

In a way, though, Lee’s presence makes sense; I’ve often wondered why none of these men’s adventure strike squads ever bother to include a medic on the team. But Lee Hatton’s prime job will be nursing the elderly Joseph Noboctu (ie the Mandela type) through the jungle terrain of Kaluba (ie the fictional African country in which all this goes down). Meanwhile we get lots of soul-plumbing from both Barrabas and Lee; the former because he just doesn’t want a woman on the team, the latter because she wonders what exactly she’s doing here.

There is also a sexual undercurrent between the two, capped off in a scene where Lee strips off her clothes and demands that Barrabas take her to bed, to “get sex out of the way.” A chagrined Barrabas hurries off, properly chastized, but this is the closest we come to sex in the entire novel; we are, of course, in the sex-shunning, gun-loving world of Gold Eagle. You can take all those sleazy adult shenanigans over to Zebra Books, buster! Meanwhile we are assured that Barrabas does in fact have a steady lay; some gal named Erika Dykstra, the sister of Barrabas’s favorite gun seller.

So once the team is finally put together, Barrabas ships ‘em off to Majorca…where they’ll train for two weeks! My friends, what the hell kind of a shit-kicking mercenary team is this? It’s for this reason I say that The Barrabas Run reads more like a “serious” piece of war fiction and less like a bloody and pulpy (and fun) men’s adventure novel. But yeah, more text is sacrificed as we read about the “Eagle Squad” learning to work together as one unit, and poor old Joseph Noboctu continues to rot in his cell.

As for Barrabas himself, he’s busy gallivanting around the Mediterranean; one thing I have to say about Jack Canon is the dude enjoys vicariously traveling through his characters. In his Killmaster installments, Nick Carter racks up some serious frequent flyer miles, and Nile Barrabas is no different here, even going all the way up to Paris (where he briefly meets with Erika and her gun-running brother). But even here too much time is spent on the mechanics of arranging an illegal arms shipment, of navigating political red tape. You almost want to check the spine and make sure you aren’t reading a book by Robert Ludlum.

Anyway, The Barrabas Run goes to 195 pages (with several pages afterwards made up of pointless appendices about Barrabas and his time in ‘Nam)…and it isn’t until friggin’ page 148 that the actual “action stuff” even begins! And mind you, this isn’t a “big print” kind of book; there’s precious little white space here. It’s all just deadening “shadowy undercover ops world”-type stuff, which for me is a chore to read. Again, it’s all almost identical to Canon’s later Blood Raid, which similarly squandered a promising, pulpy plot with too much “realism.”

Even when the action goes down it lacks much spark, let alone any payoff. For example, early on we briefly meet Field Marshal Haile Mogabe, who captures Joseph Noboctu in his attempt to wrest control of Kaluba. Mogabe is often compared to Idi Amin, which makes the reader assume the author is going to give the bastard more of a comeuppance when the bullets start flying. Instead, Mogabe basically just shows up for a sentence or two toward the end, only to be anticlimatically blown away by Barrabas!

Instead, more attention is given to the long story of how our heroes escape the terrorist compound, once they’ve saved Noboctu; again, it’s all very similar to Roberts’s Hanoi Hellground, which featured a similarly-anticlimactic denoument which shed more detail on the team escaping after their assault on the VC fortress. Here too Canon doesn’t dwell much on the action or gore. Other than a brief mention of Billy Starfoot almost hacking off some guard’s head (an incident which happens off-page, mind you), the climax is practically bloodless.

Rather than Mogabe, a sadist named Karl Heiss proves to be the true villain of the piece; he would return in future installments, where as I recall he was given more room to shine. Here Canon (or one of the other two authors) shoehorns in arbitrary mentions in flashback of how bad Heiss is; he almost got Barrabas killed on several past skirmishes. Now he’s working for Mogabe’s forces and trying again to kill Barrabas. It’s all built up so that the reader expects that this time Barrabas might get his vengeance, but of course he is denied. And goofily enough, it plays out with Heiss running after Barrabas and team as they leave on their jeep and asking if he can bum a ride!

I know I’m railing on Canon, but truth be told he isn’t a bad writer. He brings his characters to life and he has a gift for dialog. The only problem is, I think he’s writing in the wrong genre. The dude’s skills seem more suited to political thrillers and the like, the sub-Tom Clancy or Robert Ludlum stuff that others appreciate a whole lot more than I do. What’s odd is you’d figure the guy would’ve made more money writing in that genre, not to mention that he would’ve been able to publish under his own name. Of course it’s likely he was using the men’s adventure genre as his entrance into the writing field, but given how long he stayed in this particular genre, one has to wonder.

The Barrabas Run wasn’t all that great, and I’m glad it was the only volume Canon wrote. To further my theory that this was intended as a standalone novel, it ends with the “Eagle Squad” safely escorting Noboctu to freedom and then breaking up, each going their own way, Barrabas wondering when they’ll be needed again, if ever.

Little did he know he’d be back just a few short weeks later, but this time in a book by an author more suited to his specific gut-busting skills…