Showing posts with label Last Ranger. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Last Ranger. 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, August 9, 2021

The Last Ranger #8: The Cutthroat Cannibals


The Last Ranger #8: The Cutthroat Cannibals, by Craig Sargent
July, 1988  Popular Library

At this point Jan Stacy’s clearly bored with The Last Ranger; the previous volume was a tepid bore and this one I thought was even worse. For some reason Stacy here decides to give us what is for the most part a post-nuke Jack London type of story, only one with the usual absurdist Stacy touches. And not only that but he also cripples hero Mark Stone for the entire tale, having him hobble around with a broken leg. Plus Stone’s lost all his weapons and the Harley Electraglide he’s been riding since the beginning. 

Stacy also co-wrote the earliest volumes of Doomsday Warrior, and everyone knows the template of those books: each will open with Ted Rockson and team heading out into the post-nuke US and encountering all manner of wild flora and fauna. But whereas those sequences are usually over and done with pretty quick in Doomsday Warrior, Cutthroat Cannibals is like that for almost the entire novel. And that’s another thing: the title. If you read the back cover, you expect a splatterpunk yarn; it mentions “The Hunger,” a possibly inhuman group that feasts on human flesh. In reality, this group, which is made up of a mere two individuals, doesn’t appear until the very final pages of the novel. Instead, Cutthroat Cannibals features Stone being assailed by the weather, rugged terrain, treacherous rivers, superstitious Indians, and even a cult-like group of rabid dogs. 

Well anyway, for once we have an installment that doesn’t open immediately after the previous volume. Rather, Stone’s just driving around on his Harley, his pit bull Excaliber as ever with him, when he’s suddenly caught in an avalanche. (“Jesus, mother of God,” he thinks to himself, not realizing this is “biologically and theologically impossible.”) This goes on and on, and sadly is just an indication of the similar material that will occur throughout the book. Ultimately Stone’s caught in a river and swept away – and friends this isn’t the only river he’ll be swept up in during the course of the novel – and along the way not only loses his bike but all his weapons and even suffers a nasty compound fracture on his femur. Now we have more survivalist stuff as he tries to hobble around and survive even more chaotic weather. And meanwhile Stacy keeps up the goofy “banter” between Stone and Excaliber. 

Stone’s bashed into unconsciousness at one point and wakes to find some Indians looking at him. They seem to proliferate here in this post-nuke US, which now that I think of it might be commentary from Stacy that the original inhabitants of America are taking the place over again. And per genre madate they’re the Road Warrior type, a motley crew of bizarre fashions. Oh and they live in houses made of tires. But Stacy’s really focused on dogs this time, so these hardy Indian braves are unsettled around Excaliber, and can’t believe the dog actually listens to Stone. Well anyway they worship a dog whose statue looks nuch like Excaliber, but they end up keeping our hero captive anyway and wondering if they should kill him. 

This too goes on for a long time. Also the shaman shows up, and he’s a former doctor who escaped the world and returned to his Indian roots; it’s intimated that these Indians are so cut off from society that they aren’t even aware a nuclear war has occurred. He tries to fix up Stone’s leg, but it needs to be rebroken first, so he kicks it and then lets it set. Then he makes a crutch for Stone; our hero continues to hobble through the rest of the novel. Honestly I’m not sure what Stacy was going for here, giving us such a defenseless hero for the entirety of the book: Stone’s lost all of his guns, his bike, and can’t even walk around. Humorously he thinks he can make another bike with “spare parts” at the bunker…if only he can get back there! 

Stacy retreads the usual tropes here, with Stone having to prove himself in man-to-man combat with the top brave, yet afterward he’s still doomed to death. But the brave becomes his friend and the two escape. Here we get, unbelievably, even more post-nuke weather insanity, with the two encountering more waterfalls and rushing rivers and etc. Then it gets real goofy when a sort of cult-like army of dogs, two hundred strong, starts chasing them; the brave says these are “demon dogs” and it’s implied they’ve become almost supernatural as they’re able to outwit and outfox the two humans. But even here Stacy proves that The Last Ranger is really just a goofy series at heart, when the demon dogs and Excaliber start “singing” to each other that night:


In the battle – and by the way, the dogs are led by three mutts Stone considers the canine equivalents of Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco – Stone is again swept up by a waterfall and thrown around like a ragdoll, to come to in a new predicament. Here, on page 137, he awakens to find himself being watched by a pair of obese albinos…albino cannibals, that is, who have named themselves Top and Bottom. These are the “Hunger” promised on the back cover. Things get real ghoulish here, very splatterpunk, with the cannibals having a sort of mental hold on “Cro-Magnons” who act as their slaves. It’s a charnel house setup, with human skin used as drapes for the village and other horrific displays of past victims dangling everywhere. 

Stone’s thrown in a cage with…you guessed it, a smokin’ hot blonde babe, because he hasn’t gotten laid yet this volume. Even though the girl’s brother and father are also strung up and all of ‘em are waiting for their turn to be eaten – and plus she’s a virgin – the girl insists that Stone take her right then and there, so that at least she’ll have known a man before the cannibals eat her! Or as she succinctly says, “Please, do it, get it in!” The sequence which follows isn’t as hardcore crazy as previous ones, but we do get the added bonus that the girl falls in love with Stone (of course she does), and Stone feels the same – but by novel’s end he’s already preparing to ditch her and her folks so he can get back to the bunker and fix up his bike. 

Norm Eastman’s typically-great cover depicts Stone blasting away with a .50 caliber machine gun. This does actually happen, at the very end of the novel. The girl and her family turn out to have a jeep armed with this gun, and Top and Bottom have just lazily left it sitting there. After a gutchurning bit where the girl’s brother is eaten alive on the dinner table, Stone’s able to escape and commandeers the jeep, getting some bloody .50 caliber payback. And here the novel ends, Stone and the girl and her dad hopping on the jeep to “head north,” but as mentioned Stone’s planning to say goodbye soon so he and Excaliber can go and get their supplies…and, of course, continue the search for his ever-missing sister. 

Two more volumes were to follow, but we’ve had two duds in a row now. We’ll see if Stacy is able to get the series back in shape before the big apocalyptic finale.

Thursday, June 20, 2019

The Last Ranger #7: The Vile Village


The Last Ranger #7: The Vile Village, by Craig Sargent
April, 1988  Popular Library

The seventh volume of The Last Ranger as ever follows immediately after the previous volume; Martin Stone is just where we left him, caught in the middle of an acid rain thunderstorm. He crashes his Harley and he and his pit bull Excaliber are hammered by the rain into unconsciousness.

A near-dead Stone and Excaliber are found by a pair of redneck boys the next morning and hauled to a big farm owned by a bearish dude named “Undertaker” Hansen, who runs a profitable coffin-making business in this post-nuke world. I went overboard last time on my theories of how Jan Stacy (aka “Craig Sargent”) might’ve been aware of his impending death from AIDS and worked things out via his dark, ghoulish narrative. I won’t belabor the point this time other than that a good portion of the first quarter of The Vile Village is all about the funeral business. But this time the grim vibe is at least tempered with the goofy dark humor Stacy does so well:

Undertaking equipment stood everywhere, embalming fluids in ten-gallon glass bottles lined a whole wall, planking from local trees rough-hewn with bark and splinters erupting from them like a rash were piled up along one wall. Bandages, saws, needles, paint, everything that one might need to make corpses look friendly and happy for their bereaved families. Giving them the opportunity to say, “Doesn’t Tom look nice,” or, “How peaceful Fred went out,” when in fact Tom and Fred and Jervis and the whole bunch of them had gone out screaming and howling, had had to have their guts and noses and tongues sewn back on, or their blue skin painted with rouge and blush to make them look like they had just been out chopping wood in the yard when in fact they were already starting to rot, to stink up the place.

One thing gradually becomes clear, though. Stacy was struggling with the series at this point. Or at least with this installment. For one, he breaks away from the format of the preceding six volumes and has Stone engaged in an arbitrary storyline that has nothing to do with the grander scheme of Stone trying to find his perennially-kidnapped sister April. The back cover promises a Yojimbo riff of Stone putting two rival gangs against one another, but this doesn’t actually occur until the final several pages. In fact The Vile Village is a bit of a chore to get through and I suspect Stacy struggled with it.

Undertaker Hansen is one of those comically larger-than-life characters Stacy excels in, the sort of character you often see in the Doomsday Warrior series. He has a countless number of children – he can’t even remember their names – and rules them with an iron fist. Or actually a hickory cane, as he’s fond of whacking them when they get out of line. But he allows them their freedom, as Stone finds out during some hot and heavy sexual shenanigans with hotstuff blonde daughter Luann, in one of Stacy’s patented goofy-hardcore sequences:

If Stone thought he had made love with wild women before, they had been like Doris Day compared to the creature atop him. For she went wild. Her entire body jerked and bucked and twisted around him. Gritting her teeth hard, almost as if she were in pain, the woman ground around on Stone as if she were trying to grind his pelvis into flour. And Stone contributed his part too. As tired as he was. As much as his muscles just didn’t want to move – the instinct of desire was just too powerful to resist. After all, men with mortal wounds had been known to grab and “have knowledge of” field nurses in wartime. The most powerful instinct of all. To merge, to become one with the other in paroxysms of animal joy.

From Doris Day to philosophy, Stacy covers all the bases. Luann is Stone’s nurse over the course of a week, bringing him and Excalibur back to life thanks to some paste-like poultice she rubs on his acid rain-burned skin. But after this the egregious page-filling rears its head. We learn posthaste that two gangs rule nearby Cotopaxi, Colorado, the “Vile Village” of the title (Stacy must not’ve liked the place, that’s for sure): a biker gang and a redneck gang – this info relayed in a memorable bit where a Hispanic farmer comes into the Hansen clan dining room and displays the gory severed head of one of his kin, murdered by the gangs.

But after this insanity Stone spends pages learning the undertaker business from Hansen. This does include another humorous bit where we’re informed that the Undertaker’s funeral speeches are a combo of Billy Graham and a used car salesman. But it just kind of goes on, and also Stone’s impetus for even going into Cotopaxi is hard to buy. He recalls how he was referred to as a deliverer of death by the Indians “months ago” in the first volume, so he figures he’ll go into the vile village and kill some gang scum. There’s also the barely-explored motive that he’s pissed how the gang killed these farmers right in front of their wives and kids, and Stone wants revenge for them.

That’s all well and good, but the problem is he goes into town and just wastes time for the majority of the novel. Assuming the name Billy “Preacher Boy” Pinkus, Stone waltzes into the only bar in town that serves both the Head Stompers (the bikers) and the Strathers Brothers (the rednecks) and ends up blowing away a goon who works for the former gang – Stone’s first kill in the book, and his only one until near the very end. In fact The Vile Village is mostly bloodless, particularly when compared to the ultra-gory previous volumes.

But while the gore is minimized, the goofy humor is thankfully back – Stone takes a gander at herculean Head Stompers boss Bronson and reckons he “had hardly seen such muscles on anybody since he’d watched his Wrestlemania tapes on VHS back at the bunker.” Unfortunately the biker element is quickly dropped; Bronson and gang make threatening remarks to new guy “Billy” and take off, and Stone spends the majority of the novel ingratiating himself into the trust of the much-less-interesting Strathers Brothers.

The goofy vibe is what predominates. Stone makes pals with Vorstel Strathers, one of the three brothers who run the place, comparing war wounds. After this he’s given a job as a sidearm, Stone having presented himself as smarter than the redneck morons who serve the brothers, thus according more privilege. Vorstel puts him up in the local bordello, and get this, folks – even though he lives in a cathouse for the duration of the book, Stone doesn’t have sex with a single one of the women there! 

In fact the focus here again is on humor, particularly with hijinks concerning Excaliber, stuff which I think is getting to be a bit of a nuissance now. But it’s all “funny” as Excaliber keeps destroying the plush room every day when Stone leaves, and the old whore who runs the place complains about it, and Stone hands over a few silver coins for the troubles, and etc. That being said, there is some funny stuff here and there, like the unforgettable line that climaxes this paragraph:

Most of the early-morning staff hadn’t arrived yet, as it was only 6:48, so the place was nearly empty downstairs but for two old women who polished all the woodwork in the place, keeping it shining for the “gentlemen” customers. They looked at the savage-looking Stone and shuddered, looking away, wondering silently to themselves just how bad the place had gotten if it was taking in clients of such low repute. Perhaps they had better start looking for jobs elsewhere. The Hot Vagina might not be the kind of place they wanted to work anymore.

Things really don’t pick up until toward the very end, beginning with a wildly over-the-top July 4th celebration in which the bikers and rednecks have a truce to celebrate America in their own strange ways. But even here it comes off like page-filling, and for a lot of it Stone just stands around and monitors the proceedings. Finally things get real when he’s sent with a group of thugs to kill some of the local farmers who have been causing trouble for the gangs, and Stone ends up killing his own men to protect the farmers.

This proves to be the undoing of his cover, and thus Stone’s entire plan is blown – his goal is to set the gangs against each other, but it never happens. Instead he’s strung up and beaten and good as dead, but in a lame copout the Strathers Brothers decide to mess around with the just-abducted 8 year-old son of Bronson instead. Stone’s able to free himself and the boy in a hard-to-buy but still tense scene that has him employing the “push dagger” hidden in the heel of his boot.

Even worse, the finale still has Stone just standing around while the Head Stompers and the Strathers Brothers wipe each other out on the streets of Cotopaxi. That being said, Stone does blow up one of them with the missile launcher on his Harley, and Excaliber literally jumps to the rescue and takes on the Strathers Brothers’s pet lion.

But overall The Vile Village just comes off like an afterthought, as if Stacy was just churning something out quickly to meet a deadline. Which I’m assuming was the case, but still. At least the book ends with Stone deciding it’s time to get back on with his main mission and finding that damn sister of his.

Monday, December 31, 2018

The Last Ranger #6: The Warlord’s Revenge


The Last Ranger #6: The Warlord’s Revenge, by Craig Sargent
January, 1988  Popular Library

The sixth volume of The Last Ranger is basically splatterpunk horror; instead of a post-nuke action yarn it’s a grim, gory, often-unsettling work by an author who clearly has death on his mind. A sense of foreboding looms over the novel, with hero Martin Stone often considering himself “lucky to still be alive,” yet knowing that death will be coming for him very soon.

Not much is known about Jan Stacy, other than that he died of AIDS in 1989. It’s never a good idea to assume, but in this case I can’t help it – the tone of The Warlord’s Revenge seems to be courtesy a writer who has been given a death sentence. Not to use the word again so soon, but “unsettling” really sums up the vibe of this book. It’s not so much an action story as it is an exegesis on death. After 180+ pages of small pages the cumulative effect is the reader shares the author’s sentiment of despair.

This has been the general vibe of the series, but normally Stacy tempers it with black comedy. This is also somewhat true of The Warlord’s Revenge, but the feeling is lost beneath the overbearing grim tone. Stacy seems to be at pains to gross the reader out from the get-go. The novel opens moments after the previous volume ended; Stone and his claptrap crew of American Indians and rogue soldiers watch as a mushroom cloud expands on the horizon, the crazed General Patton having fired a nuke at them in the previous book’s climax.

Stone and his crew escaped, but the brother of Merya (aka Stone’s latest hot American Indian flame – so far as the subgenre is concerned, the post-nuke US is almost entirely populated by hot American Indian women) was caught in the nuclear flames and melted. The Warlord’s Revenge opens on this very scene, with the group gawking at the gory puddle that was once a brave warrior – a puke-inducing puddle that Stacy goes on to describe for pages and pages, giving us our first indication of just what sort of a nasty book this is going to be. At length Stone must give the thing burial, per Merya’s wishes, and Stacy goes full-bore on the grotesque images, from steaming organs exploding to the rancid smell of the melted goop as Stone shovels it up and tosses it in a makeshift grave. 

Through all this the mushroom cloud continues to expand until it goes into the atmosphere and becomes a broiling black cloud that will follow Martin Stone throughout the the book. Another form of death that chases him relentlessly. In fact the spewing acid rain is a sort of motif Stacy returns to again and again, with the novel even ending on the image. Death is everywhere in The Warlord’s Revenge, as are the ghosts of the past – Stone again and again mulls over the futility of his life, how he is “already dead” but doesn’t know it, how the entire planet is doomed.

It doesn’t help that he’s surrounded by fools. The book starts off one way, and admittedly I’m glad it changes course soon after. But initially it looks like we’re going to get a full book about Stone being saddled with his new responsibility as leader of these Indians and tank-riding soldiers. But eventually he sends them off on their own journey – dispensing anti-rad pills to people in the nuke blast radius – and gets back to being the loner we prefer him to be. It just takes a while to get there. We have to deal for a while with the annoying Leaping Elk, an Indian who resents “white man” Stone and goes out of his way to defy him, even putting his hand on a radiation-burned tank. This results in Leaping Elk’s hand being deformed to grotesque proportions, and Stacy goes for more gross-out stuff as he waves it around in his growing insanity.

Stacy doesn’t forget the hardcore stuff, though; despite the general air of grimy despair, Stone still finds the time to bang Merya in full-bore graphic splendor. Stacy has always delivered some of the more explicit moments of sleaze in the genre, and he doesn’t disappoint here: “The entire organ entered the beautiful Cheyenne warrior in a second, stunning her with its thickness and length.” After which Stone sends Merya on her, uh, merry way; Stacy himself seems to be bored with the whole “Stone as a leader of men” idea, and the two say their goodbyes, Merya going off with her tribe.

Stone himself is headed for a remote mountaintop retreat in Coloroda his family once used as a vacation spot. Early in the book we get a brief return to Stone’s post-nuke bunker, that paradise-like fortress with running water, electricity, food, and everything else one could possibly want – you still have to wonder why Stone just doesn’t find himself a woman and just stay there permanently, forgetting about the hellish outside world. But Stone finds that April, his perennially-missing or abducted sister, has been here before him, leaving a note behind. The last time we saw April was at the end of #3: The Madman’s Mansion, where she escaped the Dwarf’s depraved mansion with the assistance of snake oil salesman Doc Kennedy.

April informs Stone that the Mafia are after them, in revenge for the events in that previous book; Stone killed a Mafia bigwig named Scalzanni, and now his brother, Joey, has sworn revenge. Joey Scalzanni then is the “warlord” of the title, but he’s not in the book much and doesn’t really make an impression on the reader, other than that he was a butcher pre-WWIII and now uses his skills with hooked blades to fillet his opponents. Now he runs a “shopping mall of crime” in Keenesburg, Colorado, as Stone learns from a dying Doc Kennedy – Stone coming across the man’s stab-riddled body at that mountaintop retreat, left to die in the ever-present acid rain. As expected, the Mafia tracked them down, Scalzanni stabbed Doc a whole bunch, and April’s been friggin’ kidnapped yet again. She is of course being held as bait at Scalzanni’s place.

Stacy’s version of the Mafia is sort of the logical progression of the one in James Dockery’s The Butcher; rather than goons in suits who discuss “whackings” over pasta, Stacy’s are superderformed ghouls, more monsters than men. Scalzanni’s “shopping mall” takes the perversions of the Dwarf’s mansion in the third volume and expands upon them – a customer can buy every weapon possible, but also there’s a section of nude women in chains up for the highest bidder. But this is all kid’s stuff, really. There’s a noxious swamp out back where corpses are tossed – each room with a handy chute for cadaver disposal – and again it’s all very splatterpunk with the copious descriptions of floating eyeballs and guts. Even Stone’s faithful dog Excaliber pukes at the sight(!). There’s also a nightclub where a male and a female corpse have sex for the viewing enjoyment of the audience, controlled by mechanisms inserted inside their decomposing forms.

In addition there’s also a torture wing, in which Stone briefly finds himself – he’s knocked out and captured twice in the book, almost back to back. To make it even more lame, he’s saved both times by an “old whore” named Peaches who now serves as a house hooker at Scalzanni’s; she was one of the hookers Stone freed from the Dwarf’s place at the end of the third volume. Here Stone has the soles of his feet punctured, but lamely Scalzanni has to take off for a deal or something, thus leaving Stone the opportunity to escape. He frees the other victims in the torture chamber, and the sad bunch serves up another example of the morbid “humor” that runs throughout:

Not one of them should have been alive. [Stone] walked over to them, and those that could, stared back at him with barely opened eyes. One guy with his head in a spike-filled mask; one guy with his body in a coffin piercing him from neck to groin; one guy with nails hammered into his head so he looks[sp] like a bloody ice-cream cone with three-penny sprinkles; one guy with all his skinned peeled off so he looked like an overgrown, peeled grape; and one guy with only the top of him left, and all his guts ready to spill out over the floor like a broken garbage bag. Just the kind of crowd Stone loved to hang out with. 

This is just one of the many splatterpunk-esque elements in the novel. There’s also a part straight out of a horror novel where Stone comes across an army of cockroaches on the destroyed highways of Colorado. He also runs into a pack of post-nuke flagellants who whip themselves into gory ribbons in atonement for mankind’s sins. In fact this horror element takes over the novel, to the extent that there isn’t much action per se, at least not when compared to previous books. It’s mostly just Stone ruminating over the futility of this hellish world as he drives across Colorado, encountering one grotesque horror after another.

Even the stuff with Scalzanni isn’t developed as much as it should be, though his send-off is appropriate, taking place by that corpse swamp behind his mall. The finale brings the cover painting (again by Norm Eastman) to life: Stone gets on his Harley and barrels through the mall, firing the machine gun and rocket launcher on his bike. He ends up destroying the whole place, which proves to be kind of dumb, as right afterwards that radioactive cloud that’s been following him the entire novel finally breaks, and as we leave him Stone is scrambling for shelter from the acid rain.

Overall I found The Warlord’s Revenge too grim and dour to be fun; I hate to speculate, but the idea I got from the book is that Stacy knew his own end was near and was sort of working through things in the text. Of course, my interpretation is likely colored by my knowledge of what happened to Stacy, but that’s the impression I got – to the extent that this one sort of creeped me out. Which is recommendation enough to check out the book, I guess. I didn’t read this one when I was a kid – the previous volume was the last one I got – but I’m curious what I would’ve thought of it at the time.

Monday, December 18, 2017

The Last Ranger #5: The War Weapons


The Last Ranger #5: The War Weapons, by Craig Sargent
October, 1987  Popular Library

The fifth volume of The Last Ranger is basically part two of the previous volume; it opens immediately after the apocalyptic events of The Rabid Brigadier, with Martin “The Last Ranger” Stone determined to stop insane General Patton III before Patton can carry out his threat of nuking Colorado – just so he can kill Stone. 

But to tell the truth, I wasn’t really crazy about the previous book, and General Patton’s a bit too cliched a villain for my tastes, so I found myself enjoying The War Weapons the least of all the Last Ranger novels yet. Mostly because this one follows the “Stone joins the military” premise of the previous book, with Stone this time commanding a squad of raw recruits on the mad dash to find Patton’s nuclear silo. And it’s pretty clear that Jan “Craig Sargent” Stacy was having a hard time filling up a whole book this time, as to tell the truth not much happens; much of the narrative is Stone sitting in a tank, trying to navigate it through post-nuke Colorado.

This was the last volume of the series I bought when it was fresh on the bookstore shelves; in fact a memory I’ve carried around for 30 years now is the day I happened to go into my local WaldenBooks store, where I bought all my new men’s adventure paperbacks, and there was a kid my age (13 or so) standing there. I didn’t know him; he said he was from a few towns over or somesuch, and rarely came to this mall. We got in a conversation about The Last Ranger, and it was the only time I’d ever talked to someone else about the genre I loved so much. We were geeking out about the series, and in particular I recall how we both were laughing excitedly about the part in The Madman’s Mansion where Stone threw the depraved dwarf Poet out of a window – we both hoped the damn freak was dead for real. 

Then the part I always remember is we were wondering when “the new one” might be coming out…and the kid happened to look down at the shelf and was he like, “Look – the new one is out!” And lo and behold there was The Last Ranger #5: The War Weapons sitting on the shelf. But only one copy was left! The kid excitedly grabbed it up, and then, in a display of kindness that still makes me tear up despite the grizzled bastard life has made of me, the kid handed me the book, saying he’d find his own copy at the mall that was closer to where he lived. So of course I bought it; I wonder whatever happened to that kid, but I do recall that from then on when I went to that store I always wondered if I’d run into him again, though I never did.

But anyway this was, fittingly, the last one I ever bought, and reading it again all these years later I experinced occasional bouts of déjà vu, so I defintely read it back then. (Unsurprisingly, the parts I remembered were the ones with gory violence and hardcore sex!) I guess though this was around the time my interest in the men’s adventure genre was beginning to wane. Or maybe I just didn’t like it as much as the previous four volumes back then, either. About the most positive thing I can say about this one is that it really does read like the second half of The Rabid Brigadier, but then pretty much every volume has picked up directly after the one before; it’s mentioned in the text of this one that Martin Stone’s only been roaming around post-nuke America for a month.

As we’ll recall, in the last book Stone joined General Patton’s New American Army, quickly ascended through the ranks until Patton looked upon him as his future replacement, and then abruptly realized that Patton was really a sadist, one who was looking to destroy America and rebuild it in his own image. Stone managed to destroy, at much page count, Patton’s nuclear warhead, only to find out on the last page that Patton actually had more nukes at his disposal. So The War Weapons opens with Stone standing in the ashes of the nuclear silo, fighting off a few surviving NAA troops. As ever Stacy delights in the gore, indluging in a dark comedy vibe that at times reaching David Alexander heights: “The slug tore into the sniper’s head and whipped his brain tissue into instant mouse, servable at all the best parties.”

Stone stumbles across the group of men he went through basic training with, in the previous volume. Humorously, Stacy can’t seem to figure out how many of them there are, though gradually he settles on ten. But only a few of them are named; the two most memorable are the similarly-named Bo and Bull. The former is the one person Stone feels he can trust in the group, the latter is the one he trusts the least – Bull, a big sonofabitch, tangled with Stone in the previous book, and got his ass kicked by the Last Ranger. Stone is able to talk the guys out of killing him as a “traitor” and quickly convinces them of Patton’s insanity, and that he must be stopped before he sets off one of his nukes.

Here The War Weapons settles in for the long haul; the squad appropriates a trio of Bradley III tanks, taking them from a group of bikers in another gory battle. But the book almost assumes the vibe of the C.A.D.S. series, with too much time-wasting and technical detail as Stone quickly trains the men on various aspects of the tanks, and then they set off across the blasted ruins of Colorado, encountering various setbacks, usually ones of nature. Flashing back to his work on the early volumes of Doomsday Warrior, Stacy even has the group encounter freak nuke-spawn weather, with the tanks at one point buried under several feet of sand. Again evidencing the gooy nature of the series, Stone’s loyal pitbull Excaliber digs them out.

Around here is a part that had me on that déjà vu trip; Stone leaves his men for a bit and secretly heads back to the Bunker his father built here in the mountains of Colorado, where Stone spent the past five years of his life before leaving it in the first volume. For some reason I always recall these Bunker scenes; it must’ve resonated with me as a kid that Stone had a “safe space” (in the lame modern parlance) in the post-nuke world. That Stone has never considered finding himself a woman (not to mention his ever-missing sister April, who hasn’t been seen since the third volume) and just living safely and easily in the idllyic home, leaving the blasted US to its fate, is reason I guess why he’s “the Last Ranger” (a title, by the way, which is actually used to describe Stone in this one).

But for once there’s trouble in this little paradise; just as Stone’s tacked up the “painting of Michelangelo’s Creation” which Patton gave him in the previous book (despite the fact that the Creation is a ceiling fresco and not a painting), Stone’s attacked by a group of assassins who have secretly followed him here. NAA soldiers who claim to Stone before killing him that there’s a traitor in his group, one who dropped them a dime that Stone had just left camp. Stone manages to take out two and Excaliber kills the other two in another action scene that’s even heavier on the gore. We also get another glimpse at that proto-internet Stone’s dad created; Stone accesses it to learn what nuke silos are in the area. Here we also learn that Stone was a big fan of Aquaman as a kid, having named his pet hamster after the hero – Stone’s dad having made the hamster’s name the password to access this info.

The saddest thing about all the egregious tank stuff is that it’s ultimately pointless. Stone leads his mini-convoy to Patton’s silo, only to learn it’s a trap. Several more Bradleys come out and surround them, and Stone learns which of his men is Patton’s insider (it’s neither Bull nor Bo). There follows a bit of sadism as Stone is beaten to a veritable pulp, with one of his eyes swelling to baseball size. An ironic bit here has Stone uttering this badass (but frowned-up today) line to his tormentors: “I’ve had old women with AIDS hit at me harder than that.” Ironic because Stacy himself died of AIDS in 1989. One wonders what was going on in his mind when he wrote the line – was it just a fluke of irony or was there more it? (And I haven’t even mentioned how the song “It’s Raining Men” is referenced in the book!)

But Patton can’t just kill Stone. After having him beaten unmerciful (to quote Sol Rosenberg), Patton condemns Stone to “the death of ten million bites.” Stone, stripped and covered in syrup, is tied to an X-shaped cross and planted on a Colorado plateu, to become ant bait. He’s saved by the appearance of a gorgeous Indian babe, just as the ants are really tearing into him. This is Merya, “dauther of Fighting Bear, of the Cheyene,” a “full-breasted” American Indian beauty who goes around in a slim leather deerskin vest and not much else. She takes Stone back to her teepee and goes about healing him in the old way – ie spreading some sort of gunk on his beaten flesh and having the expected hardcore sex with him.

Once again Stacy devotes an entire chapter (16, for those taking notes) to sex – for some reason, yet another part that had me experiencing déjà vu, as I guess this part too resonated with 13 year-old me(!). And with insane lines like, “Slowly the spear of turgid flesh slid deeper and deeper into the recesses of [Merya’s] body,” how could it not? What’s most humorous here is that Stone appears to forget that this exact same thing happened to him back in the first volume – there too he was beaten near to death, only to be brought back to life thanks to the exuberant banging skills of an Indian babe. Stacy does kind of play on this, though; after a whopping orgasm or three, Merya declares Stone “a yanna, a giver a love,” which Stone muses to himself is the opposite of the “bringer of death” he was declared to be by the Ute Indians in volume #1.

Stone, despite having a few broken fingers and toes and a still-swollen eye, vows to lead the ten Indian men of Merya’s tribe on a raid upon Patton’s compound. Luckily they have a bunch of three-wheelers with autopistols jury-rigged to the handles. Merya of course goes along. But even here it’s all buildup for naught; promptly upon sneaking into Patton’s compound, Stone finds his troops lined up in a firing line. Again evidencing the goofy tone of the series, friggin’ pitbull Excaliber stands in the firing line with them. Stone of course saves the group, leading into a chaotic climactic battle which has three-wheelers and tanks going at it.

But as if again displaying the fatalist vibe of the series, Patton escapes again – and this time launches a nuke, right at Stone! Our hero just manages to high-tail it twenty miles from the compound, and, in perhaps another shout-out to Doomsday Warrior, finds shelter in a tunnel that’s built beneath a highway, which of course brings to mind the origins of that earlier series’s Century City. It’s all a bit hard to swallow as Stone, Merya, Excaliber, and a few others survive a friggin’ nuclear blast only miles away. But in the aftermath Merya assumes that Patton too is dead, having fired the warhead from another silo not far away. Stone figures she’s right, but he’s uncertain – personally I won’t figure the guy is dead until we see his bullet-ridden corpse, but I hope the series moves on to a more-interesting villain in the next installment.

And here we leave Martin Stone, wondering how much radiation he’s absorbed in this blast, yet another megababe of an Indian beauty at his side, loyal Excaliber at his heels, and his sister April still missing. But whereas this is where I left the series all those years ago, this time I’ll continue on with it – but here’s hoping it gets back to the insane, lurid vibe of The Madman’s Mansion and moves away from this New American Army stuff.

Have I mentioned yet that the covers for this series are courtesy men’s adventure magazine legend Norm Eastman?

Thursday, October 6, 2016

The Last Ranger #4: The Rabid Brigadier


The Last Ranger #4: The Rabid Brigadier, by Craig Sargent
August, 1987  Popular Library

The Last Ranger picks up immediately after the previous volume, with hero Martin Stone sprawled out unconscious in the snow, the ruins of the Dwarf’s depraved villa still burning in the distance. Unfortunately the “slave-whores” Stone freed in the final pages of the previous book are gone, having knocked him out, taken all of his weapons, and raced off into the post-nuke night. Meanwhile Stone’s sister April and his new buddy Dr. Kennedy have escaped – and by the way go unseen this entire volume.

But at least we get Stone’s faithful canine companion Excaliber, who still waits where Stone left him midway through Madman’s Mansion. When the two hop on Stone’s weaponized Harley and blast off into the night, the reader expects that they will reunite with April and Kennedy and the series will proceed on from there. However, Jan “Craig Sargent” Stacy has other plans; this volume, instead of continuing on with the building plot of the previous three books, will instead get mired in an elaborate “New American Army” setup that Stone is drafted into.

Easily my least favorite volume yet, The Rabid Brigadier features hardly any of the stuff that makes The Last Ranger so fun, and is for the most part an endless training and initiation sequence Stone goes through. Yet I recall really enjoying this one when it was brand new and I was 12 years old. Reading it this time, I found myself bored for long portions, something I could never say about those earlier three installments. All the crazed, gore-filled sadism of those books is gone, and this one’s basically “The Last Ranger joins the army.” 

Calling to mind the similar survivalist fiction Stacy co-wrote in the first few Doomsday Warrior books, The Rabid Brigadier features a practically endless sequence early on in which Stone and Excaliber are nearly swept up by a massive tidal wive that’s rampaging through Colorado – courtesy that post-nuke freak weather, of course. It’s page-filling at its best as our two heroes struggle desperately to outrace the huge waves; the goofiness expected of this series presents itself when Stone finally remembers a friggin’ raft his dad (who was gifted with an almost superhuman sense of foresight, it would appear) had built into the bottom of the bike.

With the push of a button Stone inflates the raft and he and the dog are nearly in the clear, but the waves are pushing them toward a cliff. They’re saved by the last-second appearance of an army helicopter, which pulls man, dog, and bike clear of the waves. These young soldiers are members of the New American Army, which has been founded within the past few years under the leadership of “Supreme Commander Patton.” Stone meanwhile falls into a stupor; in the opening pages, during a savage battle with a group of ear-collecting cannibals, he was bitten on the hand. Now it’s infected, and Stone is sent off to the NAA infirmary.

When Stone wakes up and finds a hot-bodied blonde nurse at his bedside, the veteran reader knows exactly where it will be heading. This is Elizabeth Williamson, whose sad story has it that she was a refugee saved by the NAA as it moved through the area, “cleansing” the country of cannibals, pirates, and criminals. The expected shagging takes a while, but expectedly it occurs, and humorously Stacy basically just plagiarizes from the sex scene he wrote in the previous book, complete with the description of Stone “mining” the girl with his massive prong. And just as always, once Stone’s banged the girl she’s dropped from the narrative, not mentioned again until the end.

As mentioned, the majority of the book details Stone’s hellish trials during the two-day basic training course all NAA recruits must endure. Stone you see has decided to join, despite his long-borne hatred of authority in general and the military in particular. We are reminded again that Stone’s dad was a total ass, an army man right down to the bones, and his stern nature resulted in a son who was a born rebel. But Stone figures the NAA has the right idea, as he’s been doing alone what they’re looking to do as an army: clear away the criminal, rapist riff-raff and rebuild America.

Curiously, one of the initial tests Stone and the recruits must undergo is ritually cutting themselves, and they use the same blade. I couldn’t help but recall here how Jan Stacy died of AIDs. But Stone has more worries than contagious diseases; the practically-endless training has them going through one hellish thing after another, from shooting at fresh corpses to running a death-trap course through thorns and quicksand. There’s even lots of brutal fighting courtesy ninja-type ambushers who spring out of the thorns and attack them all with fighting staffs.

As expected, Stone is a total badass and gets through unscathed, saving his fellows and uniting them as a team – subtle commentary from Stacy that our hero, despite his rebellious nature, is a true leader. In fact Stone has done so well that General Patton himself wants to meet him. An older vet who carries twin .45s at his waist, Patton bears a similarity to Stone’s father, and indeed actually knew Major Clayton Stone, claiming that he temporarily served as Stone’s commander back in ‘Nam. Unfortunately, Stacy doesn’t do much with any of this. The potential is there for a father/son dynamic between Patton and Stone, but it’s all cast aside within just a few pages.

Instead, Stone’s sent out on a mission, commanding a squad of tanks. Their assingment is to wipe out a village of cannibals. But even here we are denied the crazed nature of action scenes from previous volumes, with Stone more so trying to figure out how to operate the massive tanks. And here we get the first glimpse of the evil nature of the NAA, as the men in Stone’s crew blow away the surrendering members of the village, even the women and children. Stone, “crying like a baby,” is informed that Patton has ordered “no enemies, no survivors.” Stone cannot accept the wanton disregard for life.

Stone is even more shocked when Patton reveals that he has a nuclear warhead, one which he plans to launch on a meeting of Mafia bigwigs only a hundred miles away. In a completely goofy sequence, Patton takes Stone to his handy nuclear silo several miles from the NAA base in New Junction, Colorado, and shows off his ballistic warhead. Despite claiming to have run a similar silo before WWIII, Patton doesn’t realize that a nuke strike so close to the base will wipe all of them out. Here Stone gets further proof of Patton’s insanity, and vows to stop him.

In a development a little hard to buy, Stone decides to unite with the Mafia guys and their biker comrades, ie his former enemies, as Patton is the greater threat. Stone claims to hate these guys, but feels that they’re small fish, only doing their own thing within their own spheres of influence, whereas Patton wants to wipe out the world. So then it would appear so far as Stone’s reasoning goes that raping and killing is okay, just so long as you keep your activities to like a few square miles or something. Strange!

The Mafia-biker meeting is the highlight, as Stacy writes it more like some Satanic gathering; the leader is even described as a craven-faced ghoul who looks like Boris Karloff. Stone sells out his own troops, letting the mobsters and bikers slit their throats (it’s okay, though, as all the NAA soldiers are bad guys, or something), and he leads them all in the commandeered tanks on an assault upon the NAA base. Even here the action is mostly perfunctory, with Stone tearing through the base and finding Excaliber, who has been locked up in the pens – once again the dog spends the majority of the narrative off-page.

The finale sees a desperate Stone tearing ass on his Harley for that nuclear silo, with the warhead launched despite his best efforts. One is reminded again that this series has no grounding in reality when Stone blasts the warhead out of the air with an anti-aircraft gun. Oh, and then Excaliber pisses on the missile’s wreckage! But Patton is gone, and I seem to recall that he appears again (as does the Dwarf), but meanwhile Nurse Elizabeth is dead (remember her?), somehow murdered by Patton during his escape, even though she was all the way back at the base, waiting for Stone to come back and get her, and the last we saw him Patton was still at the nuclear silo.

But that’s that – Stone’s crestfallen, and as a kicker he’s learned that Patton has even more nukes, so all this has been moot. Well, here’s hoping the next volume gets things back on track. And I seem to recall the next volume was the last one I bought when this series was being published, so this was around the point when my enthusiasm for The Last Ranger was beginning to fade.

Monday, July 25, 2016

The Last Ranger #3: The Madman's Mansion


The Last Ranger #3: The Madmans Mansion, by Craig Sargent
December, 1986  Popular Library

Strangely, I didn’t recall much of this third volume of The Last Ranger, though I’m sure I eagerly snatched it off the WaldenBooks shelves in ’86 and quickly read it, just as I had the previous two volumes. Yet as I re-read The Madman’s Mansion all these years later, damned if any of it seemed familiar; only Norm Eastman’s typically-great cover sparked anything in the dusty ol’ memory banks.

At any rate this one opens just two days after the previous volume. Hero Martin Stone speeds from Boulder, Colorado, where as we’ll recall he took on both a death-cult and a biker gang called The Guardians of Hell. Stone is determined to save his cipher of a sister, April, who was abducted by the Guardians and taken off to Vernal, Utah, where she will be put into the depraved hands of Poet, aka The Dwarf, a quadrapalegic sadist who goes around in a wheelcair with guns in the armrests and who turns out to be a lot more important than he seemed in his previous appearances – from his fortress in Vernal he hosts a deluxe watering hole for the new rulers of this post-nuke ‘90s America, from Mafioso to drug dealers to bikers.

While it takes its time getting to the good stuff, The Madman’s Mansion at least opens with the outrageous gore Jan Stacy (aka “Craig Sargent”) excelled in. Stone is waylaid by a group of bikers as he continues his escape through Colorado, riding as ever his armored and armed Harley Electroglide with ever-faithful pit bull Excaliber clutching the seat behind him. Our hero makes short work of the hapless scum: “But Stone was already firing forward again, taking out one more, with a stream of five slugs that scissored down his face, cutting a line from forehead to chin that seemed to just open up and spew out everything within it – eyeballs, brain tissue, tongue, and teeth – into a bubbling stew of parts in the road, a steaming smorgasbord just inches from the gushing corpse that dove forward into the white snow.”

But soon after this opening chaos the book settles into a measured pace for the next hundred or so pages. We do however get a return trip to “the Bunker,” ie the nuclear shelter Stone spent the previous five years in, buried in the Colorado mountains. I always enjoyed these scenes when I read this series as a kid, but even here I had no recollection of the Bunker sequence in this volume, which sees Stone opening up tons of canned food for Excaliber as repayment for saving Stone’s life so many times. Afterwards the pit bull is a bloated lump that can only lay in misery on the floor – once again Stacy develops a humorous rapport between man and dog, with many funny scenes between the two. 

Stone again consults the sort of proto-internet his father, Major Stone, left behind for him in the Bunker, a computer interface which answers any military-strategy question Stone might have. In this case he asks how a lone person can attack a heavily-guarded fortress, for Stone has learned that the Dwarf’s Vernal retreat – which was once a posh ski lodge – is guarded by hundreds of men, many of them former insane asylum patients. But Stacy holds off on the carnage, with the book sort of detouring into some of the goofier stuff one might encounter in Stacy’s other post-nuke series, Doomsday Warrior, as Stone stops off in “Mom’s Diner,” a bed and breakfast on the outskirts of Colorado, where he gets in a poker game that becomes a gunfight.

Here Stacy introduces a character I had no recollection of: Dr. Abraham Reagan Kennedy, an old hippie-type who drives around the blasted country in a “house-truck” (complete with chimney), selling “Certified Snake Oil.” Stacy is much too enamored with Kennedy, giving over pages and pages to his blatherings, particularly when it comes to selling snake oil. But Kennedy proves to be Stone’s in to the Dwarf’s resort, as Kennedy is hired each year to put on a magic show there. And guess what, that’s just where he’s headed right now. So Stone hauls his massive bike onto Kennedy’s big truck (formerly a moving truck), which is both a home and a store on wheels, stuffed with the various bric-a-brac Kennedy sells to eager clientele.

More flashbacks to Doomsday Warrior ensue as Stone and Kennedy drive into the freak weather that was customary in that earlier series: a tornado-blizzard that goes on for too many pages and, despite the danger Stacy strives to convey, doesn’t have a chance in hell of actually killing our hero, his new best friend, or his faithful dog. If anything this scene just provides the setup for another goofy Stone-Excaliber moment, as a mud-drenched Stone, who rode out the storm from beneath the truck, demands that Excaliber – who stayed nice and clean inside the truck – jump out and also get muddy. This the dog does with joyful aplomb, once again coming out on top in this latest goofy exchange with his master.

But a bit after page 100 The Madman’s Mansion takes a change for the better, abruptly becoming the most lurid offering yet. The Dwarf’s plush resort is of course the titular “mansion,” and here insanity reigns; the nation’s new “elite” come here to cavort in the most outrageous, most sleazy manners possible, and Jan Stacy plumbs the darkest recesses of his capable imagination for some truly over-the-top shit, like a roulette wheel where the “ball” is a severed head to crazed “bloodcleaner” maids who worry about “flying penises” that might eat them. The Dwarf has staffed the place with former asylum patients, and as we know Stacy had a penchant for nutcases-turned-enforcers, as memorably shown in C.A.D.S. #1.

The former high-class ski lodge is now the stomping grounds of bikers, Mafia bigwigs, and scantily-clad female chattel; women are so disposable here that a shocked Stone even finds himself stumbling over casually-discarded female corpses as he’s shown to his grand suite by a jaded preteen bellhop. Later Stone will find sections of the lodge catering to the most perverted whims imaginable, including a room where girls are strung up and slowly sliced to ribbons. The Dwarf also runs a lucrative “white slavery” business, and Stone will gradually discover that this is the fate the sadist has in mind for April. Meanwhile Stone, after killing a Mafia thug in a knife fight, enjoys the explicit sex scene which is mandatory for the series.

I forgot to mention – Stone, due to the events in the previous volume, is wearing a disguise: he’s now “Vito ‘Pimp’ Staloni,” Mafia bigshot from New York, clad in a pink pimpsuit with violet sunglasses (the clothing provided by Kennedy). At any rate a blonde bimbo with an awesome bod named Triste is so turned on by Stone’s killing of the Mafia thug that she throws herself at him. After dancing in a room with an all-female, all-naked band and mutilated corpses arrayed along a clear floor beneath the dancers’s feet, Triste and Stone head back to his room for a “long night of super sex.”

Stacy devotes the entirety of Chapter Fourteen to the sexual shenanigans, and unlike in the Doomsday Warrior books it doesn’t get very purple-prosed, instead sticking to hardcore description throughout. It goes on for pages and pages as these two get along in the most XXX-detailed manner imaginable: “It was as if he were mining her. The harder he pumped, the more she seemed to open. As if her body had lived just for this night, her breasts just for his hands to squeeze, her entrance just for him to find the full depth of. Then he suddenly seemed to go half mad himself and started banging into her like a jackhammer.” And so on!!

Finally, in the last third of the book, things started to get somewhat familiar – and indeed made me wonder if the book had been so OTT that 12-year-old me just couldn’t handle it and promptly forgot everything! Anyway Stone, after checking out more of the Resort’s horrors, finds a slavery auction going on, beautiful, nude young women trotted out and pawed by an obese auctioneer. Who will be surprised when one of them turns out to be none other than April? Stone bids desperately for his sister and wins at exorbitant cost, even though he has no money. But it turns out to be a trap – when he goes to collect his winnings, Stone is instead bonked on the head and captured by Dwarf, who has been expecting him.

Here The Madman’s Mansion becomes even more like an ‘80s horror paperback. First we get a spine-chiller of a chapter where Stone is cuffed amd thrown in a brackish pool while rats, big centipedes, and various other creepy critters come after him. He passes out and comes to at a dinner table with Dwarf himself, presented with a banquet of delicacies. But man Stacy was in a gross-out mood when he penned this one, as it turns out the food is human flesh – “deveined” eyeballs for potatoes and even a poor young woman (nude, of course) with a spigot in her throat, so the Dwarf can tap it and hurridly share the “wine” before she dies! There’s even a bizarre bit reminiscent of The Butcher #2 where a massive snake eats another girl.

Stone, still in cuffs, must now fight a seven-foot mutant with “muscles that would have made Arnold Schwarzenegger turn in his bodybuilding badge,” with a face that’s “a mass of tissue like bloody pudding.” This knock-down, drag-out fight is particularly brutal, as is everything else in this volume, with Stone literally knocking the mutant’s brain out! When an outraged Dwarf orders Stone’s death, hell suddenly breaks out with the appearance of Kennedy, tossing grenades. Deus ex machina be damned, Kennedy also has the “blueprints” for the Resort, and in the commotion they escape to the elevator shafts and rappel up to Dwarf’s floor-spanning suite on the 18th floor.

Even though he was just down there in the chaos of the ground floor, Dwarf’s already somehow up here on the top floor – who cares about realism, anyway? – and he’s leading a bunch of dudes in robes as they prepare to sacrifice poor April, nude and nailed to a cross! Did I mention it’s Christmas? With “tommy guns” roaring Stone and Kennedy save the day, and here occurs about the only thing I remembered from The Madman’s Mansion, as a victorious Stone kicks Dwarf off his wheelchair, picks him up by the throat, and hurls the misshapen bastard out the window! Indeed I got such a vicarious thrill out of this all those years ago that I remember eagerly discussing this scene with a fellow Last Ranger fan I ran into at the Country Club Mall in LaVale, Maryland sometime in early 1987, when the fourth volume came out – and I remember the kid and I both reacted with the same excitement when we saw that the fourth volume was sitting there on the shelf; back in those pre-internet days you had no idea when new books were coming out.

Unfortunately though, we readers see that Dwarf does not die – he plummets through the frozen-over pool and bobs to the surface, “to mean to sink,” and as I recall he returns in the next volume to wreak his vengeance. Meanwhile Stone’s acting a little too concerned over April; intentionally or not, Stacy sort of hints at a more-than-siblings relationship between the two, with Stone fretting over the girl’s nude body. At any rate he lets her and Kennedy escape separately – and believe it or not April finally gets a few lines of dialog, revealing a fiery temper – while Stone meanwhile kills a bunch of guards, blows up the resort, and saves a mack truck full of “slavewhores.”

 Anyway, this one was pretty crazy when it got going, but the middle section was a bit too padded and goofy – I could’ve done with less of Kennedy’s “snake oil” blatherings. But man when it got out there it really got out there, and many sections of The Madman’s Mansion could’ve come out of the “splatterpunk” subgenre of horror fiction that was popular at the time.

Monday, June 1, 2015

The Last Ranger #2: The Savage Stronghold


The Last Ranger #2: The Savage Stronghold, by Craig Sargent
October, 1986  Popular Library

I had another fun time revisiting my nerdlinger youth, reading the second volume of the Last Ranger series. This one was just as entertaining as the first, and I can see again why this series so resonated with my 11-year-old self: it’s awesome! Jan Stacy once again turns in a goofy but violent tale about a dude, his dog, his Harley, and the post-nuke world in which they live.

Picking up two weeks after that first volume, Stone and his pit bull, who we learn here he’s named Excalibur, are heading deeper into Colorado; Stone’s witless sister April was captured by the biker maniacs the Guardians of Hell in Denver at the climax of that first installment, and Stone’s hellbent to save her. The biggest boon to the series is the introduction of Excalibur; Stacy turns it into a buddy novel, with lots of banter between Stone and the dog. Not that the “bullterrier” can talk, of course, but his nonverbal responses and reactions to Stone throughout the novel actually made me laugh.

Stone by the way was consistently depicted on the covers as wearing sleeveless fatigues and goggles (I disagree with Zwolf – I think the goggles look cool!), but in the text we learn that he goes for more “realistic” post-nuke garb: jeans, a few sweaters, and a leather jacket. He also wears a motorcycle helmet with visor, so there go the goggles. Also I don’t believe the cover artist ever properly captured Stone’s Harley, which not only is an Electroglide 1200 but more importantly has a .50-caliber machine gun built onto its frame, the barrel jutting out from above the headlight.

The first novel spent most of its time world-building; The Savage Stronghold gets right to the good stuff with Stone blowing away a group of mutants who have erected a barrier outside some road near Pueblo, Colorado. They turn out to be cannibals too, with Stone coming across the grisly remains of one of their feasts. He blows away the half-eaten corpses, thinking them an affront to god – that is, whatever god allowed Earth to become such a hellhole. Running throughout the novel is a nicely-done subtext of Stone’s growing bitterness toward this world, and the life that was denied him by the nuclear holocaust.

Another interesting element Stacy builds in The Savage Stronghold is how 23-year-old Martin Stone slowly begins to think of himself in the role of a savior or at least a hero of the post-nuke world. The series shares the blackly humorous cynicism of David Alexander’s Phoenix series, but The Last Ranger is even more acidic, with even the narrative tone dripping with despair (I lost count of the number of times “fucking” was used as an adjective – ie, “Stone wondered how long until the whole fucking world collapsed,” and etc). Stone begins to feel that he is the only person on the planet who still cares, and as the narrative proceeds he begins to help those unfortunates he meets.

The first such person is an emaciated man crucified on a wooden cross outside of Pueblo. (Stone’s shocked reaction to the sight is another example of Stacy’s subtle dark humor: “Jesus Christ!”) After Stone cuts him down the man proceeds to explain that he was put up there by the Brothers of the Same, who rule Pueblo. Then a few of the Brothers show up: hulking, gray-robed sadists whose faces are hidden by cowls. They employ these cattle prod sort of things that shoot out electric lashes; one of them fries the poor guy Stone just saved, and Stone makes quick but gory work of them. Stacy retains the ultra-gore of the Doomsday Warrior series; anytime someone dies, we get thorough detail of brains gushing, eyeballs exploding, etc.

Stone eventually learns that The Brothers of the Same preach the equality of sameness. If you are in any way different from their definition of “sameness” (as defined in their massive handbook) then you are punished. Stacy has a lot of fun spoofing organized religion, though it is a little hard to understand how or why the Brothers work with the Guaridans of Hell, whom they co-rule Pueblo with; you’d think each would naturally hate the other. Stone’s plan is to pose as a trapper, here in Pueblo to trade animal hides, and he quickly makes a sale with Straight Razor, aka Straight, the pot-bellied Guardian boss with a penchant for knife fighting – and also the man who stole away with Stone’s sister.

For vague reasons Straight has decided to marry April, and he’ll do so in a Brothers-hosted ceremony on Sunday, two days away. Also Straight’s into dog fights, and insists that Stone bring his mutt to that night’s fight. Much deliberation on Stone’s part, as he feels terrible that he’s about to toss the trusting pit bull to the dogs, literally, but it all turns out moot – Excalibur, unsurprisingly, is a born fighter, and makes quick and gory work of Straight’s previously-undefeated champion. But when Stone demands April as his reward, he’s outed by the surprise appearance of Poet, that armless and legless dwarf who made Stone’s life hell back in Denver.

Shot up and bleeding to death, Stone manages to escape, but he’s forced to leave Excalibur behind. In true Doomsday Warrior fashion Stone manages to get saved by a group of rebels who live in an abandoned gold mine outside of town. And sure enough there’s also a smokin’-hot chick there (Melissa) who takes an immediate interest in Stone, and vice versa; cue a super-explicit sex scene that goes on for a few pages as Melissa crawls in bed with the convalescing Stone. Unlike Doomsday Warrior it doesn’t get purple-prosed at all, and in fact is probably more explicit than what you’d read in most any other men’s adventure novel of the ‘80s (excluding only the Depth Force series).

“If I can fuck I can fight,” claims a still-injured Stone, and thus armed with an Uzi and some old dynamite he limps back into Pueblo on Sunday morning to save his sister. Instead he’s promptly caught by the Brothers and taken to their Temple of Pain, where he manages to free himself after some sadistic stuff. Stacy gets even more sadistic with a bizarro part where Stone discovers a section where the Brothers keep their human experiments, a scene capped off where Stone finds one of them still living, even though his brain has been removed and is sitting in a tank of water (Stone blows it apart in another of the novel’s hilariously gruesome moments).

The finale is mostly made up of Stone blasting the church of the Brothers, right in the middle of April’s wedding ceremony. Speaking of April she continues to be such a cipher – Stacy doesn’t even bother describing her this time – that the reader has a hard time understanding why Stone’s in such a tither over saving her. Also I believe she speaks for the first time in the series here – “Martin, I thought you were dead!” – before she’s pulled away and Stone gets in a savage knife fight with Straight. After this it’s a lot of dynamite tossing and then Stone and Excalibur standing in the rubble and taking out hordes of Brothers – that is, with a little last-second help from the Pueblo freedom force.

By novel’s end April is still missing; Stone is informed by one of the surviving Guardians that Poet took her off to his “central headquarters” in Utah. Even Stone is uncertain over this, as he’d thought Poet was nothing more than a court jester. But apparently he’s some post-nuke bigwig, and more importantly now he’s got April. So now Stone must continue on toward Utah, but Melissa insists that he stay for the night, so she can bathe him and feed him – “And then we can just fuck and fuck all night.” Now that’s a post-nuke babe you stick around for, but Stone’s damn determined to save his sister.

In my reviews of the early Doomsday Warrior books I wondered endlessly who was the “better” author: Jan Stacy or Ryder Syvertsen. Reading The Savage Stronghold, I see now that all of that was moot: the two authors have such similar writing styles that I wondered if Syvertsen had written this book, too. Seriously, the novel is filled with run-on sentences and the same sort of bombastic yet goofy tone which is prevalent in the sole-authored Syvertsen books.

That being said, The Savage Stronghold was still a lot of fun, even if it wasn’t filled with action – though as stated, when the action did go down it was incredibly graphic (both in the violence and the sex departments). What more could you ask for?

Thursday, January 2, 2014

The Last Ranger #1


The Last Ranger #1, by Craig Sargent
May, 1986  Popular Library

I had a blast re-reading this first volume of The Last Ranger. The first time I read it I was 11 years old, it was 1986, and I’d eagerly grabbed a copy of the book from the shelf at WaldenBooks. In fact over the years scenes from this novel have remained with me, so it was sort of strange to read the book again these decades later, almost like déjà vu.

The series ran for 10 volumes and is one of the best examples of the post-nuke pulp subgenre. I bought and read the first five volumes as they were published, after which my interest in the genre petered out and I moved on to sci-fi; I do know though that The Last Ranger is a rare men’s adventure series that offers a very definite conclusion in its final volume (spoiler alert: the entire planet explodes!).

But man, I was really into this series, like in a big way. I’ve written about how crazy I was about Phoenix Force, but I was just as crazy about The Last Ranger. I remember eagerly checking the shelves every time I went to WaldenBooks to see if the latest volume had come out.   And it’s easy to see why I loved it so much, as the series is obviously catered to the interests of a young boy – it’s all about a studly dude in his early twenties who, while trying to both escape from and live up to his father’s shadow, goes out to kick mutant ass and take names in a post-apocalyptic USA, armed to the teeth and riding around on a customized Harley chopper. Plus he has a pet pit bull!

As a kid I took the “Craig Sargent” by-line at face value, but in recent years as I’ve learned about house names I’ve begun to suspect it was a pseudonym. And it turns out it was, as according to this site Craig Sargent was in reality Jan Stacy – aka one half of the duo that was Ryder Stacy. This is obvious upon reading The Last Ranger, which comes off very much like Doomsday Warrior, only slightly less cartoonish. Also there’s a strange bit of irony with the Last Ranger series, which ended in 1989, the same year Stacy himself passed away, dying of AIDS…makes one wonder what thoughts went behind that whole “destruction of Earth” series conclusion.

This first volume is much more concerned with characterization than the genre norm, and indeed for the first half doesn’t much come off like a men’s adventure at all. (No fear, though, because in the second half that patented Ryder Stacy insanity kicks into full gear.) We are treated to a very long backstory about our protagonist’s father before we even get to the actual hero of the tale. Major Clayton R. Stone is that father (we'll just go ahead and assume he's related to Mark Stone), and we read about how as a teenager he was able to bluff his way into the army during WWII, becoming such a great soldier that he continued to fight in Korea and Vietnam, despite raking in a fortune in his civilian life as a munitions developer.

Martin Stone is the series protagonist, and we learn that he was born in 1972, Clayton Stone finally having met a woman and settled down (in between heading off to whatever war was currently going on). Humorously enough, Clayton Stone’s wife doesn’t get any dialog or hardly any narrative space. But we learn how Clayton Stone would try to raise young Martin in the ways of the military, but how Martin was very disinterested. Meanwhile, another child was born: April, a pretty blonde who is given even less narrative time than her mother. This leads to some unintentional comedy when later in the novel April is abducted and Martin Stone must save her; the reader is moreso like, “Stone has a sister?

Also it must be mentioned that Stacy confuses us by referring to both father and son as “Stone.” For the purposes of the review though “Stone” will refer only to Martin, who again is the true hero of the series, which isn’t very apparent throughout the first half of The Last Ranger #1. Instead we read how Clayton Stone becomes certain after the Vietnam era that a nuclear war is imminent, and thus uses his millions to buld a massive bomb shelter complex deep in the Rocky Mountains, “about 150 miles north of Denver.” This by the way is around the same location as Century City in Doomsday Warrior, so either this was an in-joke from Jan Stacy or he and Ryder Syvertsen were just crazy about that particular region.

Everyone believes the old Major is insane, but Clayton Stone becomes more and more certain that civilization is doomed. And so it is that before dawn on February 13, 1990 Clayton Stone awakes and knows in his bones that today is the fated day. He forces his family into their cars and they hightail it through the mountains, arriving at their bomb shelter complex just as the Russian-fired nuclear missiles begin to hit US soil. A double irony with that 1990 date is for one of course the fact that Jan Stacy himself didn’t live to see it, but also that this is one of the few post-nuke pulps in which WWIII doesn’t occur in 1989 – for whatever reason, ’89 was like the go-to year for writers of post-nuke pulps.

Stuck in the sprawling complex, which features all the comforts of home and more, the family goes about their life, though Stacy really doesn’t elaborate, and there are no scenes with all four of them together. Again, one could even forget there’s a Mrs. Stone and teenager April, as Stacy solely focuses upon Major Stone and son. Now that the world has ended, Stone finally heeds his father’s pleas, and thus begins to train with him, the Major bestowing all of the skills and knowledge he has learned from his many years of being a Ranger. This goes on for a period of five years, after which we’re to believe that Stone is as tough and skilled as his father, even a better shot than him (a gun range and massive arsenal being in the complex, naturally). Personally I had a very hard time believing this, given that battlefield skills are borne out of experience, not lessons from dad.

But, conveniently enough after training is complete, Major Stone dies, suffering a massive heart attack at the dinner table. (This was one of those scenes I’ve remembered over the years.) Over the past five years (the date now 1995, and Stone now 23 years old) the Major has told the family that radiation has scarred the nation and that not only is it unsafe out there, but no one survived. This by the way is another big miss on the Major’s part: his stated goal for building the complex was that the Stones would possibly have to repopulate the Earth…but meanwhile it’s just him, his wife, and their two kids! The least the Major could’ve done was bring along a mate for Stone and April, but whatever… But now that the Major’s dead Stone is able to get into his father’s previously-barred radio room, and there Stone discovers that not only is there barely any radiation out there, but also that mass pockets of hummanity have in fact survived.

Stone, who has always fought against his dad, gets really pissed at the old man, believing the family has been lied to for five years. So they all hop in a Winnebago (the complex of course well stocked with vehicles as well) and head out…where they are immediately attacked by Road Warrior-esque bikers, Stone beaten nearly to death, and both his mom and April raped and killed (though Stone later learns that April wasn’t killed and was indeed abducted by the bikers).

Pulled half-dead from the scene of the massacre, Stone is saved by a group of American Indians, of the Ute tribe. Humorously, despite civilization having ended a mere five years ago, the Utes act like it was all long in the past, talking about how “the white man” destroyed the world and etc. They also hate whites, something often drilled into Stone, but due to the obligatory “Indian honor” of pulp they are duty-bound to help the young man heal. This sequence goes on for quite a while, as Stone lives with the Utes, taking part in their ceremonies and getting closer to Chamma, an of course beautiful young Indian girl who is the only one who will really talk to Stone.

My theory is that Jan Stacy was the writer behind the psychedelic/metaphysical stuff in Doomsday Warrior, a theory which seems to be proven here with a long “magic mushroom” trip Stone goes on with the Ute shaman and several others. This is a pretty interesting sequence, with Stone et al hanging above the ground from hooks that are embedded in their chest muscles; Stone hallucinates his mother and father coming for him as zombies. And just as Doomsday Warrior was always sure to include a sex scene, so too does The Last Ranger #1, Stone and Chamma getting it on in pretty explicit detail.

Finally Stone has recovered and he leaves the Utes, trekking back to the complex. Along the way he makes his first kill, offing a pair of bikers. (Bikers come off really badly in this novel!) Stone’s return to his bunker-complex home is another of those scenes I’ve somehow always remembered, but strangely Stacy does little to play up on the feelings that arise in Stone as he comes back to the now-ghostly complex in which he shared the previous five years of his life with his now dead or missing family members. Not that this sort of soul-plumbing is typically expected from a men’s adventure novel, but as mentioned The Last Ranger #1 is a bit more focused on characterization than most others in the genre.

Another memorable sequence is Stone’s discovery of a previously-locked room in which his father kept various computers; on one of them the Major recorded all of his thoughts on warfare in encyclopedia form, for the express purpose that Stone could refer to it – and also in one of those narratively-convenient deals, the Major has also left behind an “if you’re reading this it means I’m dead” message in which he explains to Stone that he lied to the family because he knew the world would be a dangerous place, so he wanted them to stay in the bunker for at least 15 years. Of course, Stone now knows his father was right.

But now it’s payback time, and in the final quarter the novel really kicks into gear. Chamma is the one who informed Stone that April was still alive; she told him that when the Utes arrived they saw the girl hauled off, and she figures the bikers took her to Denver. She further informed him that Denver is the domain of the Guardians of Hell, an army of bikers lead by Rommel. This time Stone will be prepared for the outside world, and thus he breaks out the weaponry; the novel features the gun-porn that was mandatory in the ‘80s, which itself marks it from Doomsday Warrior, which was more fantasy-based in its weaponry, what with its “9mm assault rifles” and other imaginary guns. Stone also breaks out a customized Harley Electroglide 1200, which has a friggin’ machine gun strapped along it!

Stone now fully becomes “The Last Ranger,” using his dad’s data storehouse of warfare strategy and the bunker arsenal to kill biker scum real good. Stacy doles out the gory violence expected from “Ryder Stacy,” with lots of descriptions of brains blowing out and sliding across the floor and etc. Stacy also serves up the unexpected and quirky characters Doomsday Warrior was known for, especially in the form of Guardians of Hell boss and Denver ruler Rommel, a 400-pound mass of muscle who snorts ether and practices “Zen nihilistic hedonism.”

Insinuating himself into the Denver underworld as a biker looking for his break, Stone wastes one of Rommel’s goons in that tried-and-true method of gaining a boss’s trust by showing him how weak his underlings are. Stacy delivers a bunch of oddball characters here, from Queenie, the beautiful but sadistic leader of the Slits (ie the female branch of the Guardians of Hell) who literally emasculates any man she has sex with (and of course she immediately has her eyes on Stone), to Poet, an armless and legless radiation-scarred dwarf who goes around on a customized electric wheelchair, spouting “poetic” prophecies and warnings.

Stacy gets wild here, from an orgy sequence (in which an armless and legless whore is even brought out for Poet!) to a part where Stone has to eat the heart of the Guardian he killed as part of his initiation into the biker army. Meanwhile he searches for April, eventually figuring that she’s being safeguarded with several other pretty young women as part of the “rewards” that will be given out for the Guardian Olympics, a biker event of various matches. Stone signs up for the marksman contest, scoring the best shots due to his expert sharpshooting skills (and the target of course is a fresh corpse!).

Unfortunately it all ends too quickly; strange given the elaborate and leisurely build of the first three quarters of the novel. But upon winning the match and heading for where the girls are stashed, Stone is ambushed by the Slits, and wakes up bound and surrounded by the biker women, Queenie informing him that they’re all going to screw Stone, after which she’s going to hack off his dick and kill him! After freeing himself and taking out Queenie (also hurling Poet up against a wall, the freakish dwarf having showed up to watch the festivities), Stone heads back to Denver and sets the place to blow, leading to a quick but final confrontation with Rommel.

However April is still a captive by novel’s end, having been spirited away by one of the Guardians while Stone was being held by the Slits. This as I recall is a recurring storyline with the series; I think Stone searches for April for like the first three or four volumes. Also as I recall the Poet returns, though I do remember Stone gets vengeance on him at some point, once again throwing him somewhere – in fact, I remember standing in WaldenBooks one day in 1987 or so and discussing the series with some other kid who happened to be there, as we were both standing in the men’s adventure section (which was nestled between the Westerns and Sci-Fi sections) and started talking about how much we both loved The Last Ranger, and further how happy we were that Poet finally got his comeuppance.

One thing Stone does however rescue by novel’s end is a pit bull, part of a menagerie of various animals Rommel kept imprisoned in one of his bars. The dog refuses to leave Stone, even chasing after him when he drives away from Denver. So Stone decides to keep the dog, but hasn’t named it yet, and in fact I can’t recall the dog’s name. However it too becomes a mainstay of the series.

Anyway as the unwieldy length of this review will attest, I am very fond of this series, and having re-read the first volume I can happily report it’s not just from nostalgia. The Last Ranger #1 offers up pretty much all you could want from an ‘80s slice of post-nuke pulp, and if my memory serves me the ensuing volumes only get better and better.