Monday, November 12, 2012

Zardoz


Zardoz, by John Boorman and Bill Stair
April, 1974  Signet Books

Zardoz is one of those films that’s more fun to talk about than to watch, just a weird blitz of a movie, with a flying stone head, future hippie communes, rampant toplessness, and Sean Connery running around in thigh-high boots and red diapers.  At the very least, I can respect director/writer/producer John Boorman’s attempt to “go beyond 2001.”  I mean, you’d never see someone attempt anything like this movie in today’s world, where most sci-fi is just cgi-laden, PG-13 junk that caters to the tweener market.

What’s most surprising about this novelization is how slim it is.  Given the elaborate/psychedelic nature of the actual film, one would expect the novel to be a bloated mess.  Instead it is so focused that it almost comes off like some tractate from a forgotten gnostic religion.  According to his preface, Boorman’s initial draft of Zardoz more resembled a novel, and after filming the movie in late 1973 he decided that perhaps it should be a novel after all.  So he called in colleague Bill Stair, who helped Boorman during the writing stage of Zardoz, and went about fashioning it all into a book, using excised portions and storylines from his earlier screenplay drafts.

One thing I can say is, if you rewatch the actual film after reading this book, you will certainly understand everything you see.  Zardoz is pretty unique in that it’s a film that shows more than it tells, so this novel really fills in a lot of blank spots.  And this isn’t the typical sort of film novelization, where it’s the work of some contractor who’s churning out a book based on some early draft; this is the actual work of the film’s creator. 

The story follows the film quite closely, only changing things here and there, with the biggest changes coming at the climax.  Those who have seen the film though will not find anything much different in the opening section, other than a brief background on protagonist Zed – we learn that his father was also an Exterminator, thus high above the common rabble, and so Zed too was raised to be a leader of men.

The setting is hundreds of years in the future, and some apparent calamity has sent hummanity back into a near-primitive existence.  Zed is an Exterminator who rides about on his horse, armed with pistols and rifles, blowing away the Brutals, ie peasants and the like.  His god is Zardoz, a gigantic stone head that flies around and pronounces things like “The penis is evil” in a booming voice, then spits out more pistols and rifles from its gaping mouth.  (Can you imagine Boorman pitching this to the studios?  Man, there will never be another time in Hollywood like the early ‘70s.)

We meet Zed as he has snuck into Zardoz’s mouth, lifted off into the air and flying inside his god.  Zed is not filled with holy reverence, though.  We eventually learn that Zed is here for revenge.  Instead of being the murderous villain we expect him to be, Zed is actually enlightened – for one, when Zardoz proclaimed that the Exterminators stop exterminating and instead force the Brutals into slavery, to harvest crops, Zed started to suspect something was up.  Then, after a mysterious meeting with some shadowy figure in a library, Zed began to read, homeschooling himself…and he was a fast learner, too, as the novel informs us that Zed is a “super mutant,” with both physical and mental superiority over normal humans.

All this is learned much later in the book (and film), but long story short, Zed discovers in the goofiest possible way that his god Zardoz is nothing but a joke.  (Famously, the name is a play on The Wizard of Oz.)  So Zed has snuck within the stone head to find out where it comes from, who is behind it.  So focused is he on his mission that when he sees another man inside the stone head (Arthur Frayn, the creator of Zardoz, though we don’t learn this until later), Zed simply shoots the bastard and watches him fall to the ground far below.

The stone head lands in a vast plot of land filled with buildings and robe-wearing Eternals, ie humans who have somehow learned to cheat death and now live in a sort of hive community.  This place is called the Vortex, and it is protected by an invisible barrier.  Zed comes in contact with some of the Eternals, but plays dumb, not admitting to having killed Frayn.  Not that it much matters, though, for the Eternals regenerate, even if the body is destroyed, and even now Frayn’s embryo is growing into an adult being.

A pair of Eternals latch onto Zed as if he’s a wayward dog, or at least one of Pavlov’s dogs.  The first “normal” human they’ve seen in perhaps centuries, they marvel over Zed’s “barbarian” nature and carry out various experiments on him.  In particular they are fascinated by his lusts and desires.  Since these people cannot die they’ve cast aside their sexual impulses, with the result that no one now has sex and no children have been born for hundreds of years.

Things proceed much as in the film.  After a psychedelic group mind-vote, the Eternals deem to allow Zed to stay in the Vortex for a few days, until Frayn has regenerated – then they can get to the bottom of what happened to him.  Meanwhile Zed is shuffled around the Vortex, sometimes hanging with Friend, a male Eternal who despises his immortality, other times being traded off between Consuella and May, female Eternals who harbor lustful thoughts behind their sneers.  The book even replicates the unintentionally hilarious scene where the gals try to goose Zed’s libido via a series of sexual images projected on a screen.

Zed’s mere presence fosters revolt within the Vortex, which in addition to Eternals is made up of those who have rebelled and have been aged as punishment, and finally those who are so apathetic that they do nothing but sit around and stare into nothingness.  The moral of the story is that man is not designed for infinite existence, and immortality will eventually lead to apathy and madness.

Along the way Zed learns a bit about the Vortex.  Most importantly he learns of the Tabernacle, a mysterious force which apparently controls the Vortex and its occupants.  It also mentally unites them and keeps them from remembering how it was created, or indeed where it even is, so that they may never destroy it.  Zed, who has sworn to destroy the Vortex, realizes that to do so he must destroy the Tabernacle.  But to do that, he must first figure out what it is.  Meanwhile, he discovers that the Tabernacle is trying to destroy him. 

With a group of Eternals led by Consuella out to kill him, Zed hides out with Friend and a gaggle of May’s female followers.  They understand that Zed can save them, but he must be prepared first.  Since time is of the essence, they must instruct him by “touch-teaching.”  This entails a very elaborate and very psychedelic section where Zed mentally voyages into inner and outer space, and really clarifies all of the nonsensical stuff that occurs in the film version.

Here the novel delivers the answers that the film did not.  For one, we discover that the Vortex is really a spaceship, one that never left the earth.  Hence the force field which surrounds the place, which is really just clear material of dense construction that was created to endure the rigors of space travel.  (Why is it clear?  So the spaceship occupants could see outside into space and thus manuever around asteroids and the like…!)  The Eternals were so created so that they could survive the long years of space voyaging, and indeed their fellows are far out into space, but for whatever reason this particular ship never took off, and the Eternals instead became vapid occupants of a desolate earth.

Still in his psychedelic mind-trip, Zed sees the construction of the Tabernacle.  Created by a scientist, it “lives” in crystals which are implanted in the minds of each of the Eternals.  Further, to ensure that none of them ever died, the scientist made each of them, including himself, forget how the Tabernacle was created.  It just sort of goes on and on, with Zed free-floating through psychic space, witnessing past events – that is, when one of the female Eternals isn’t having astral sex with him.  There’s a lot of psychedelic-hued purple prose here, with Zed getting busy on the mental plane with a few of the Vortex gals.

The denoument is basically the same as the film.  Chaos overtakes the Vortex and Zed’s fellow Exterminators swoop in, delivering the sweet relief of death.  Zed, who was being prepared as the ultimate deliverer of the Eternals, has been reborn after his astral/psychic voyaging, and can no longer bring himself to murder.  Nothing stops his old Exterminator friends, though, who chop down characters like Friend and the reborn Frayn, who go to their deaths with cheer, in what I assume we are to take as a happy ending.  Zed meanwhile escapes with Consuella, where we are told – just as in the film – that they eventually have a child and then grow old together and die.

Writing-wise the book is pretty good, with a literate feel...or, at least, the striving for a literate feel.  It does though have the expected clinical/sterile tone I get from most British pulp, but in this case it actually complements the aloof tone of the story itself.  Finally, the authors are adept at doling out metaphysical mumbo-jumbo, serving up some truly delirious dialog.  (Choice line: "Stay close to me, inside my aura.")

So then, the novel really exists as a clarification of the events in the film, sort of like a companion piece.  I guess the biggest compliment I can pay it is that, after reading this book, I wanted to watch Zardoz again.  And who knows, maybe one of these days I’ll get drunk enough that I actually will.

Thursday, November 8, 2012

Rich Dreams


Rich Dreams, by Ben and Norma Barzman
April, 1982  Warner Books

Harold Robbins was notorious for writing blockbuster novels about characters who were thinly-veiled analogues of real-life figures; I often wondered, then, why no one ever wrote a Harold Robbins-type novel about Harold Robbins himself. Well, someone did – Ben and Norma Barzman, friends of Robbins, who, after hearing Robbins's (fictional) life story, realized it had the makings for a perfect blockbuster novel. Rich Dreams was the ensuing book, a paperback original that apparently went unnoticed and was soon forgotten (I only discovered it via the biography Harold Robbins: The Man Who Invented Sex). However, it did succeed in pissing off Robbins, who quickly cut all ties with the Barzmans.

The Robbins analogue here is Arnold Elton, “sex-novel king” who, now in his forties, has reached the pinnacle of success. He’s relaxing in his villa on the French Riviera, enjoying the good life with his newly-pregnant third wife, and meanwhile brokering a deal to take over a failing movie studio. This is the “present” storyline of the novel, and the movie studio deal takes up a goodly portion of the narrative; like his real-life inspiration, Arnold Elton is more interested in business deals and making money than writing novels. Indeed, Elton’s novels are given short shrift.

Elton’s business acumen and wheeling and dealing are given most focus throughout these portions, and obviously this is a good indication of the real-life Robbins. But then, Elton is nowhere as colorful or memorable as Robbins. By all accounts, Harold Robbins was a drug-taking, booze-drinking lout who was more often seen with a hooker on his arm than one of his wives; a running joke in Rich Dreams, though, is that Elton is pretty much a square, looking for true love from his various wives, hardly partaking of anything stronger than a mixed drink.

In other words, our protagonist is boring. This is one of the biggest misses with the book, and the biggest puzzler. If the Barzmans had more fully captured Robbins the wild man, we would’ve had a hell of a book. As it is, Elton is more a businessman and less of a deviant, which makes for a mostly tepid read…not to mention an exhausting one, given the novel’s 526 pages.

The early portions are the best. We meet Elton en route to France, having bought out the entire first class compartment of a 747. Before the flight’s over he’s managed to talk a stewardess (still so-called here) into sleeping with a millionaire Texas oil man who happens to be back in coach – there because he couldn’t get a seat in first class. All so Elton can keep his precious deal from falling through. Long story short, Elton once worked for a movie studio, of the Universal/Paramount type, and the place is about to go under. With some trickery and chicanery, Elton can get it for a few million.

From there to Elton’s villa, where the reader finally gets a bit of some Harold Robbins-esque goodness; Elton is greeted by the sight of his nude Mexican assistant (nude save for a coke spoon which dangles from her neck, that is), who wants to have sex with him while Elton’s wife watches. And Elton’s wife approves; in fact it was her idea. Elton’s response is to throw the assistant out and rant and rave; he only wants to be with his wife. The reader sees that we have another 500-some pages to go, and the dread sets in.

We also must endure some scenes with Elton’s two children, both of them in their early 20s and both looking to their dad for some money to make a feature film with hardcore sex scenes in it. The kids are incredibly precocious and demanding and it’s a great commentary by the Barzmans on the type of children Harold Robbins might have had, or at the very least, a person who wrote his type of novels might have had – there’s a great scene, much later in the novel, where Elton has breakfast with the two kids while they are still pre-teens, and they start asking him about fellatio and the like, all of it stuff they learned about from his novels. (Elton’s uneasy response is to tell them his books are for adults.)

Midway through, the novel jumps back to Elton as a boy, and for a few hundred pages we read about how he came to be. Growing up in hardscrabble roots, he escapes into the navy, fights in World War II, and lucks into a job in Hollywood, at fictional Alliance Studios. The Barzmans don’t really bring Golden Age Hollywood to life, as Elton is too low on the totem pole to interact with stars or go to lavish parties. In fact, he finds most joy working in the accounting department – yet more tie-in to the real Robbins story.

After another break, though, Elton ends up writing scripts. When his first is rejected for featuring straight-up sex scenes, he’s fired and a writing friend advises he turn the tale into a novel. Elton does and the ensuing book is a huge success, playing up on the salient aspects and going over huge with the late ‘40s reading public. The most Robbins-esque scene occurs soon after, with Elton meets a fiesty agent who barges into his place, announces that she is going to make him huge, and later has him explore every aspect of her body before they have sex, announcing everything she feels during it – all “research” for Elton’s novel, for greater accuracy. Unsurprisingly, she becomes Elton’s first wife.

The majority of this portion of the book is about Elton’s married life. Again, his actual novels aren’t much covered; we’re just told they’re sexy and usually deal with characters who are successes in some arena. Now, this is obviously more commentary on the real Robbins, who likely just considered his own novels product for the masses. But still, Robbins was sure to pepper his novels with outrageous/sadistic/insane sex scenes, stuff completely off the map, stuff that no one else would ever think of let alone write. There’s none of that in Rich Dreams, and it’s all a matter of telling rather than showing.

Meanwhile, back in the “present,” which I assume must be 1982, Elton is told shortly before a grand party he’s hosting that someone has put out a contract on his life. You expect this would turn the narrative into more of a suspenseful or at least paranoid tone, but still the Barzmans give us endless scenes of people just talking about business deals and the like.

At this point the “naughty” stuff is totally gone, and the book is past the point of becoming a total bore. The worst part is that when the culprits behind Elton’s death contract are revealed, it’s not only stupid but anticlimatically resolved. (Spoiler warning: It turns out to be his damn kids. Why? Because Elton wouldn’t give them the money for that film. And what does Elton do when he finds out? He slaps them around.)

There are a few bright points here and there. The aforementioned uncomfortable breakfast scene is one, with Elton’s kids discussing the lurid details of his novels matter of factly. Also the Barzmans insert a few in-jokes; early in his career Elton is advised that, in order to keep from being sued when writing a roman a clef, just have a cameo from the real person he’s writing about in the book – ie, if you’re writing about a Hugh Hefner type, have a party scene later in the book and mention that Hugh Hefner’s there. The Barzmans then do just that, mentioning that Harold Robbins is vacationing nearby during Elton’s climatic party scene.

Still, it was a chore of a read, much too long for its own good and not nearly lurid enough. The potential was there, though, and it was fully squandered. Who knows, maybe Robbins was most offended by Rich Dreams because it made him seem so boring and domesticated?

Monday, November 5, 2012

The Savage Report: 1994 (aka The Savage Report #1)


The Savage Report: 1994, by Howard Rheingold
No month stated, 1974  Freeway Press

I’ve been meaning to read this one for a while – I love retro sci-fi, particularly of the psychedelic variety, and Howard Rheingold’s Savage Report: 1994 seemed to offer everything I could want when I first spotted it 6-7 years ago in the sci-fi section of a Dallas Half Price Bookstore. Rheingold’s name might be familiar to those into dream research and/or New Age-y nonfiction pieces; in the early ‘90s, for example, he co-wrote Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming (the book on lucid dreaming, for all those who might be interested in experimenting with it).

The Savage Report: 1994 is the first volume of what is promised on the back cover as a monthly series by Rheingold, published by Freeway Press. In reality though, the “series” lasted all of two volumes. No idea if this was due to low sales, problems with the publisher, or simply because Rheingold couldn’t keep up with the accelerated publishing schedule. And it’s not like there’s much info on the book out there; Rheingold, who has his own website, leaves the Savage Report books strangely unmentioned in his bibliography. But given the novel’s predilection for New Age mindsets and psychedelia, there’s no question it’s the same man’s work.

It also seems like this series was an obvious attempt to meld men’s adventure with sci-fi. The only problem is, Rheingold’s leanings toward inner exploration, yoga, and the like don’t really jibe well with gung-ho men’s adventure action, to the effect that the few genuine action scenes here are rendered a bit…clunky. But then, the entire book is kind of clunky, with a goofy far-flung future world of 1994 populated moreso by caricatures than actual characters. What makes the clunkiness odd is Rheingold’s gift for wordspinning; he doles out a brace of ten-dollar words, many of them concantenations of his own devising, which only serves to heighten the psychedelic/Future Shock feeling of the book.

Anyway. The series details the adventures of the three-person “Savage Squad,” movers and shakers in the very-different United States of Rheingold’s 1994. Rheingold pulls a neat trick here in that he shows more than tells for the duration of the novel; with intimations and references from the many characters, you only get a glimpse of what happened to make this 1994 as it is. Only toward the end, during a televised debate (which is the friggin’ climax, by the way), does Rheingold get into a bit more depth – namely, after the hippies ushered in a new mindset in the ‘60s, the public went into an eco-awareness sort of thing in the ‘70s, to such a degree that capitalism itself was abolished in the ‘80s.

Now, the United States, which we’re told is no longer a world power nor is interested in being one, is a nation of inward-journeying post-hippies, more interested in self-potentializing than in making big bucks or messing in world affairs. Yet for all that, somehow this doesn’t stop them from creating ultra-advanced technology, well beyond what we even have today. But then, science fiction is always more about the time it’s written than the time it takes place, and The Savage Report: 1994 comes off more like a hyper-accelerated 1974. Despite the advanced technology, the changed national mindset, it all still comes off like a mid-‘70s book, with an appropriately-macho hero and a refreshingly-liberal attitude toward sex and drugs.

Eve Savage is the gorgeous blonde host of “The Savage Report,” what we’re told is the most popular “holo-program” in the entire world. Eve I guess is like a female version of Norman Spinrad’s Jack Barron; with a mere word she can make or break entire organizations. But even with such power and influence she only has a small, two-person team at her disposal: Jack Anderson, the aforementioned macho hero who, wouldn’t you know it, used to work for some shadowy intelligence agency as a covert operative, and Smoky Kennedy, also-gorgeous combat master and tech wiz, who has a casual sex thing going with Jack…who himself has a casual sex thing going with Eve. (Unfortunately, Eve and Smoky don’t have a casual sex thing going.)

So the way this all works is, Eve hosts her globally-popular show while Jack and Smoky go out in the field and perform research and investigations, even setting up shots in dangerous locations for location footage and the like. It’s just a goofy concept, a reporting team that’s also a group of commandos, especially with Jack packing a “radar-jamming” .357 Magnum and Smoky backing him up with a host of weaponry. (The weapons throughout are positively sci-fi goofy, like Smoky’s “lase-knives.”) The storyline of this first novel has the team uncovering a plot among the military elite – a plot to put the US back into the world arena as a verifiable military presence.

Jack Anderson is really the star of the piece, though Rheingold often trades off to scenes from Eve’s point of view. (Smoky gets relatively little screentime.) Jack is actually the impetus for the Savage Squad’s latest piece; while enjoying a drink at a “shuttle port” bar (a drink served up by a “lesbian bartender,” we’re told…and Rheingold just leaves it at that), Jack meets up with a former covert ops pal who, mere seconds after saying “so long,” is killed in a shuttle-bombing. The guy left behind clues, and pretty soon Eve’s team has stumbled onto an elaborate plot, one that has Jack and Smoky fighting off a variety of assassins, infiltrating a secret base in the jungles of Mexico, and even being psychically tortured by the infamous Dr. Tek, aka the villain of the piece, a cyborg evil genius who is behind the governmental conspiracy.

Back in the US, Eve’s narrative concerns her trying to figure out who is behind this military plot, the goal of which appears to be the ousting of the president and the restoration of America’s military roots. This culminates as mentioned in a live debate on Eve’s show, with Eve up against one of the generals behind the plot; Rheingold makes the general yet another caricature, spouting out all sorts of right-wing blowhardy, ranting against the hippie-fied mindset of the world; of course, it all comes down to Vietnam, which, according to the general and his cronies, is when America truly lost itself, because it left the war unfinished. Ironically, the stuff the general says throughout this scene seemed to me more “realistic” insofar as what an American of today would say, if debating with a Brave New World-type of character like Eve Savage, whose reality is impossible…it’s hard to imagine this America of Rheingold’s ever happening, especially in just twenty short years from publication.

So if Rheingold’s future world comes off as a bit too rushed, so does the novel itself. The book is a little breathless, which adds to the clunkiness. Well, breathless so far as the scenes with Jack Anderson go. The scenes with Eve come off a bit as wheel-spinning, with Rheingold using her parts to sort of recap what has happened thus far. In fact there’s quite a bit of repetition in the narrative, not to mention a ton of grammatical and spelling errors – which, again, just adds to that breathless pace, I guess. But as mentioned, it is admirable how Rheingold shows his weird future world in effect, instead of spending pages and pages telling us about it.

Another admirable thing about The Savage Report: 1994 is the focus on self-potentializing, which itself was a mainstay of ‘70s sci-fi. Jack and his colleagues spend a goodly portion of the narrative boosting their reaction times and whatnot via popping pills; “stims,” as Rheingold calls them – neurostims to help them think more clearly, a muscle stim that Smoky takes that makes her run so fast that she plows through a rock wall, and etc. Heavy focus is also placed on meditation and yoga, but then this comes off a bit goofy when a captured Jack assumes a yoga position when faced with his captors, in an effort to protect his thoughts from the expected mental probing. It’s a bit hard to imagine say James Bond settling into a lotus position when confronted by Blofeld.

Again though, this is just another example of how the two thrusts of the novel don’t work together, the action stuff and the New Age/better tomorrow stuff. Another problem with the book is the characters. In short, none of them are likable. Jack is the typical men’s adventure protagonist, so nothing surprising there. But Eve comes off as shallow and manipulative, not to mention arrogant. We’re constantly told how popular and respected she is, but she does nothing really to make us understand why she’s so esteemed. And Smoky doesn’t do much other than save Jack, have sex with him (usually right after saving him), or trade banter with Eve – the two have a bit of hostility toward one another, and Rheingold intimates this is because they both like Jack.

In addition to the stim-popping, yoga-practicing, and politicking, Rheingold also adds a little sex and violence. There are just a few action scenes, the most memorable being where Jack and Smoky defend themselves against black-garbed assassins, killing the lot of them…and then having sex right there amid the carnage. Rheingold combines sex and violence again later in the tale, when Smoky frees Jack from a cell deep within a cave; Smoky informs Jack that the muscle-boosting stim she used to run through the rock wall has some rather unexpected side-effects. Rheingold gets a bit purple in the sex scenes, which makes it all the more enjoyable.

Because in the end, that’s the one word to describe this goofy book: “enjoyable.” I mean, you could bash Rheingold for concocting such an impossible 1994, mock him in retrospect. But I respect it when an author just gets out there, and in its own way The Savage Report: 1994 is like a more action-focused, pulpy take on Shea and Wilson’s Illuminatus! trilogy. Not as good, but similar, even with a bit of an occult/metaphysical streak. (No fnords, though. At least, none that I could see…)

So yeah, it’s rough and it’s wild, and at around 220 or so pages it’s a bit too long for its own good. And yet, it’s also too bad that the next volume, The War of the Gurus, was the last one. But I’ve got it, and I look forward to reading it for another blast of retro-futuristic, stim-popping sci-fi.

Thursday, November 1, 2012

Gannon #3: Blood Beast


Gannon #3: Blood Beast, by Dean Ballenger
No month stated, 1974  Manor Books

For Karen Bonner it was a terrifying night. Her first night in jail. But the worst part were the two dykes who tried to lesbian her.

Yes, friends, we are back in the crazed world of the Gannon series by Dean Ballenger, a man whose narrative style and syntax are so outrageous that he can even use nouns as verbs. Sadly this was the last of the series (so technically it could be considered a trilogy, I guess), but it’s a hell of a way to go – despite the fact that Blood Beast comes off like a clone of its two predecessors, it’s just as wild, violent, and mean. (The title, by the way, comes from Gannon, who refers to himself as a “blood beast.”)

Once again Gannon serves as a “Robin Hood,” taking on the rich fat-cats who exploit the working class. And once again, Gannon is almost a co-star in his own series; he isn’t called onto the scene until events are well underway, and there are many scenes where he just disappears. But again as in the previous two books, it’s not like Ballenger spins his wheels when Gannon isn’t around. As ever, Ballenger populates his tale with a cast of upper-class and lower-class oddballs who talk in a bizarre patois, like ‘30s gangsters mixed with truckdrivers.

The above-referenced Karen Bonner is the mark this time, set up to take a fall by her super-rich boss, Peter Hibbs. Reason being, Hibbs’s playboy son Brian is “vigorished” by Juice Ollman, a hood who extorts the kid for seventy-five thousand. Hibbs Jr goes to his dad, who sets up Karen Bonner, a gorgeous blonde who works in accounting who wouldn’t let Hibbs sleep with her. Hibbs has the books done up so it looks like Karen embezzled, and after a joke of a trial she’s sent to jail, where the aforementioned “lesbianing” takes place.

Karen’s dad, a working joe who can barely afford his mortgage, hears about Gannon and gives him a call. As in the past, when Gannon shows up his potential client feels underwhelmed; Ballenger reminds us that Gannon’s just a “little tiger” and doesn’t look anywhere as tough as he actually is. But one look in Gannon’s eyes and Karen’s dad knows he has found his man. Gannon as is his custom doesn’t want any money from Karen’s father; he’ll get his payment from the fat-cats and hoodlums he busts up.

Even though this novel takes place about two weeks after #2: Blood Fix, Gannon has apparently become a kung-fu master. This is mostly so Ballenger can throw in the occasional “donkey fist” or other martial arts term in the brawl scenes, but also so he can write things like “the kung-fu’d dude” in regards to the people Gannon beats up. Also worth noting is that for once Gannon doesn’t employ the spiked brass knuckles which he used so memorably in the previous books.

Gannon pays Karen’s bail and insists she live with him as Hibbs or the crooks will surely send some hoods after her; Karen could easily blow Hibbs’s entire story. It’s funny because, while Gannon feels sorrow for the shafting Karen was given, and her living with him is necessary to keep her alive, Gannon doesn’t let that sway him from planning to give the gorgeous lady a “shafting” of his own. There are many humorous scenes where Gannon, while reflecting on the current case, will segue into the “good thoughts” of how he will soon go back to his hotel to screw Karen…only thing is, Karen is probably the weakest female character yet in the series; she only has a few lines of dialog, and most of the time she’s either crying or freaking out over the corpses Gannon has just created.

And to be sure, Gannon once again creates a ton of corpses. I think Blood Beast has more action scenes than the previous books; there are many scenes of Gannon blowing away hoods with his Sten gun. There’s even a goofy scene where Gannon goes to Hibbs’s corporate office and threatens the guy; Hibbs calls in his security guards, one of whom is a psychopath, and a firefight ensues, complete with Hibbs himself leaning out of his own office window and blasting away at Gannon down in the parking lot!

Hibbs Jr and Sr are mostly forgettable, but Juice Ollman is another of those Ballenger-patented creeps who jumps off the page. He spends the entire novel trying to off Hibbs and Gannon, always failing. He does succeed with offing Hibbs Jr, though, and this is another of those unsettling but played for laugh scenes that Ballenger excels in, where Juice calls in his two best guys, a pair of sadists who hoist Brian Hibbs up on the rafters of an abandoned loft and take bets on how long he will live after they set him on fire – putting the flame to his exposed genitals, of course. (In fact, poor Peter Hibbs suffers the most in this tale; after getting screwed over by Juice he then gets his ears cut off, and later on gets his thumbs cut off!)

But the usual darkly comic sadism is in full effect, for one last ride…people get blown apart by Thompson subguns, shot in the face, set on fire, beaten to death. The action stuff is great, but had me wondering. The igenuity and determination people show after Gannon arrives on the scene makes their earlier reluctance questionable. What I mean is, Peter Hibbs spends the narrative trying to get Gannon killed, when meanwhile all he had to do was show this same determination at the beginning of the tale, and have Juice Ollman killed after he tried to extort Hibbs’s son. But I guess that’s missing the point.

It’s hard to relay the dark humor Ballenger so effectively doles out, in both the narrative and the dialog. And Once again his hero is an unflappable, hardcore bastard, not even fazed when a pair of would-be muggers get the jump on him – and, mind you, Gannon doesn’t have a weapon on him:

Gannon looked at Costigan. He had a Webley in his hand. With a silencer. Concealed by his attache case from anyone who might come into the lot.

“It’s not a healthy thing,” Gannon said, “laying a gun on people. It’s liable to get you dead.”

“Listen, wise ass, just drop that wallet!” Costigan said.

“You’re making the kinds of sounds,” Gannon said, saying it low but very hard, “that people make who are tired of this world. So rip off, stupids, while you still can!”

I love these books, they’re just a blast to read and Ballenger’s style is so unusual that, as I’ve said before, you don’t even mind how he tramples over ordinary grammatical and writing rules. But I wonder how much longer this series could’ve lasted. Ballenger makes no intimation that this is the last volume; like its predecessor, Blood Beast ends with Gannon planning to leave town posthaste, given that once again a lady (Karen herself) wants to become “Mrs. Gannon.”

I think it would’ve been tough for Ballenger to keep this up for more volumes. The story setup is too limited; how many times can you read about Gannon getting hired to clear the name of some poor sap who was screwed over by the rich? All of which is to say that I think it’s a good thing the Gannon series only ran for three volumes, giving us an undilluted blast of nutzoid violence that never grew stale.

Monday, October 29, 2012

The Martian Viking


The Martian Viking, by Tim Sullivan
May, 1991 Avon Books

The concept of this novel sounded too good to pass up – a Classics professor of 2070 or thereabouts is banned to a penal colony on Mars, where he gets hooked on psychedelic drugs that give him visions of ancient Vikings that surf the cosmos on their battle ships! It’s all very Philip K. Dick (whom author Sullivan even thanks in the dedication), combined with a definite sort of late ‘60s radical feel…I mean, there’s even a Patty Hearst analog here.

I get the feeling Sullivan must’ve seen the (awesome) 1990 film version of PK Dick’s Total Recall, which subdued Dick’s philosophies and replaced them with prime-era Arnold and Verhovian gore (not to mention triple-breasted mutant gals), and figured to himself, “Hey, I should do my own version of this, only more faithful to reality-questioning spirit of Dick’s original, a-and I’ll add lots of drugs! And vikings!” And somehow he pulled it off – this breezy novel, not even 300 pages, has all the signs of a late ‘60s slice of psychedelic sci-fi.

But the debt to PK Dick’s work is strongest; Sullivan even replicates the goofy names Dick would give his characters. To wit, our hero is Johnsmith Biberkopf, a professor of the Classics living in the Conglom world of the future, where Big Brother has taken over good and proper. Johnsmith actually reads the Classics, much to the puzzlement of his fellows. But such radical thinking raises eyebrows, and soon enough Johnsmith finds himself without a job – which is against the law in this grim future, one punishable by banishment, usually to the moon.

Johnsmith has also been left by his wife Ronindella, a thoroughly unlikable character who does nothing but instill reader animosity. Perhaps the biggest question is why a nice guy like Johnsmith would even get involved with her in the first place, but this is one of the many questions Sullivan leaves unanswered. Anyway, Ronindella, who wants more out of life, has contrived to get Johnsmith fired from his job so he can get banned to the lunar minepits, where Ronindella will be able to cushily live off of half of Johnsmith’s ensuing paychecks. Oh, and she’s secretly sleeping with Johnsmith’s best friend.

For a bit of a brighter note, there’s Smitty, Johnsmith’s 9 year-old son, who looks up to his dad and of course doesn’t want him to be banned to the moon. But Johnsmith has no choice and, the night before he’s to appear before a committee for his official banishment, he indulges in some illegal “onees” (pronounced “one-nees,” the narrative would imply): psychedelic drugs which look like ball bearings. Hold one of them and you’re off on a trip; hold three and you’re in another world.

Johnsmith, for his first time out, holds all three at once and suddenly finds himself in an ocean, a massive Viking ship coming at him. Johnsmith, who has a special fondness for Beowulf, spends the novel wondering if they’re really Geats – since he’s a professor he’s given to such pedantic concerns.

Another thing never properly explained is that Johnsmith is banned to Mars instead of the moon – actually, a better fate, as the Mars colony has it easy compared to the lot of prisoners on the moon. Along with him go Alderice, a heavyset gay black man who was actually employed as a government tail on Johnsmith, but who was so bad at his job that he too was fired, and Felica, the aforementioned Patty Hearst type, a radical devoted to ousting the Conglom, who in reality is the daughter of a mega-wealthy family and who was kidnapped by some anarchists and eventually turned over to their side.

The characters are basicaly two-dimensional, even Johnsmith himself. My assumption is that this is just due to the fact that Sullivan intends The Martian Viking as satire. There’s a lot of material in this book, a lot of subplots and characters, and a vast world with a history that’s untapped. What I mean to say is, the novel easily could’ve been twice its length, and this is both a strength and a weakness. I guess it’s a sign of the novel’s quality that I wished there was more of it.

Anyway, Johnsmith finally arrives on Mars, where he lives in a military complex overseen by the cliched sort of lieutenant you’d expect, who rules the prisoners with a steel fist. Johnsmith and his two friends (Felicia though soon becomes more than a friend) assume they’re here to help in the agricultural projects going on, terraforming the planet for eventual human colonization, but first they’re put through army training, firing guns and laser weapons and etc. Turns out there are “Arkies” here, aka anarchists, who rebel against the Conglom and attack the military base. How these Arkies got here is yet another unanswered question.

Eventually Johnsmith is told his true reason for being here – he’s supposed to take onees in a sort of controlled experiment. Turns out onees are developed here on Mars; some of them have been “archecoded” to give the Viking ship visions, and the government wants to find out how it’s happening. Gradually Johnsmith will learn that it’s the work of the Arkies, who have an insider agent who archecodes the onees as they are made; the Arkies, beyond their political beliefs, are also psuedo-religious, and believe the “Great Ship” will soon be coming to Mars to deliver them all. You guessed it – the Ship is the Viking ship Johnsmith and others see in their onee trips.

There’s more besides. Sullivan works in an elaborate subplot back on earth featuring the loathsome Ronindella and her manipulating of Johnsmith’s former best friend. There’s also another subplot about Johnsmith’s pal getting advice from a “cyber-therapist” (Madame Psychosis), and his goofy plot to get Ronindella away from what passes in this goofy future as the Christian church. All of this stuff had nothing to do with anything and just got annoying, mostly because the characters here were so self-involved and despicable.

The material on Mars is more interesting, and Sullivan keeps it moving, with Johnsmith caught up in an attack on the Arkie base, where he discovers who is the insider archecoding the onees; it’s a fellow prisoner, an attractive woman named Frankie, who too soon becomes involved with Johnsmith. Pretty soon Johnsmith is caught up in her plans to escape – plus there’s an Arkee deserter who stumbles onto the military complex, proclaiming that the Great Ship is soon to arrive. In fact, it might just appear at the site of the old Viking rover which trundled across Mars nearly a hundred years before, in 1976. Hmm...

Everything comes to a head with both Smitty and Ronindella on Mars (Smitty won a ticket for two there in an utter piece of deus ex machina), Johnsmith, Frankie, Alderice, and Felicia escaping, and the Vikings appearing in a sort of celestial whirlpool, sucking both Johnsmith and Smitty up into it so that pretty soon they’re traveling about the cosmos on the Viking ship, fighting sea monsters (!), before a strange sort of “was it all a dream?” kind of ending that seems tacked one because Sullivan couldn’t figure where else to go.

But then, the clues are there all along, and it’s not like Sullivan goes out of his way to make it subtle – one could easily see the entire book as nothing more than an onee trip on Johnsmith’s part. This is even hinted at in the finale, when Johnsmith finds himself on some barren plain, talking to his deceased father. To me the most interesting thing here is how the end of the novel prefrigures the sucktastic finale of the overpraised Lost series, with our hero not only finding himself in limbo, but also being given the scoop by the ghost of his father. And hell, the Arkies themselves come off very much like the Others on Lost, all of which makes me wonder if Sullivan ever watched that show and grit his teeth in rage.

Sullivan’s writing though is pretty good. The characters as stated don’t have much depth, and the goofy names get annoying (not to mention Sullivan’s strange decision to give two of his main female characters names that begin with an “F” – but then, that might be another clue that all of this is the product of Johnsmith’s limited imagination).

The action scenes aren’t very violent, and beyond the occasional curse word the novel’s almost prudish…save for an unexpected and somewhat-graphic sex scene late in the game, when Johnsmith beds Frankie – who, by the way, turns out to be more of a Conglom-fighting radical than Felicia ever could be. (Felicia herself meanwhile sort of drops into the background of the narrative...more sign that all of this is the product of Johnsmith’s hallucenogenic delusions, or just Sullivan’s inability to juggle all of his characters and plots?)

Sadly, the psychedelic stuff goes away as the novel proceeds, and despite being sent to Mars to test onees, we hardly get any more scenes of a drugged-out Johnsmith. However there’s a definite lysergic haze to the novel, particularly as it approaches its freeform ending, which takes it into the outer limits of fantasia. The reader expecting a pat ending will be frustrated, as Sullivan goes for more of a “Bobby in the shower” type of a Dallas ending. But really, such endings are never satisfactory for readers who have invested themselves in a novel.

Thursday, October 25, 2012

Able Team #4: Amazon Slaughter


Able Team #4: Amazon Slaughter, by Dick Stivers
March, 1983 Gold Eagle Books

It’s been too long since I’ve returned to the work of GH Frost. His contribution to the Able Team series, #8: Army of Devils, is one of the best pieces of action pulp ever, a tour de force of madness and gore, up there with the Phoenix saga. Amazon Slaughter at times approaches that unhinged level, but not quite. It more than makes up for it with the high-quality level of Frost’s writing, which again is leagues above the genre norm.

The copyright page credits the book to “CJ Shiao,” but Frost acknowledges it as his own on his website. I think Frost, again working under an alias (“LR Payne”) also wrote the first and third volumes of the series (I don’t believe he wrote the second one, though – that was Norman Winski), but I haven’t read them. At any rate this fourth volume ushered in an unbroken set of installments Frost turned in for the series, though apparently he was removed from it; his comments on his blog and also those he left on my review for Army of Devils suggest that he didn’t quite get along with Gold Eagle.

Frost’s comments make it sound that GE was unhappy with his work, or at least the direction he was taking with the characters. This is just more indication that Gold Eagle never understood quality men’s adventure and just wanted to churn out the same old “terrorist of the month” shit…and more indication why you’d have to pay me to read the majority of the books they’ve published. Anyway, that has nothing to do with the book at hand, which is a piece of quality men’s adventure.

The Able Team trio (Carl Lyons, Gadgets Schwartz, and Pol Balancales) are sent down into the Amazon due to recent evidence of a plutonium factory somewhere in the jungle, in an uncharted region of the map claimed by Bolivia. We readers know that the factory is under the control of Wei Ho (fetchingly named “Death incarnate” on the back cover), a Chinese warlord who employs a Khmer Rogue assassin as his security chief, as well as an army of mercenaries from around the world.

Wei Ho’s army ransacks the native Indian population (the Xavante), decimating entire villages. They kidnap the healthy and force them to work at the plutonium plant, which itself is a death sentence, as every Indian they’ve forced into bondage has died from working around the plutonium. All of which is to say that there’s a lot of death and bloodshed and misery going on here, and Frost really builds it up, showing the horrors of the Xavante in gruesome and excruciating detail.

Able Team is quickly on the scene, voyaging down into the jungle where they hook up with a group of Xavante warrirors. I believe this must’ve been the introduction of the Atchisson assault shotgun to the series, as Lyons has one and must explain it to his comrades. As is customary there’s a lot of witty banter between the trio, with lots of ragging and good-natured putdowns.

Even better there’s a touch of the psychedelic, when Lyons smokes some sort of substance with the Xavante. Pretty soon he’s gone native, painting himself in the black goup the Xavante make from genipap, covering themselves in it to ward off insects and to mask themselves with the terrain. Lyon’s mind is somewhat blown, and more banter ensues as Pol and Gadgets try to determine how gone he really is.

A goodly portion of the novel in fact is given over to Able Team working with the Xavante as they journey deeper into the Amazon. There are a few firefights here and there, most notably one in which they attack a group of mercenaries while they’re hauling around prisoners. One of the escaped prisoners is a young Brazilian army lieutenant named Silveres, who after initial hostility starts to help the team.

Action scenes are rendered very well, even if none of them have the savagery of Army of Devils. Frost is really good at getting you in the heads of his characters, for example Silveres as he volunteers to swim off alone through piranha-infested waters to sneak attack a ship filled with Khmer Rogue and turncoat Brazilian soldiers.

Strangely we get Wei Ho’s backstory toward the very end of the novel, as Able Team receives intel on his history. While this chapter is enjoyable, documenting how Wei Ho turned his family’s drug and crime business into an empire, blackmailing powerful communists in China, it just seems so out of place this late in the game. Even stranger is that Wei is so quickly brushed off in the last pages of the book, not nearly given the villain’s farewell you’d expect of such an evil character.

And for that matter, the finale itself is rushed. Two of Wei’s top henchmen just disappear from the narrative, and instead Able Team and the Xavante launch a dawn raid on the mercenary camp. Again, it’s a gory scene, with lots of heads exploding and guts spilling, but still nothing on the level of Frost’s later masterpiece. And again unlike Army of Devils, Amazon Slaughter just rushes to a conclusion. There’s no wrapup or even any real resolution, just a bunch of dead Cambodians and mercenaries. It’s as if Gold Eagle lost some of the pages of Frost’s manuscript during the printing process.

But for all that it was still an enjoyable book. The rapport of the team really sets this series apart from others, with the Able Team guys coming off like the soldiers in Gustav Hasford’s Short Timers, ribbing each other with that same sort of dark and morbid sense of humor. Frost returned with the next installment, Cairo Countdown, even though it too was credited to another author (Paul Hoffrichter). I’ll be reading that one next.

Monday, October 22, 2012

Doomsday Warrior #6: American Rebellion


Doomsday Warrior #6: American Rebellion, by Ryder Stacy
September, 1985 Zebra Books

The Doomsday Warrior series storms on, picking up immediately after the events in #5: America's Last Declaration, with Rockson and Rona barely alive after a massive assault by 21st Century Nazis on the Freefighters’ home base of Century City. American Rebellion opens with Rockson knocked out cold, having been tossed like a ragdoll by a falling bomb – that imminent “Death itself” he must have felt, reaching out for him, on the last page of the previous installment.

So with American Rebellion authors Ryder Stacy finally deliver on that hoary old action-pulp cliché: the hero who suffers from amnesia. Yes, the bomb blast not only knocks Rockson unconscious (and Rona too), but when he wakes up he has no idea who he is. This makes him easy pickings for the roving bands of slavemasters who like vultures hunt and peck through the carnage of the just-ended battle; Rockson is pounced on as perfect material for the labor force being sold to newly-built Nazi city Goerringrad.

Rona meanwhile was knocked several yards away by the blast, and when she comes to Rockson is already gone, taken by the slavers. Not that Rona knows this. She has her own issues, though, captured by another group of slavers who know she’ll earn them quite a profit due to her beauty; Rona too is taken to Goerringrad, where she will be put on the auction block as a pleasure slave.

The back cover has it that this amnesia storyline will be the meat of the tale, and to tell the truth such stories have never done much for me. Luckily though Rockson has his memory back around a hundred pages into the tale. Before that though we must endure long stretches of Rockson being put in a squalid existence with the other slaves in Goerringrad, trying to foster their patriotic spirit while shovelling up corpses all day and tossing them into a toxic marshland along the outskirts of the Nazi-run city.

The action focus of previous books is lost here; Ryder Stacy focus more on Rockson’s inherent ability to lead and inspire. In a way the plot of this one’s sort of original because from the start we’ve been told that Rockson is regarded as “the Ultimate American;” here we see him still having the same charismatic effect on others, even when he just thinks he’s some anonymous slave.

Also, American Rebellion further plays out an element that has been featured in every novel in the series yet – namely, a group of American slaves “becoming men again” and turning on their Red captors. In previous books these have usually been little bits, usually having nothing to do with the larger storyline, and usually ending with the slaves dying as a result…that is, after killing a bunch of Russians. So then this novel pretty much plays out like one of those incidents, only in full, going on and on, with Rockson always on the cusp of remembering who he is.

Rona’s storyline is more entertaining. She’s sold to a high-ranking Nazi who takes her into Goerringrad’s Nazi palace. In a chuckle-inducing and bizarre scene the commandant of Goerringrad falls at Rona’s feet and begins licking them…turns out Rona is a dead ringer for the Nazi-worshipped Eva Braun!

Not the real Eva Braun, that is; in a goofy turn of the narrative Ryder Stacy explain that Rona looks like an idealized portrait of Eva…one where Eva has been given red hair and a killer bod…! Anyway the Nazis now worship Rona as Eva reborn, a goddess in flesh, and put her up in an ivory tower where no one may touch her or even look at her.

But guess what – Rockson has a perfect view of her while on his daily rounds of corpse-dumping. Of course, he can only see the gorgeous redhead gawking down at him, waving her arms frantically as if she recognizes him. Rockson can only suspect that he must know the woman, but meanwhile he has other issues, like the endless ringing of alien voices in his brain (turns out to be psychic messages being sent out to him but going unanswered) as well as the dark shape he sees skimming beneath the surface in that toxic marshland.

Anyway, before you can’t take much more Rockson has regained his memory (in true cliched fashion it’s only after some ruffian slave, jealous of Rockson’s power over the others, bashes him on the head during a sneak attack) and is leading the slaves in a riot. They manage to free Rona but Rockson and Rona are pulled away by an escape rocket sled or something, leaving the just-freed slaves to their fate.

Rockson wants to go back, but they’re pursued by Nazis and end up in the marshland, where Ryder Stacy get to unleash another family of monsters into their unfolding epic. Each volume of the series has had some new monster in it, and American Rebellion doesn’t disappoint. This time we have the Narga, Swamp Thing-like monsters who once were human but were killed by the Nazis and dumped into that toxic dump, which brought them back to life; Rockson is only able to keep them from eating him and Rona with his psychic skills. Soon enough he is friends with the leader.

The Narga are basically like the monsters in Where the Wild Things Are, only they like to eat people, even “smoking” their corpses over campfires to save for later. Ryder Stacy published a book on movie monsters in 1984 and you can tell that here they were indulging in all of their horror movie joys; the Narga are probably the most frightening and gorge-inducing creatures the authors have yet presented us. Plus their names are damn awesome: there’s the leader, Nitrogen Carnivore, and others like Sulphuric Death, Monoxide Blood, and even Methane Death. It’s surprising some ‘80s speed metal band didn’t lift one of these for an album title, or even a group name.

The novel’s only halfway through and Rockson has already launched a raid on Goerringrad, the Narga at his side; here the authors delight in giving us all sorts of gruesome detail about the monsters biting off heads and eating guts, all delivered in their patented clunky style. If I’m right in my estimation of who wrote what, then I’m betting Jan Stacy wrote the majority of American Rebellion, as it has little of the psychedelic/New Age flourish I suspect was the work of Ryder Syvertsen. (Though there is a cool scene where we see the bizarre cult rituals of the Narga, who, to quote the old Sho Kosugi film, pray for death – if there’s any scene in American Rebellion written by Syvertsen, this would be it.)

Unfortunately the novel sort of plods on after this. Having freed the slaves and bid farewell to the Narga, Rockson and Rona and a young slave Rockson has taking a liking to make their way to Century City, which when we last saw it in the previous book had been hit by an indirect thermonuclear blast. They arrive to find the place in a total shambles, a mere shadow of the underground paradise of previous books.

The novel takes on a Jules Verne feel as Rockson, back together with his pals “the Rock squad,” ventures into the pits of the earth, trying to discover and fix whatever has ruined Century City’s power supply. This section just kind of goes on and on, with the team in their asbestos suits making their way down into 200+ degree heat.

But what’s weird is that the authors seemingly tack on a finale that has nothing to do with anything; like a jump cut in a film, a missing frame or something, immediately after fixing the power supply Rockson is squared off by himself by some hidden explosives and suddenly must fight an entire team of martial arts masters! This goes on for about fifty pages, just one kung-fu fighter after another introducing himself to Rockson and then engaging him in a fight to the death. There are even a few ninjas.

I’ve always felt that martial arts fights don’t translate as well to fiction as gun-fights do…it gets very repetitive to read about someone throwing a punch or a kick. And here it gets very repetitive, just going on and on and on…not helped by Rockson’s sudden knack for delivering bad one-liners to his opponents, something even the assassins make note of. My assumption is the killers were sent by the Reds – in a brief scene earlier in the tale we witnessed the first meeting of Premier Vassily, President Zhabnov, and Colonel Killov, who united in their determination to kill Rockson, agreeing to send out “the best of the best” to assassinate him.

But our authors sort of leave this vague; only after the endless battle has ended does Rockson stop to ponder how the assassins got there, beneath the guts of Century City, and if they relayed its location back to the Reds. I mean, it’s pretty admirable that these dudes were able to so easily find the place that Killov has been fruitlessly searching for since before the series began!

We get another attempted assassination scene, this one better than all the others combined, as another ninja-type materializes in Rockson’s room and uses mental trickery on him, not to mention a flaming sword. But still, American Rebellion has lost steam long before, the entire last half coming off like padded wheel-spinning and padded endless fighting.

Interestingly though this volume does not end on a cliffhanger – unless, that is, you want to count the sex scene that’s brewing between Rockson and Rona on the very last sentence of the book. And speaking of which, this is the only book yet in the series that doesn’t feature one of Ryder Stacy’s trademark goofy-but-graphic sex scenes…dammit!!