Showing posts with label John Shirley. Show all posts
Showing posts with label John Shirley. Show all posts

Monday, May 17, 2021

Traveler #8: Terminal Road


Traveler #8: Terminal Road, by D.B. Drumm
February, 1986  Dell Books

I’ve been wondering how John Shirley would handle this eighth volume of Traveler, given that his previous contribution, #6: Border War, was basically a series finale, with Traveler literally sailing off into a Happily Ever After with his lady love Jan. But as we know from the previous volume, which was courtesy Ed Naha, Traveler’s HEA was short-lived: his boat was bombed out of the water, Jan lost, and Traveler returned to the weary, battle-hardened life of a post-nuke road warrior. 

So as it turns out, Shirley basically just ignores that previous book; other than a late, very brief recap of what happened after Border War, Terminal Road just picks up the pace from the earliest installments as if there’d been no change to the status quo. Traveler’s back in his armed and armored van, the “Meat Wagon,” playing tapes as he travels the road, his riding companion old Army pal Hill. Shirley has read Naha’s previous volume, as we do get a bit of detail on that one, and the fallout from it. Like for example that Traveler’s other old Army pal Orwell is still recovering from the wounds he endured, and thus decided to stay in Mexico a bit with new US “President” Jackson. And Shirley also answers one thing – while Naha left Jan’s fate a mystery, Shirley clearly informs us she was killed in that seaborne attack. Bummer! 

Shirley also answers another question I had – namely, when the series takes place. He makes it clear throughout that the year is 2005; the nuke war occurred “sixteen years ago,” which we’re informed was 1989. So this confirms my theory that the Dell editor who handled the back cover copy was just plain confused…because once again the back cover states that the book takes place “twenty-seven years after doomsday!” This would place the action in 2016, which is incorrect. Otherwise Shirley doesn’t dip into the subplots he introduced in previous books, ie Traveler being a supernaturally-chosen savior of post-nuke society or whatnot; in fact, I get the impression that Terminal Road was quickly churned out so as to fill a contract, or maybe because Naha needed help. 

Chief evidence of this is that Shirley, for the first time in the series, borrows a gimmick from William Gibson; each chapter alternates between two protagonists. It’s been decades since I read Gibson, but I recall this being a schtick of his in every post-Neuromancer novel. So one chapter will focus on Traveler, and the next will focus on a character new to the series, a bounty hunter named Hastur. And as with Gibson these concurring storylines slowly coalasce into one. Shirley’s never done this before; Traveler was always center stage from beginning to end, so this really gives the impression that Shirley had said all he wanted to say in Border War and was just churning this one out in a pinch. 

Which is not to say Terminal Road isn’t good. In fact it was one of my favorites in the series yet. Like all of Shirley’s Travelers, it’s essentially just a fast-moving action story, but what adds to it is the contrasting natures of Traveler and Hastur. While Shirley never outright states it, the implication is that Hastur is everything Traveler could have been: a Special Forces badass who has turned his back on any vestige of goodness and murders with impunity for money, fuel, or supplies. He’s a seven foot giant of black-American Indian heritage and built like a pro football linebacker. He carries a host of weaponry and rides an armored “trike” with a teardrop windshield. He takes glee in killing for profit, and is in every way the antithesis of Traveler, which makes for an entertaining read. 

The only problem is, Hastur seems like a poor man’s substitue for the Black Rider, that jet-black mutant biker villain who appeared in Shirley’s earliest installments. But unfortunately Shirley killed the Black Rider off, thus he had to come up with this new guy…who, despite lots of setup, turns out to be pretty much a dud in the supervillain sweepstakes. I mean when we meet Hastur he’s killing with ease – and we see how evil he is, as he wipes out his target’s entire family – but when he tries to take out Traveler later in the book he just makes one goof after another. Which makes the whole “alternating protagonist” chapter-switches all the more strange: are we supposed to be rooting for Hastur in his chapters? Hoping that he catches Traveler unawares? While it’s a neat narrative trick, it just comes off like it did in Gibson’s novels: an easy way to meet the word count. 

Another curious thing about Terminal Road is that the customary gore of Shirley’s previous books is mostly gone, and the sex almost nonexistent. I mean there’s a part where Traveler, as expected, gets busy with some post-nuke babe he meets along the road, and it fades to black! This from a series that would at least give a paragraph or two of lovably purple prose. Granted, Traveler and the lady’s second “bout” is slightly more, uh, fleshed out, but still it’s nothing compared with what, uh, came before. (My mind’s permanently in the gutter, in case there were any question.) So to recap – our hero is only in half the book, given the alternating chapters, and the sex and violence have been greatly reduced. Regardless, Terminal Road is still heads and tails better than the previous volume, which makes me sad that this was Shirley’s final installment. 

Shirley opens the book with what will be the only big action scene: Traveler and Hill, barreling through West Texas, take out a small army of Roadrats. After this they take on a job from a commune that’s been hit by Bubonic Plague; Traveler and Hill will do a “serum run” to a hospital in Utah in exchange for fuel and supplies. Traveler learns about the job opportunity via his short-wave radio; can’t recall if this aspect was much mentioned in previous novels, but here Shirley has a whole post-nuke radio society, with people on the various bands recreating old radio shows, just jabbering away, or calling out for aid. There’s a great part later on where Hastur gets hold of a shortwave radio and starts fucking with people, like a post-apocalyptic Jerky Boy or something – this could’ve gone on much longer, so far as I was concerned. 

Speaking of Hastur, in his sections we see him also offered a job: to bring Vice President Veronica Barlowe the head of Traveler. Barlowe I don’t believe has been mentioned before, but she is the VP of crazed President Frayling, who we learn is still recuperating from the previous book. In fact, Traveler is wanted dead because he nearly killed Frayling. Shirley excels in unexpected humorous bits; my favorite in this regard is when Hastur, who has never heard of Traveler, reads the dossier Barlowe provides on him – how he’s seen so much action that he’s become a legend – and bluntly declares, “Sounds like a nobody.” 

Hastur actually carries most of the narrative, shuttling around the South and trying to find Traveler. Most of the action takes place in New Mexico, by the way, and Shirley does a great job bringing the setting to life. Meanwhile Traveler just drives along, blissfully unaware he has a bounty on his head. Hill has suddenly developed a personality, so there’s a goodly bit of chatter between the two. Also this time Traveler’s listening to a “Coltrane tape” as the miles roll by, the music blotting out any thoughts. The cover depicts a random encounter with a “war mech;” for the first time Shirley introduces a sort of sci-fi element to the series, with these battle robots having been created shortly before WWIII and used to guard secret military installations. Most of them, we learn, were destroyed with the nukes, but a few survived and have gone solo, attacking people at random. 

The robot is described pretty much as it appears on the cover, and comes after Traveler and Hill while they’re fixing a flat tire. It’s a rolling tank with .90 caliber cannons and .80 caliber machine guns, as well as other stuff. Solar-powered, to boot. Traveler and Hill are only saved by the sudden appearance of two women in “powered gliders;” they swoop over the war mech and start dropping bombs on it. This is Vickie, a pretty blonde, and Dennie, an also-pretty redhead. Soon we learn their story: Mormons who have come from a high-tech sanctuary built beneath Salt Lake City before the war, so that a new generation could survive any nuclear calamity. 

Only the girls reveal that the men never showed up; while the women and kids made it down there before the nukes fell, the men didn’t. In the passing years a community has developed, with two warring factions: the “conservatives” who think religion should dictate all affairs, and the “liberals” who want to follow the Constitution. Vickie and Dennie are part of the latter group, and they’ve come up to the surface world to find a group of escaped conservatives – who have taken off with computer gear and other essentials that are necessary to maintain the underground society. Meanwhile Traveler and Hill have actually met these escaped women, not knowing who they were – early in the book they came across a bunch of smiling and polite blonde women who looked like “women from before the war;” their bus had been damaged and Traveler helped them repair it. 

It’s inevitable something will soon be happening with these couples – I mean Vickie and Dennie are presumably virgins, having grown up in a “matriarchal” society, both of them having been kids when they went to the sanctuary years ago. Shirley doesn’t elaborate much on this, but he does of course have Traveler hook up with Vickie (the hotter of the two, naturally). But as mentioned he doesn’t go into the full-bore sleaze details of past volumes, dammit. Instead Shirley goes another route – that Traveler, “despite himself,” starts to fall for Vickie. Even though he “promised himself he’d never love again,” yada yada yada. I mean you’d think Jan’s fate would give him a prefigure of what could happen, but nope. 

Hastur slowly makes his way to Traveler, using cunning to figure out where he’s headed. But as mentioned he’s a poor villain. He bungles chance after chance to take out his prey. But with this sole villain it’s clear Terminal Road isn’t headed for a big finale. Rather, Shirley goes for something that wouldn’t have been out of place in a Marvin Albert novel, with two men squaring off in the harsh elements. After a few firefights – some of which are rather costly to Traveler’s companions – Hastur holes up in a cliff and Traveler scales it to take him on man to man. The villain’s sendoff is memorable, but the climax seems more in tune with a suspense-thriller than a post-nuke pulp. 

And that’s it for John Shirley’s run on Traveler. We leave our hero as we met him, adrift in the post-apocalypse with the Meat Wagon his sole recurring companion. And also Shirley doesn’t plant any carrots for future volumes, unless Naha intends to do something with the newly-introduced Vice President. Otherwise Terminal Road is another entertaining installment of the series, though honestly the sixth volume came off like a more fitting conclusion. Here’s hoping Naha will take a few cues from Shirley in the following novels and deliver similarly fast-moving yarns.

Thursday, March 12, 2020

The Specialist #10: Beirut Retaliation


The Specialist #10: Beirut Retaliation, by John Cutter
August, 1985  Signet Books

The penultimate volume of The Specialist unfortunately loses all the oddball touches John Shirley imbued the previous ones with; Beirut Retaliation is for the most part a standard “terrorist of the week” yarn that would’ve been at home in the Gold Eagle line of books. Previous installments featured such pulpy aspects as Jack “The Specialist” Sullivan gaining super strength and even killing subway trolls with throwing stars, but this one doesn’t feature any of that, and in fact comes off as pretty dispirited. Maybe Shirley knew the writing was on the wall for the series and just phoned this one in.

It’s about three months after the previous volume and when we reconnect with Sullivan he’s on a flight to Beirut. For the past few months he’s headed up Project Scalpel, a Defense Department initiative that’s been created to revenge terrorist attacks on the US. Sullivan we’re told has never taken a contract from the US government, or any government, but in this case he has made an exception; over 200 Marines were killed by radical Islamic terrorists in Beirut three months ago, and Sullivan’s burning with the desire to dish out bloody payback. Shirley saves us the trouble of reading all the red tape and planning Sullivan’s had to go through to get here, doling out chunks of backstory in various flashbacks.

I’m probably the only men’s adventure reader in history who kept wondering, “Yeah, but what about that little girl Sullivan adopted in the last volume?” Shirley does bother to fill us in on that, eventually, in another of those flashbacks – a flashback in which he almost perfunctorily dispenses with that other series mainstay, Sullivan’s hardcore shenanigans with his latest girlfriend. This is Bonnie, who lives in Manhattan and I believe first appeared in the second volume, but I was too lazy in my review back then to note the name of the main female character in it. I think it was Bonnie. Anyway, she’s now becoming more of Sullivan’s “main woman,” to the point that our hero’s afraid he’s falling in love. In the flashback he visits Bonnie, who is the official guardian of little Melinda, who as we’ll recall Sullivan rescued in the previous volume.

Sullivan’s brought the little girl a Cabbage Patch Doll (which cost him eighty bucks!!), finally having gotten away from the busy prepping of Project Scalpel in DC, but Melinda’s in school. However Bonnie’s there, which makes for the prime opportunity for some “afternoon delight.” While previous volumes have featured (intentionally) comedic purple prose, this one’s basically over and done with in a few sentences, though we do get this memorable line: “[Sullivan] pumped and pounded like an M110 self-propelled howitzer.” Surprisingly, this will be it so far as Sullivan’s sexual activities go – save that is for a surprise bang late in the novel (which happens to be one of those precious few “oddball” moments). 

But all this was in the past; we meet Sullivan while he’s flying in to Beirut…and then a PLO terrorist tries to hijack the plane. In the incident depicted on the cover by artist Mel Crair, Sullivan’s able to bullshit his way into the cockpit, where he almost casually disposes of the terrorists. But he’s undercover, the secrecy of Project Scalpel of prime importance, so the nebbish businessman who was seated beside Sullivan is given credit for foiling the hijacking. This is a subplot Shirley later plays out, when the businessman – made famous by the media for his “heroic” actions – becomes a target of terrorists and Sullivan has to go to the rescue.

Sullivan’s hand-picked team for the Beirut retaliation features series staples Merlin and Rolff, commandoes who have helped Sullivan in previous exploits but who have now, for plot contrivances, gotten soft: Merlin’s “hooked” on marijuana and Rolff drinks all day. Then there’s Rialto Block, a tough black vet Sullivan fought with in ‘Nam; Sullivan’s recruiting of Block for Project Scalpel features an interminable flashback of Sullivan going into the “black Mafia” of Washington, DC and finding Block, who now acts as a mob enforcer. And finally there’s slackjawed yokel Boots Wilson, a southern racist who hates Block, and vice versa. And heading up Project Scalpel is military moron Colonel Mitchell, whose prime motivation is covering his own ass and ensuring that he keeps Sullivan in check. He’s also the one who insisted that Boots Wilson be part of the commando team.

In other words the team’s a mess, and Sullivan, who is particularly driven this time, blows a fuse when he sees what a shitty state they’re in. We take an unwanted detour into military fiction as Sullivan puts the team through hellish boot camp, pushing them into a self-sustaining unit. This does lead to one of the oddball touches that we took for granted in previous books: Boots, who takes off from the team after a grueling hike through the desert, runs afoul of “desert bandits.” Clearly inspired by the Sand People of Star Wars, they wear masked turbans and ride in Jeeps that have skulls on them. This leads to the best action scene in the book, as Sullivan and the others come to the rescue in armed dune buggies, climaxing with a gory sequence of Boots beating one of the bandits to death with his bare fists.

But otherwise Beirut Retaliation lacks the dark humor of the previous books, and just comes off like any other men’s adventure novel from the ‘80s. Even the villains are sadly typical: the Holy Warriors of Islam, who are known for using self-explosive devices to wipe out people, places, and things. And again we get a sad reminder of the progressive movement of radical Islam: Sullivan has to explain to his comrades that these particular terrorists don’t care about their own lives, and indeed look forward to martyring themselves if it means they can wipe out a bunch of innocents. They’re led by the mysterious Hassan the Red, so named because he wears a red turban; he claims to get his orders directly from Allah, and only informs his underlings of their latest target days before the attack will be scheduled. Hence, Sullivan and team know another attack is coming, they just don’t know where or when.

The bit with the nebbish businessman who took credit for the airplane rescue is another fun moment; he’s being kept in a bakery, and Sullivan and Moshe (a Mossad agent Sullivan’s worked with before) stagger in, pretending to be lepers. This part features Sullivan rushing through flames and fooling the superstitious terrorists into thinking he’s a demon from hell. Later in the book Sullivan looms over another captured terrorist, one that’s been drugged so that his body feels nothing, and pretends to be a ghost. Oh and the best bit of all is a random, eleventh hour sequence in which Sullivan takes the virginity of a pretty female terrorist they capture; when Moshe says no torture will make the girl talk, Sullivan says he has another idea in mind. Unfortunately brief, this sequence is on the level of other craziness in previous books: “[Sullivan] suddenly thrust deep within her once again and ground his dick into her sore, bloodied twat.” Good grief! But she’s game for it: “Having tasted a real man, she was a junkie for Sullivan.”

Otherwise too much of Beirut Retaliation is padding, with Sullivan and team going around Beirut and trying to get a lead on Hassan the Red’s plans. The climax involves them chasing after a four-man suicide party that’s planning to wipe out a US Navy ship in Alexandria, Egypt. The climax sees some dire repercussions for some of Sullivan’s team (spoiler alert – it’s none of the recurring characters), and even worse Hassan the Red escapes into Iran. The novel ends with Sullivan vowing to chase into Iran and wipe him out, government be damned. Sadly this means the next novel will continue with this bland Gold Eagle vibe – and even more sadly, the next volume would be the last. 

Bonus factoid: Each volume of The Specialist has featured a “next volume preview” sort of thing, excerpting a few pages of the next installment. We’re told in this one that the next volume will be titled “Iran Retaliation,” but the actual published title was American Vengeance. I’m curious if this sheering away of the pulp aspect and going for more of a blasé, generic “Muslim terrorist of the week” angle was due to the publisher…maybe sales were dwindling and they figured just aping Gold Eagle might help. If so, the plan failed.

Thursday, December 12, 2019

City Come A-Walkin’


City Come A-Walkin,’ by John Shirley
July, 1980  Dell Books

Back in the early ‘90s at the height of the cyberpunk craze I first heard of John Shirley’s City Come A-Walkin,’ which at that point was a nigh-legendary early example of the subgenre, supposedly impossible to find. I remember seeing ads in magazines for a pricey trade paperback reprint of the book, wondering if it would be worth checking out. Then I moved on to other things and forgot about it, until one day sometime in 2005 I found this original Dell paperback at a Dallas Half Price Bookstore. At half off the original cover price and in mint shape, to boot. This was back in the days when HPBS didn’t put stickers with inflated prices on every single damn “old” book and actually lived up to the name of the store.

An interesting note is the big and bold “Fantasy” on the cover of this Dell edition. This is an accurate designation, because it turns out City Come A-Walkin’ is less Neuromancer-esque cyberpunk and more of a magic realism sort of thing. This isn’t just due to the premise of the book – that the city of San Francisco is personified into a living being which interacts with chosen vassals. It’s true of the entire narrative. Characters react to bizarre situations with nonchalance, and we even have some characters who are capable of ESP, apparently a fairly common thing.

This would be one thing if we were in some far-off future, but City Come A-Walkin’ is set in 1991. The vibe is cyberpunk in how the corporations and banks have pretty much taken over daily life and also in the general air of urban decay. Otherwise there are no parts where the heroes jack into the Net and go off into virtual reality worlds, a la William Gibson. In this regard Shirley’s work is actually more prescient, as the computers are mostly used for financials and surfing the web – there’s an accurate prediction of what the internet will be like when one character visits a phone booth that’s also a news kiosk, magazines and newspapers being searchable onscreen.

The urban malaise is made clear posthaste; the novel starts in the grungy inner city of San Francisco and stays there for the duration. “Angst rock” is the music of the day, the polar opposite of the bland disco music which still plays in clubs. Shirley clearly wrote the novel in the late ‘70s, but he does get it right in that the “disco” of his 1991 is “made by computers,” and thus has more in common with the “disco music” we really did get in the early ‘90s: techno. As for angst rock, it’s clearly modelled after punk, only apparently with more of a heavy metal edge and adlibbed lyrics. At least when Catz Wailen is doing the singing; she opens the novel, sitting down in a studio booth to hear back a few hours of music she’s recorded with her band. Only in a prefigure of the EVP phenomenon, she starts hearing a familiar voice speaking to her beneath the music.

The voice belongs to Stu Cole, and it’s clear from the outset he’s “no longer with us.” But rather than speaking to Catz from the afterlife, he’s moved into some sort of quasi-limbo. He wants to tell Catz what happened to him, but to do so he will go into “the necessary mindset [of the] third person,” which fortunately means that the novel’s not going to be in first-person – I personally hate sci-fi that’s written in first-person. From here we slip back a few weeks to May of 1991, as Cole tends to his grungy bar in San Francisco while Catz Wailen, uh, wails away with her punk-metal band. Cole isn’t your average protagonist: forty-two, with thinning hair and a growing pot belly, he was briefly involved in local politics and is in love with San Francisco, even decorating his hovel of an apartment with photos he’s taken of it.

This night Cole notices a strange patron in his bar, an otherwise nondescript dude of medium height and build who has a granite-visaged face which is mostly hid behind a pair of mirror-lensed sunglasses (a look soon to be a cyberpunk staple). Cole notices this guy interracting with some of the patrons and gets a weird vibe from him, so he asks Catz to check him out. Catz has ESP, conveniently enough, and is able to get a good look at who this guy is and what he wants. She sends Cole what she’s learned via “psi-shots” as she sings with her band. In other words she sends Cole mental flashes and also sings about this stranger in her ad-libbed vocals. This is where the title of the book comes from. It’s all pretty goofy.

Even goofier – the stranger is City, ie the City of San Francisco itself, taking the form of a human and walking among his people. Cole just accepts this, again indicating that this is more of a magic realism sort of affair. Catz for her part knows beyond question who and what City is thanks to her ESP – and folks I have no idea why Shirley gave the book’s three protagonists names that all start with “C.” I mean, Cole, Catz, and City. Why not just add a Cora and Carlos to the lineup? Luckily there’s a bit more inventiveness with the plot. City isn’t just the city in a human body, he’s also the personification of the will of the people, a subject very near and dear to Cole’s heart. His own political objective was to give voice to the inner city dwellers who are increasingly straightjacketed by the corporations and banks, thus we are to understand why he’ll be drawn to City.

City makes a memorable first impression. He causes two men and a woman to start fighting and stabbing each other; turns out City has informed the trio that they’re cheating on each other. After this City rushes off to confront some hookers, returning them to their parents, City adopting new guises with each visit. Oh and goofily enough his being always emanates disco music, which only Cole can hear, and this is supposed to be another indication of City’s bizarre powers, but really it just made me think of that pimp in I’m Gonna Get You, Sucka who had a dude with a boombox follow him around to provide his theme song. There’s also a running subplot about Vigilantes who wear stockings over their faces and who have declared war on the hookers of the city; Cole’s received a threat from them, given that his business is an unofficial headquarters of the local hookers. The Vigilantes are basically the brownshirts of the government and will serve as the main villains throughout.

Eventually the plot surfaces: the Mafia is becoming involved with the banks and the government in a corrupt scheme which will further shackle the miserable populace; more importantly so far as City is concerned, a global internet will eradicate the boundaries which separate cities, rendering them needless, and City will die. Shirley of course doesn’t use the term “internet,” but this is what he describes – all customers and employees shopping and working from their own homes via computer interface. I found this interesting because Shirley in his own way is advocating populism over globalism – there’s actually less of a leftist reactionary tone to the novel than I expected there would be – with the concern that the identities of individual cities (and people) will be lost in the sprawl of global conformity.

The only problem is, City gradually proves to be what the British would call a “nutter.” He has chosen Cole as his latest vassal due to Cole’s love of San Francisco and its people; Catz can also come along due to her psi abilities, which allow for easier grasping of City’s goals and objectives. Thus he sends the two off on increasingly-dangerous missions to destabilize the Mafia-bank corruption which threatens San Francisco’s autonomy. From the start City is sadistic; he sends Cole and Catz into a bank building, armed with guns and wearing masks, and somehow compels Cole to pull the trigger and kill a Mafia bigwig. A guard is also killed in a particularly cruel manner, with a firehose jammed through his eye.

In addition to the thinning hair and expanding gut Stu Cole is a much different protagonist than Shirley’s series characters Jack Sullivan and Traveler; he dwells on his acts of violence through the novel, plagued with nightmares of having taken lives. Another big difference is that Cole isn’t as likable as either Sullivan or Traveler, but this is mostly because he becomes an unthinking dupe of City as the novel progresses. He not only lacks the backbone but also the memorable spark of either of those later characters. And as for the narrative itself, true Shirley was more of a veteran writer when he moved on the The Specialist and Traveler, but it would seem the action-centric themes of those series books forced him to be a more streamlined writer; too much of City Come A-Walkin’ comes off as filler, a lot of it comprised of word painting or flights of fancy which Shirley didn’t saddle his later novels with.

As mentioned Cole becomes more of a willing pawn in City’s increasingly maddened schemes. City doesn’t have as much power during the day, thus can’t appear in human form during daylight and will speak to Cole over the TV airwaves. Cole meanwhile is under attack by the government, his credit erased – a theme here is that there’s no such thing as physical money anymore, all of it credit via bank accounts, and Shirley’s argument is how a corrupt, overbearing government could destroy someone’s entire wellbeing with the click of a button. Cole’s also losing his club, the banks asking for an insane fee to buy it back. At this point though he’s almost in a zombie state, shuffling around the city at City’s behest, usually getting in scrapes with the Vigilantes.

Cole’s also not as savvy as Sullivan or Traveler when it comes to the action stuff; he constantly makes bonheaded moves. Like when he and Catz get in a firefight with some Vigilantes, then run after them and jump in their truck as they get away. In other words the two just pretty much hand themselves over to their enemies. Here Cole and Catz are beaten for info, and finally City’s able to free them – starting a fire in the house – but Cole’s forced to leave Catz behind. He gets her back in another action scene, one with a memorable start: Cole meets himself, appearing as a ghostly figure a la the “Burning Man” material in The Stars My Destination. Ghost-Cole tells our Cole where Catz is, what to look out for, and etc. Another reminder of the surreal nature of the novel is that Catz, upon being freed by Cole in a brief action scene, is pretty nonchalant about Cole’s story of meeting his future self.

Another big difference between this and Shirley’s series work – the sex is a lot less explicit here. When Cole and Catz get to the expected tomfoolery it’s all off-page. Cole for his part has been suffering from impotence, something Catz intuits thanks to her ESP, but he’s also nervous because he’s so “old” and out of shape and Catz is all young and pretty and stuff, or at least I assume she is; Shirley doesn’t much describe her, but she comes off like Patti Smith mixed with Debbie Harry or something. When Catz pleads with Cole to break it off with City because of the increasing danger, not to mention Cole’s increasing slavery, he refuses. At this point Catz herself is already on City’s bad list; he’s told Cole that “the girl can no longer be trusted” because she doubts City’s omniscience. Catz ends up leaving San Francisco with her band.

It’s hard to root for Cole at this point; he hides in an apartment, having lost his own place, waiting loyally by the TV for any messages from City. Now he’s a terrorist for City, planting bombs and getting in firefights at his behest without ever questioning anything. And City becomes more and more of a villain, even beginning to question Cole’s loyalty. The book climaxes with a bizarre, surreal moment in which City tries to kill Cole, with Cole ultimately finding himself in a removed sort of reality. This takes us back to where we started, and Shirley gives a memorable finale in which Catz basically tells ghost-Cole to kiss off – she’s too busy living life to care about his deranged “cities must survive” shit.

Shirley includes some cool stuff here and there, in particular an angst rock concert by a group called The First Tongue, which as described sounds like modern group Ghost, down to the clerical robes and facepaint. Even cooler, Shirley references Blue Oyster Cult here. The urban squalor is well depicted, as are the dangers of an overbearing totalitarian government. But I really didn’t care for any of the characters. Sure, Shirley probably considers The Specialist and Traveler as just contract work, but the protagonists of those series were likable and easy to root for. His writing in City Come A-Walkin’ is strong, though, and in some ways prefigures his later work in the masterful Wetbones. Overall I can kind of see why this one was so regaled in the cyberpunk days, but I personally didn’t think it lived up to its reputation.

Thursday, December 6, 2018

Traveler #6: Border War


Traveler #6: Border War, by D.B. Drumm
June, 1985  Dell Books

It’s a veritable Old Home Week in this installment of Traveler, which sees John Shirley writing what comes off like a series finale. This leaves me with many questions, as Shirley did pretty much the same thing in The Specialist #3; he caps off the entire series with a satisfying conclusion. One wonders what led him to this, as there were seven more volumes of Traveler to go.

I wonder if Shirley just figured this was it for him on the series, but as it turned out he wrote one more volume: the eighth installment, with series co-writer Ed Naha writing the others. Maybe it looked like Traveler was about to be cancelled and Shirley wanted to give the readers a proper finale. Who knows. Whatever the story behind its creation, Border War is a blast, my favorite volume yet in the series. It features everything you could want in post-nuke pulp, save for the inexplicable lack of Shirley’s patented hardcore sex scenes. Bummer!

First though a bit of pedantic housekeeping: the back cover states that the novel takes place in 2015, which is odd given that previous volumes were set in 2004. In the text itself, Shirley writes that WWIII happened in 1995, “seventeen years before.” This would place the action in 2012. First I thought Traveler took one hell of a detour in his drive to Arizona, which he began in the climax of  the previous volume, but later we’re told that the third volume was just a year ago. So what I assume has happened is that Shirley intended to write that the nukes came down in 1985, not ’95, or maybe a copy editor just goofed. But even that doesn’t work out, as seventeen years after 1985 would be 2002, not 2004. Ultimately I just said to hell with it and enjoyed the book.

So Traveler is headed for Arizona in the Meat Wagon, his buddies Link (a muscle-bound black dude first introduced in the third volume) and Hill (an old Special Forces pal who debuted last volume) riding along, as well as the seldom-speaking Rosalita, the sexy Hispanic babe Link has hooked up with. Traveler himself wants to hook up: with Jan Knife Wind, the Indian babe who was established as his soul mate back in the third volume, but whom Traveler unceremoniously dropped at the end of that volume so he could get back to travelin’. Traveler is so intent upon reuniting with Jan that one wonders why he didn’t just stay with her in the first place. Again, it seems clear to me that Shirley assumed this would be the last volume of the series, or at least his last volume, and wanted to give Traveler a proper sendoff.

But nothing’s ever easy in the post-nuke US, and when Traveler and crew arrive in Pyramid Lake, Arizona, they find the place overrun by Hispanic-looking soldiers in black uniforms. Jan’s tribe has been imprisoned, and these soldiers, as Traveler learns after a soft but violent probe of the area, are from El Hiagura. The same Central American country Traveler was stuck in doing CIA stuff when WWIII happened. I’m not sure if this has been stated before, but here it’s relayed that El Hiagura is actually Guatemala, the new name coined by commie dictator Diaz, aka “the Colonel Qadafi of South America.”

In a unique spin on things, Shirley has it that the United States has become the stomping grounds for “military advisors” from other countries; in other words, the US has become the new Vietnam. And those former third world hellholes are veritable industrialized empires in comparison to the nuked US. What really makes Traveler seethe is his realization – perhaps grasped a bit too quickly – that senile President Frayling, commanding his lunatic “army” the Glory Boys from a bunker in Las Vegas, is clearly working with Diaz, despite Frayling’s hatred of commies. It’s again made clear that Frayling “started World War III,” something the entire surviving populace of the US is apparently aware of, and this is just yet more of his nefariousness.

Each volume of Traveler has been heavy on the action, with many of the books really just extended chase scenes; Shirley continues the trend but varies things up a bit. For one, people finally seem aware that bullets and ammo would be scarce 17 years after nukes destroyed the country, so Traveler, in an attempt to save his ammo, often resorts to using a crossbow. There are still many scenes of gun-blazing gore on full auto; even the mounted machine guns on the Meat Wagon see some use, and Traveler at one point takes out a Russian helicopter with an M-79 grenade launcher, just like Rambo was doing in movie theaters at the time. The El Hiagurans tote new submachine guns Traveler’s never seen before, things that look like Uzis, but surprisingly there’s never a part where Traveler gets his hands on one of them.

Each volume of the series has also had a bit of a metaphysical slant, and Border War really goes all-out with it. In many ways this volume comes off as almost New Agey as the average volume of Doomsday Warrior. Traveler is briefly captured by the El Hiagurans and finds Jan’s tribe in the camp stockade; Jan herself unsurprisingly has been taken away, to serve as Diaz’s personal concubine. Meeting with the chief of the tribe, our hero learns he is the clichéd “Chosen One” of prophecy who will lead “the red man” against “the white man.” Through the novel Traveler will experience the occasional astral voyage, meeting a spiritual Indian and reconnecting with mysterious holy man Nicholas Shumi, returning from previous volumes.

One of these astral voyages features a surprise appearance by a previously-vanquished foe: the super-cool Black Rider, Traveler’s mutant archenemy who was killed off in the fourth volume. As part of a test to prove he is indeed the chosen one, Traveler is baited by the Black Rider, who claims that while his body is gone, his spirit is strong as ever. But Traveler is powered by his love for Jan, whereas the Black Rider is just fighting out of hate: “Traveler kicked his ass but good.” All of this seems to me another indication that Shirley intended this to be the series finale.

We also see a return from Orwell, another of Traveler’s old Special Forces guys, last seen in the third volume. Now he’s a prisoner at a Glory Boys base, but manages to break free and assemble the surviving soldiers into another of the rag-tag armies Traveler will use to beat the El Hiagurans. Orwell is also our guide through the horror element Shirley delivers each volume; there’s an arbitrary but fun bit where he takes a tour of all the gruesome mutants Frayling’s men have created out of unwilling test subjects. I believe Shirley has a bit of in-jokery here, as we’re told that Orwell’s second-in-command is a guy named Bolan who looks around sixty and claims to have fought in Vietnam. More in-jokery comes courtesy Traveler, who early in the book poses as “Robert B. Parker” to avoid the Glory Boys who are looking for him.

Shirley introduces a new character, one I assume will become important in later volumes: The Grizzly, a burly, red-bearded roadrat leader who was a friggin’ professor of Medieval Literature and Mythology pre-war. Now he’s like a figure from Beowulf, commanding his loyal army of bloodthirsty roadrats. Shirley clearly has fun writing this character and I appreciated how he wasn’t just another of Traveler’s many one-off enemies; Traveler and comrades free Grizzly and his crew from the El Hiagurans, after which Traveler appeals to the man’s patriotic instincts – America is being overrun by a militant horde, and it’s time to band together and kick those South American asses back where they came from. To its credit, though, at least this particular horde is honest about the fact that it’s an invading army.

Another new character is one of those one-off enemies: the Gila Lord, another roadrat leader, but this one a super-massive monster with lizard eyes. Word has it he’s not human, and I kept picturing the Mutant Leader from Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns. In an arbitrary but very entertaining sequence, Traveler must fight the Gila Lord in a match to the death in order to win the support of his roadrats. Shirley again shows his mastery of the minor details: the Gila Lord comes onto the stage amid much fanfare, biting off the fingers of one of his attendants to feed to his pet gila. After all this, Shirley just has Traveler “stroll” onto the stage, which I thought was very funny. But then as ever there is a subtle comedic element that runs through Traveler.

Traveler becomes a post-nuke Patton, putting together a makeshift army of Indians, roadrats, and “real” soldiers who have become sick of the ruling Glory Boys. Speaking of which we have an almost anticlimactic sendoff for President Frayling; the Reagan analogue hasn’t even appeared yet in the series, I think, but here Traveler and his army finally decide to make short but final work of him. Frayling’s exit would of course be another indication of the quick wrap-up Shirley appears to be giving the series, but it leads to fun potential developments for future volumes, in particular a character at the end of the book who reveals his surprising intent to become the next president. 

Action is frequent and as usual well-handled. Shirley as ever delivers appropriate gore, as well as a cruel streak in Traveler – his torture of a captured El Hiaguran soldier shows a new side, though in his defense the soldier beat Traveler around during Traveler’s brief imprisonment with the El Hiagurans. Toward the end of the book Traveler becomes more of a field commander, so that the climactic battles for the most part feature Traveler watching from afar while others do the fighting. Indeed, Shirley attempts to shoehorn too many big battles into the text, and given that the book’s so short this means that many of them are basically dealt with in summary. We do get more detail in the bigger battles, like the fight to free Kansas City – which sees yet another return of previous characters, like Baron Moorcock (yet another in-joke), last seen in the second volume.

But as mentioned Shirley doesn’t treat us to one of his purple-prose XXX scenes. Jan stays off-page for the duration, and in fact I think she has like one or two lines of dialog. Shirley is more intent on giving Traveler a Happily Ever After; he is as expected reunited with Jan (like a page or two before the end of the book!), and further decides that he’s going to go off with her on Diaz’s captured yacht. Further, Traveler gives the Meat Wagon to Hill and Orwell, who are going to stay behind and help rebuild the United States – Traveler just wants the tape deck and the tapes! Meanwhile Link and his girlfriend Rosalita will come along with Traveler and Jan on the yacht, hoping to find some paradise in this post-nuke world.

 And that’s it for Border War, and seemingly for Traveler. Curious then that there were more volumes to go. A peek at the back cover copy of the next volume would indicate that Traveler is not headed for a Happily Ever After, which reminds me how I felt when I saw Alien 3, the opening of which completely ruined the dramatic finale of Aliens. I’d love to know the story behind Border War; did Shirley intend it as his swan song? If so, was it because he wanted to leave or because it looked like Traveler was going to get cancelled? Or did he just want to wrap up all the plot elements he’d created in the previous volumes so that Naha could work off a clean slate upon his assumption of the writing duties?

Regardless, I loved this one, and it encapsulates everything that’s great about post-nuke pulp.

Monday, July 23, 2018

The Specialist #9: Vengeance Mountain


The Specialist #9: Vengeance Mountain, by John Cutter
June, 1985  Signet Books

It’s hard to believe, but The Specialist is coming to an end; after this one there’re only two more, and the shame of it is that by this point John Shirley (aka “John Cutter”) has gotten his template down – basically, The Specialist at this point has become a sort of parody of The Executioner, with everything taken well over the top. Vegeance Mountain is very much an indication of this, as it’s basically just a long-running action sequence with some of the darkest comedy you’ll find in men’s adventure. That being said, the series still isn’t as cool as the stuff Shirley was writing at the same time for Traveler

Another thing that makes it unfortunate that the series is ending soon is that Shirley sets up a subplot that promises big changes for tough-ass hero Jack “The Specialist” Sullivan: namely, he’s considering adopting a young girl and raising her! This character is named Melina and is introduced in one of the grimier opening setpieces yet in the series, reminding readers that, of all the ‘80s men’s adventure series, The Specialist comes closest to capturing the grimy vibe of such books from the ‘70s. Whereas most other series in the ‘80s glossed out the sick-o material one would find in a ‘70s men’s adventure novels, replacing the sleaze and filth with detals about guns, guns, and more guns, John Shirley delivers what comes off sort of like a more polished installment of The Sharpshooter.

We meet Melinda in an opening sequence which sees Sullivan taking out a kiddie porn producer in the woods outside New York, where the bastard shoots his “movies.” It is of course an unsettling topic, but it must be stated that Shirley has his tongue firmly in cheek throughout, ramping up the insanity. In other words he takes a subject that is disquieting and disgusting in reality, but puts an almost surreal spin on it, with a “producer” so depraved that one is certain – or at least prays – that such a creature couldn’t actually exist.

Melinda is the man’s latest “star,” kept naked and shackled in this cabin in the woods, forced to “act” in perverted movies in exchange for bare morsels of food. As ever Shirley goes wildly overboard to make his villain loathsome so that the reader can’t wait to see him axed, but this kiddie porn freak really isn’t around enough to make much of an impression. As expected, Jack Sullivan makes short work of the guy’s henchman, delivers the producer a fitting sendoff to hell, and saves little Melinda – Shirley keeping the scene refreshingly free of treacle. Sullivan drops the poor girl off with Bonnie, the hotstuff private eye who first appeared in the previous volume, and asks if Bonnie would consider adopting her – then, after some off-page good lovin,’ Sullivan splits!!

He's soon contacted by another private eye, this one a sleazeball by the name of Preminger. This guy’s been hired by several victims of one of the more depraved and psychotic characters you’ll ever encounter in fiction: Jerome Farady, Jr, who according to Preminger has murdered 180 women(!!) over the past years, each of them in sexually sadistic ways. Farady, a Ted Bundy type (in that he has boy-next-door good looks, and isn’t a slavering wild-eyed freak as one might expect), has escaped prison because his father, Farady Sr, is a multi-millionaire with all kinds of power and influence.

But these victims of Jr’s excesses have banded together; each of them has lost someone due to the sadist, and they’ve heard of the Specialist and knows he’s the guy who can permanently punch Faraday’s ticket. Sullivan briefly meets them – taking the opportunity to check out hotbod brunette Angela Mills, whose mom was chopped to hamburger by Faraday – and promptly takes the job. Sullivan, as ever fueled by the need for vengeance, is almost at comic book levels here, becoming more and more enraged by the stories he’s hearing about Farady, and vowing to kill him but quick. Unfortunately Farady Jr and Sr have both sequestered themselves in an old fortress deep in Mexico, guarded by roving packs of ruthless mercs.

Sullivan heads for Mexico, where the rest of the novel plays out. He picks himself up a CAWS auto-shotgun thing, as memorably featured in the later Cybernarc #4. Shirley pulls a fast one, making us thing the novel’s going to be a long-simmer affair of Sullivan posing as a mercenary hoping to get a job at the “castillo,” as the fortress is constantly referred to. Posing under the in-joke name of Richard Stark, Sullivan beats up a few of the mercs, including fat boss Ludlow and drug-dealing punk K.C., and gets a successful audience with Faraday Sr, who doesn’t trust “Stark” but decides what the hell, he’s hired. Sr by the way is appropriately insane, ranting and raving beneath the framed painting of his forebear. In a bit of series continuity he also reveals he was once a client of the Blue Man, from volume #3. As for Jr, he’s locked away on his own floor of the fortress; no one’s allowed to see him, but Sr occasionally sends local whores in there to be raped and killed.

Shirley really goes for an over the top dark comedy vibe throughout; the mercenaries who guard the fortress are all criminals of the most depraved sort, boasting of how many women they’ve killed. Even “harmless” K.C. brags about wasting a couple people who found out about his dope-smuggling venture. While the reader settles in for the long haul on this – Sullivan dealing with these guys while trying to figure out how to kill Jr – Shirley pulls the rug out with it all happening in the next few pages. Sullivan takes out a monstrous Jamaican merc (who of course is toking on an equally-monstrous joint before the fight) – and gets into Faraday Jr’s chamber. But he misses his chance to kill him and has to escape into the jungle.

From here Vengeance Mountain employs the same template as all the other John Shirley men’s adventure novels I’ve read: it becomes a long chase scene. Sullivan spends more time fighting the corrupt local cops, all of whom are in Faraday’s employ. Shirley doesn’t muddy up the storyline with too many characters; Sullivan befriends a local bar owner who considers gringos his best customers, and the only other character here is the mandatory easy lay Sullivan must have each volume: none other than Angela Mills, who has come to Mexico because she wants to see Faraday Jr dead, and just hiring the services of the Specialist isn’t enough.

Sullivan is more pissed than anything at the girl’s presence, but of course we have the expected sex scene – up to the usual explicit standards we now demand from Mr. Shirley. Angela by the way has “the most incredible body” Sullivan has ever seen; indeed, his “heavy artillery [begins] to throb” when Angela tries to seduce him back at her hotel room. A graphic sequence which has Angela promising Sullivan that he won’t make her climax. If you think Sullivan fails in this, you are hereby sent to the men’s adventure remedial class.

The plot is barebones but what keeps it moving is Sullivan’s near-insane resolve to kill Jr; there are moments where he basically fuels himself with thoughts of getting his hands on the bastard’s throat. But it must be said that Shirley himself finally seems to be running out of fuel. Much, too much, of Vengeance Mountain is padded-out backstory about Sullivan’s days in ‘Nam. Too many times he’ll be looking off into the Mexico jungle and think how it’s so similar to ‘Nam, and from there we go into an extended backstory about a hairy patrol he once endured with his loyal soldiers. This seems to be setting up the plot of the next novel, which promises to see Sullivan leading a new team of soldiers, this time in an excursion into Iran.

The fun as ever comes in the unexpected moments of dark humor. Like when Sullivan discovers a traitor in his midst, one who has come down to sell info to Faraday Sr; when Sullivan gets him, he beats the traitor so badly that his face looks “like a cherry pie that’d been run over by an 18-wheeler.” When the going gets too tough Sullivan sends out for help, and old familiars Merlin and Rolf show up for the climactic assault on Faraday’s castle. Angela takes part, too, getting some field experience with assault weaponry. Shirley doesn’t shirk on the gore, either, so his action scenes are always entertaining, though it must be said that the Specialst doesn’t do near as much gory damage with his CAWS as Rod and Drake did in Cybernarc #4.

For the most part, though, it was the dark comedy I most enjoyed in this Specialist. Otherwise the storyline was a little too simple, and the volume was a bit of a comedown after the more entertaining previous installments. As mentioned though, there was only two more volumes to be, so we’ll see if Shirley gets back to previous standards. 

Monday, November 20, 2017

Traveler #5: Road War


Traveler #5: Road War, by D.B. Drumm
February, 1985  Dell Books

Probably the best way I could describe this fifth volume of Traveler, which is once again courtesy John Shirley, would be “a post-nuke Cannonball Run.” Seriously, Road War is all about a diverse group of cutthroats who engage in a race to discover a perhaps-mythical cache of gold. And, as with Shirley’s past Traveler output, it’s basically an extended action scene, one that doesn’t let up from first page to last.

It’s still 15 years after 1989, when WWIII went down, so time hasn’t really moved on much in the past few volumes, even though we learn the third volume was “months before.” It must be some short time after the previous volume, as Traveler is still hanging out with Link, the muscle-bound black guy he met in the climax of that installment, a former Green Beret so big that an M-16 looks like a “toy” in his hands. To tell the truth I kept confusing Link with Orwell, Traveler’s black buddy back in the third volume – not to sound racist or anything. The characters are just very familiar, and are basically just ciphers for Traveler to talk to, so it isn’t just him driving around alone in his “Meat Wagon” armored van. And another character in the book also confuses Link and Orwell, so there.

But anyway Traveler and Link are hanging out in a bar in the Drift, in the desert ruins of Nevada; a radiation-poisoned prospector known as the Old Man in the Hole gets in front of everyone, throws out some platters of beaten gold with maps scrawled on them, and claims he found a huge stash of gold out in them thar hills. The old man is a notorious bastard, prone to lying and deceit. He claims he’s telling everyone this because he himself will have no use for the gold, as he’s dying of stomach cancer – and also because he hopes everyone kills each other while hunting for it. For gold can still buy a passage to peace here in the post-apocalypse; supposedly there are areas relatively unscathed by radiation, but it costs a pretty penny to get there.

Then the Old Man starts off a gunfight which results in him getting killed – the tumor blown out of his stomach via shotgun and splattering on the wall. As ever Shirley provides his tale with customary ultra-gore, which is how I demand it. But be warned, friends, Road War is the first Shirley offering yet that does not offer any of his weird creature feature radiation-spawn mutants or any of his just-as-outrageous sex scenes! I mean for once poor old Traveler doesn’t even get laid, folks. As for the monsters, perhaps Shirley felt he’d gone overboard with them in the previous volume, which was stuffed to the mutated gills with various disgusting monsters. This time the only monsters are the human survivors of WWIII.

Chief among them is The Spike, leader of a gang of roadrats called The Wasps. The roadrats have appeared throughout the series, and are basically the mohawked, heavy metal-wearing barbarians of Road Warrior. The Spike is suitably horrific, with teeth filed to fangs and the usual screwed-up punk aesthetic; she even claims she wants to cut her “tits” off and cauterize the wound, because they just get in the way. Traveler runs into The Spike and her obedient roadrats in the bar, sparking a rivalry that will last throughout the novel. For of course, she is one of the people who sets off on the gold-hunt, as do Traveler and Link.

Traveler for his part could care little about the gold, but Link’s all fired up about it, so what the hell? “Let’s go get killed,” Traveler says; our hero is in an especially cynical mood this time around, but that only serves to make the usually-dark humor of the series all the more humorous. But man he’s like a post-nuke Philip Magellan in this one; there’s a total Marksman moment where Traveler ties a bunch of freshly-killed corpses to the back of the Meat Wagon and barrels past the Wasps, cutting the cord so that the corpses sprawl in the van’s wake as a warning.

The book really is just an extended chase scene, but it’s delivered incredibly well. Traveler and Link get in one battle after another; even “quiet” interludes, like when they pull off for a rest or to save apparently-stranded motorists, turn into full-bore action scenes. So really it has much in common with the action movies of the day; Shirley even provides a sort of soundtrack, with Traveler at one point hauling out a boom box to blare out the window as a distraction, blasting “Raw Power” by Iggy & the Stooges: “Early punk-metal rock. The raw stuff.” Link even gets in on it in a later, entertaining part where he gets behind the wheel of the Meat Wagon and comes to Traveler’s rescue, the Stooges scaring the shit out of the latest enemy they’ve encountered.

There’s even a bit of action-comedy banter between Traveler and Link, usually delivered while the bullets are flying, like when Link blows away a dude who tries to crawl into the Meat Wagon and his blood and brains splash inside – “Don’t mess up my car, bro,” complains Traveler. A bit more comedy comes via Jamaica Jack, a Drift resident captured by the Wasps and freed by Traveler and Link, at the latter’s request – Traveler as ever doesn’t go out of his way to help people, trusting no one. But Jamaica Jack doesn’t make as much impact in the narrative as I thought he might. Nor does Rosalita, a sexy Hispanic gal used as a sex-slave by The Spike(!); she rides along in the Meat Wagon with Traveler and Link, but does not engage in what I figured would be the obligatory sex scene with Traveler. Instead, she becomes Link’s woman, mostly because he’s the only one who can speak to her in Spanish.

Action is constant and energetically-delivered throughout; you never get the sense that Shirley’s just going through the motions like you would in the work of a lesser writer – like say Joseph Rosenberger. He writes every action scene as if it’s his first, with copious gore and gunplay and deadpan dialog. Some highlights would be an encounter with the Glory Boys – aka what remains of the US Army – in a ghost town, as well as a pitched battle with the “digmen” who live beneath the earth and try to catch Traveler and Link with their sticky, gladiator-style nets. And of course there are countless fights with the Wasps, The Spike increasingly desperate to kill Traveler, and vice versa.

Throughout the race our heroes keep encountering a dragster, which sometimes shoots at them as it flies by. At length – and the book occurs over two or three days – we discover that the dragster is occupied by Hill and Margolin, the two remaining members of Traveler’s old CIA Special Forces squad (Orwell, from the third volume, being the third). This is the first Traveler’s seen them since 1989, and they are ruined versions of their former selves, their minds warped by the neurotoxins Traveler himself was dosed with, back in ’89. But unlike Traveler, they were never cured of the effects, to the point that Margolin in particular has become like a machine gun-carrying Cassandra, prone to visions, just one step away from full-blown insanity.

The four manage to locate the hidden gold, which is buried in a ravine surrounded by a colony of hostile digmen. But The Spike and her sole remaining follower get the jump on our heroes, with the Spike using Traveler as a decoy for any traps the Old Man might’ve left behind (of which there are a few). The gold does indeed exist, but Traveler’s heightened senses detect something unusual about it. Not that it matters, as The Spike gets locked inside the vault due to one of those traps – and suffers one grisly fate, as we learn the Old Man really was a bastard, as the gold is radioactive and whoever finds it will die from it, just as the Old Man himself did. Plus he’s even left some food behind for whoever gets locked in the vault so they’ll live longer – to suffer longer!

There are so many pitched battles throughout Road War that the last one with the digmen doesn’t make much of an impression, but Margolin does suffer in the skirmish, offing himself via heroic sacrifice. As if proving how pointless everything is in this hellish post-nuke USA, Traveler, after going through hell to find it, basically shrugs off the lost cache of gold, and he and Hill give Link their gold maps so Link and Rosalita can go find happiness. Meanwhile Traveler’s decided to head on south to hook up with Indian galpal Jan again, last seen in the third volume. Hill says he’ll go along, which means Traveler will have a new co-riding buddy next time around.

I’ve enjoyed every volume yet of Shirley’s Traveler. He doesn’t waste the reader’s time with padding or digressive nonsense, and instead delivers a thrill-a-minute action story with plenty of gore. Not to mention a heaping helping of dark comedy. You can tell he was having fun as he wrote it, and that fun carries over to the reader.

Thursday, November 17, 2016

The Specialist #8: One-Man Army


The Specialist #8: One Man Army, by John Cutter
April, 1985  Signet Books

Jack Sullivan is back to kick some ass in the eighth installment of John Shirley’s The Specialist, which is easily my favorite one yet – Shirley has clearly gotten more comfortable writing straight action-adventure, and he even indulges in a bit of horror fiction this time, which adds a nice and unexpected touch to One-Man Army.

Similar to mid-‘80s action movies like Death Wish 3, this one has Jack “The Specialist” Sullivan moving into an apartment building to defend the tenants against the gang-bangers who are terrorizing them. Sullivan is in total superhero mode this time out; this guy is by far the most superheroic of all ‘80s men’s adventure protagonists, even though Shirley does a capable job of making him seem relatively human. But damn, Sullivan’s the dude Mack Bolan would call if he needed help!

Still mulling over the offer he was made last volume to head up a covert strike force for the government, Sullivan heads back to New York to help out an old flame named Bonnie, a hotstuff private eye who has gotten deep in it on her latest case. Hired by the tenants of a brownstone on the Upper East Side, Bonnie’s learned that the landlord, a crime syndicate-type named Legion (who has a penchant for taking out his glass eye and polishing it in front of his hechmen), is trying to clear out the building, raze it, and turn it into some sort of lucrative heroin-importing deal or somesuch.

After engaging Bonnie in one of Shirley’s enjoyably-hardcore sex scenes, Sullivan poses as the latest tenant and moves in. Here the fun begins; each volume of The Specialist has become more and more fun, with Sullivan the godlike figure of justice kicking evil’s ass in heroic fashion. This opening sequence is much in the Cannon Films mode, with scarred, battle-hardened, massively-muscled Sullivan moving in with the cowardly tenants – and promptly kicking the ass of the street punks Legion has hired. Given Bonnie’s “no killing” stipulation, Sullivan is relegated to using his fists, though when necessary he whips out a .44 Automag and blows a few of ‘em away in gory splendor.

As with the previous volume, One-Man Army is pretty single-minded in its sole plotline, of Legion sending more and more goons to the brownstone, either for them to disappear, get arrested, or come back in pieces. And again Sullivan demonstrates his Batman-like powers, his deadly skills so legendary in the underworld that gangsters nearly piss themselves at mention of “The Specialist.” This time though Shirley varies up the plot a bit with Tony “The Chill” Fabrizzio, a professional assassin with untold kills whom Legion hires to take out Sullivan.

Unfortunately Fabrizzio isn’t very interesting, and turns out to be the cliched pulp hitman. When Sullivan, more so due to his own innate sense of security than anything conscious, manages to avoid Fabrizzio’s attempted hits, the hitman turns coward and tries to run away. It gets even more Death Wish-esque when Bonnie is the one who gets hurt, Fabrizzio firing a grenade into Sullivan’s room in the brownstone. Surprisingly she doesn’t die, though she’s in the hospital the rest of the novel.

This of course only serves to make Sullivan even more consumed with vengeance. Desperate to find Fabrizzio and make him pay, Sullivan tears up Legion’s army of punks and gangsters. We get a great sequence where Sullivan hops into his armored van with its missile launcher and drives up an abandoned five-story parking structure in Queens, encountering a new booby trap on each level. Even though this sequence ends with Sullivan’s van destroyed, it’s still a helluva lot of fun.

Even better is the next sequence, which features the horror element mentioned above. In the highlight of the entire book, Sullivan chases Fabrizzio into the abandoned, grimy tunnels beneath the New York subway system. But it’s a setup; Legion’s henchman Crackwell has hired the Precious Ones, a gang of Satanic punks who live beneath the surface, to kill both Fabrizzio and Sullivan. The Precious Ones lurk in the rat-infested subway tunnels, and first they capture Fabrizzio – who in his panicked state thinks they’re the zombies of his victims – using him to lure in Sullivan.

This is pure pulp action-horror, with the Precious Ones mutant freaks (Shirley casually drops the tidbit that many of them are insane asylum escapees) who worship Satan and like to drop their victims into a pit of giant rats who eat people down to the bone. One of them’s even an “albino Negro,” like that scary-as-hell dude in The Omega Man. Sullivan, who thinks of them as “subway trolls,” takes them on with Automag and shotgun, massacring them, but he’s still caught – and almost thrown in the rat pit. But without surprise he manages to escape – and then he’s killing the rest of them with friggin’ ninja throwing stars!! This is the best sequence yet in the entire series, complete with Sullivan yelling “I’ve always wanted to meet Satan!” as he jumps into the rat pit.*

But after this craziness, the novel sort of drifts along to an unspectacular finale. Legion has escaped to Sicily, and Sullivan trails him there, but we get a lot of page-filler about him buying guns from an arms dealer and scoping out the villa Legion’s staying in. And even worse, Sullivan doesn’t even get to kill Legion here, instead just taking out a few Mafia thugs and then hiding on the airplane Legion hires to take him back to New York. The finale is at least memorable, with Sullivan chaining Legion up in the cellar of one of Legion’s tenements in Harlem, a place in total disrepair with a broken furnace Legion has refused to fix; the villain ends up freezing to death, while meanwhile Sullivan and an all-better-now Bonnie head off to Hawaii for a quick vacation!

Shirley’s clearly having fun with the series, even delivering subtle in-jokes. During the first Sullivan-Bonnie boink, Shirley uses the purplish prose phrase “pink steel” to describe Sullivan’s massive member. Later in the book, while stalking through Times Square, Sullivan passes heedless beneath “lurid movie marquees” for various porn flicks, one of which happens to be titled “Pink Steel!” This clear enjoyment in the writing is even more impressive when you factor in how quickly Shirley was writing the books; this one was published just two months after the previous one.

*I wonder if the Precious Ones were inspired by the titular subway-lurking creatures in Robert Craig’s 1982 horror paperback Creepers.

Monday, September 12, 2016

Traveler #4: To Kill A Shadow


Traveler #4: To Kill A Shadow, by D.B. Drumm
November, 1984  Dell Books

John Shirley delivers another fast-moving Traveler installment that reads more like splatterpunk horror fiction than the typical post-nuke pulp; of all the authors I’ve read in this subgenre, Shirley is the best at conveying the horrors of a post-nuke world. But by “horrors” I don’t mean starvation and disease and widespread suffering; rather, I mean gut-churning monstronsities that have been spawned by the radioactive fallout. While Shirley’s preceding two volumes have had horror elements, To Kill A Shadow goes full-bore, with our hero confronting one nuke-created monster after another.

But whereas such monster moments would be played more as a goofy creature feature in say Doomsday Warrior, Shirley’s monster moments are a helluva lot more creepy and scary – not to mention gut-churning. He’s got some sick stuff this time out, displayed immediately, as Traveler, now up in Northern California to look into some “strange US military business going on up this way,” runs into a pack of cen-cars, ie half-men, half-cars. Sounds super-stupid, but these are such disgusting creations – they haul around translucent packs, in which you can see the digesting remains of the humans they’ve eaten, for example – that it isn’t played for laughs at all.

It’s now 2005, we’re informed, whereas the previous volume was in 2004; not sure how much many months have passed, but Traveler has been thinking about heading back down to Arizona to hook up again with Jan, the sexy Indian babe he fell in love with last time. But first he’s up here in California to find archenemies Vallone and the Black Rider, to finally settle the score he has with both of them. This is how he runs into the cen-cars, which we’re informed are pre-nuke military experiments that have run amok in the post-nuke world.

Indeed, all the monsters Traveler encounters this time are the creation of genetic experimentation courtesy the post-WWIII American army; as in previous books, there’s a rabid anti-right sentiment throughout. Shirley was no doubt the only leftist punk rock writer in the entire men’s adventure/post-nuke pulp genre, and that’s once again quite apparent; his books have an edgy energy uncommon for the genre. As we’ll recall, Vallone is the bastard who caused Traveler’s nervous system to be damaged by a neurotoxin chemical before the war, and now he’s become the head of the “Glory Boys,” ie the leather-clad soldiers of the new United States.

Traveler wants to kill the bastard once and for all, plus he also wants to take out the Black Rider, the all-black mutant biker who first appeared in the second volume. Traveler figures the two might be involved with whatever “military business” is going on here in California. During his gory battle with the cen-cars Traveler comes across human captives who are bound and hanging, waiting to be feasted on by the creatures. He frees them and escapes to their commune, which is run by Brother John, aka “Christ.” The people here, each of them named “Brother” or “Sister,” are part of a religion that sees John as Christ reborn, his “Holy Book” providing them all the guidance they need.

Sure enough, the Holy Book has prophecized a “Holy Warrior,” and Brother John – an amiable sort whom Traveler thinks looks more like a young rock star than a religious leader – is certain that Traveler is he. Traveler as expected smirks at all this, and besides he’s more interested in Sister Ilana, aka “The Doubter,” a tall, sexy member of the commune who keeps throwing our hero the eye. Turns out she’s had her own vision about him – he’s the man she’ll fall in love with, but whose presence will lead to her death. This doesn’t stop them from engaging in one of Shirley’s patented hardcore sex scenes, which unfortunately is the only such scene in the book.

Traveler’s shenanigans with Ilana serve to piss off chunky, unattractive Sister Jane, who gets revenge by setting Traveler up; the only person on the commune who has seen any of the Glory Boys, Ilana guides Traveler over rough country for a few days, leading him to where she claims to have seen the soldiers – and right into a Glory Boy ambush. (For her troubles she’s sent to the experimentation pens by Vallone.) In a brief firefight Traveler’s head is hit and he’s blinded. He manages to escape, running blind through the woods, and Shirley doles out more of his creepy-crawlies: Trompers, these bizarre creatures that are like hunchbacked legs that the Glory Boys ride on, and Snakeheads, half-men, half-snakes.

Brother John’s people save Traveler, thus putting them in danger of reprisals. Meanwhile a recuperating Traveler spends more quality time with Ilana and also befriends Robbie, a twelve-year-old boy who has grown up in the commune and is subtly presented as the son Traveler was supposed to have – the son who was incenerated in the nuclear war, several years ago. Shirley doesn’t make this budding relationship cloying or maudlin, and spends occasional sections of the narrative in Robbie’s perspective, so we readers see that he’s a strong character in his own right, and a survivor just like Traveler.

Shirley this time also brings back the metapyhiscal aspect of the series, courtesy Nicholas Shumi, the wizened Buddhist monk who rides around on his elephant-sized mutatn cat, Ronin. Shumi and Ronin appear sporadically, with Shumi again telling a cynical Traveler that Traveler is an important person in post-nuke America. He also intimates that he has “plans” for young Robbie. Shirley opens up the novel a bit further with Quinlow and Buford, bumbling dudes who work for the military as Snakehead handlers but who harbor a lot of resentment for Vallone and the Black Rider; clearly meant to remind the reader of Laurel and Hardy, these two eventually become Traveler’s comrades. 

Luckily the blindness stuff doesn’t stick around long – it too being foretold by Ilana in her vision, by the way – and it turns out a bullet lodged in his skull has impaired Traveler’s sight. After surgery, he gets his sight back in another tense action scene, in which Ilana has been captured by Vallone and the Snakeheads and held for ransom. In the fight, Traveler not only regains his vision but is also unable to save Ilana, who is killed by one of the Snakeheads, thus fulfilling her own vision-prophecy. Wisely, Shirley doesn’t waste much print on her after this; Traveler buries her, thinks grim thoughts, and gets on with the business of revenge.

First though he has to prepare Brother John’s commune for the attack that is to come. Over the next week Traveler trains these people how to fight and how to defend themselves; from Quinlow and Buford they have learned that Vallone will be unleashing his latest biological horror upon the commune: the Gutters, which are like biped rhinos. They have horned heads which are designed to gut their prey, hence their name.

The ensuing battle is chaotic and bloody, Shirley mostly relaying it through Robbie, who proves himself to be a hero. Traveler meanwhile has gone off to gather up his “secret weapon,” which cleverly turns out to be those cen-cars. When Traveler defeated their leader, early in the book, the surviving cen-cars honked their horns at him as a sign of their fealty(!). Now Traveler drafts them in the bloody battle against the Gutters.

The final quarter of To Kill A Shadow gets back to the vengeance plotline. Traveler and a few commune members, including Quinlow and Buford, head off in Traveler’s Meat Wagon van. More bizarre post-nuke stuff ensues, like a memorable visit to “The Hungry Land,” a section of earth created by the Black Rider which feeds on anyone that comes across it, literally; Shirley describes the place as having a pulsing purple glow, very reminiscent of a blacklight poster. Have I mentioned that, in Traveler’s world, the phrase “Satan’s Burned Earth” has replaced the old “God’s Green Earth?” Yet more indication of the black humor which Shirley has invested this series.

Perhaps the grossest monster in the book is a 14-foot long maggot that guards the tunnel that leads into Vallone’s underground military complex; the monster-maggot too was biogenetically created from a man. The battle with it is creepy and gory, leading to some inventive usage of TNT. In fact Shirley spends so much time on monster-bashing that the fights with the Glory Boys almost come off as forgettable; after fighting so many disgusting creatures, some thug in a leather uniform just seems mundane. However, Shirley does at least give memorable sendoffs for Vallone and the Black Rider. 

Interestingly, To Kill A Shadow sees Shirley hastily wrapping up a plot he’s been building over the past two books. This is the same thing he did in the concurrent Specialist series, which featured a hasty wrapup of the overriding vengeance theme in the third volume. To Kill A Shadow was the fourth volume of Traveler, but it was the third one Shirley wrote, so I find it interesting that here he follows the same three-volume vengeance arc. In fact it makes me wonder if in both cases he hedged his bets and wrapped up the plots in case either series didn’t do well and folded early.

While it’s nice to see Traveler get his vengeance, it does come off as a bit unsatisfying, particularly because Shirley spends so much of To Kill A Shadow with the Brother John commune and Traveler’s blindness and young Robbie and etc. Vallone and the Black Rider appear in just a handful of pages each. Given that it turns out this is the last we’ll ever see of them, it would’ve been more satisfying if they’d been a little more visible throughout the novel.

But Shirley, as mentioned, at least gives them memorable sendoffs. Vallone’s is the most outrageous: Traveler, having broken into the military complex, finds a nude Vallone in bed with his latest woman, who has tied Vallone to the bed; Vallone likes to get whipped, you see. Traveler, still holding a stick of dynamite, lubes up the end of the shaft, lights it, and sticks it up Vallone’s ass! He even laughs crazily as he runs out of the room before it explodes, looking back inside at the carnage and destruction.

The Black Rider’s fate is a bit more standard: the mutant escapes the base in a helicopter, and Traveler commandeers another, holding the pilot at gunpoint and ordering him to chase after it. After knocking the Black Rider’s helicopter out of the sky—right over the Hungry Land, conveniently enough – Traveler chases after him, shoots him in the chest twice, and watches happily as the ground opens up and eats its own creator. Which should pretty much be all she wrote for the Black Rider; too bad, as he was the most memorable villain in the series, but as mentioned sadly underused here, only garnering a few lines of dialog.

Along the way Traveler picks up a new comrade in arms: John Link, a muscle-bound black prisoner in Vallone’s complex who served as a Green Beret in ‘Nam. Given that he decides to head to Arizona with Traveler in the finale, I expect we’ll see him in the next volume. However we won’t be seeing Robbie – Traveler, when he returns to the commune, is upset to find that Robbie is gone. Turns out Shumi returned and took the boy with him, stating his plans to train the boy as his apprentice. Here we learn that Traveler had intended to take the boy himself, to be the father figure he needed – quite a bit of character development for a guy who has spent the past two volumes trying to run from responsibility.

Shirley again displays his dark, cynical roots with the revelation here that Brother John is dead, killed by a Snakehead while defending Robbie in yet another attack on the commune. Turns out that John’s “Holy Book” was nothing more than a science fiction paperback from 1986 titled The Holy Warrior, all about a hero who came to save a religious commune in a post-nuke hellscape! It’s this sort of genre-mockery that Shirley pulls off throughout the series, and it’s a lot of fun, mostly because he always plays it so straight; as opposed to The Destroyer, despite the near-parody levels of the series, it’s all quite serious to the characters themselves, thus Traveler can be enjoyed both as an over-the-top exercise in gory horror and as a genuine men’s adventure tale.

Anyway, I’m really enjoying this series; as I’ve mentioned before the post-nuke setting gives Shirley free reign to indulge in his horror and sci-fi roots, so you can tell he too was enjoying it. I’d place Traveler alongside Doomsday Warrior and the almighty Phoenix as the best in post-nuke pulps.

Thursday, February 27, 2014

The Specialist #7: The Vendetta


The Specialist #7: The Vendetta, by John Cutter
February, 1985  Signet Books

I’m betting John Shirley's original title for this volume of The Specialist was “Make ‘Em Pay,” as the phrase is repeated a few times by bloodthirsty hero Jack Sullivan, who’s in full Johnny Rock mode this time out – in fact going even further, to the point where he’s practically a psychopath. I’ve said before that Shirley can churn out a great men’s adventure novel when his heart’s in it, and The Vendetta is a case in point.

In an earlier volume we learned that Sullivan had a rocket launcher installed in his war wagon van; this time out we actually get to see him use it, when in an early action scene Sullivan fires it against a group of Mafia thugs. Yes, the Specialist once again goes up against La Cosa Nostra, in particular the family of Don Toscani of New York. Sullivan’s been hired by Janet Springer, a gorgeous (of course she is – and busty, too!!) lady whose brother and father were mudered by Toscani.

Janet wants Sullivan to “make ‘em pay,” and this is what Sullivan proceeds to do…over the course of the entire novel. It’s funny, because in novels like Wetbones Shirley proves his mastery of multiple plot strands, but in The Vendetta and the other Specialist novels he sticks to a single plot until the bitter end. But in this regard The Vendetta again comes off like a throwback to the lurid ‘70s incarnations of the genre, like the The Sharpshooter and The Marksman, with our merciless hero enacting merciless vengeance with single-minded resolve.

And speaking of merciless, Sullivan here could give lessons to those earlier “heroes.” He’s even more unhinged than normal, thanks to a bump on the noggin he suffers early in the book. As The Vendetta progresses and Sullivan fully engages in his war against Toscani, the Specialist becomes increasingly violent and insane. Like the Hulk, if he’s pushed too far he goes nuts, beating people until they’re hamburger. He’s also capable of inhuman feats, like picking up a friggin’ Harley Davidson chopper and crushing someone with it.

Shirley doesn’t waste as much time on plot or development – Janet hires Sullivan, and after he’s hurt in that opening melee she helps him recuperate for a few weeks in a shack Sullivan keeps in the woodlands north of New York. Of course graphic sex ensues, but once that’s done with (as well as a pair of yokels who have the fatal misfortune of sneaking onto the property with the intent of raping Janet), Sullivan calls up his old pal Merlin to come watch Janet while Sullivan goes into town to kill some mobsters. And that’s pretty much it. 

But the demented glee with which Shirley writes the ensuing carnage is almost contagious. This is the most darkly comic Specialist yet, and they’ve all been pretty darkly comic. Shirley also proves his gift with doling out action movie one-liners, like when some hapless thugs try to mug Sullivan on the streets of NYC, and after telling them he left his wallet at home he asks, “You accept bullets instead?” We even get the in-joke stuff, like how Sullivan’s “undercover” name is Rich Stark.

Also the violence and nihilism is through the roof. Sullivan in his increasing madness goes to staggering displays of death and destruction in his intent to spread fear in Toscani and his men. This stuff too goes into the “inhuman feats” realm, like when Sullivan constructs a friggin gallows for one of his victims and times it so the noose drops just as Toscani drives by. The novel is filled with these vignettes of Sullivan going to some insane length to murder this or that Toscani flunky.

Eventually Sullivan too realizes something is wrong with him. After visiting a doctor he discovers it’s a blood clot that’s making him act so crazy, the result of that head trauma he received in the opening pages. The doc gives Sullivan some experimental laser surgery to break it up, but it still lingers a while, with Sullivan only slightly less insane when pushed too far. Meanwhile two of his old ‘Nam pals, both of them FBI agents and reappearing from earlier novels, are hunting for Sullivan, due to his latest acts of mini-genocide: Holstead and Sanson. Shirley works in a little subplot here with Sanson covertly trying to recruit Sullivan for a new Justice Department task force.

Maybe the only problem with The Vendetta is that the villain is so forgettable. We never see Toscani do anything bad; from the opening pages he’s gnashing his teeth over the fact that the Specialist is out to get him, and he spends the entire novel quaking in terror. Meanwhile we read as Sullivan puts various Toscani henchmen through the veritable wringer, and it gets to be that you start to feel sorry for these guys. But I’m assuming that’s the point, as Jack Sullivan himself is the closest thing to a “villain” in the novel.

But anyway despite once again being too long for its own good (surely it was a Signet mandate that these books were so long), to the point where it comes off as perhaps one “Sullivan kills a dude in horrific fashion” scene too many, The Vendetta is still probably my favorite volume yet of this series, mostly because it comes off like an amped-up ‘80s variation of The Sharpshooter or The Marksman, with a “hero” more insane than the “villains.”