The Lone Wolf #8: Los Angeles Holocaust

The Lone Wolf #8: Los Angeles Holocaust, by Mike Barry

July, 1974  Berkley Medallion

First of all, apologies for missing last week’s post; super busy lately. Now let’s get to the latest volume of The Lone Wolf…surprised to see it’s nearly been a year since I read the previous volume. Time’s really flying lately! But it seems as if Barry “Mike Barry” Malzberg also needed a breather, as Los Angeles Holocaust is stuck in a sort of holding pattern throughout, Malzberg developing and expanding on a new theme: that lunatic “hero” Burt Wulff has lost his mojo and knows he has become just as vile as the criminals he’s sworn to take down. 

First of all, Mel Crair’s typically-great cover has nothing whatsoever to do with the plot of the book. While the action does occur in Los Angeles, Hollywood is not part of the setup and there is no part where Wulff shoots at someone on a movie stage, or whatever action Crair is depicting. Indeed, this volume could just as easily be set anywhere else in the United States; Los Angeles and its surroundings only slightly play into the narrative, with Wulff spending the majority of his time staying in a low-rent trailer park. 

We pick up just a few days after the previous volume…and, surprisingly, Wulff’s gotten laid in the interim. This courtesy Tamara, the hotstuff college-aged former junkie who first appeared in the second volume and then again in the fourth volume. Malzberg opens en media res with Wulff and Tamara already shacked up in a Los Angeles hotel room, where Wulff has spent the last “twelve hours fucking the shit out of her.” But Malzberg is never one for exploitation in this series – we are too locked in Wulff’s nihilistic thoughts for such stuff – and Tamara does not contribute much to the novel; indeed, she’s gone in just a few pages. 

Tamara’s main function is to set up the theme Malzberg will dwell on throughout the entirety of Los Angeles Holocaust: that Wulff has lost it. And it’s not just Wulff who is experiencing this – Williams, Wulff’s former partner on the NYPD, also realizes he’s lost it in the interminable sections from his point of view, and also Calabrese, the main series villain (ever since his debut in the sixth volume), worries over how he has lost it in his interminable sequences. 

This makes the setup of the novel a little shaky; Wulff is, for the first time in the series, worried that he’s “in over his head” now that Calabrese wants him – or, “the whole world is out to get him,” as Williams sees it. But in reality Calabrese just sits around in his office in Chicago and mulls over how he’s off his game, over seventy and losing his edge, and he dithers with various killers who go off to hunt down Wulff. 

Yet meanwhile there are all these disconnected action scenes where random people come after Wulff or Williams, with no setup or resolution on who they are; again, as I’ve mentioned a million times already in these reviews, just furthering the surreal conceit of The Lone Wolf. Like for example, the book opens with some random guy knocking on Wulff’s hotel room in L.A., and Wulff drops to the ground as a precaution, and the dude takes a shot at him, and Wulff blows him away – but who this guy is, how he even found Wulff in his hotel, is never explained. 

There’s an even crazier part midway through where Williams is hauling a trailer full of carbines and whatnot to Los Angeles to join Wulff in his fight, the black cop having decided to quit the force and help out his former colleague. These guys pull him over and a shootout ensues, and only later in the book does Williams realize he has no idea who those guys even were, and finally convinces himself that they were modern versions of highway robbers, just a random vehicular mugging on the interstate! 

But again, this crazy shit is exactly what I like about The Lone Wolf. And also I’m happy to report that the morbid obsession with fresh corpses has returned; there’s an extended scene in particular where Wulff has gunned a dude down and stands there over his corpse, ruminating, noting how the expression changes after death, comparing his own mental outlook with the corpse’s, and on and on – I mean, safe to say, we aren’t talking Mack Bolan, here. Burt Wulff is damaged to the core, and this damage permeates the narrative itself, and honestly I dig it a lot. 

Tamara does not dig it, though; she tells Wulff that he is not the man she met, months ago, the man who saved her from the heroin addiction. She says back then his vendetta seemed just, or at least she believed it was, but now she can tell that Wulff “likes it,” that he’s become just as evil and merciless as the mobsters he kills. Continuing with the surrealism, Tamara puts on her clothes and walks out of the hotel, telling Wulff so long, and Wulff just stands there, worrying that some other killer might be out there, or an ambush or something…and then after a while he’s somehow certain that Tamara has made it through without problem, and is safe! 

Malzberg is so focused on the mental facet that he sets up subplots and drops them without warning; we get a sort of “Captain America and The Falcon” angle, or at least the promise of one, when Wulff calls Williams, tells him he’s in over his head, that he needs help, and after a moment’s decision Williams decides to go out to LA to help Wulff in his blood-quest. We’re also told that Williams’s wife has left him – and she’s about to give birth to a son, too – and Williams just figures this is the perfect opportunity to go start killing mobsters. 

I was wondering if this would be the new setup for the series, Wulff and Williams taking on the syndicate as a team, but humorously enough, Malzberg does nothing with it, and indeed within a few chapters Wulff and Williams are at each other’s throat (literally), and they decide to once again go their separate ways. I almost wonder if Malzberg had seen the recent Hickey & Boggs, which also paired white and black heroes; in addition to the Los Angeles setting in general, there’s also a part where Wulff and Williams go to a stadium, and a thug starts to trail them, which kind of reminded me of a similar sequence in Hickey & Boggs. 

While Los Angeles and its environs is not really brought to life, it is the subject of Wulff’s – which is to say Malzberg’s – acerbic ruminations, ie, “Los Angeles was a state of mind…a severely deranged mind,” and etc. But as mentioned most focus is placed on a hole-in-the-wall trailer park Wulff stays in, where he encounters suspicious locals who seem more like rednecks from the country. 

But then, these books could really take place anywhere; the true locale of The Lone Wolf is Burt Wulff’s mental landscape, which is where we stay for the majority of each volume’s narrative. This time Malzberg expands by taking us into the mental landscapes of Williams and Calabrese’s as well, but their musings are all so similar that it could be the same character. Williams in particular has gone from the guy who believed in the system to a man ready to blow away crooks alongside Wulff, so his scenes read almost identically to Wulff’s, only with periodic asides on what it means to be black in the United States (though Malzberg does not play up the race angle too much). 

Wulff though is still the star, and frequently in Los Angeles Holocaust he comes to the conclusion that he has become vile and cruel; after gunning down the dude in his hotel room in the book’s opening, he wonders why he doesn’t “lay down beside him.” This will be dwelt upon throughout the novel, and Malzberg makes it clear – as if he hasn’t already – that Burt Wulff is not a hero for the reader to root for. 

The recurring theme of “in too deep” is expanded to even a fourth character: a one-off guy called Billings, a freelancer here in Los Angeles to get the bounty on Wulff, but instead decides to steal the two million dollars worth of heroin from Wulff to sell for his own profit. In doing so, Billings realizes he will incur the wrath of Calabrese…but, after committing himself to it, he realizes he’s now in too deep and cannot go back to the way things were. 

Action has never been a focus of The Lone Wolf, despite which Malzberg has often turned in some genuinely thrilling sequences. Unfortunately this time it’s rather tepid; Williams gets in that interstate shootout, and then later in the book there’s a bit where Billings and two others ambush Wulff and Williams at the trailer park – even lobbing grenades at them. But even here Malzberg is more concerned with the mental musings of the characters, with them ruminating on things even as the bullets are flying. 

Malzberg also has a gift for unusual characters; there’s a part midway through that could almost come from a Parker novel, where Williams buys guns from a Harlem-based preacher. This guy has an arsenal beneath his place, and he has a running monologue that sparkles with more personality than Wulff and Williams put together. 

Otherwise, Los Angeles Holocaust really doesn’t move the needle. Wulff is in the same place as when we met him, still with the two million dollars worth of heroin and still alone. The whole “let’s team up with Williams” thing is brushed under the carpet, as if Malzberg has changed his mind halfway through writing the book. That said, this one ends with a cliffhanger, with Calabrese getting Wulff in a compromising position…and setting up their long-awaited final matchup. 

Oddly enough, Los Angeles Holocaust implies that Wulff will likely be headed to Chicago…but the next volume occurs in Miami! So either something else comes up, or he really took a wrong turn in Albuquerque.

Barca

Barca, by Lou Cameron

July, 1974  Berkley Medallion

The first of a handful of paperback originals Lou Cameron published with Berkley in the mid-late ‘70s, Barca is like the later The Closing Circle in how it clearly seems to take the work of Lawrence Sanders as inspiration. Indeed, Cameron is at such pains to produce a “legitimate crime novel” that, again like The Closing Circle, he undermines his own pulpy premise and turns in a tale that is much too staid for its own good. As it is, Barca is a slog of a read, a 256-page, small-print slog that is more focused on dialog than it is on thrills. 

Reading the back cover copy of Barca, the reader is promised a tale in which the titular tough-guy cop is shot in the head but survives, and now is on a trail of revenge. The reader will be frustrated to discover that this is not the novel he actually gets. 

Rather, the reader gets a lot of talking in Barca. A lot of talking. Hell, folks, even after waking up in the hospital bed with a bullet in his friggin’ brain, even here Barca gets in a pages-long conversation with his partner, Crane, and his boss, Lt. Genero. And they aren’t just talking about the bullet in the brain, either! It’s almost like a proto-Seinfeld in how their conversation just roams all over the place. 

And this is how it will go through Barca. It was the same thing in The Closing Circle, of course, and it occurs to me now that this was the same thing Herbert Kastle was doing in his own contemporary crime novels – lots of “salty, realistic chatter from jaundiced cops” stuff. I’ve only read a few novels by Lawrence Sanders – and I’m ready to rank The Tomorrow File as my favorite novel ever, these days, surpassing even my old top favorite Boy Wonder – but from what I’ve read, his novels too were dialog heavy. And yet, at least from the ones I’ve read, they didn’t come off as stultifying chores, like these two Cameron novels. 

So here’s the deal: Detective Sergeant Frank Barca is a New Jersey cop with twenty years of experience in Homicide. At novel’s start he and his younger partner Crane are providing protection for a guy in the hospital who is about to turn evidence against the Roggeris, a mobbed-up family with tentacles all over Jersey. Then when Crane goes out for cigarettes and Barca’s alone with the guy, someone sneaks into the room and shoots Barca in the back of the head, then puts the rest of the gun’s bullets into the would-be witness. 

In material seemingly taken from a medical textbook (like Sanders, Lou Cameron wants us to know he’s done his research), we learn how the bullet did a ton of damage to Barca’s neurons but came to rest in his brain in such a way that he survived – and maintained all of his physical abilities. However, the bullet has also come to rest in such a way that to retrieve it via surgery could result in Barca’s death. This too is explained in copious detail, as Barca exposits back and forth with a neurosurgeon some months later, after coming out of therapy. 

Barca struggles with some memories, like when a pal from the Korean War calls him to wish him well, and Barca cannot remember the guy for anything. Barca’s bigger problem however is that it is only a matter of time until his brain rejects the bullet that is embedded in it. When this happens Barca’s mind will blank out, and meanwhile his body will go into convulsions and he will ultimately die. This too is covered in copious expository dialog. 

The premise is interesting: Barca gets the chance to solve his own murder, and he has to do it fast, before his brain explodes. Instead of Plot A, however, we get Plot B: Lt. Genero, reluctantly accepting Barca back on duty, puts Barca on another case, because it would look bad for the force if Barca started investigating his own shooting(!). Which Genero assures Barca the force is totally doing, it’s just a question of manpower and whatnot… 

So Barca gets the case he was working on before he was shot: looking into the hit-and-run death of a guy named Fantasia. It’s maddening in a way; the back cover and first pages set you up for one story, then Cameron pulls the narrative rug out from under you and soon Barca’s looking at the corpse of a dead young black girl who hooked for some boys who lived above Fantasia’s pharmacy, kids who were mostly into a dope and booze scene and not so much into heavy drugs. In other words, you get another story entirely than what was promised. 

Barca’s old partner, Crane, has moved on to a new gig after being promoted, but Barca will occasionally head over to his place to engage in dialog – because, gradually, it becomes clear that the Fantasia death might be connected with the Roggeris, ie the mobbed-up family that was going to be ratted on by the guy Barca and Crane was guarding the night Barca was shot in the head. 

It takes a long while for this to develop, though. For the first half of Barca we have a methodical procedural in which Barca interrogates a cast of characters who knew Fantasia; most memorable is Wrong Way Corrigan, an 18 year-old punk child of wealth who is known for crashing expensive cars. During this Baraca becomes acquainted with Beth Wilson, an (apparently) pretty blonde social worker who was helping the young black hooker who died of an OD. 

For a writer with a pulp background, Lou Cameron is curiously chaste. At least in the novels of his I’ve read. That he pulled off such prudery in the sleazy ‘70s is quite a feat. But there’s zero exploitation of the female characters and there is zero sex; Barca notices that Beth gradually begins to grow feelings for him, but when she asks him on a date late in the novel he turns her down – he doesn’t want her to start to like him and then have her feelings crushed when he suddenly dies. Personally I thought Barca was coming on as a little too self-important; just because a girl asks you out doesn’t mean she’s going to fall in love with you. 

We fare slightly better on the action front, but even here Cameron fails to deliver what he promises. Due to his condition Barca is not allowed to drive a police car, so he finds a workaround and starts driving a motorcycle. It’s a Honda, not a Harley, but Barca also starts wearing “leather togs” and packing two pistols, making the reader think of Chopper Cop, or better yet the bike-riding cop from The Blood Circus. 

But man; we only even know Barca looks like this because other characters mention it (again, the majority of the novel is relayed via dialog), and Cameron does precious little to deliver on his own pulpy conceit. I mean Barca drives the Honda around here and there; at no point does he turn into the leather-wearing, bike-roaring hellraising cop the veteran pulp reader might want. 

The novel’s sole “action scene” is over before we know it; following leads, Barca ends up at a garbage dumb outside of town, and none other than one of the Roggeris pull up. One of the guys with him’s a coked-up “junko,” and Barca shoots him with his Colt Cobra when the guy rushes him. But this scene too is played up more for the suspense angle, as Barca soon learns that there was more to this situation than he expected. 

But then overall Barca is more of a procedural than a thriller. Sometimes it’s unintentionally humorous, like the many and confusing tentacles that make up the Roggeri family. I mean there’s the one who was going to be turned against, the one who is a legitimate businessman, the one who became a priest. Then there’s the old crone who might be the most cruel mafioso of them all. And it’s all talking, talking, talking; even parts where Barca goes to talk to his old priest and they get into various theological debates. 

I mean a part of me can see Lou Cameron enthusing over all this, turning in a meaty and weighty “crime novel” that has more in common with John Gardner (the American, not the Brit) than Don Pendleton. But it comes off as so ponderous, especially given that so many scenes have no bearing on the outcome of the novel. The bantering between Barca and Lt. Genero also gets old after a while, and there are so many parts that are dumb – like Barca figures out another workaround, how to keep his gun even when he’s temporarily removed from the force, but when Genero tries to give Barca back his gun officially, Barca tells him to forget it! 

Probably the biggest issue with Barca is Barca himself. He’s nowhere as interesting as Cameron seems to think he is. There’s a lot of muddled stuff about his Italian upbringing, and how he could’ve been in the Mafia, but again it’s all just dialog with no payoff – like when Barca tries to ask that old priest of his about “omerta” and all this other stuff. None of it amounts to anyting other than making the book seem even longer. 

So, the reader can forget about the plot promised on the back cover of Barca. The concept of a tough-guy cop with a bullet in his brain going out for revenge on the mobsters who tried to kill him sounds like a great story, but it’s not the story we get in Barca. Instead, we get a tough-guy cop with a bullet in his brain who…investigates a hit-and-run death and talks to a bunch of people. Only gradually does he get around to solving who it was who almost killed him – and even this doesn’t have the emotional payoff the reader might want, Cameron going for more of a ‘70s-mandatory downbeat ending. (But an unsurprising one, as it should be obvious to even a disinterested reader who shot Barca.) 

I wasn’t very crazy about The Closing Circle, either, as it suffered from a lot of the same stuff. But that one was marginally better because the subplot about the killer at least kept things moving, and there was certainly more of a sleazy overlay – not via sex or anything, given Cameron’s prudishness, but in the wanton description of people shitting themselves when they’re strangled. To this day when I watch Dateline or whatever and it mentions a victim being strangled, I’m like, “Why aren’t you telling us they shat themselves?!” I mean, it’s the one thing I learned from The Closing Circle. 

Cameron wrote a few more of these “realistic cop novels in the vein of Lawrence Sanders” for Berkley; curiously, one of them is titled Tancredi, a name that appears in Barca. It’s not a cop or even a character in Barca, but a building where one of the Mafia capos operates out of, “The Sons of Tancredi.” There doesn’t seem to be any connection between these novels, so maybe Cameron just liked the name and decided to use it for his next book. But I’ll probably read that one next, and hope that it’s better than these first two.

The Lone Wolf #7: Peruvian Nightmare

The Lone Wolf #7: Peruvian Nightmare, by Mike Barry

July, 1974  Berkley Medallion

Boy, the title of this seventh Lone Wolf is no joke; this one’s truly a “nightmare,” even more surreal and fractured than the previous six volumes, with nutjob “hero” Burt Wulff shuffled from one bizarre situation to another with little setup or resolve. In fact he spends the majority of the text being taken into captivity by one group or another, ususally freed by some random act of fate. There is a dreamlike texture to the narrative, to the extent that I wonder if it is intentional on Malzberg’s part, even down to the title of the book, Peruvian Nightmare. 

Malzberg also plays some unusual tricks with time in this one, again furthering the “nightmare” vibe. Events will transpire, then we will go back to how they started, then we will have characters reacting to things that haven’t happened in the narrative yet, only learning later on how those events have occurred. The opening is a case in point: we meet Wulff as he’s being propositioned with an offer to run heroin across the border for a cool two hundred thousand. Wulff, we learn, has been a prisoner in a hotel in Lima, Peru for the past three days – a prisoner of syndicate bigwig Calabrese, who for reasons even Calabarese didn’t understand allowed Wulff to live at the denoument of the previous volume, sending Wulff off to some other country. 

That country has turned out to be Peru, and it won’t be until later in the book that we get the backstory on Wulff’s journey here. The narrative unfolds in such fractured fashion that it takes us a while to even learn the name of the guy looking to hire Wulff here in Peru: he calls himself Stavros, and he owns the hotel Wulff is a prisoner in. Stavros, we learn in the frequent sequences from his perspective, was a Nazi in WWII and now lives in Peru under an assumed Greek name, and he has worked with Calabrese over the years. But Stavros has gotten delusions of grandeur and misses his old days of Nazi power, deciding to start up his own drug line. And he wants Wulff to help him start it. 

So we have a recurring motif picking up from the previous volume: another old man who, for motives of his own, gives Wulff another chance at life. We learn from the many sequences from Calabrese’s point of view that the old Syndicate boss has realized his mistake and now wants Wulff dead – hence, Stavros is saving Wulff from the Calabrese thugs who will be coming for him. But why exactly Stavros would want Wulff, who has dedicated his life to blowing up the drug underworld, to transport pure uncut heroin across the Andes is something Malzberg doesn’t really elaborate on. But then, it’s just another dreamlike quirk in a novel filled with such quirks. 

The Lone Wolf is also a series filled with recurring themes and motifs; one that Barry Malzberg has done in the past, and does three separate times in Peruvian Nightmare alone, is a motif where one character holds a gun on another, and the two trade seemingly-endless “You aren’t going to shoot me/Oh yes I am going to shoot you” dialog, a running gag that always ends with Person B actually pulling the trigger and killing Person A. As mentioned, this happens three times in Peruvian Nightmare: with Calabrese, with Stavros…and with Wulff himself, in a finale sequence which seems to me Malzberg’s final word that his hero is the same as his villains, given that Wulff too toys with and teases his prey before killing him. 

But then, one reader’s “recurring thematic work” could be another reader’s “author lazily repeating himself as he meets his word count.” That accusation could also be levelled at Peruvian Nightmare, particularly given how Malzberg spends the first half of the novel trying to get the story started. We have the open with Wulff being offered the job by Stavros, then we have a flashback to how Wulff began his war on the drug world with overviews of the previous six installments, then we go back to how Wulff got to Peru, then we see how Wulff was initially approached by Stavros for the job. Only then do we pick up from the opening scene, but even then it’s a bumpy ride, with Wulff essentially a McGuffin who is exchanged from one group to another – Calabrese’s men trying to capture him and kill him, Stavros’s men trying to get Wulff up into the mountains so he can acquire the sack of uncut heroin and begin his journey north to transport it across the border. 

Regardless, The Lone Wolf is still a lot of fun, and certainly one of my favorite men’s adventure series, just because it’s so whacky and illogical. Even the action scenes have a strange dreamlike vibe. Like in the bit where we learn how Stavros approached Wulff: Wulff comes back to his hotel room, to find two thugs waiting there for him. They take out their guns, saying how they’re going to kill Wulff – one of the thugs randomly looking down the barrel of his own gun, as if this were a Loony Tunes cartoon or something. It gets even stranger, as Wulff manages to take down both thugs with his bare hands, and steal one of their guns, and meanwhile the two thugs have gotten “tangled” together on Wulff’s bed, and Wulff shoots at “the thing” they have become together, and “it” starts mewling and yelping after Wulff shoots “it.” I mean the entire series is just weird. 

And even after that, only then does Wulff notice that another person is sitting on the bed, this being Stavros; I mean the “little man” has been sitting right there on the bed this whole time, while Wulff was fighting and shooting the two thugs who became one entity after tangling up with each other on the bed, and Wulff only notices the little man is there when the man says something to Wulff. And what the man says is “I like your work,” which is a compliment I could extend to Barry Malzberg himself. It is incredible how out-of-bounds The Lone Wolf is, having nothing in common with the average men’s adventure novel yet somehow being an on-the-level spoof of the entire genre. 

Wulff loses his mojo a bit in this one, sort of shuffling from one incident to another, and another play on the titular “nightmare” is that the air is thin up in the Andes, adding to Wulff’s lack of clear thinking. This elicits another surreal “action scene,” where Wulff is on a bus filled with gasping (and puking) tourists who are trying to adjust to the thin Andean air as the bus takes them to the Incan ruins, and a thug smashes his way onto the bus, trying to shoot Wulff but missing because he too is suffering from the thin oxygen up here. But it’s really like this throughout: Wulff will be on his way somewhere, and someone will come out of the woodwork and try to kill him, and Wulff will manage to turn the tables. But otherwise Wulff himself is not the one who moves the narrative forward; he is cast more into the role of perpetual victim, thrust into one surreal situation after another – which, you guessed it, really plays up on that “nightmare” vibe. 

But this fractured, dreamlike vibe leads to something we’ve never had in The Lone Wolf: an appearance (via flashback) of Wulff’s fiance, whose murder set off Wulff’s war on the mob in the first volume. But even in that initial installment, the girl was dead as soon as the book began, and so far as I can recall we’ve never gotten any flashback material with her…until now. Randomly enough, Malzberg delivers a scene between the two, sixty-seven pages into this seventh volume, a dream sequence in which Wulff flashes back to a time when they discussed how Wulff both hated and loved being a cop, leading to an off-page sex scene. It’s strange that the scene is even here, but again it adds to the strange vibe. Or it’s more indication of Malzberg spinning wheels as he meets that word count; as further indication of this, we even get a ‘Nam flashback this time. 

Speaking of cops, we also have some stuff with Williams, Wulff’s former partner on the force; last we saw Williams, he’d been stabbed by a junkie. Now he’s out of the hospital but he’s still weak, and he wishes he could find Wulff to tell him that he, Wulff, was right – the system doesn’t work, etc. Malzberg as ever finds the opportunity to rant and rave about society in general and random things in particular; Peruvian Nightmare, in fact, features a strange bit where Wulff rages to himself how the shock systems in cars went to hell in the ‘50s…and mind you this ranting and raving occurs during an action scene. There is overall a bitter, dispirited air to The Lone Wolf, but whereas the similarly-downer vibe of Stark made for an equally-dispiriting read, Malzberg is a superior writer and there is more so an air of dark comedy to The Lone Wolf. 

I do get the feeling Malzberg had been to Peru, as he injects what appears to be real-world topical details into the sequences around the Incan ruins. But Mel Crair’s typically-great cover is misleading, as Wulff doesn’t get in a shootout right by the ruins themselves (and there’s no girl whatsoever for Wulff in the novel iself – the one on Crair’s cover doesn’t exist in the book). That said, Wulff does manage to blow up a car during one shootout. Malzberg’s “action scenes” are just as strange as ever, but this time the nihilistic “let’s stare at the corpses and ruminate on life” stuff has been toned down. Instead, the nightmarish effect of taking a life is more pronounced, with Wulff haunted throughot the novel by dreams of men he has killed. 

Not that this lends Wulff any humanity. Indeed, Malzberg seems to be at pains to illustrate how Wulff is just as vile as the “bad guys” he’s after. As mentioned, this is most demonstrated in the finale, in which Wulff taunts a man who is pleading for his life, just as villains Calabrese and Stavros did to their own victims earlier in the novel. The finale of Peruvian Nightmare features yet another of Calabrese’s thugs trying to kill Wulff, but the two end up stalking each other in the pitch-black darkness of a cliff in the Andes. The would-be killer loses his gun and spends a few pages pleading for his life with Wulff, begging that Wulff drop the whole thing and the two work together to survive their situation. But Wulff resolutely responds that he is indeed going to shoot the guy. It’s a bitter scene for sure, particularly given how Wulff, next morning, refuses to “connect” the voice he heard in the darkness with the corpse of the man he now sees…as if Wulff himself cannot face the inhuman killer he has become. One suspects this is the same process Calabrese and Stavros went through in their own journeys to villainhood. 

Even the end of the book rams this home; Wulff comes across an American helicopter pilot and bashes him in the face. “You didn’t have to do that,” whines the pilot, and the reader understands his point; a former Stavros employee, he has no reason to stay in Peru and would have taken Wulff out of the country without being bashed in the face. But then, Wulff states that he had trouble with another helicopter pilot in Cuba, and isn’t about “to make the same mistake” this time. 

Thus Peruvian Nightmare ends, with Wulff presumably on his way back to the United States – and meanwhile the subplot with Calabrese still stands, providing an effective framework into the next volume. Malzberg has developed another theme in that Calabrese seeks to regain his aggressive nature by killing Wulff, leading to a scene where Calabrese bangs his 38 year-old mistress (we’re informed he’s kept her for 15 years) and then starts thinking of Wulff and dreaming of getting hold of him. So yes, yet another dream within Peruvian Nightmare, more evidence of the surreal feeling of the novel – making it up on the fly or not, Barry Malzberg proves again and again in The Lone Wolf that he’s a gifted writer, and I continue to really enjoy this series.

The Lone Wolf #6: Chicago Slaughter

The Lone Wolf #6: Chicago Slaughter, by Mike Barry

May, 1974  Berkley Medallion

The Lone Wolf series continues to impress, if for no other reason than the strange vibe Barry “Mike Barry” Malzberg brings to the tale. Not to mention the clear fact that he’s winging his way through the narrative. In a way this brings the reader into the creative process, as it’s almost as if you and Malzberg are fguring out where the story is going at the same time. 

As I was reading Chicago Slaughter it occurred to me why I rate The Lone Wolf so highly: I have no idea what’s going to happen next. With one of Don Pendleton’s Executioner novels, for example, you pretty much know exactly what’s going to happen; each installment follows the same overall pattern, and only in the particulars might there be any surprises. Or more pointedly, in one of James Dockery’s The Butcher novels, there’s no surprise whatsoever, as each volume is essentially a rewrite of the one that came before: if you’ve read one Dockery Butcher, you’ve read them all. 

But man, this does not hold true for Barry Malzberg’s The Lone Wolf. There is no telling where the plot will go or what the characters will do. While you’d expect this would bring more “realism” to the tale, it only serves to make the series even more surreal, at least when compared to other men’s adventure novels. Malzberg, clearly unaware of any “rules” for this genre, will do what he pleases – for example, if some new tough professional assassin is introduced to the tale, don’t make the assumption that this guy will eventually tangle with “hero” Burt Wulff, as would happen if such a character were to be introduced in an Executioner novel. Instead, some other random element or character might interfere with this typical format, meaning there might not even be a confrontation with Wulff at all. In a way of course it’s anticlimatic, but at the same time it’s cool because it makes the series so unpredictable. 

For once there’s no direct pickup from the previous volume, but this is still a continuity-heavy series. Last we saw Wulff he was headed out of Cuba; when we meet up with him in Chicago Slaughter he’s just come into New York, and it’s a few days or so after the climax of the previous book. His goal is to shove the suitcase of heroin he’s been toting around “in the face” of Williams, Wulff’s former partner on the NYPD. Malzberg has introduced this conceit that Williams, to Wulff, represents “the System,” and Wulff’s goal is to show Williams how corrupt and unworkable the system is. But this theme really only exists in Wulff’s own deranged mind, as we learn from the frequent sequences from Williams’s perspective that Williams too questions the system, and spends the entirety of Chicago Slaughter recuperating in the hospital from a stabbing he endured (courtesy a black drug dealer) in the opening pages of the book. 

Wulff too does some serious pondering throughout Chicago Slaughter. A recurring sentiment in the series has been Wulff’s “I’m aleady dead” line, but in this one he starts to wonder whether he really is ready to die. He also becomes “sick” of his one-man war on the syndicate, due to the “ugliness” of the death he leaves in his wake everywhere he goes. Once again Malzberg truly brings a morbid tonality to the series, with that same ghoulish focus on recently-dead victims of Wulff:

The manner of that way in which a man gave up life was some comment on how he had held onto it during his time, and Versallo had wanted very much to live.  Now, lying still in the posture of death the mouth had fallen open, rigidified into a pained bark of dismay and horror as if Versallo had caught some glimpse of the actual form of death during his passage and had screamed out against it, was maintaining that scream evey now.  A mystery, Wulff though, a mystery -- life, death, the intertwining of the two, none of it ever to be understood; and yet men attempted to control death in the way that they did, inflicting it, holding it off because only that gave them a feeling of immortality.

Or an earlier part, where Wulff shoots a guy and we are informed that “He died as if he had been practicing it alone in bed a long time.” It probably says more about me than Malzberg when I admit that stuff like this has me laughing out loud as I read it. Really this series is either a darkly comic masterpiece or just a depraved tale for depraved minds. Speaking of which Wulff – and I guess Malzberg – crosses a line this time that isn’t too commonly crossed in the world of men’s adventure: Wulff kills a few members of law enforcement. Not dirty ones, either (or at least if they are, we aren’t told so); just guys who are attempting to bring him in. Generally these lone wolf heroes refrain from killing cops, but Wulff flat-out murders these guys, gunning them down in cold blood. Later on he realizes he could’ve let them live, but essentially shrugs it off. Still, these murders gradually make Wulff question himself and his vendetta, but more importantly these murders have the reader questioning what kind of a hero Burt Wulff really is. (Spoiler alert: He isn’t a hero at all, but that’s been clear since the start of the series.) 

The metaphysical vibe I love so much about The Lone Wolf is still here; another conceit is that bigwigs in the criminal underworld will throw themselves at Wulff, arrogantly assuming they’ll be able to break him…but of course they end up themselves broken. This happens a few tines in Chicago Slaughter, the first with a Mafia executive who tries and fails to defeat Wulff’s will, and then toward the end with an even higher-level executive who think he has defeated Wulff’s will – but only manages to have him escorted out of the country. This conceit adds to the dreamlike quality of the series; the impression is almost that Wulff is a supernatural presence. 

Mel Crair’s typically-great cover is misleading, as once again there’s no female character in this volume…for Wulff, at least. The sleaze quotient is filled by a random busty secretary in the employ of one of the Syndicate executives Wulff goes up against. The sex scene between these two is pretty bonkers:

He locked the door and checking his watch decided that he could give her ten minutes.  Ten minutes was more than enough for what he needed; he banged the shit out of her, working her up and down, and demanded that she finish him off with her mouth.  She balked, one timid peep of resistance, but he gave her the look and repeated the demand and she went at it without another word.  Drained him dry.  Drained him fucking dry.  He came in her mouth gasping, groaning, beating on the slick surfaces of the couch like a butterfly, forgetting for the moment that he was fifty-three years old, that he was hooked up to his neck, that most of the time he had trouble coming, that he had kicked horse five years ago and there had truly never been a period of more than an hour since then when he had not been in agony for it...forgot all of this beating and screaming against the couch, coming into her mouth and she held it there when he had finished, her cheeks bloated until at a look from him she swallowed all of it with a gasp.  Thought she she would be able to ditch his seed in some toilet but no one was going to get away with that.  

The construction of the plot is also “spur of the moment;” as mentioned Wulff when we meet him is in New York, even though “Chicago” is in the book’s title. And in fact the first chapter implies that the book will be set in New York, featuring an evocative opening of Williams, undercover in Harlem, being stabbed. But when Wulff hears of a Federal prosecutor who is taking on the drug world in Chicago, he decides to just go there and take this guy the valise with a million dollars worth of “shit.” Though just as often it’s referred to as “two million dollars worth of shit.” Again, the series is pretty loosy-goosy with facts and elements of realism; despite getting hold of a revolver late in the book, Wulff still hunts for “clips” for it. Oh and the action scenes, despite being relatively smallscale – ie, Wulff just shooting a couple people – are still apocalyptic. In this one Wulff manages to burn down a building, unaware that he’s even done so until after the fact; even he is awed by his supernatural qualities. 

But the Federal prosecutor thing isn’t much dwelt upon; instead, Wulff gets caught (another recurring conceit of the series) and taken into the presence of one of those Mafia bigwigs. After this Wulff is caught again, but this part is super random, seeing as it does Wulff getting into some road rage on the parkway with another motorist, one who runs Wulff off the road(!). After this Wulff turns himself over to the Chicago cops – lots of stuff here about how brutal and simple-minded Chicago cops are – and later on he’s taken into the presence of yet another Mafia bigwig. Indeed, Malzberg has spun so many wheels that by novel’s end he just barely remembers the entire “Federal prosecutor” subplot, and quickly brushes it off with some dialog. 

As for that second Mafia bigwig, his name is Calabrese and Wulff senses that he’s the most senior underworld boss Wulff has yet encountered. Such a boss that Calabrese, an old man, essentially tells Wulff that he, Wulff, is really nothing more than something “interesting to think about,” and decides to let him live…for reasons that have more to do with how Wulff brings excitement to an old man’s life. Or something. At any rate Chicago Slaughter ends with Wulff about to be escorted by Calabrese’s men to someplace outside the United States, where I suppose Calabrese intends Wulff to stew for a while until the old man calls for him – I’m really not sure, but the entire thing, not to mention Wulff’s blasé reaction to it all, just makes the entire scenario seem all the more surreal. 

Like I’ve said many times before, it’s totally unlike typical genre entries like The Executioner or The Penetrator, but The Lone Wolf really is one of my favorite series, and I’m having a great time reading it.

The Proud Enemy (The Demu Trilogy #2)

The Proud Enemy, by F.M. Busby

June, 1975  Berkley Medallion

The Demu Trilogy continues with this second installment, which was published as a paperback original two years after Cage A Man.  Once again, though, I read the complete reprint of the novel as found in the 1980 Pocket Books paperback The Demu Trilogy.  Before The Proud Enemy, this anthology also features a mostly-forgettable short story titled “The Learning Of Eeshta,” focused on the young “female” Demu introduced in the first novel, and how she goes about learning of mankind; it originally appeared in If Magazine, and takes place in the final quarter of Cage A Man.

As for The Proud Enemy, it opens right at the ending of Cage A Man, thus giving the impression that this trilogy is indeed one long book.  As we’ll recall, that novel ended with hero Barton commanding the Demu starship he escaped from captivity, in, and now part of a fleet of 40 Earth starships that was about to set off on an assault upon the Demu homeworld.  However, more focus was placed in that novel on Barton's alien girlfriend, Limila, getting a bunch of plastic surgery to look human again, rather than this interstellar war plot.

Ultimately this will prove true for The Proud Enemy as well, but initially Busby does follow on with the space combat stuff. But it’s goofy and continues the juvenile tone of Cage A Man (ie, where Barton took over a Demu spacecraft and managed to fly it back to Earth and land unscathed). For, moments after the fleet launches into space, they all sort of hover there for a bit and Barton and Space Agency rep Tarleton get on the viewscreen and brief the other 39 ships on the objectives of the mission, complete with a rundown of Barton’s captivity and who the Demu are – and also the fact that there are a few aliens with Barton on his ship. 

This all made me laugh out loud. I mean folks, don’t you think such a briefing should’ve taken place before the armada took off from Earth? I mean clearly it’s all here for the readers who bought The Proud Enemy but hadn’t read the previous book; catchup material that just comes off as doubly ridiculous when collected here in The Demu Trilogy. But man it really is ridiculous, complete with Barton calling little Eeshta over to the viewscreen and having her pull up her robe so he can show the viewers her lobster-like exterior shell and talk about the sexual apparati of the Demu race! 

Actually, around this point something occurred to me about The Demu Trilogy. This juvenile tone, where a “regular” guy can escape alien captivity, steal one of their ships, hook up with another alien babe, and then fly back to Earth where he ultimately becomes the boss of a space armada – all this, really, could be seen as coming from Barton’s own imagination. In Cage A Man Busby stressed that Barton was able to survive his eight years of captivity via his skills with “hallucination,” where Barton would create a reality in his mind and escape there. So who’s to say the events of the trilogy itself aren’t just the product of Barton’s imagination, still trapped there in his Demu cell? But then again, as Alan Moore once said (no doubt while stroking his beard in deep thought): “Aren’t all stories imaginary?” 

I could press my theory without much effort. I mean, even though Barton et al are on a spaceship headed off into another galaxy to kick some alien ass, the plot soon becomes focused on…who sleeps in what bed. Barton’s ship, Tarleton explains, is special because it’s equally made up of men and women…so Barton can sleep with Limila and the other men and women can sleep with each other. Seriously, a whole bunch of narrative space is focused on this, and little details like description of the ship’s interior and etc are pushed to the side. And once again F.M. Busby is a “cut to black” author when any of the sexual material arises; there is absolutely nothing in the way of explicit material. 

Since the voyage lasts a long time, we also get material on how the bedmates are free to, uh, swap, though Barton doesn’t partake because as we’ll recall he’s in love with Limila, she of the 60 teeth, six fingers and toes, half-bald head, and boobs that hang low on her rib cage. Busby goes to great pains to show Barton’s complaceny with Limila’s alien nature, totally devoted to her and all, and it just seems strange to me because I must’ve missed the part where he fell in love with her in the first place. As stated in my review of Cage A Man, Barton and Limila’s star-crossed romance was forced into the narrative with little setup or explanation. 

Not that this stops Barton from some action on the side. Limila’s people, the Tilarans, are kind of reserved and overly formal, yet casual sex is the rule. Male and female Tilarans will openly fondle a person, moments after meeting them, if they find them attractive. Kids, don’t try this at home! My impression was Busby was taking the ‘70s swinger vibe into a sci-fi setting, and Limila takes off with an old boyfriend to spend the night with him the night they land on Tilara, and Barton meanwhile scores (off-page, naturally) with some Tilaran gal who starts fondling him. 

Busby’s powers of description are pretty weak throughout. Tilara is hardly described, and again, what we do learn is filtered through the rudimentary prism that is Barton’s mind – he can’t make “much sense” out of Tilaran traffic and architecture and whatnot, so Busby just leaves it at that. Again, one can easily argue that such topical details are limited because Barton’s imagination is limited, and he’s the one creating this entire scenario in his mind. But it is really lame; like a part where Barton goes to a Tilaran hospital and Busby notes that a Tilaran is sitting there, “reading,” and you’re left wondering, “Reading what?” I mean, do they have lurid-cover paperbacks on Tilara? Is the guy reading a notepad? Have they advanced to display screens? It’s just all so vague as to be maddening. 

Oh but I forgot: that bedswapping scenario on the ship leads to some confrontations. A young hothead named app Fenn, son of a Space Agency bigshot, bullies his way from one gal to the next, wanting to get all the sex possible. This frustrates the woman who was previously rooming with app Fenn, and Barton goes to soothe the guy, instead getting in a fight with him – Barton smashing app Fenn in the face with a chair. Later Limila goes to app Fenn to offer herself to him, explaining to Barton later that this is a time-honored Tilaran custom in which women call off the blood feud between two men. But when app Fenn sees that Limila does not have breasts (which we’ll recall were lopped off by the Demu in the previous book), he sends her back to Barton with the message that Barton can keep his “plastic woman.” 

Whereas this would lead to a violent confrontation in a typical novel, Barton instead seethes for a bit…and then Busby drops the ball entirely, with app Fenn getting in some other trouble when the crew lands on Tilara. Barton and app Fenn never even have a proper squaring off. As for Limila’s boobs, we get a repeat of the plastic surgery onslaught of the previous book, as Tilaran doctors graft on a new pair for her and put in teeth buds to regrow her second set of teeth, and yada yada yada. So much of this stuff is just retread of Cage A Man, I mean two volumes of this “trilogy” are devoted to Limila being turned into a Demu, then into a human, then finally back into a Tilaran. 

Things pick up when Hishtoo, the surly Demu captive, steals a ship, along with a few Tilaran hostages. Here Hishtoo gets his revenge, messaging back that he, too, will eat his captives, same as Barton did in Cage A Man. Barton gives chase in his own ship – and here we learn that space travel doesn’t make for the most thrilling action. Like when they spot Hishtoo’s ship, eventually, and to decelerate so they can come abreast him will take…approximately thirty-some days. It’s sort of like that throughout; Busby spends more time on characters sitting around in undescribed rooms on the ship, drinking stale coffee and eating various alien cuisines. 

Even crazier, The Proud Enemy doesn’t even lead to a thrilling conclusion. Instead, it sees Barton and comrades disguised as Demu and walking around on the Demu homeworld of Sisshain, where they come upon a massive spaceship that clearly was not made by the Demu. Instead, some ancient race preceded them and the Demu stole their tech from them; something that was alluded to by Tarleton in the previous book, but apparently a secret so devastating that the Demu are willing to sue for peace to keep it all a secret. 

So this second installment of the trilogy was pretty lame. Not much in it really happened, and what did happen mostly came off as a replay of stuff in Cage A Man. The trilogy concluded with End Of The Line, which appeared five years later in The Demu Trilogy. Since I’ve gotten this far I’ll be reviewing that one soon, too.

The Lone Wolf #5: Havana Hit

The Lone Wolf #5: Havana Hit, by Mike Barry

March, 1974  Berkley Medallion Books

Barry “Mike Barry” Malzberg ventures even further into stream-of-conscious territory with this fifth volume of The Lone Wolf, which per series template begins immediately after the events of the previous volume. As we’ll recall, Martin (or Burt, we haven’t figured it out yet) Wulff has just gotten on a plane bound for New York, a valise with “a million dollars worth of shit” (aka uncut heroin) with him. 

As Havana Hit opens, the plane has redirected as the result of a hijacking. While initially I thought this was a coincidence, at length Wulff realizes that the hijacking has occurred because of him. Or, rather, because of the valise. Like the previous valise of heroin Wulff toted around in the earliest volumes, this one is a MaGuffin in the true sense; it moves the plot along because everyone wants it, but otherwise it has no real bearing on anything. And as mentioned it’s interchangeable with the prevoius valise of heroin, which Wulff tossed in a lake in Boston. 

I do like The Lone Wolf, but I’m finding myself more interested in what is going on in Barry Malzberg’s head than I am in what’s atually happening in the books. And there’s no question what’s going on in Malzberg’s head, as this time he retreats even further into his own headspace, doling out incessant observations on society, crime, Cuba, trust between colleagues, and what have you. I mean in no way whatsoever could you ever confuse this series with The Executioner. There is a strange, surreal texture to Lone Wolf that is similar to The Butcher in how it all comes off like the events of a dream. Wulff is our guide through the dream, making things happen, as ever his mere presence somehow affecting reality – nowhere more apparent than in this opening, where a plane filled with people is hijacked merely so the Syndicate can get their clutches on Wulff. 

This is the least action-centric installment yet. Not that the previous ones were action blockbusters, but Havana Hit is so confined to Wulff’s mental musings that the action comes off as a distraction. Adding to the weird vibe of the series is the fixation on death. There might be gore in other men’s adventure novels of the day, but generally the victim is forgotten about after we’ve been told how his head’s exploded and his brains have burst out. Not so here. When Wulff or someone else shoots a guy Malzberg will keep going back to him, focusing on the corpse, how it changes appearance in its postortem state, the killer thinking again of how easily life is stamped out and how death equals us all out, etc. In a way it’s so overdone that it made me think of the MST3K episode Night Of The Blood Beast, where the characters kept obsessing over the corpse of an astronaut and Mike Nelson quipped, “I’ve never seen a man so dead!” 

Well anyway, Malzberg’s clearly winging it this time. This has been apparent in previous volumes but this time it’s especially pronounced. It is clear that Malzberg just sits down at his typewriter and writes, and what comes out is what gets printed. There is no editing to take out any chaff; Malzberg-via-Wulff will wax morbidly about mundane things for pages and pages at times. The observant reader can even detect Malzberg pushing himself at times to get back to the plot – there are parts where Malzberg literally commands himself to get back on-track so far as the story goes. But as mentioned I kind of enjoy this aspect because I like to see the feverish mind of a writer at work. 

All of which is to say the plot of Havana Hit is pretty thin. In a nutshell, Wulff’s plane is hijacked, the hijackers take it to Cuba, and the passengers are anticlimactically let go (off page) and Wulff finds out the entire thing was orchestrated just to get hold of him. Meanwhile Delgado, a sadistic Cuban military official whose sadism is a gauze for the cowardice he displayed back in the ‘50s as one of Castro’s flunkies in the mountains, brutally kills off the hijackers for bringing this problem to them. As mentioned though Malzberg has no grand plan when he starts writing, thus as the novel progresses Delgado is retconned into being a Syndicate man himself, even though in his intro he hates the hijackers for being so stupid as to believe they would have friends here in Cuba. It’s all very hazy because it’s so underdeveloped. 

As for Wulff, he manages to free himself in one of the novel’s few action scenes. Taken off in a helicopter, supposedly to freedom, Wulff realizes it’s really a hit and as ever takes matters into his own hands. In this way he meets Stevens, an American expat currently working for the Cubans as a helicopter pilot. Stevens factors heavily in the second half of the novel, serving as a meek counterpoint to Wulff; whereas Wulff takes life by the reigns and makes things happen, Stevens has spent his life running from responsibility. But even in this characterization Barry Malzberg can’t stay consistent; Stevens will periodically change from resigned to inspired, whichever benefits the current whims of the plot. 

What it really comes down to is a lot of mordant commentary on Cuba. Havana Hit offers interesting period commentary in that the Castro regime is fairly new to power and, in Wulff’s eyes, Cuba had almost become an American annex during the previous regime – every native he meets speaks English and acts like an American. There’s also a lot of musing on Stevens’s lack of resolve and how it “bleeds” into Wulff, making him in danger of losing his killer drive or somesuch. To tell the truth it’s all very weird and as ever things just play out as if it’s all a dream. I mean Stevens, despite spending his life not wanting to get involved, decides to go confront Delgado with Wulff, and even though the two of them only have old revolvers the ensuing firefight is so apocalyptic that the second floor of a building explodes. 

Another recurring schtick of The Lone Wolf is that a secondary “main villain” is revealed in the final pages. The same holds true here, with Delgado, built up as the main villain in the first third of the book, unceremoniously replaced by a new guy who works in the Intelligence division of the Cuban military. But it all comes down to that damn valise of heroin, which everyone wants, but no one more so than Wulff himself. So we have yet another recurring schtick of a finale where Wulff takes on everyone – including supposed comrades – to retain possession of “his property.” 

While enjoyable just for the second-hand buzz of the whole surreal aspect, Havana Hit is really a sort of stumble in the series; I suspect you could just skip it altogether and not even miss anything. For by novel’s end Wulff is once again airborne, headed back for the US with his valise of heroin, which is exactly how the previous volume ended. But judging from the title of the next installment, it looks like Wulff ends up in Chicago instead of his desired destination of New York.

Midnight

Midnight, by Dean Koontz

November, 1989  Berkley Books

Dean Koontz was one of those ubiquitous horror authors in the ‘80s; I’d see his name everywhere, but I never read any of his books. Of course at the time his image was that he was a second-rate Stephen King, or some other dismissive impression, and I didn’t know any kids in school who read his books. Of course, they lapped up VC Andrews and stuff like that, but that’s another story. All I mean to say is, you’d always see Stephen King books in my middle school and high school in the mid-‘80s to early ‘90s, but you’d never see a Dean Koontz book. In fact the only place I ever saw one was my mom’s copy of Twilight Eyes, which I never read. 

But, as has been documented in recent reviews, I’ve been on a random horror kick lately…and I was looking for a “creature feature” read…and I stumbled upon this Koontz novel, which seems to be the epitome of a creature feature. Indeed the contemporary Kirkus states this bluntly. So I decided to make Midnight my next horror read, even though it was pretty long – which seems to be typical of horror novels in general – coming in at an unwieldy 470 pages of small, dense print in this Berkley paperback edition. Long story short, Midnight served up the creature-featuring I wanted, with the caveat that the abundant description and character introspection ultimately ruined the impact, turning the novel into a chore of a read. Also, most curiously of all, the abundant description did not extend to the creatures. Lots of description of the fog and the mist and the forest, sure, but when it came to the werewolves, monsters, and even cyborgs who populated the tale, for the most part – at least for the first 300 or so pages – Koontz would only provide slight description of them. This I guess is akin to a monster movie where the monster stays in the shadows for the majority of the film. 

First off, this is the horror novel Burt Hirschfeld never wrote. Koontz’s prose style, with the heavy atmospherics and introspection, is uncannily reminiscent of Hirschfeld’s, at least in this novel. But then it occurred to me that Koontz was the guy who, the decade before, published Writing Popular Fiction, a book which gave specific directions on how to write like Burt Hirschfeld. However I mean this solely in the way the narrative unfolds, not in the content; unlike a genuine Hirschfeld novel, Midnight is not overly concerned with the sex lives of its characters. In fact the novel is relatively anemic in the sexual arena. What a bummer, man! But in the constant probing of its characters’ thoughts and emotions it is very reminiscent of something by Burt Hirschfeld. 

But whereas this constant probing of emotions works in a Hirschfeld novel, where the emotions of the characters compel them in their sexual urges and whatnot, it unfortunately becomes a drag in a horror novel. I mean when you have werewolves, cyborgs, and a creature that’s literally stated as looking like the titular monster from Alien, the last thing you want is to incessantly be informed about how people feel, or what they think, or what incident in the past caused them to think and feel the way they do now, and etc. I mean the plot Koontz delivers requires a fat-free delivery to really work. Instead it becomes a ponderous bloat with way too much extranneous detail and stalling. The monsters are lost amid the rampant navel-gazing. 

That said, the writing is very good…it’s just too much of a good thing. I did enjoy the atmospheric word-painting, with Koontz very much bringing to life the coastal Californian town in which Midnight occurs. I also dug the glimpse into the inner views of the cast of characters. But around page 150 I felt like I’d hit a brick wall. Even crazier was that Koontz wouldn’t let up on it; I mean the novel is split into three parts, the entire thing taking place over a day or two, and part one gradually (very gradually) builds up the creature feature you’ve been wanting. Then part two takes three steps back with immediate and obtrusive flashbacks for the main characters – even an egregious dream sequence that goes on for several pages. I could only imagine what a more streamlined author could’ve done with the plot setup. 

For make no mistake, Midnight is straight-up pulp horror in its conceit: it’s literally about a mad scientist who conducts Island Of Dr. Moreau style experiments on the populace of a small town. But Koontz clouds the pulp fun with way too much introspection and discussion, explaining everything away to the point that it’s not nearly as fun as it should be. I mean even late in the game, when the few heroes have finally found one another, the sole humans in this monster-plagued town, and decide to do something about it…even here we get long-winded discussions on the “nature of man” and how “not all scientists” are like the crazy bastard here in town who has patterned himself after Dr. Moreau. I mean who gives a shit? Go kill a friggin’ werewolf or something! 

But man those first hundred pages or so I was really into Midnight. Koontz sets the scene with an evocative opening in which a young woman goes running at night through Moonlight Cove, a closeknit community on the coast of California. Soon she is chased by creatures, and here Koontz’s “keep them off the page” motif actually works, because they’re just shadows with luminescent eyes. The poor young woman soon meets her fate, which starts the story proper. Hers is not the first murder in town; Sam Booker, the character who comes closest to being the main protagonist, arrives in Moonlight Cove shortly thereafter to figure out what’s going on. Sam is an FBI agent, and the Bureau has taken stock of the untoward amount of “random deaths” in the small town. 

Another new person in town is Tessa Lockland, “cute” blonde thirty-something documentary filmmaker who happens to have been the sister of the young woman killed in the opening scene. She too will soon learn that there are monsters about. Also there’s Chrissie Foster, an 11 year-old who has experienced first-hand the weirdness that has taken over Moonlight Cove, given that her parents have turned into monsters(!). Along with a disabled ‘Nam vet named Harry Talbot (and his service assistant dog Moose), these four people will be Moonlight Cove’s only hope. 

Meanwhile there’s the villain of the piece: Thomas Shaddack, a Bill Gates type who is mega-wealthy due to his work in the tech field and lives in a mansion in an exclusive area of town. I thought this book was right up my alley when Shaddack was introduced in what could’ve been a scene out of Altered States, floating in a sensory deprivation tank and literally getting off on the thoughts of his own grandeur. But Shaddack too is undone by the dense onslaught of introspection and narratorial padding; he starts the novel like a pure villain but ends it as a whimpering narcissist. On the villain side there’s also Loman Watkins, police chief of Moonlight Cove and one of the prime movers of the “accidental death” lies which have brought Sam Booker to town. 

Long story short, Shaddack has devised methodology for advancing the human body, turning them into “New People” via injections which shoot various technology into the system, making people undergo “The Change” before they are reborn as supermen and superwomen with all kinds of augmentations. But one doesn’t get much choice when it comes to “the jab.” First Shaddack forced the change on Loman and the rest of the cops, then injections were given to the public in random groupings. The title of the novel has to do with Sam’s discovery that Shaddack plans to have injected the entirety of Moonlight Cove by “midnight” of the night after Sam’s arrived in town. Personally I felt the title was not suitable for the novel; “Midnight” implies almost a Gothic sort of vibe and doesn’t convey the glut of monsters one will encounter in the book. 

It takes quite a while for Sam, Tessa, and Chrissie to learn all this, though. The first hundred-some pages concern the three of them trying to make their way across a strange and dangerous Moonlight Cove. The stuff with Chrissie definitely has a Stephen King vibe to it, first with her parents – who are apparently werewolves – chasing her out of her house, and the plucky little girl making her laborious way through the woods, hiding underground, hitching rides, and etc as she tries to get to safety. One might say Chrissie is a bit too plucky for an 11 year-old, though Koontz has it that she’s an avid reader (one who dreams of being a writer one day), but I was an avid 11 year-old reader (not too many years before this book was published, in fact), and I certainly wouldn’t have been able to handle myself as well as Chrissie does. 

Koontz really goes for a slow burn in this opening part, with Sam and Tessa slowly realizing something very disturbing is amiss. But the suspense angle is blown for us readers due to the sequences that focus on Thomas Shaddack and Loman Watkins, as we immediately know what’s going on in town. Thus there’s a feeling of “figure it out already!” when we get back to Sam and Tessa trying to deduce why everyone’s acting so weird. Oh and also there’s Harry Talbot, confined to a wheelchair, who snoops Rear Window style on the community with a telescope; he too knows something is going on, and in fact it was his letter which brought the FBI onto the scene. I have to say, though, I had a hard time understanding how a crippled ‘Nam vet was able to afford a three-story structure on a hill that provided a view of the entire town. 

Only gradually do the monsters come out of the shadows. For the most part they’re werewolves, and we do get a nice horror sequence where Loman and his fellow cops take on a local who has “regressed” to werewolf state and can’t turn back into a human. Here too though we get that onslaught of explanation; even though this werewolf is snarling at them and ready to pounce, we have a lot of dithering on what caused him to turn into a werewolf in the first place. Here too we learn that Koontz is basically taking monsters from contemporary films and putting them in the novel; the werewolf’s hand reminds one character specifically of the werewolf in The Howling, and soon after Chrissie encounters a character who mutates into a monster specifically compared to the titular Alien. 

But man, the forward momentum is just constantly lost. Like that part with the werewolf. After Loman handles things, Shaddack shows up to appraise the situation…and he and Loman get in a practically endless conversation about the nature of “the change,” just right overtop the werewolf’s corpse, and it’s just…dumb. And like I said, Part 1 builds up momentum, taking place over the span of a few hours, and when Part 2 opens the next morning Koontz gets back into the introspective stuff instead of continuing on with the momentum he painstakingly built up. Even here, with all the heroes congregating in Harry’s house, we don’t get to any action…Koontz clearly had a movie in mind, as he has all this “movie moment” stuff in here, like Chrissie singing pop songs the morning after she was nearly killed by monsters as she prepares a hearty breakfast. It just comes off as contrived, like “I could see Goldie Hawn playing this part!” And made even worse because Goldie Hawn is constantly referenced in the book itself. 

At least we get more real monster stuff here, but it’s repetitive. We have back-to-back sequences in which two different characters meet two different cyborgs, both of whom (both of which?) are literally connected to their computers. But on that point Koontz is really ahead of the curve; he writes about computers and technology way beyond what I expected from a late ‘80s novel. The only thing that sets Midnight in its era is that Moonlight Cove has been shut off from the rest of the world by Shaddack’s closing down of the phone lines. This entire subplot would be undone in our modern cell phone era. Oh I forgot to mention Koontz also throws The Blob into the mix, with a weirdo bit where three of the monster-people regress even further, into a protoplasmic ooze which hungers, of course, for human flesh. 

That said, the book seems like it wants to end somewhere in the 300s, but it continues on for another 100-plus pages. Like for example one character vows to personally kill Shaddack…and this subplot just churns. Meanwhile Shaddack becomes increasingly dumb an ineffectual to suit the demands of the plot; there’s a ridiculous part where he says he doesn’t know who “Dr. Moreau” is. It just goes on and on, losing the power and mystique it had in the opening section, to the point that it’s a relief when things finally wrap up. There’s also a Maguffin about Shaddack’s heart being tapped into all those who underwent the change, or somesuch, a dead man’s switch sort of thing that would kill everyone in town if Shaddack himself were to be killed. But again, as buffoonish as this guy acts in the finale you wonder how he ever even thought of any of this stuff. 

Special note must be made of the end, though. It’s so reactionary it’s hilarious. So Sam has a teenaged son who listens to “heavy metal rock” and he and Sam don’t get along much. Sam worries about the kid, hinging all his concerns on that damn heavy metal. Meanwhile, we learn in one of those incessant flashback/introspection deals that Sam’s wife – ie the kid’s mom – died of cancer a few years ago. Gee, do you think the kid might just be dealing with his mother’s death in his own way? Regardless, Midnight ends with Sam stomping on his son’s heavy metal CDs and then forcing him into a bear hug. I mean even the producers of the ABC After School Special would’ve thought that was too much. But then maybe Koontz had his tongue in his cheek. 

Otherwise, I found Midnight too bloated to recommend. But Koontz was/is incredibly prolific, so I don’t think it would be fair to judge the guy on just this one book. And hell, others might enjoy it more than I did. I just wanted more creatures and less atmospheric word painting about the fog, mist, and buried emotions.

The Peacemaker #4: The Wyss Pursuit

The Peacemaker #4: The Wyss Pursuit, by Adam Hamilton

March, 1975  Berkley Medallion Books 

The Peacemaker limps to a close with a fourth volume that’s even more tepid than the previous three; titular “Peacemaker” Barry Hewes-Bradford doesn’t even kill anyone in this one. I mean at least he shot the occasional bad guy in the previous books. This time ol’ Barry spends the majority of the narrative doing exactly what Mel Crair depicts on the cover: making phone calls. 

Speaking of the cover, again we get confirmation that Crair’s depiction of Barry is his own invention. The moustached lothario of the Crair covers does not exist in the actual novels. Instead, Barry is specifically stated as being “tall and black-haired” – no mention of a moustache, blondish-brown hair, or a bow tie. Also speaking of Crair’s cover art, it’s misleading in another regard: the scene shown doesn’t actually happen in the novel. While Barry and his assistant Lobo do ski down a slope as someone fires at them, Barry does not return fire – in fact he and Lobo flee off to safety and hide, waiting for the sniper to go away. The Peacemaker!! 

Yeah, but this one’s really lame, and just further evidence that the series was DOA from the get-go. I mean like Zwolf said, it’s supposedly a men’s adventure series, yet they named it “The Peacemaker,” and they got a woman to write it!! Maybe some editor at Berkley just had a goofy sense of humor. Whatever, Marilyn “Adam Hamilton” Granbeck again writes what is really a mystery novel, one that isn’t even gussied up with the paltry thrills of the previous installments. 

The series concept itself is also ungainly, that mega-wealthy Barry operates on the side as a crimefighter. The problem is, as I’ve bitched about in each previous review, Barry himself doesn’t do much – he just gets one of his untold employees to do the work for him. Thus there is very little tension or excitement in the series. Barry isn’t even given a proper background of a men’s adventure protagonist; he's just rich and has legions of employees at his disposal, so it’s not like he’s some ‘Nam vet out for payback. In fact it’s Lobo who does most of the “action stuff” in the series, but this time even Lobo doesn’t do much. 

The plot this time has to do with a heroin smuggling scheme; some mysterious drug kingpin known as “Wyss” seems to be targeting Barry’s freight line, using the ships to transport heroin out of the fictional Southeast Asian country of Balarac. Just forget about any promises of action and think of The Wyss Pursuit as a mystery novel and you might enjoy it more than I did. As mentioned it’s even slower-going than previous volumes, but Granbeck’s prose is strong enough that I figure she’s probably a fine writer in an element she’s more comfortable with. 

Granbeck is good with effective scene-setting, like the opening in which a hapless sailor on one of Barry’s ships accidentally uncovers the heroin and is killed for it. However Granbeck again proves that Barry is not really an action hero in the standard mold when later in the book Barry and Lobo get ahold of the killer and grill him for info on the heroin scheme. This takes place inside Barry’s limo as it slowly moves along Broadway in Manhattan; Barry doesn’t threaten or harm the killer. Indeed, Barry pays the guy and drops him off! A guy who killed one of Barry’s own men! It’s all just so against the grain of what makes for an action hero that you can only shake your head at the poor editorial decision-making at Berkley. 

So to reiterate, in the course of The Wyss Pursuit Barry doesn’t get in any fights, doesn’t shoot anyone, doesn’t do much of anything except travel around the country and make some phone calls. That said, he does get laid this time, by two different gals (not at the same time, though!)…however if you just thought to yourself, “Yeah, but Granbeck probably keeps it off page,” then award yourself a no-prize. And neither female character is exploited in the wonderful way mandated by the men’s adventure genre. One’s an insurance investigator who seems to have her own agenda and travels around the world with Barry, the other’s one of Barry’s jetset acquaintances. Curiously Granbeck seems to imply early on that the insurance investigator is interested in Lobo, but that might’ve been a misreading on my part; I did doze off a few times while reading the book, after all. 

Reinforcing the “mystery novel” vibe is the titular Wyss, a notorious figure in the drug world. It turns out that Wyss is behind the heroin-smuggling on Barry’s ships, with the added kick in the crotch that Wyss wants the heroin to be discovered so as to cause Barry legal and other woes. Even here we get more of a lowkey payoff, with Wyss finally being tracked down in Switzerland…but posing under another name. Instead of taking direct action, Barry tries to entrap him and all that, and it’s lame. And yes, it’s in Switzerland that the cover incident occurs, with Barry and Lobo hitting the slopes as one of Wyss’s goons sharpshoots at them. 

I mean this one’s so lame, Barry doesn’t even take part in the climactic action scene. It’s all relayed via report as Wyss and his ship get in a fight with some Balarac forces, and Barry frets while it goes down. And smokes a bunch of cigarettes. In previous installments he’d at least blow something up. It’s like with this one Granbeck didn’t even bother to give us that. But one must appreciate her steadfast determination to not cater to the demands of the action genre. Anyway not that it matters, as with this volume The Peacemaker comes to a close. It shan’t be missed.