Endworld #2: Thief River Falls Run

Endworld #2: Thief River Falls Run, by David Robbins

No month stated, 1986  Leisure Books

Man it’s been years since I read the first volume of Endworld – it was before my kid was even born, and he’s halfway through kindergarten already! Well anyway, I have many books in this series, as well as sister volume Blade, so it’s about time I get back to it. The only thing I could remember from my reading of the first volume back in 2016 was that the series seemed like a ripoff of Doomsday Warrior, only for the Young Adult market, and also that I didn’t like it very much. 

And this second volume just confirmed my feelings; Thief River Falls Run comes off like an edited-for-TV version of Doomsday Warrior, lacking the gore and purple-prosed sex of that superior series. Otherwise it has the same setup: one hundred years after a nuclear hell, and a cast of colorfully-named asskickers. But whereas Ted “The Ultimate American” Rockson and his pals act like true men’s adventure heroes, Blade and his fellow “warriors” are like innocent children. Part of the schtick of this series is how Blade and his “family” venture out of their safe space in Minnesota and encounter other people, and they’re just so innocent and unaware of everything. 

And whereas Doomsday Warrior had its cake and ate it, too, with Rockson and friends talking about 20th Century trivia (thanks to that “library” of videos and books in Century City, of course), Blade and his friends are confused about such mundane things as a car horn. Yes, friends, there is actually a part in Thief River Falls Run where Blade accidentally leans on the horn of their post-nuke all-terain vehicle, the SEAL, and they all wonder what that strange loud noise they just heard was. Did the vehicle make the noise?? So there is none of the winking-to-the-reader nutjob stuff like in Doomsday Warrior, and that even includes the sex material…Blade and his fellow warriors, you see, only get busy when they are married! WTF!! The whole damn thing is like a post-nuke Little House On The Prairie. 

This series is also starting to remind me of another Leisure post-nuke pulp series: Roadblaster. Not that it’s that bad, it’s just that, as with Roadblaster, our heroes takeforever to get anywhere. Last volume they wanted to go to Twin Cities, apparently the post-nuke Minneapolis. They didn’t make it. This volume they try to go to Twin Cities again. They don’t make it! Compare to Rockson and team, who would go to space and back in a single volume. 

Another annoyance is that we can’t just have a team of post-nuke shit-kickers. Instead, Robbins gussies up the plot with the unwanted presence of Joshua, a long-haired pacifist who is so naïve he seems to have walked out of a book written by Ned Flanders. And Plato, the leader of “Home,” insists that Joshua go with Blade and the Warriors on the Twin Cities run! You almost wonder if the guy’s an inside agent, setting Blade and the others up. 

Speaking of inside agents, David Robbins sets up several dangling subplots for future volumes. There is the threat of enemy agents within Home who plot to wrest control from Plato, and also the development that Blade’s father, the former leader of Home, was murdered years ago as part of a plot. Blade stumbles upon this info during events in Thief River Falls, mostly due to the presence of mutant “Brutes.” He learns via happenstance that Brutes, which are kept on leashes by Watchers, might have been used to kill his father. 

As for Blade, he’s still sick from infection as this one opens; it’s some unspecified time later. Robbins spends the initial pages introducing two new characters who will presumably factor into later novels: a young woman named Rainbow (who is comatose the entire time) and her precocious, twelve year-old daughter Star. They have escaped from somewhere, “hunters” after them, and Blade’s colleagues Hickock and Rikki-Tikki-Tavi save them. After this nothing more is said about the two, but the way they are introduced, Star asking tons of questions about Home, might indicate they will have bigger roles in future. This part furthers the Doomsday Warrior vibe, with the Warriors fighting a giant mutant spider. 

So anyway, once Blade is better old Plato tells him to try to get to Twin Cities again – but this time he’s taking along Joshua. Robbins uses this as a way to fill up the book’s unwieldy 256 pages: Joshua spends pages and pages defending his pacifism to Hickock. Now it would be one thing if Joshua were constantly being pressured by the Warriors, but instead it's Joshua who is constantly judging them and their “violent” ways. And folks it’s just no fun reading a post-nuke action thriller with a main character who keeps judging everyone for being “too violent.” 

There’s also a bit of a Guardians vibe with our heroes driving around in their customized vehicle. There’s only periodic action, like when a biker takes a shot at them and Hickock blows him away – cue more bitching from Joshua. Fortunately, Joshua goes through some character growth in Thief River Falls Run; a subplot concerns him being forced to kill to save his comrades, and Robbins seems to use Joshua as a stand-in for those who complain about the use of excessive force…you know, like brain-addled puppet politicians who wonder why cops can’t shoot violent perps in the shoulder or something. When it’s kill or be killed, you kill, and this is the lesson Joshua learns. 

And sadly this subplot turns out to be the “meat” of Thief River Falls Run. Because action-wise, again we aren’t talking Doomsday Warrior. The vibe’s actually more like a Western, with Blade et al coming across a saloon in the titular town and engaging with some redneck gunslingers. There is a lot of promise for Twin Cities here; we learn the place is overrun by rats and roving crime gangs. This info is courtesy Big Bertha, a pretty young black woman Blade and team rescue from the gunslingers; they were keeping her as a sex slave. 

One thing we learn is that there are no black people in Home; Blade muses that there was “one black family,” but they died long ago. Hence Big Bertha is the first black girl any of them have seen, and Bertha herself takes a shine to Hickock, whom she calls “White Meat.” As for “Big Bertha,” she informs us she got this name on account of her “boobs.” She also calls Hickock “honky,” and Robbins clearly wants us to understand that these two will become an item…which works out for Hickock, as his chosen mate was killed last volume. Which I admit I’d entirely forgotten about, but Robbins frequently reminds us. 

I also forget the gore quotient of The Fox Run, but it’s only minimal in Thief Falls Run. The Warriors shoot several people, but the violence is mostly PG-13 at best. There’s also a lot of hand-to-hand fighting, with Blade taking on a male-female pair of Brutes. We’ve been told in these first two volumes that “only animals” were mutated by the nukes, with the insistence that there are no human mutants, but the Brutes seem to disprove this. Joshua and Bertha take on one in the climax, and there’s also a cool part where an injured Blade is separated from his friends as hunters, Watchers, and a revenge-minded Brute come after him. 

But humorously it’s back to square one at the end of the novel; Blade decides to call off the “Twin Cities run” yet again, and the team gets in the SEAL and heads back for Home. Maybe next volume they’ll actually get there!

Endworld #1: The Fox Run

Endworld #1: The Fox Run, by David Robbins
No month stated, 1986  Leisure Books

Clearly tapping in on the post-nuke success of Doomsday Warrior, Endworld was courtesy David Robbins and ultimately proved to be even more popular, spanning twenty-some volumes and even a sister series, Blade, which also ran for several volumes. Like Doomsday Warrior, this one takes place one hundred years after “The Big Blast,” aka World War III, however unlike Doomsday Warrior it doesn’t play it all so over the top. While some might appreciate this, I missed the typical craziness of post-nuke pulp.

Just to get the similarities dispensed with, Endworld also concerns a group of American heroes a century after nuclear war, living in an idyllic, almost socialist sort of paradise safe from the radioactive rigors of their post-nuke world. But, judging from this first entry, the series lacks the spoofy jingoism of Doomsday Warrior, and indeed we aren’t even told who the nuclear war was between – in other words, there are no “Reds,” aka Russians, making life miserable for the surviving Americans. And while this series does have radiation-spawn “mutates,” unlike the creature features of Doomsday Warrior these ones are scarred, half-dead animals that are covered in pus-filled carters and boils. 

We’re also missing the patented ultra-gore and graphic sex of Doomsday Warrior, more on which later. The Fox Run has violence throughout, but Robbins is in more of a streamline/outline mode than Ryder Stacy, usually just stating that a character is shot and leaving it at that, rather than detailing the exploding brains and spouting cerebrospinal fluids. As for sex, forget it. This book could almost pass for juvenile fiction – again, more on which later.

Our heroes are members of the Family, a group of survivors who live on the Home, built shortly before the war and nestled in a desolate area of Minnesota. Made up of seventy-five or so people, the Family lives on a bunker-type compound complete with fortified shelters, tons of stocked food, and even more guns and ammo. Led by the wizened Plato, who looks much older than his fifty-odd years, the Family is broken up into different specialized units, a la the socialist setup of Doomsday Warrior; as in that superior series, it’s all about the community and not the individual in Endworld. 

A squad of three-man Warrior teams lead the Home’s defenses, “Alpha Triad” being the top one, and its leader being a 24 year-old mass of muscle named Blade, who appears on the cover of every Endworld novel in full homoerotic splendor. Lacking the memorable, outrageous charm of Ted “Doomsday Warrior” Rockson, Blade is as naïve and innocent as the rest of the Family, completely ignorant of the world outside and uncertain what pre-nuke society was like – in another parallel to Doomsday Warrior, the Family has scads of books in its library, but none of the videos or other computer tech of that other series, so all they’ve learned has come from the several hundred books the Home’s builder, Kurt Carpenter, stocked for them. 

This first entry is very concerned with world-building, often shoehorning background material in the narrative with no warning. At length we learn that Carpenter, paranoid of a nuclear war, bought the land on which the Home was built and started off the community shortly before WW III; he himself was killed by a radioactive cloud. In the last similarity I’ll mention between this series and Doomsday Warrior, here too our heroes must endure the harsh and bizarre post-nuke weather patterns, in particular green clouds that can kill a man with just a single vapor. We get to see one of these in action early on, as even studly Blade is almost killed by a mere cloud.

It’s almost 100 years to the day since “The Big Blast,” and Home leader Plato has a concern – everyone’s growing old much too fast. He feels that it’s time for the Family to finally venture outside of the area of the Home and go to far-off Twin Cities, where Plato hopes to find research equipment that will help him figure out why everyone seems so much older than they really are. Plato himself looks to be in his seventies despite being twenty years younger, and his concern is that if something isn’t done hummanity itself will be gone within a generation.

Blade, bowie knife-wielding leader of Alpha Triad (we’re informed each member of the Family choses his or her own name at age sixteen), will head up the journey to Twin Cities. The other two members of his Triad will go along: Hickock, lean and rakish crackshot who talks and acts like he’s in the Wild West, and Geronimo, muscle-bound, spear-fighting “Indian” (who humorously enough is like 98-percent caucasian, only calling himself “Geronimo” due to a smidgen of American Indian in his genes). These two characters annoyed me no end – it was nauseating how many times Hickock would call someone “pard,” and Robbins develops a three-way banter between the Triad that strives for comedy but only seldom attains it.

The thing is, I didn’t like any of these guys. Even worse is Joshua, young Jesus-wannabe acolyte of Plato, a pacifist who preaches of “the Spirit” and whom Plato insists will go along to Twin Cities with the Alpha Triad. I kept waiting for Joshua to get killed, but unfortunately it never happened. At least we don’t get to read too much about him, given that, after an almost humorous amount of narrative buildup, the Twin Cities run is called off! When some enemies raid the Home – apparently the first non-Family humans our heroes have ever seen – and steal away the young women, the Family’s priorities quickly change.

No, instead it will be the Fox run, as it develops that these villains, who call themselves The Trolls, reside in Fox, Minnesota, much closer to the Home than Twin Cities. Unbathed cretins in foul-smelling, raggedy frocks, the Trolls take advantage of the Home’s sluggish defenses and steal off several women, including Blade’s flame Jenny, a bland but busty blonde. To further evidence the juvenile nature of the series, our heroes constantly question why the Trolls would take their women – the entire abduction is a mystery to them.

And to me this is the biggest drawback of Endworld. Our heroes, while being super-skilled at killing mutates and talking about guns and whatnot, are almost Edenic in their blissful ignorance of man’s dark heart. We will learn eventually that Home founder Kurt Carpenter wrote a sort of guidelines that has become a veritable bible for the Family. One of its stipulations was “no promiscuous sex.” What a bummer!! Hence Blade and Jenny apparently have never consumated their love – to do that requires “binding” to one another, aka getting hitched.

So anyway, with Jenny and the other gals captive, Blade and the others – even Plato – are plain flummoxed. “Why would anyone want to abduct our women?” Becomes almost a constant refrain. This, coupled with the lack of gory violence, is what leads me to almost classify Endworld as juvenile fiction. It’s even written in juvenile fiction tones, as shown here in a sequence in which Blade kills a mutate:

Blade watched the headless body flop on the grass, blood and pus forming a pool around it. He repressed an urge to continue hacking the body, to chop it into tiny little pices[sp]. How he hated the mutates!!! Every damn one of them had to be exterminated! After all, one of them had killed his father. 

Yes, friends, “After all, one of them had killed his father” is really a sentence in the narrative. And let’s not forget the triple exclamation points, not to mention the Leisure Books-mandatory typo of “pices” instead of “pieces.” This section not only shows the book’s juvenile tone, but is also about as gory as it gets – everything else is pretty bland, so far as the violent setpieces go. So if you know a kid who likes to read, I’d suggest Endworld. It’s certainly going to be better than whatever progressivist bullshit is currently passing for juvenile fiction today. Plus, given the lack of late ‘80s period details or USSR villains, the series is almost timeless.

To me, this juvenile vibe is both good and bad. Bad, because personally I prefer my post-nuke pulp to be insanely gory and filled with graphic sex, a la Doomsday Warrior, Traveler, and the almighty Phoenix. But at the same time it’s good because…well, to briefly broach a personal subject, after 14+ years of marriage my wife and I are about to have our first kid, due in late January. It’s a boy, and if it develops that he likes to read as much as I do, then I’ll have the perfect set of books to turn over to him when he’s 11 or so (which is the age when I started reading men’s adventure – though I went straight to the “adult” stuff like Phoenix Force, so maybe Endworld could be read by someone even younger).

Anyway, to get back to the review. While the women are carted off to Fox (and one of them, Joan, happens to be the sole female Warrior in the Family), the Alpha Triad heads off in hot pursuit, taking advantage of the just-unearthed SEAL. Yet another bit of prescience courtesy Kurt Carpenter, the SEAL is an all-terrain, solar-powered vehicle of opaque plastic-light material that’s impervious to bullets. It’s been stored in an airtight, grave-like chamber for the past century. Our heroes first must learn how to drive it, having never seen a working car before – again, this series, at least this first volume, lacks the quasi-futuristic tech of Doomsday Warrior or even the sub-Mad Max gearhead stuff of Traveler.

More comedy ensues as first Hickock nearly wrecks the SEAL and then Blade, being overly cautious, refuses to take it over 15 mph as they head after the Trolls. Eventually he’ll get on a blasted highway and take it up to 60. The SEAL doesn’t factor much in The Fox Run, other than providing basic transport, but one figures it will heavily feature in upcoming volumes, as all books in the series featuring “Run” in the title. I forgot to mention that Robbins shoehorns a bunch of gun-porn into the book, courtesy Hickock; there’s an interminable part where the Triad go into the Home armory and Hickock rattles off several guns and their attributes as he outfits his comrades with the weapons he thinks they’ll need.

The finale sees the Trolls returning to their blasted home, Fox, and putting the women through a series of trials to filter out the hardiest. Here the women encounter Nadine, a crone-like lady who seems familiar; turns out she’s Plato’s long-lost wife, abducted by the trolls seven years ago. The trials are kind of lame, and end with one of the women tossed to a pack of ravenous wolverines. Robbins plays some time tricks with the narrative, having Blade magically show up disguised as a Troll in the wolverine arena before backtracking to explain how he got there, as if this is post-nuke Elmore Leonard or something.

While Hickock, Geronimo, and a family they encountered on the way to Fox blast away at the Trolls, Blade engages titanic Troll leader Saxon in a grisly knife fight, which is likely the most violent part of the book, featuring as it does a character’s groin getting hacked off (hint: it isn’t Blade’s). We also get tantalizing mentions of a group called “The Watchers,” who apparently have their own motorized vehicles and whom even the Trolls seem to fear. But otherwise that’s that – a few casualties, but otherwise the women are saved, including of course Jenny, and it’s back to the Home.

At 255 pages of super big print, The Fox Run is fast moving and does a capable job of introducing this post-nuke society. I’ll keep reading the books – and I’ve managed to pick up most of the series, as well as all of Blade – but I have a feeling I’ll be turning them all over to my son in about a decade or so.