With no signs of stopping, Derrick Ferguson's Dillon racks up another win.
Dillion is hired to investigate his old friend Lord Chancellor C'jai of Xonira, accused of piracy. We get submarine battles and swordfights, but not near as over-the-top as other entries.
A civil servant who monitors sex offenders is losing his mind. He's suspended for actions he doesn't remember, prone to fits of anger, has horrifying hallucinations, and is visited by a stranger in his backyard warning him to not use the phone.
Is it a government conspiracy? Demon possession? Time travel and alternate universes? Is it all a dream? Is he dead and being tormented in the afterlife?
Good prose, but the story reaches a level early on and doesn't move from there, aside from a quick scene of violence that felt out of place. Without things ramping up I was just left to guess what the resolution would be. I didn't guess completely right, but given that the story felt four parts Jacob's Ladder and one part Angel Heart, it wasn't a surprise either.
Some loose threads are wrapped up at the end, but like Jacob's Ladder a lot is dropped. The audiobook's narration was a good artistic choice, whispery and lethargic, but didn't help with the pacing.
Newcomer Greg Gifune challenges the champion Derrick Ferguson for the Young Guns Title
Robert "Author of Psycho" Bloch worked from Weird Tales through Tales from the Darkside. Known mainly for the Hitchcock adaptation, my favorites from him have been in horror anthology TV and film.
A school bully is menaced by the cat of a witch whose house he burned down. Just gruesome enough to stay in the ring.
A woman wanting a dragon statue and our "hero" run around a warehouse getting menaced and knocked out. No adventure, an unfair mystery, and caps off with a bad-even-for-spicy-pulps light hearted rape.
A mill owner prone to blackouts believes he's been on a murder spree and is a danger to his wife. Standard shudder stuff, though Blassingame crafts a more dreamlike atmosphere than most.
Lansdale waxes sentimental with an elderly man fighting death to save his wife.
Deep in the inner earth, the evil Fellowship of the Black Cross worships a giant worm with a human head.
Everyone drops dead at the death themed restaurant Café Styx, where guests sit at coffins and are served by waiters dressed as skeletons. Felt like he wrote a mystery into a corner and just abandoned it as a horror tale.
A homeless man finds a woman dead in the jaws of a lion statue at the La Brea tar pits. Promising premise runs aground in a series of false finishes in a single locatiom.
Brackett goes over the ropes. Robert E. Howard is disqualified and escorted out of the ring by security.
Our next entry Wyatt Blassingame started with Weird Menace before moving into juvenile non-fiction.
Spooky story of interplanetary body transference.
A man seeking to kill his romantic rival is bonked on the head and awakens in the past as Conan the Reaver, who has square bangs, wears a loincoth and worships Crom. This supposedly isn't officially Conan, but whatever. These framing stories of people regressing to past lives feel like ways to fill out story fragments.
Narrative of a man still conscious after dying in a crash. Cliché subject saved by Shaver's inept yet impassioned take.
Guy dies in a car wreck, dies in a plane crash, looks for his houseboat, killed his wife.
Batman fights Lansdale's interdimensional serial killer The God of the Razor, from his novel Nightrunners. Mostly prose, but parts are written in comic book script, which was distracting.
Disgraced former cop navigates the world of criminals and crooked police to uncover the truth of his brother's suicide. My favorite tough guy prose, but the plot was a little limited.
An Alabama preacher is seduced by a vampire.
Etchison goes over the ropes.
Tunneling up through the floor, Richard Shaver emerges from the hollow earth and joins the fray.
Was Shaver a man haunted by strange messages from beyond and used those experiences to become a pulp writer? Was he an aspiring pulp writer first and used the Shaver Mystery as a gimmick? Was he a rambling lunatic whose inane scribblings were rewritten by Ray Palmer?
Whatever the truth, the man was crazy.
A prisoner learns a novel means of escape - into his own mind. The world his dreams created has spawned life, and he can live in that world while a robot in the dream world controls his daily activities. He can travel into other dream worlds, where he recruits other prisoner and seeks to bust up the Prison Industrial Complex Racket, only to find it run by a former Nazi with strong mental defenses. Ambitious, creative, and Shaver definitely doesn't pull it off.
Mall kitchen appliance pitchman with dark motives.
A crystal cube creates a doorway to a gruesome dimension of the dead, where a man tries to dump the body of his murder victim. Truly chilling.
A falsely accused man hijacks a ship to Mercury for evidence to save his loved one and encounters telepathic crystals.
Available in Bumper Crop from Amazon
Dark quickie tale of human sacrifice.
Arcane African rites and a carnivorous gorilla in the pine swamps of Mississippi. More racist than it sounds.
All authors stay in the ring
The Queen of the space opera, Leigh Brackett, springboards over the ropes and into action.
Earthman from Mercury John Stark accompanies a dying friend to his homeland on primitive Mars, only for him to die, leaving him a mysterious talisman. He gets involved with an invasion led by the titular Amazon, who's described as on the cover, and stops an ancient frozen city from awakening and reclaiming the planet. Good prose and imagination, but could stand to have more adventure - the Amazon hardly does anything.
A man is approached by people he's never met, claiming they know him under a different name, only to later turn up dead. A doppelganger story outside of the shudder pulp formula.
A teenager is found dead and mutilated and his friends trace his steps to a new girl in school. There's a fine line between "atmospheric quiet horror" and "half-formed ideas with no ending".
Not really an occult investigator story, other than a wrap around narrative. A woman returns to the woods to discover the truth behind a shadow that scared her as a child. Thin story with some creepy imagery.
An abusive husband loses his arm in the Foreign Legion, and like everyone exposed to the horrors of war and trauma, came out a gentler man. Unsold attempt at the confessions market, more fun as a novelty than on its own merits.
Green Hornet and Kato investigate the murder of one of Hornet's alter ego's employees.
James Reasoner goes over the ropes. Howard clings on by sheer force of novelty. Lansdale is knocked cold, but comes to before Ernst can drag him over the side.
Author of mystery, weird menace, and action, prolific pulpster Paul Ernst enters the ring.
Conan sneaks into a sorcerer's tower to steal a fabulous jewel, only to find it's a tortured captive alien. The third Conan story published, and my favorite of his so far.
Comedy horror piece about a vampire house that drains the life from other houses in the neighborhood.
The Avenger and Justice Inc. help a threatened circus against ghost clowns.
A psychic with her own agenda helps the police find a killer.
Two reporters go to a spooky insane asylum for lunatic deaf-mutes. Horrible creatures, secret passages, blasphemous surgeries, everything you want from a Shudder Pulp
Collected in Twelve Who Were Damned and Other Stories, available from Amazon
All five authors stay in the ring.
From men's mags to the Twilight Zone, master of the form Dennis Etchison returns to the squared circle.
Bibliography https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?1419
Tarzan's airship crashes on the way back from the underground land of Pellucidar, landing him near an island with strange creatures. Paced like a longer piece that was cut short.
A WW I pilot is abducted by aliens and joins in their intergalactic war.
The first published James Allison story, a modern man who remembers the lives of his previous incarnations. Feels like a framing device to publish story fragments, but the monsters were fun enough.
Noir plot (dame asks a bar pick up to commit murder) with quiet horror execution.
Californian Dennis Etchison withstands the Texas tornado and all authors stay in the ring.
Robert E. Howard brings his two fists to the ring, and the three Texas titans face off in the squared circle.
Probably not complete works at Amazon
Atmospheric chiller of an author living with a former keeper in a defunct lighthouse.
Reprinted in High Cotton, from Amazon
Reporter Kolchak encounters ghost pirates after revenge on a corporate raider aboard a cruise ship. Fun, but doesn't quite hit the tone of the TV show.
Irish pirate Vulmea invents a hidden treasure to escape the clutches of the British. Angry natives, hidden tunnels, and a giant snake. Vulmea ends up aiding his British captor for the sake of his wife and daughter - presumably the scores of men he kills were childless bachelors.
All authors stay on their feet.
The million word a year man James Reasoner steps in the ring. His output defies bibliography. Read his blog https://jamesreasoner.blogspot.com/ and buy his stuff on Amazon https://amzn.to/3GioDlN
An obit writer follows a lead about deaths at a flophouse.
Quickie about a homeless woman finding a cursed pair of dentures.
Lansdale and Reasoner go toe to toe, both authors staying in the ring.
Fantasy and horror author Tanith Lee springboards into the ring.
Bibliography https://isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?105
Amazon shop https://amzn.to/3vyFmvX
Collected in Tanith Lee A-Z, from Amazon https://amzn.to/3IhgBft
A man's object of revenge dies too soon, but not too late for voodoo-esque magic.
Two dirt bags an their drive-in "date". The first of his splatterpunk dark comedy pieces in the Rumble.
"What happened to that old man I was talking to?"
"There's no old man here. Might have been the ghost that portends death in the village. Excuse me, I'm off to live a happy and full life."
Lee and Blackwood go over the ropes.
The further Star Wars gets from Lucas the better it tends to get, but the tie in novels just seem like a mess. Forgotten Realms retains the title.
In the far north of the Forgotten Realms, a wizard is possessed by a magical crystal and is building an army of goblins, giants, and a demon to threaten the settlement of ten-towns.
Meet our heroes: Drizzt the Drow, a dark elf shunned by his own people for not being evil; Bruenor the grumpy elf, Wulfgar the Barbarian, and there's a halfling thief that is in the periphery who joins the gang later.
The entire genre acts as a pastiche to Lord of the Rings, but there are some very specific elements here, including the dwarf and elf comparing kill counts. Homage or theft, depending on how charitable you feel.
Ninety percent exposition and council meetings, but the remaining ten percent was good fun. The first appearance of fan favorite Drizzt - I was expecting him to be more angst ridden, but this may be what counts as edgy in fantasy fiction.
Set 25 years after A New Hope, the Star Wars gang have kids, the new Jedi are disorganized, and the galaxy is being invaded by the Yuuzhan Vong, an alien race of religious zealots who use advanced biology for their technology.
Mainly known for killing off Chewie by dropping a moon on him. Everybody's got to go sometime, and this all got rebooted after The Force Awakens, but Salvatore kind of pulls a Ed Brubaker, killing off a major supporting character on the front end to show the stakes are high.
The audiobook I listened to was abridged, mercifully. The full version is four times longer, and from what I could tell reading a synopsis, didn't have additional major scenes. Other than Chewie buying it and the cool aliens, not a whole lot going on. First in a series of nineteen.
I first came across the account of medium Estelle Roberts assisting police in the investigation of the disappearance of Mona Tinsley in 1937 England in the book Strange Talents by Bernhardt J. Hurwood. In that account, Ms. Roberts accurately described the murder, identified the killer, and located the body. A check of primary sources flavors those claims a bit differently.
Wikipedia has a good summary, and I've verified things like dates and places with contemporaneous newspaper accounts. Roberts involvement was covered at the time by Psychic News, and her direct account was published in her 1969 book 50 Years a Medium.
Mona Tinsley was reported missing in January of 1937, Roberts became involved a month later, and Mona's body was discovered the following June. Roberts did not ID the suspect, as Frederick Nodder was arrested a couple days after the disappearance, well before Roberts got involved.
Roberts also didn't help police locate the body, which was found by boaters. She says herself "“I can’t say precisely where" the body was, but supposedly channels Mona's tormented spirit to follow the path, which led to a field that Roberts and her entourage found impassible, though the killer supposedly had no problem following the route carrying the corpse.
The location she supposedly gave has along the lines of through fields and rivers, which describes pretty much all of England. It's implied that the body was found just beyond the "impassible" field - it was eight miles away across several villages, in an accessible area.
Roberts herself still hedged her bets, saying "The river holds the secret of the child’s whereabouts", which isn't the most exact way of saying you know the body is in the river.
So far, at best, even if Roberts had legit psychic powers, they didn't come in handy in this case, as the killer was already known and she didn't help locate the body. Most of the claims about the details of the murder were unverified, as Nodder never confessed.
Her knowing some limited details is less impressive when we learn that police questioned her about her impressions of the case prior to her entering the murder scene, which would tip her off. Her knowing the landmarks near a building she just travelled to isn't particularly remarkable. The biggest piece of evidence of her psychic powers was supposed to be the fact that she knew the killer used the side door to dispose of the body, which was proven because the front door was nailed shut. Despite having a 50/50 chance to begin with, she probably figured that piece out when she entered the house.
The only things that she reports to have known that were verified were that the child was dead and that she had been strangled. It was widely assumed Mona had been murdered - in fact this case led to changes in British law requiring a body for a murder charge. The strangling she was accurate on, but even then she only revealed this after the end of the trial.
Psychic News drip fed hints during the case, but only published details after they had been confirmed. According to the paper, Roberts told her followers that she had told the police where to find the body, which doesn't match her later account, and was told to her followers after the body had been found. Psychic News hints at other details, but doesn't publish any until after the trial was over.
Roberts reports being hesitant to assist police - contemporaneous accounts say she was concerned about the death penalty, and her later account says she didn't want publicity (despite announcing details to her followers at her own meeting hall). Either way, she claims that she helped in order to bring the family peace and closure.
Here again, even (or especially) if she was psychic, this doesn't hold up. Roberts claimed that Mona was raped (not verified in the autopsy) and that she was constantly in horror reliving the experience again and again, possibly for eternity. I'm sure this brought the family great comfort when they read this in the papers.
The grandmaster of ghost stories, the wiseman of the weird, Algernon Blackwood straightens his bowtie and enters the ring. Bibliography https://isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?1126
An Englishman is drawn to a sleepy French village, where he becomes obsessed with a young maid and witnesses a Satanic cult of werecats. Which is possibly debunked by Dr. Silence with the much more plausible explanation of past life regression.
Turns out that ghost in the haunted house was a ghost.
Available in The Bishop of Hell and Other Stories from Amazon https://amzn.to/3uEXYdD
Interplanetary outlaw Northwest Smith is recruited by a Venusian harem-mate seeking help against her inhuman captive. Like Shambleau it involves his will being sapped by an alien creature, and like Black God's Kiss the story was mostly walking through corridors and repetitive descriptions.
Sword and Sorcery this time, from being hired in a tavern to fighting a sorcerer, with some horny schtick from the hero.
Collected in in this 45th Anniversary Tribute, from Amazon https://amzn.to/3Q8Ktg8
"True" story about a blind landlady who finds the clue that jails a bluebeard tenant. More artistic license than usual to create a narrative, and not the most interesting case to begin with.
Lansdale cleans house, knocking Kobler, Moore, and Brown over the ropes, Blackwood barely holding on.
Early 20th century gothic author Marjorie Bowen returns to the TFC ring.
Biliography https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?12578
Collections in print from Amazon https://amzn.to/3EWyU6t
A clerk in Revolutionary era France is haunted by a murdered former lover. Telegraphed ending, but atmospheric enough.
Available in The Bishop of Hell and Other Stories, from Amazon https://amzn.to/3uEXYdD
The Events Concerning a Nude Fold-Out Found in a Harlequin Romance by Joe R. Lansdale
Dark at Heart 1992 - available from AbeBooks affiliates.abebooks.com/DVYg9b
Amateur detectives get intrigued by a vandalized page of a porn mag stuck in a Harlequin romance sold to a used bookstore by a disgraced circus dog trainer.
Dry history of toxicology. The highlight is an early technique - having doctors taste the vomit of a dead child and then taste various poisons to see what matched. Science!
Conquered warrior Jirel travels to the pits of hell for a weapon to claim revenge on the man who defeated and forced a kiss on her. Beautifully descriptive, thought there's only so many times you can use "dark" and "cold".
Collected in Jirel of Joiry, available from Amazon https://amzn.to/3FXU3Pq
Kobler's pushed against the ropes, but rallies back to the center of the ring. All four authors stay in the ring.
From Weird Tales to 77 Sunset Strip, C.L. Moore spent much of her career writing with her husband Henry Kuttner, though we'll be focusing on her individual, unique style. ISFDB
A shanghaied simpleton sees daemons, colored spiritual beings like living auras, among the ship's crew.
Flash monologue about a barfly Martian vampire.
Collected in A Little Green Book of Monster Stories available from Amazon
All authors stay in the fight.
Lin Carter was best known as a fantasy editor, but was also a prolific name in the pulp revival scene of the late 60s through the 70s. Much of his work is in print as ebooks, available at Amazon
Bibliography at ISFDB
True crime story of a spinster who falls in love with a doctor, tries to kill his wife with poison candy, then contrives to poison the stock of the confectioners to cover it up.
Written from the perspective of Abdul Alhazred, the mad Arab author of the Necronomicon. Not sure if this is supposed to be a story or what was happening, just a lot of old timey talk name checking every Lovecraft proper noun with an apostrophe.
A couple in a cabin and a tale about human sacrifice to an ancient idol.
Collected in A Little Green Book of Monster Stories available from Amazon
Lin doesn't even make it through the ropes, but Lansdale and Kobler stay in the ring.
Our first entrant is Joe R. Lansdale. From detectives to splatterpunk to westerns to sword & planet, Uncle Joe covers a lot of ground, and is the master of East Texas noir. Get his stuff on Amazon
Limited bibliography at Galactic Central and ISFDB
He is shortly joined by our second author, John Kobler.
Before moving up to the slicks, John Kobler spent three years writing for the pulps, mainly Dime Detective. In addition to gory historical true crime features he introduced a couple of defective detectives. One of the more over the top pulp writers and you could feel that he was having fun. Good bibliography of this period here.
An ancient preserved body dug up from a bog in Denmark possesses a woman.
Defective detective Peter Quest is going blind and has a death wish, hoping he dies in action before the lights go out. He keeps news clippings of his exploits, and although the cases were successful, he writes "failure" across them, because he failed to get himself killed. Peter Quest is little dramatic. In this case, wealthy old men disappear to turn up murdered and stricken with leprosy.
Thirty authors enter the ring, one by one. Each round every story I like stays in the ring. Any misfire and it's over the ropes.
After all thirty authors have entered things get more competitive. If all the stories in a round are good, the one I like the least gets eliminated.
Depending on performance, we could see from 30 to 59 rounds, and from 30 to over 900 stories. Buckle in, we're going for a ride.
Six champions defend their titles.
David Sodergren and Ray Garton face off in the steel cage for the Intercontinental Title and a shot at the World Title belt.
Thirty short stories authors enter the ring one at a time. Last author standing is the our first Cruiserweight Champion.
Twelve novels and potentially hundreds of short stories.
Take a look. It's in a book. A Reading Rumble.
The Garbage Man makes a great showing in his debut, while Night Wind is out of its element. Garbage Man covers for the 1 2 3.
A single mother moves to a small town which is being plagued by violence. Her son and her author neighbor love interest seek to find the truth.
A good example of how a novel can change genres by turning various elements up and down. The first half reads like a Zebra Horror novel with the murders cut out - there's a serial killer, but it's all in the background. There's a bunch of foreshadowing things like a haunted house, a psycho ex-husband, and evil native American spirits before settling down half way through.
The second half is more of a thriller, which is a weird middle category in itself - not scary enough for horror, not enough fighting for action, not enough mystery for mystery. There's a dash of hinted supernatural in the form of a wolf who might be a reincarnated wise man.
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The official category for Night Wind is romantic suspense, of all things. Not my expertise, but the only romantic elements were that the male lead was described as handsome more than once and we get a couple quick "maybe we can be more than friends one day" lines
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Reminds me of pulp stories where they'd add "her blouse ripped and you can see her boob" to an unsold story of any genre and they could sell it to the spicys. This feels like a trunk novel from a prior decade (payphones and answering machines figure in the plot, along with the obligatory "we don't get cell reception in the mountains") that got updated and tweaked for the market.
Book version of the twitter feed @garbagemania and the story of the Garbage Man, a wrestler who went from 90s Japan to the Arkansas indies to a mall food court pretzel shop. He's making a comeback in a side yard fed filmed in VHS for Dutch investors while trying to manage single fatherhood.
I tend to be suspicious of any book that started line online, much less from twitter, but the flow works better in long form while keeping the concision of the original format.
Hilarious, great stuff, though granted it's niche to the point that it feels like it was custom written for me. Check out the twitter feed, and if you dig the vibe check out the paperback, which has new material.
Opening our event in non-title action, a Men's Adventure veteran faces off against a veteran of the Tokyo Dome. It's Garbage Men: Wresting in Shadows by Anthony Adams against Stephen Mertz' Night Wind.
Forgotten Realms claims the TV title from Alien Nation.
Derrick Ferguson defends the Young Guns Title against Hunter Shea.
Parker gets a face job from a black market plastic surgeon and plans an armored car heist, which is complicated by threats to reveal his identity to the outfit.
This is a heist novel but it also has the feel of a police procedural, only from the criminal side.
The prose has a lack of affect that mirrors Parker's sociopathy, and reminds me of early Bret Easton Ellis or Dennis Cooper. I like this kind of style, but when it's utilized for page upon page of Parker buying a used car it can get to be a bit much. Others could find it lifeless and padded and I couldn't really argue.
The way the story is lined up is unusual. Not a lot of planning for the heist, but a lot of preparation, along the way foreshadowing point by point what was going to go wrong: a curious state trooper, vehicles about to break down, etc. Then the heist goes more smoothly than it had any right to.
The story is then taken over by a side plot from the point of view of the plastic surgeon's chauffeur, Stubbs, a brain damaged former Communist organizer. Parker's involvement seems convoluted and ultimately futile, as he goes to great lengths to avoid killing some people and drops others without a qualm.
I'd rather Stubbs had gotten a series, as he was a more interesting and likeable character. Parker gives lip services to having a code, which would put him in anti-hero territory, but then he'll do something like enjoy hurting sex workers, not because he's a sadist, but because he wants them to pay attention. A couple notches further into bad guy territory than a Walter White, but not full blown Freddy Kreuger either.
Currently criminally overpriced for Kindle, check your library.
Dan Brady investigates Judge Dredd obsessed children who stumble upon Arachne activity and are menaced by spectral dogs. Far and away the weakest of the series.
The World Champion mounts its psychic defenses against the nihilistic onslaught of Richard Stark's Parker.
Matt Helm is assigned to take pictures for a journalist in Sweden with the expectation he will be given a target to "touch". In the meantime he's been ordered to not take action, and lets himself get beat up to avoid arousing suspicion, which doesn't help thrill levels. Every cover is blown from the start, and Helm jus kind of hangs around while those around him are occasionally murdered.
The Helm series feels like a reaction to idealistic trends in the genre, like grimdark is to fantasy, but this is years after James Bond and decades into hardboiled and noir crime fiction, and I have no idea what he's reacting to. The whole "I might eventually kill someone, do you find that upsetting?" attitude seems a bit tired by 1960.
The attitude towards women is tiresome - one has to put up with at least a little chauvinism in these kinds of books, but it felt like half the word count was Helm judging women's appearances. Some folks go in for the non-PC, "when men were men" stuff, but here he's complaining about their shoes. Pretty much all the secondary characters are women, but they just exist for Helm to brutalize. He even brags about torturing a woman in the first novel. It's not that I disapprove of women in action settings, but it's written to be edgy years after I the Jury started that trend.
Another take is that Helm the character is actually sentimental and trying to convince himself, unsuccessfully, that he isn't. Either way, these kinds of themes are better delivered while the action is going on - here, we get themes instead of action.
While the bulk of the troops are on a mission to rescue a VIP downed behind enemy lines, traitors among the South Vietnamese troops allow a takeover of Camp A-555, with journalist Robin Morrow taken captive.
The re-taking of the camp plays out as a series of small skirmishes. This series works better on a smaller scale, and I didn't get a sense that hundreds of people were involved. This is the second book in a row in which Morrow is captured and tortured, this time with even less emotional impact than the last - hopefully this doesn't become part of a formula.
This match brought to you by Black Coat Press, publisher of French science fiction in translation and modern Wold Newton tales. Visit them at blackcoatpress.com and buy their stuff at Amazon
Two interesting titles, one pro-corporate violence, one with anti-corporate violence. Interesting, but not enough to continue either series. The referee declares no contest, and the Intercontinental Title is vacated.
William Lambert is William Justice, CEO of Lambert International and ruler of his own island nation Haven. After a man dies in his UN office, he takes his entourage to Uganda and involves himself in a civil war. Gaddafi is trying to reinstall Idi Amin as ruler, using biological weapons developed in a cola plant.
Justice fulfills a white savior prophecy of Mama Alice, the spiritual leader of an opposing tribe, and leads a charge to destroy the factory, releasing the biological agent that kills the defending army.
Not great on action - a handful of scenes of Justice's crew running from soldiers before the final raid, for which Justice is naked throughout - but some interesting elements. In the fake bio in the back for McQuay's pseudonym, it states this book is "the bulk of his message to the world".
McQuay is slow dripping Justice's background, which would be great if I intended to read the other books. His family was killed, and sometime after that he created Lambert International, a company that does business. LI liberates an island from the French and starts its own country of Haven. Justice rules as CEO, and citizens are also shareholders and employees. This maps out to either Libertarianism or Communism. Other than standing against injustice and wanting corporations to rule everything, we don't get much more of Justice's politics.
Probably best to read Justice as a lunatic wreaking havoc wherever he goes, not so great at traditional heroics. He leads hundreds of unarmed tribesmen to their death as a distraction (if that), kills 10,000 soldiers who probably aren't involved with the biowarfare, all to maintain power for Museveni, who is technically an improvement over Amin.