Knockdown
by J.A. Johnstone
Pinnacle Books, 2020
William W. Johnstone has been dead for a quarter century, but his byline shows up on hundreds of titles, mostly westerns. They haven't revived his horror or post-apocalyptic titles, but some of his few thriller series are still going. The plot synopses read like a madlibs of Newsmax chyrons: After a Black president bans guns, Muslim Mexican cartels invade and force gay healthcare on everyone; stuff like that.
Johnstone published three installments of the one truck driver army Rig Warrior, and decades later we have a new installment. I think it may be tied in to another series, Dog Team or something. The one Rig Warrior I read was mostly just yelling at a journalist for being liberal, and J.A. really captures that original spirit.
Knockdown starts off with some light racism, then offers some information that makes the intro slightly less racist - checkmate, lib! We get constant exchanges like:
"No, but let me explain in depth why that's OK".
Only took 40 minutes into a 10+ hour audiobook for one of Johnstone's patented "journalist as liberal strawman" scenes which leads into a discussion about how there are only a handful of white supremacists in America and liberals are too mean online.
J.A. was kind enough to frontload a couple of weak action sequences as samples so we can know we're not missing anything, unless you just like having your prior beliefs validated by fictional characters. Even if you're the fan of old fashioned pulp adventure that "you're not allowed to do any more" (ed note: you're totally allowed to do it), there are plenty of alternatives.
Nobody's stopping anybody from using Mexican cartels or Islamic terrorists as the baddies in their book. J.A. could have just done that, but they get so mealy mouthed and weaselly about it they vacillate between apologizing or being defiant that they're not apologizing, rather than showing some stones and just doing it, like they're more worried about what some Tumblr lefty will think about it than trying to be entertaining.
As always, I am available to ghost write a revival of the "Satan inspired" series.
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