WWX Cruiserweight Title

His Brother's Keeper by George Fielding Eliot 
Weird Tales, September 1931

Gruesome quickie about fitting two in an iron maiden.

https://archive.org/details/WeirdTalesV18N02193109

Rest in Pieces by W.T. Quick

Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, January 1980

A flunky who ripped off the mob has a contract put on him by a sentient bomb with very specific parameters. The target has four hours to escape, the bomb can track him anywhere by brain waves, teleport to his location, is not allowed to hurt anyone else, can teleport innocent people away from the blast but only within a certain radius, and is not allowed to teleport the target - the last two convolutions are only to aid the attempt at a clever ending.

George Fielding Eliot retains the Cruiserweight title.

World War X - Ring One, Round One

 

Carter Brown, Terry Harknett, Crime Does Not Pay, Ryder Stacy, Tim Waggoner, Laurence James, Frank Rich, and Leo Kessler stay in ring one for round two.

Blood and Ice by Leo Kessler

Blood and Ice (aka Frozen Mountain)
by Leo Kessler (Charles Whiting)
1977, Futura

I've seen this listed as either 7 or in 8 in the SS Wotan and/or Dogs of War series. If it followed a larger group, at this point the series is down to Sergeant Major Schulze of the SS. Schulze, leading green European conscripts, moves through the mountains of Budapest in a suicidal diversionary action. When defeat is certain, Schulze leads a group of deserters and teams up with Jewish refugees to evade both the Soviets and Germans on the way to Austria.

Violent and sleazy, though a titch tame when compared to other 70s British historical exploitation. The scale of the story jumps back and forth between blow-for-blow action and high level summarizations - kind of inevitable in war fiction, but felt more abrupt than usual. 

The book didn't exactly glamorize the Nazis, but the author clearly had a lower opinion of the Soviets. Schulze gets more anti-hero cred than I'd like to see a Nazi get, but it's not like any of this is morally defensible. Schulze hates Hitler and the Nazi establishment, but is a virulent racist in his own manner. 

Available from Amazon

Jake Straight 1: Avenging Angel by Frank Rich

Jake Straight 1
Avenging Angel
by Frank Rich
1993, Gold Eagle

The Jake Straight series is set in a pseudo-communist dystopian future, more punk than cyber (Joe Strummer was Prime Minister at some point). After the world was torn apart in the Corporate Wars, the Party, led by corrupt officials, have taken tenuous control, opposed by more radical factions, fascist skinheads, wino crusades, and corporate remnants.

Straight is a Bogeyman, a semi-official executioner styled as a hardboiled private detective. Straight prides himself on only going after the worst criminals, but is tricked into assassinating a poet wanted on a political warrant. He goes after the truth, and his fee, and of course some dames are involved.

Aside from a gyropistol which acts like a modern gun, and various synthetic food substitutes, not much in the way of technological advancement. The plot is pretty basic, ending abruptly after a dramatic build up, but works to showcase the setting and characters.

Jake Straight himself is a complicated character, a former soldier who was supposed to die in a suicide mission, not fitting into the Party establishment nor the counter-culture, dealing with PTSD, and of course being drunk most of the time.

The 2007 reprints use the same artist (Tim Bradstreet) and I think the same model (Tom O'Brien) as the early Garth Ennis Punisher run, though not the exact same shots.

From Amazon

The Brood by Richard Starks

The Brood
by Richard Starks
1979, HarperCollins

A couple is going through a rough divorce, with the wife getting controversial therapy for the childhood abuse she received from her mother. Their kid has signs of abuse and hubby tries to get custody, and to get his ex away from her therapist. Meanwhile, his mother in law is killed by a child-like humanoid.

Somehow, the therapy is causing the wife to spawn physical manifestations of her rage, which go on a killing spree. Hubby tries to reconcile, saying they need to be a family again, and failing that he strangles her, the end.

Novelizations of horror films often suffer from pacing problems, with background and exposition taking up more page space than the horror elements, and this is no exception. Has no resemblance to a horror story for well over the first half, and makes no attempt to describe Cronenberg's visuals.

I haven't seen the movie, but if it's like the book, Cronenberg abandons all pretense at subtext and just openly fantasizes about murdering his ex. The story is based on his own divorce and child custody case, to the point of casting lookalikes. This may beat out Taken for the most divorced film ever made.

Overpriced at Amazon https://amzn.to/47jZoes , listen to the Audiobooks of the Damned version

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyyFF4GMjyg

Devil Rides Out by Dennis Wheatley

Devil Rides Out
by Dennis Wheatley
1935, Hutchinson

Some good guy magicians are in spiritual battle with foreigners and the disabled. One level it kind of reminds me of the magic battle of Asian cinema, except that it's boring and almost nothing happens. Wheatley is capable of writing engaging thrillers, but this wasn't one of them.

Mostly just Duke de Richleau spitting out a random hodgepodge of supernatural knowledge: More candles! The sheets must be white and absolutely clean! The Germans did no wrong!

Standing out is one effective sequence involving Saiitii manifestations, which seems to be an homage to William Hope Hodgson's Carnacki stories.

"A dim phosphorescent blob began to glow in the darkness; shimmering and spreading into a great hummock, its outline gradually became clearer. It was not a man form nor yet an animal, but heaved there on the floor like some monstrous living sack. It had no eyes or face but from it there radiated a terrible malefic intelligence.

Suddenly there ceased to be anything ghostlike about it. The Thing had a whitish pimply skin, leprous and unclean, like some huge silver slug. Waves of satanic power rippled through its spineless body, causing it to throb and work continually like a great mass of new-made dough. A horrible stench of decay and corruption filled the room; for as it writhed it exuded a slimy poisonous moisture which trickled in little rivulets across the polished floor. It was solid, terribly real, a living thing. They could even see long, single, golden hairs, separated from each other by ulcerous patches of skin, quivering and waving as they rose on end from its flabby body–and suddenly it began to laugh at them, a low, horrid, chuckling laugh."

Overpriced on Amazon https://amzn.to/4asuXW9

Killer Flies by Mark Kendall

Killer Flies
by Mark Kendall
1983, Signet

Escaped genetically altered flies eat people and later mutate into giant flies before being stopped by organ music. I guess flies can bite, but this is one of the less plausible animal attack books. More pages are devoted to romance. A rancher widow's child dies in the fly attacks and she spends her time wondering if she should hook up with the scientist who killed her daughter or if she should keep banging one of her employees.

Available from Amazon https://amzn.to/48aIMXs

Bunco Brawl: Hand Two

 

Breed is quicker on the draw and wins hand two

Fancy Hatch by Zachary Hawkes

Fancy Hatch
by Zachary Hawkes (Alan Riefe)
1984, Pinnacle

Fancy Hatch is on the trail of revenge for her beloved, finding employment as a deputy in small towns to use the resources of law enforcement to track the killer down.

Fancy solves a murder, foils a bank robbery, and sees her target stand trial in a sequence I completely skipped. Trial scenes are dull enough, mad much worse when the reader has first hand knowledge of the crime. Well written but light on the action, some shootouts resolving in a couple sentences. The obligatory three sex scenes were so badly done either someone edited those in or Riefe wrote them absurd purpose out of protest. I got the sense he'd rather be writing a Hec Ramsey style Western procedural than a proper Adult Western.

From Amazon https://amzn.to/3KrcSfh

Writing Westerns: How to Craft Novels that Evoke the Spirit of the West by Mike Newton

Writing Westerns: How to Craft Novels that Evoke the Spirit of the West
by Mike Newton
2012, Writer's Digest Books

Quick primer to writing westerns, perhaps not enough to actually write one, but enough to know what you're getting into. Good overviews of types of westerns, history, technology, and slang, with resources for further reading.

Newton's non-fiction is very thorough, which kind of works against him here. I don't think we need to know how many episodes of Branded were on TV, or the exact number of Western comedy films released in the 80s. A lot of this pads out a short work. Felt like those excesses could be trimmed and the remainder either be introductions to a more thorough work, or be a smaller, and cheaper, work.

Available from Amazon https://amzn.to/3QWDxUJ

Breed 1: The Lonely Hunt by James A. Muir

Breed 1
The Lonely Hunt
by James A. Muir (Angus Wells)
1976, Sphere

Azul, aka Matthew Gunn, is a half White, half Apache who returns home to find his tribe slaughtered for their scalps. He tracks the killers to and from Mexico, picking them off one by one.

Some inconsistent morality from Azul, sometime helping people like a farmgirl and a priest, other times torturing or killing relative innocents as it's convenient. Possibly the most violent of the Piccadillys I've read, with the scalp vendor ending up like something out of Clive Barker. 

Available from Amazon

Bunco Brawl: Hand Two

 

Aaron Fletcher leaves the table and three more cowpokes face off - Breed, Fancy Hatch, and Mike Newton.

Witches 1: The Prisoner by James Darke

Witches 1
The Prisoner
by James Darke (Laurence James)
1983, Sphere

Set during the English Civil War, John Ferris is a former soldier seeking revenge on the witchfinders who killed his parents and have taken his beloved. The melee fights are as plentiful as the sex, rape, and torture, and works equally well as adventure as it does for sleaze.

From Amazon

Doc Savage: Czar of Fear by Lester Dent

Doc Savage
Czar of Fear
by Lester Dent
November 1933

Doc is accused of murder while facing the hooded Green Bell, who is destroying the industry of a small town. The kind of case Doc can face in his sleep, and the added element of him being a fugitive just meant he had to duck down in his car a couple times.

From Amazon https://amzn.to/3zEtb66

A Nightmare on Elm Street: Protege by Tim Waggoner

A Nightmare on Elm Street: Protege
by Tim Waggoner
2005, Black Flame

Years ago, Freddy kills a pregnant woman and implants part of himself in the unborn child, who survives. The child is protected from Freddy's influence by a dream catcher until he accidently breaks it, causing his dark side to take over.

Good characters and matches the feel of the original films better than most Black Flame books, but suffers from the same page bloat as the others and could have been cut in half.

From Amazon https://amzn.to/42ODy1H

John Eagle Expeditor 2: The Brain Scavengers by Paul Edwards (Manning Lee Stokes)

John Eagle Expeditor 2

The Brain Scavengers

by Paul Edwards (Manning Lee Stokes)

Pyramid, 1973

John Eagle is a White man raised by Apaches who answered Mr. Merlin's classified ad for a secret agent. His mission is to eventually go to Siberia and blow it up. Half the book follows Russian scientists around and generally lounges around, but the basic idea is that Russia is kidnapping Western scientists and keeping them in an underground base.

The action half of the book isn't much of an improvement. Some decent snowbound survivalist adventure, but the action scenes weren't much and Eagle largely just waltzes in and out of the base without much trouble. Instead of firearms he has a gas gun and bow and arrow, neither of which seem to perform much better than a silenced pistol.

I guess Stokes felt obligated to squeeze in a sex scene somewhere, and he does so in the worst way possible. A scientist he's "rescuing" seems to panic, so he uses the time honored Apache method of making a woman submit by raping her. It was a titch more "dubious consent" as they say in the romance novels, but it ain't great. Eagle isn't exactly the most heroic of characters, reminding his allies that they're expendable or outright threatening to murder them.

The book felt a bit of early Nick Carter Killmaster, which Stokes also wrote for, with some added superficially outré elements that didn't amount to much.

From Amazon https://amzn.to/45Qg9xI

Doomsday Warrior 2: Red America by Ryder Stacy

Doomsday Warrior 2
Red America
by Ryder Stacy

The ultimate American Ted Rockson infiltrates and liberates a Russian brainwashing factory. Afterward he runs into a native American biker community, which would have been painfully stereotypical except that they all talk like beatniks. More sex than most post-apocalyptical books of the 80s, including a peyote fueled romp.

From Amazon https://amzn.to/3XyvFNp