Tag: Supernatural

Review: Created The Destroyer

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Created: The Destroyer

The Remo Williams Destroyer series has been one of the biggest “rivals” to Mack Bolan, starting with 1971’s Created: The Destroyer, and continuing for a massive number of books. I figured that, like with Mack Bolan, I’d start at the beginning.

Who and What

Police officer Remo Williams is saved from death row by secret agents, trained under a martial arts master, and then seduces a woman to stop her criminal father. It’s that kind of book.

DEEP HISTORY OF TEM

The prose in this book is very, very purple. It’s purpler than a king’s wardrobe. Thankfully, while it’s overwrought and ridiculous, it doesn’t get in the way of a smooth read.

Zombie Sorceresses

You know, I just felt I had to put the word “EVERYTHING” in this section. It’s that kind of book. And that kind of series.

Tank Booms

The action suffers from a bit of the same overwroughtness as the prose, but it’s still very good. The series is a martial arts one, which is a fun change of pace from some of the gunpowder-filled cheap thrillers I’ve read before.

The Only Score That Really Matters

This book is unfortunately a product of its time and has some uncomfortable racial stereotypes and slurs. Beyond that, it’s a raucous, goofy cheap thriller, and I could see why it spawned the mega-series it did.

Unstructured Review: The Power

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Ok, now I’m really stretching things with Fuldapocalypse. I’m reading and reviewing something that’s social-commentary supernatural fiction. Even if it does involve a war.

The book is Naomi Alderman’s The Power.

So, the premise of the book is that women gain the ability to fire blasts of electricity (the way Alderman explains the origins of this power reminded me of old comic books, and I really wish she’d kept it more deliberately mysterious than she did). The most oppressed are the first and most determined to lash out, and they end up taking over the world and showing that power corrupts (hence the title).

The geopolitics are weird (A Saudi-focused Moldovan civil war?) and clearly bent to fit the story even by the standards of a world where women can become she-Electros. The depictions of every conventional armed force are cringeworthy in the limited research, even if forgivable given the author’s background. There are interludes that serve as combination infodumps and “ok, do you get it now? DO YOU GET IT NOW?” reinforcements of the point. Worst of all, the prose manages to be exceedingly dull and exceedingly pretentious at the exact same time, plodding on with every chapter feeling the same.

I can’t fault the book for wanting to have a message or make a statement. The basic messages of “people who are pushed down will push back if given the chance” and “power corrupts” are true and worth sharing, even if they’re not exactly the most profound or unknown. But it’s just so blatant and so clunkily executed that I was soured by it.

Which is a shame, because both of the concepts (women suddenly gaining a physical advantage and/or superpowers emerging regardless of the context) would make for good serious speculative fiction if done right.

(For a somewhat different opinion on this book, see author Kate Vane’s review here )

Review: Dark War Revelation

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Dark War: Revelation

When I saw Mark Walker’s Dark War series, I knew I had to read it. This was something. This was a supernatural WW3-finally the zombie sorceresses were in their element! The first installment, Revelation, was a real interesting book, but fell slightly short.

Me and the Sci-Fi and Fantasy Reviewer are both covering this book. It fit our tastes, and his review is here.

Icelands

This is a strange book. The story as a whole is a desperately needed reimagining of the genre, but some of its parts, if taken totally in isolation, would resemble a formulaic Fulda Gap tale. A gritty Red Army-level one rather than a Team Yankee style action-adventure one, but still not the most original, if it wasn’t for the monsters.

But the monsters make it stand out. Unfortunately, they don’t really stand out on their own-these are very much run of the mill daylight-vulnerable vampires and silver-vulnerable werewolves.

Rivets

Sadly, this has lots of rivet-counting details and the occasional inaccuracy. The conventional, non-supernatural WW3 battles are decently written, but suffer from the common problem of not being integrated into a cohesive whole that much. The whole story has a little too many rivets for its own good-too many tank gun descriptions and the like. Not too many, but still a little annoyingly.

Zombie Sorceresses

Come on. It’s a supernatural thriller. It feels off to argue “plausibility”.

The “Wha”?

Ok, the plot and characters are rather jumbled.  The prose is kind of clunky and a little too tell-not-showing. More importantly, the horror elements and the “World War III” elements aren’t mixed well. The horror parts are basically genre cliché and there isn’t really any lasting gimmick beyond “there’s vampires and werewolves in WW3 Germany”.

When the supernatural parts are mixed with the exploding tanks, they do well. But too often they aren’t mixed as much as they should be.

The Only Score That Really Matters

This achieves more than the sum of its parts by having the audacity to combine the two very, very different genres together. The pieces by themselves are not the best, though not unreadable either. It’s basically a decent but formulaic WW3 combat tale and a decent but formulaic monster horror tale smashed together like two armored divisions in a meeting engagement on the North German Plain.

But from the novelty factor alone, it becomes worthwhile. The genre needs all the shakeups it can get, and it’s an amusing, entertaining cheap thriller if nothing else.