|
Volume 3, Issue 17
Book ReviewsABLE TEAM: ARMY OF DEVILSby Dick Stivers 
Ah, the '80s. A time when slim, enumerated novels overran the 'juvenile literature' shelves -- Sweet Valley High, The Babysitter's Club, Boxcar Children ... The Executioner Series. Mack Bolan (motto: "Live Large") was the protagonist of a popular pulp fiction series centered around post-Vietnam war fighting. Mack disposed of terrorists with, as they said back then, extreme prejudice. The novels were bloody, mean, and financially successful enough to spawn spin-offs, such as The Able Team, a long-running series written by Dick Stivers. This installment, number eight, concerns a new drug which renders 'punks' incapable of feeling pain. These punks are indoctrinated by Communists and Muslims to hate whitey, kill cops, and generally create havoc upon the good ol' you ess of ay. Carl Lyons stands in their way. Together with his partners, Pol Blancanales and Gadgets Schwarz, and his lover, Flor Trujillo (who does indeed get kidnapped by the bad guys), Lyons wields high-powered weaponry en route to wholesale murder and against-the-rules destruction, stopping at nothing to keep the Commies at bay. In short, it's a terribly dated book. The violence is gratuitously over-the-top: in the first 10 pages, we witness one rape and 15 brutally described murders, including one of an infant. Stivers' prose leaves little room for interpretation. He hates Commies, distrusts blacks, and has mixed patronizing emotions about Mexicans. Little hints of word choice -- calling Mexico "Central America" and the United States "North America" when in reality Central America begins at Mexico's southern border -- are glaringly obvious in today's politically corrected atmosphere. But in 1983, this was riveting stuff. A certain segment of America was hungry for another war ... we were due. Gangs, drugs, terrorists: it all got crushed through the Reagan-era propaganda machine and spat out as impending apocalypse. This isn't so much a commando novel as a fantasy tale; the doped-up punks are magically transformed into immortal zombies by just a cigarette of 'crazy dust'. One has to be killed five times with three different weapons. Heads explode a lot in this book. It's hard to judge this work fairly. After all, the entire genre died when the Iron Curtain got taken down and sent to the Iron Dry Cleaners. They just don't make 'em like this anymore. Stivers stumbles quite often with vocabulary and plot holes, but that's forgivable since I suspect he cranked one of these out every two or three weeks. The character motivations are transparent or weak, but the whole thing's over in less than two hours, and by the end you're really motivated to blow the snot out of some bad guys with a big ass gun. More than anything, these hyper-violent flag wavers are a reminder of America's past, and better yet, a reminder that no matter how much sense our culture makes today, it's all going to look damn silly in 15 to 20 years. Even blood and guts are subject to becoming campy. C--- Chris J. Magyar This book is available at Black & Read: 7821 Wadsworth Blvd. or online at www.blackandread.com 
|