Showing posts with label William W. Johnstone. Show all posts
Showing posts with label William W. Johnstone. Show all posts

Monday, September 26, 2022

Wolfsbane


Wolfsbane, by William W. Johnstone
March, 1987  Zebra Books
(Original Zebra edition 1982)

Yet another thick horror paperback courtesy the prolific William W. Johnstone, Wolfsbane was first published in 1982; shown here is the cover of the 1987 reprint, which I lifted from Too Much Horror Fiction (where you can also see the original cover). I can’t make out the artist signature, but this cover, while super cool (and embossed in true ‘80s horror paperback style), has no relation to the story itself. This one is Johnstone’s take on werewolves, but don’t go into Wolfsbane expecting a typical werewolf tale. 

Instead, expect Johnstone’s typical horror novel plot: Satan comes to Smalltown USA in the 1980s. (I grew up in Smalltown USA in the 1980s, and trust me, Satan would’ve gotten bored quick.) Actually, Wolfsbane takes place in 1976, though the “shock twist” finale occurs in 1981. Otherwise it’s the same as the other Johnstone horror novels I’ve read, with the caveat that Wolfsbane isn’t nearly as twisted, perverted, or downright great as The Nursery. But on the other hand, it’s definitely better – which is to say sleazier – than Toy Cemetery. It just isn’t as sleazy as The Nursery

I say this is a werewolf novel, and technically it is, but Johnstone rarely uses the word in the book; instead he calls them “loup garous,” given that the novel takes place in Louisiana. But man, these creatures, when they do appear in the book (which honestly isn’t all that often), are hardly even described. Johsntone’s powers of description fail him greatly when it comes to the creature feature material; about the most we get is that the beasts are hairy and have hideous faces. Most of the time they appear in shadows, and there are other monsters besides the werewolves, like a witch and a horde of things that try to attack the protagonist during a memorable if brief sequence in the finale. None of them are much described. 

Otherwise, Wolfsbane was a lot better than I expected it would be. For the first hundred pages or so I was thinking to myself that it was a fine novel, with little of the rampant exposition or page-filling of Johnstone’s other novels. Unfortunately though, the book kept going. In fact, it kept going to almost 300 pages, and by novel’s end all that exposition and page-filling was out in full force. The novel actually got to be humorous with the lame page-filling, with interminable stalling in the third half as the hero, Pat Strange, incessantly traded barbed dialog with the villain, 90 year-old witch Madame Bauterre. That said, Wolfsbane does not feature any of Johnstone’s right wing sermonizing, but to tell the truth I wouldn’t have minded much if it did. In fact that was just the extra icing on the cake in The Nursery, which is seeming more like the William W. Johnstone horror novel that has it all. 

The opening seems to be inspired by the old Universal horror classics, with a werewolf loose in the bayou hamlet of Ducross Parish, in 1934. The werewolf is taken down by the townsfolk and the human corpse immolated and sealed up so that the creature will never rise again. Then the guy’s wife and children are kicked out of town. We move then to 1976, and that wife, the aforementioned Madame Bauterre, has returned to Ducross Parish. She will be the prime villain of Wolfsbane, a 90-something crone of pure evil…one who indulges in a few super explicit sex scenes that are actually stomach-churning. Johnstone clearly seems to be chortling to himself as he details, in graphic detail, M. Bauterre’s rape of a few captured men in the novel…it’s sleazy stuff for sure, but just extremely gross, with lots of detail about the old witch’s various, uh, “dry” bodyparts. 

But it wouldn’t be a horror PBO without a hotstuff heroine, and she comes in the form of Janette Bauterre Simmons, granddaughter of M. Bauterre and widow of a ‘Nam special forces commander. Janette seems to be the main protagonist as the novel starts, and I thought Johnstone for once was going to get away from his traditional “Vietnam vet badass” hero. But I was wrong, as Pat Strange – a Vietnam vet badass – is the true hero of the tale. Janette is atypical of the usual Johnstone heroine, though, or at least unlike the ones in the other Johnstone novels I’ve read: she’s determined, brave, and follows her own path. She sets the events in motion, deciding to visit her grandmother in Louisiana despite M. Bauterre’s order not to – and Janette soon figures there is some crazy stuff going on. 

Given the bayou setting, be prepared for a lot of hamfisted “accented dialog” stuff; ie “you rat” instead of “you’re right” and “lak” instead of “like.” Luckily neither Pat nor Janette speak this way, so we only have to endure this when it comes to a few minor characters. The opening has you prepared for the worst, though, with a lot of Ducross Parish locals gawking at the returned Madame Bauterre and going over the events of 1934. The only local character who has more of a part in the novel is Sheriff Edan Vallot, and Johnstone pulls an interesting trick here in that Vallot, the cop, is actually more believing of the supernatural than Pat Strange is. 

As for Pat, he’s of a piece with other Johnstone protagonists: yet another professional soldier in his 40s who is chosen to become God’s Warrior. It’s goofy but fun as Pat, when introduced, is gone to fat and living in a shack in South Carolina, having recently given up his warring ways. But for reasons he can’t comprehend, Pat abruptly stops drinking and begins working out and running ten miles a day(!), to the point that he’s a fit fighting machine when Janette shows up at his door one day. Of course, “God Himself” has chosen Pat to be “His Warrior,” to fight Satan in this latest installment of the “game” the two beings engage in. 

Oh and that’s another thing. Wolfsbane answers a question I’ve wondered about for a while: whether William W. Johnstone had a sense of humor. He clearly did, because there is a lot of humor in the novel; tortured, unfunny humor, but an attempt at humor nonetheles. This is mostly relayed via none other than Satan himself, who often appears (via his voice only) in the final third of the novel…and starts talking about his love of baseball! The devil’s voice comes from a “bubbling” section of the bayou and makes sarcastic comments throughout the novel’s climax, disparaging “Him” and taunting Pat. It’s all more goofy than actually funny, yet at the same time it could be evidence that Johnstone realizes his repetitive horror plots are shit and he himself doesn’t take them seriously. I mean folks the devil at one point actually says to Pat, “Who do you think I am, Barbara Streisand?” 

But the unintentional humor is more prevalent. As mentioned the book becomes almost tiresome in the second half with the egregious stalling. Actually this starts off even in the first half; Janette, in Paris, is attacked by a werewolf in her grandmother’s study, actually sees the beast revert to human form after being shot by a guard, and yet spends the next several chapters wondering if there is “more going on” with her grandmother. So Janette goes to Ducross Parish, where M. Bauterre bluntly tells Janette she should leave, but Janette stays behind, suspecting something is going on (remember, she was attacked by a friggin’ werewolf), and she even goes to the lengths of getting a nightvision camera so she can take photos of the hairy beasts that congregate in the courtyard at night. 

And all along her grandmother keeps appearing to her, telling her to leave, etc. It’s tiresome but only a taste of the tiresome events that will ensue. Pat comes into it because Janette just happens to come across an old letter from her deceased husband, the Special Forces commander, which mentions Pat Strange – and yes, Janette’s husband was indeed Pat’s commanding officer! All this is just the work of God, of course! So Janette goes down to find Pat Strange in his South Carolina shack…and the two immediately start screaming at each other…which of course leads to one of Johnstone’s OTT sex scenes. Again, not nearly as OTT as when the hero first had sex with his girlfriend in The Nursery (a scene which featured such unforgettable dialog as, “I want to suck you, Mike. I want to suck your cock.”), but still pretty OTT, with dialog like, “It’s called doggy style,” and “Cum with me!” And yes, it’s spelled that way, same as in The Nursery

Actually the two go at it all night long and into the next day, there in Pat’s shack, which doesn’t even have indoor plumbing. Johnstone leaves the ensuing boinkery mostly off-page, and only a stray mention of it here and there in the latter half of the novel, when Pat returns to Ducross Parish with Janette and stays with her in her room in M. Bauterre’s mansion. For Janette has brought Pat back with her as her guardian, and now it’s Pat’s turn to wonder if all those creeping shadows down in the courtyard are really werewolves and whatnot. Here the stalling hits us full force, as Madame Bauterre incessantly taunts Pat, only for Pat to taunt her back, the old woman getting angry at Pat’s uncouth language. It goes on and on, with “I could destroy you now, but I won’t” crap, only nothing happens, mostly because M. Bauterre is aware that Pat is “God’s Warrior,” thus he cannot be touched due to the rules of the “Game.” 

Pat’s investigation entails lots of driving around Ducross Parish and meeting the locals, including an old witch-woman who lives in the swamp. Johnstone also brings in a “family” subplot in that warring dynasties are involved with the werewolves, but this too just comes off like more page-filling. The sad thing is it takes forever for anything to happen. A few corpses pile up, clearly werewolf victims, but we have the usual horror trope where no one wants to believe it was a werewolf who did the killing. Again though Johnstone subverts the usual by having the sheriff be the one who suspects werewolves, and not Pat, who keeps searching for rational reasons. 

This too is another Johnstone schtick, the warrior chosen by God who not only isn’t religious but who also doesn’t believe in the supernatural. But also part of the schtick is God’s Warrior gradually coming to accept his lot – which of course means a finale in which he takes up a gun and shoots down a bunch of people. Oh I forgot, another Johnstone schtick is where the town is slowly corrupted by Satan, with the small group of heroes excised from the community; this happens so quickly and with such little setup and followthrough in Wolfsbane that it was actually humorous. But anyway, as God’s Warrior, Pat is able to gun down werewolves and such with nothing more than a shotgun and a “.41 mag.” Whereas the average person would need silver bullets or whatever, Pat’s divine blessing allows him to kill the creatures with regular bullets. 

But man, any hopes of Pat going up against a host of creatures are quickly dashed. Johnstone blows through the action like he’s running out of space…and I guess he is, given that he’s spent the past 250-some pages stalling. Again, it’s nowhere near the craziness of The Nursery, where that “God’s Warrior” gunned down possessed teens with nary a concern. Instead here Pat heads onto Madame Bauterre’s grounds – after enjoying a quick snack on her lawn! – and is quickly shooting at zombies and werewolves and other assorted monsters, none of which are described. Johnstone also has that goofy quirk of referring to various characters Pat’s gunning down by their names, with no reminders, and the reader has no idea who the hell they are. So that too adds to the unintentional comedy. 

The biggest miss here is the abovementioned part where Pat is chased by sundry monsters on the estate, but the description of them is vague at best. There was all kinds of opportunity here for true horror as Pat is chased by creepy crawlies across the estate. Also the final confrontation with M. Bauterre is a bit weak, with the old evil woman standing there patiently as Pat sets her up for a divine shotgun blast. But even worse is that Johnstone rushes through the monster-killing action, and instead goes for a “shock” finale where the devil plunges Pat into a deep sleep…and he wakes up on Halloween of 1981. Johnstone seems to be setting things up for a sequel, with Pat vowing to stay in Ducross Parish to ensure the devil never sets foot in it again, but I’m not sure if Johnstone ever wrote a sequel to Wolfsbane. It’s looking like he did not. 

Overall though Wolfsbane wasn’t too bad. It had a lot of stalling and padding, but there was just enough of Johnstone’s typical goofiness to make it fun. I mean I know I’m supposed to say he’s a horrible writer and all, but I’d rather read something like this than “serious” horror fiction.

Monday, October 10, 2016

Toy Cemetery


Toy Cemetery, by William W. Johnstone
December, 1987  Zebra Books

I couldn’t help myself – I just had to read another horror novel by William W. Johnstone. I had several of them to choose from, but I went with Toy Cemetery because it seemed to offer up a variation on Johnstone’s normal horror theme – Satan comes to Smalltown, USA – thanks to the presence of evil, Puppet Master-esque toys. Ultimately though Toy Cemetery was just like the other Johnstone horror novels I’ve read…only, once again, lacking the sleazy, lurid mastery of The Nursery.

And like those other books it is way too goddam long…412 whopping pages. But it does have some big ol’ print. All the usual Johnstone tricks are in play: rampant exposition, pedestrian prose, Christian sermonizing, go-nowhere digressions and padding, cardboard cutout characters, an “all women are evil” theme, and occasional bursts of violent action. Two things missing from the usual Johnstone oeuvre are the Right Wing pontificating and the sleazy hardcore sex. While I didn’t miss the former I defintely missed the latter; even though Toy Cemetery initially has you thinking it might approach The Nursery levels of sleaze, the sole sex scene is mostly vague and the book instead comes off more like a vain attempt at capturing the “kids meet horror” vibe of vintage Stephen King. 

Yes, kids play a central part in Toy Cemetery, Johnstone apparently having read Stephen King’s It and figuring he could rip it off somehow. Unfortunately this denies us the twisted shit typical of most other Johnstone horror novels, as in the long sections from the perspectives of the child characters Johnstone goes for a “naïve” sort of approach. However our main character is per the usual Johnstone template: 38-year-old Jay Chute, a ‘Nam veteran who runs an accounting firm in NYC. The novel opens as Jay and his 9-year-old daughter Kelly arrive in Victory, Missouri, the small town in which Jay grew up. But per the Johnstone horror template he hasn’t been here in over twenty years or so, and boy has the town changed (again per the template); what Jay doesn’t realize is that, of course, friggin’ Satan himself has taken over. He first notices something is up when an apparently-living toy runs in front of his car.

Johnstone is not the best when it comes to description, and sadly the toys themselves are vague and forgettable. Mostly because people throughout the first half of the novel keep seeing them, then blinking in surprise, and then wondering if they imagined it. Indeed, Toy Cemetery sets a precedent for muleheaded characters in a horror novel; literally, the first 150 pages or so are composed of characters seeing outright supernatural shit – ghosts, living toys and dolls, even mutant monsters – and still doubting what they saw. Hell, they’re still up to it within the final fifty pages, after they’ve had conversations with ghosts, watched a toy funeral(!), and even killed a few of those mutants. It’s all laughable, which again is standard for Johnstone’s work.

The novel moves at a glacial pace. Actually that’s an insult to glaciers. Let it just be said that Toy Cemetery is not jam-packed with action. Jay Chute is more mulheaded than even the Johnstone norm, and his daughter Kelly comes off as the stronger character. There’s a subplot (which eventually disappears) that Kelly and the other kids are hipper to what’s going on in Victory than the stupid adults, and in fact Kelly gets more shit done, including even braining a Satan-possessed teen boy midway through. (Her trauma over killing another human is quickly brought up and even more quickly set aside.) Kelly soon runs afoul of a gang of kids her own age, led by a slightly-older girl named Jenny; the two will eventually become friends, of sorts.

Johnstone does himself no favors with such similar character names. I spent the entire novel confusing Jenny with Kelly. It doesn’t help that all the characters are such cardboard cutouts. Later we’ll meet resident hotstuff Deva, who is Jenny’s mom as well as being Jay’s old girlfriend, and later there’s Piper, Jay’s ex-wife and occasional bedmate, who by the way happens to be a famous fashion model. There’s also a bunch of kids in Jenny’s group, and all of them run together, but eventually one of them named Ange will bubble to the top. Johnstone works in this “Satanic child porn” thread that he ultimately does nothing with, but many of the kids in the town have been victims of it…we know that Jenny has united her band against Satan, wearing crosses, and Johnstone initially has us thinking that they’ll be the heroes of the tale, but he ignores all of it and the porn ring element is quickly reintroduced and jettisoned in the final half.

The sleaze element as mentioned is nowhere on the level of The Nursery; when Jay first arrives in Victory, to pick up the deed to the house his recently-dead Aunt Cary left him, he runs into sexy twentysomething Amy Fletcher. She comes over to his house later that day and proceeds to seduce him, but surprisingly Johnstone leaves the sex scene – the only sex scene in the book – vague. And in fact Jay can’t even remember the details, and Amy is shocked that she was so brazen…as if something came over her, don’t you know. But this is all brushed off; the first of many such incidents in which our dense-brained protagonists explain away the strange happenings.

Gradually Jay will learn of the utter depravity of the place. Even though everyone acts friendly as can be during the day, at night they become ghoulish freaks; Jay is even shocked to learn that some of his old school friends have grandchildren – even though their own children are barely in their teens. Deva becomes Jay’s main companion here; she too distrusts the town residents, telling Jay how all the weirdness started when the big toy factory opened up. Oh, and Jay’s Aunt Cary was apparently the source of all evil, and had a bunch of toys and dolls in her various houses, and soon after moving into the house Aunt Cary left him Jay is attacked by one of the toys, which slices at both him and a friendly cop named Jim Klein – and sure as hell both of ‘em just basically shrug it off and figure they imagined it or something!!

With the presence of Deva, and later Piper, who comes to Victory to be with her ex-husband and her daughter, I thought for once Johnstone was gonna give us some strong female characters. Not to mention Jenny and Kelly, who take more action than Jay does until the very end. But midway through the novel Johnstone remembers “hey, waitaminute – them womenfolk are all evil!”, and suddenly previously-strong female characters are hinted at being secretly evil. It’s so mind-numbingly stupid – not to mention brazen – that I almost gave up on the book. I mean it’s one thing to start off this way with all sorts of secret evil, but to have various characters clearly be good and then suddenly – I mean within the span of a page – to be “shockingly revealed” as evil all along is something else. To be clear, I was more annoyed by the rampant stupidity than anything “sexist” or whatnot. I mean, bad writing is fine, but stupid writing is where I draw the line.

Throughout it all the toys come and go…there turns out to be two factions, one good and one bad. As mentioned though Johnstone rarely describes them. While I hoped for a tale of GI Joe-type action figures ripping people to shreds, instead Johnstone has old-fashioned dolls and toy soldiers, and usually just describes them as “a tiny man” or “a little doll.” None of them even have any cool gimmicks like in the second Puppet Master movie; the closest we get is a “Viking” toy who goes at people with his tiny axe. But these aren’t the sole creatures in the novel. We also have these mutant-type things that have hulking bodies and tiny heads; the one memorable horror-esque scene has Jay and Jim (again with the similar names, you see) escaping from them in a car, blasting away with their shotguns.

The outright sleaze is gone but there are some lurid moments, most notably when Satan’s minions go for the “dark love” treatment and mind-control Jenny and Kelly into trying to have sex with their parents(!). This is weird stuff for sure, with an also-aroused Jay tossing his prepubescent daughter out of bed and locking her in a room, all of it similar – but nowhere as over-the-top – as the part in The Nursery where the Satan-possessed teen gal begged the hero to whip and sodomize her. Later Jay and Deva, visiting Aunt Cary’s haunted house in the woods (yes, Johnstone even throws in a friggin’ haunted house), are nearly overcome by the same supernatural lust, straining against the Satanic impulse to screw (“Fight it, Deva! Pray!”).

And boy are there some dumb moments, like a part where our characters hear ghosts having sex. The highlight of them all is an unforgettable, so-dumb-it’s-genius bit where our heroes witness a regular toy funeral, some of those good toys carrying the corpse of a “dead” comrade and giving it full burial honors, complete with Taps being played and rifles being fired in tribute. What makes it all the more laughable is that Johnstone strives to convey emotion, trying to invest all sorts of import; the scene plods on and on for several pages. More humor is added in how he keeps cutting over to our human characters, who watch on in growing sadness, all of them crying. Except for “some of the women,” though, Johnstone at this point remembering that all women are horrible creatures and thus not prone to loving emotions.

Another thing missing this time out is the action climax. Jay and comrades are limited to hunting rifles, pistols, and shotguns. As per the Johnstone template, the few Christians have banded together in Aunt Cary’s house, whose ghost sporadically appears, by the way, accusing and taunting Jay – who still wonders if he’s imagining it, of course – even after she appears to all of them, Jay says, “It was a dream.” But the band of Christians, including Jay, Jim, Father Pat (a blind priest dedicated to fighting Satan), and General Douglas (an old war vet who served in the OSS), vow to stop the Satanic forces taking over Victory. All the women at this point are vaguely hinted at being evil – even the kids!! – and Johnstone shows his usual vile brand of “Christianity” when Jay later says “to hell with them,” speaking of both ex-wife Piper and his daughter Kelly. As usual with Johnstone, once it is revealed that someone is with Satan, whether willingly or not, there’s no hope at all for them – they must be killed.

There are occasional patches of gore, but too little, too late, in particular an attack by those mutant-type monsters, one of which rips the jaw off a night guard. Jay himself is captured, knocked out – by one of those women, naturally, though we don’t find out which until later – and along with Amy he’s tossed in the town hospital/prison. Oh and speaking of whom Amy is suddenly with the group, now; humorously, Johnstone doesn’t even reintroduce her or anything. She’s just suddenly in a scene with our heroes and stays there for the duration. But even the big action finale typical of Johnstone is gone. After torching Aunt Cary’s house in the woods (another ludicrous scene Johnstone tries to weigh with emotion), our heroes pack some rifles and pistols and start firing away.

By this point, very late in the game, Johnstone has figured out what is going on. Turns out the humans in town aren’t really human, or something; they’re like porcelain dolls, or something, and those living toys are possessed with the souls of townfolk. Or something. And the “good” toys are made up of souls who tried to fight against the Satanists, or something. It’s all super convoluted and confusing. But it does cap off with the memorable bit of an incensed Jay smashing Victory residents and watching as they disintigrate into showers of porcelain dust. Johnstone kills off the majority of his characters here – Amy by the way we are informed was raped repeatedly while in captivity, even at one point by her own father – and also he finally makes up his mind which of the other female characters are really evil: All of them!!

Even the little girls are suddenly revealed as sadistic murderers, with Kelly offing one important character and Ange another. Oh and by the way Johnstone finally recalls that “child porn ring” subplot, with a bizarre scene where Jay discovers all the child porn tapes and watches them…even taking them back to his house so the other adults can watch them!! I mean did they order a pizza, too??

It’s all so off-putting and unsettling, mostly because it’s so pedestrian in the writing department. As ever Johnstone writes everything with a modicum of description or depth, a sort of “see Spot run” vibe that only makes the weird shit all the weirder. But anyway Jenny and Ange both feature in these porn videos, even though absolutely zilch is made of it, and despite the fact that this would make clear that both girls are victims of the cult, it ultimately matters little in Johnstone’s fucked-up rationale: both kids are consumed by Satan and thus must die.

Oh and also a recurring Johnstone deal is “the Old One;” not Satan himself, but a slightly-less-powerful demon who resides in the town and soaks up the evil powers and whatnot. This creature doesn’t get much screen time but is described as looking like an old man; the finale, which sees Jay leading a cop squad through Victory and killing off townspeople willy-nilly, has Jay looking to finalize the score with the monster.

By this point Jay’s picked up another babe, a hot blonde news reporter who is the biggest victim of all in Johnstone’s “all women are evil” agenda. Seriously, this lady goes through hell with Jay, even saving his life – and then in the last page Johnstone pulls another of his half-assed “twists.” By this point the reader is so fatigued that he or she could honestly care less what happens to Jay, however he gets another twist ending of his own…injured and to be nursed back to health by daughter Kelly, revealed to be fully evil now…indeed the book ends with Kelly figuring she’ll soon start having sex with dear ol’ dad!!

Anyway, I asked for it, I guess. And the helluva it is, I’ll probably read another of Johnstone’s horror novels…by the time I start thinking of reading another one I’ve forgotten what a painful experience it can truly be.

Thursday, July 28, 2016

Stand Your Ground


Stand Your Ground, by William W. Johnstone with J.A. Johnstone
August, 2014  Pinnacle Books

I happened to be in a Wal-Mart one Saturday afternoon in September, 2014 and for the heck of it I checked out the book section, just to see what garbage passed for bestselling fiction in today’s miserable, vapid world. Unsurprisingly, the majority of it was crap – paranormal romances, tweener-focused apocalyptic fantasy, and thick paperbacks with photoshopped covers about female FBI agents. But then I saw another paperback, this one just as fat as the others and with the same sort of generic cover apparently mandatory today, but this one had “William W. Johnstone” in embossed font.

“But he’s been dead for ten years!” I think I said out loud. However it turns out that William Johnstone is like the Tupac Shakur of fiction, a very prolific author despite being long dead. The book, Stand Your Ground, was co-credited “J.A. Johnstone,” which according to the back cover was none other than Johnstone’s nephew, continuing the tradition of his uncle – and curiously, the back cover bio never outright states that William Johnstone is no longer living. But the William/J.A. writing combo turns out to be quite prolific; I couldn’t believe how many books have been published by the two over the years.

So, as you all have likely figured out, William W. Johnstone has followed in the path laid out by Don Pendleton, with a host of ghostwriters turning out novels under his name. Pinnacle Books closely guards the secret of who has served as J.A. Johnstone, but the imprint has at least maintained the right wing sentiments so inherent in the work of the real William Johnstone. I found this interesting, as Pinnacle has been owned by Kensington since the late ‘80s, and Len Levinson told me once that Walter Zacharius, the man who ran Kensignton, was a rabid left-winger. Regardless, the William/J.A. novels appear to be very right wing, with Stand Your Ground itself given over to arbitrary digressions about the foolishness of liberalism. Mind you, I’m not complaining – I was chuckling throughout, mostly due to the arbitrariness of it all.

It looks like Pinnacle has tried to get on the Lee Child bandwagon with its own Jack Reacher; the William/J.A. union has, over the past decade, published a trilogy of thick paperbacks about John Howard Stark, a ‘Nam vet who, judging from the synopses of the three books, has spent a lot of time killing Mexicans who have attempted to invade America – taking advantage of those weak borders, naturally. For all intents and purposes, Stand Your Ground is another Stark novel, yet curiously his name is not mentioned on the back cover. Instead, we are informed that the hero is Lucas Kincaid (a badass name if ever there was one), a former soldier on the run from the government who is hiding in the small town of Fuego, Texas – location of a prison which a horde of Muslim terrorists have just been transported to.

My friends, don’t you believe it. Lucas Kincaid is a minor character at best for the majority of the book (which runs a too-long length of 408 pages). And forget about those ass-kicking qualities the back cover attempts to convey for Kincaid. The dude spends the first 300 or so pages sitting in front of a computer in the prison library! Rather, John Howard Stark is the true protagonist of Stand Your Ground, and either Pinnacle didn’t promote this as another Stark book because they were trying to launch Kincaid as the new William/J.A. hero, or perhaps the book was written by a different ghostwriter than whoever turned out those earlier Stark novels.

But then, even Stark isn’t the main protagonist. One of the main problems with Stand Your Ground is that there are just too damn many characters for the reader to contend with. I mean it’s like a right-wing War And Peace at times, as “J.A.” presents us with a host of Fuego locals, visiting left-wing journalists, and vengeance-minded Islamic radicals, all of them vying for the reader’s attention. William Johnstone also had big casts in the books of his I’ve read, but at least he’d gradually whittle the narrative span down to focusing on just one main character. Not so for J.A., which results in an unwieldy narrative mess at times.

The back cover also has it that the plot of Stand Your Ground is about a bunch of terrorists who invade Fuego to free their imprisoned comrades, taking the school’s high school football team hostage and threatening to kill them one by one until their demands are met. Well, this sort of happens…in the last 60 or so pages of the book. Before that the novel just keeps building and building and building…toward something. Annoyingly, every chapter – even every section within a chapter – ends on a cliffhanger, no matter how forced, which only makes the reader more eager for something to happen.

Because the thing of it is, the shit-kicker, right-wing residents of Fuego know something’s up, and they know the rotten liberal government in Washington isn’t going to do anything about it, but damned if it still doesn’t take them way too long to realize their asses are in the fire. The book is almost an exercise in constantly putting off the fireworks. Whereas normally I’d bitch and moan about this, for Stand Your Ground I really didn’t mind – mostly because “J.A.” takes the opportunity to bash liberals again and again and again. This book is in every way the exact opposite of another I recently read, The Hydra Conspiracy.

Stand Your Ground occurs in the near future, perhaps in 2024, ten years after the publication date. I did estimate that 2008 must’ve been the “over ten years ago” date which is often mentioned by the characters, complaining about how that’s when the country first started going to hell – the year Obama was elected into office, of course. But this novel gives a picture of progressive liberalism run amok, a world which we are heading toward in reality. While it never gets as over-the-top as the similar potential future in NYPD 2025, it shares the same sentiments: liberalism is stupid, its adherents are brainwashed hypocrites, it weakens society, and it is ultimately dangerous.

What’s interesting though is that, despite all the “grown up” politics stuff, the book is almost written on a Young Adult level. There is a curious lack of cursing throughout (other that is than a very late utterance of the word “fuck”), absolutely no sex, hardly any exploitation of the female characters, and rather muted violence – people die, to be sure, but the author rarely details the carnage. In other words the book is PG-13 at best, which leads to the unintentionally humorous outcome of a right-wing book that has been Politically Corrected. The author also tends to overdescribe things, which again lends it a juvenile vibe; the momentum is constantly halted so we can be informed how characters react to dialog or action or whatever, as if the author doesn’t want the reader to encounter a single bit of mystery or confusion.  (The cynic in me figures this is just the author catering to the perceived reading level of his audience.)

Which isn’t to say the writing is bad – indeed, I get the feeling that this particular “J.A.” might’ve served some time at Gold Eagle, or perhaps was just a fan of Don Pendleton. There is that same assured craft to the prose, and some of the single-sentence paragraphs sprinkled throughout definitely have the feel of Pendletonisms. And when things happen it all gets very good – it just takes a long time for things to happen. This leads me to believe that the author was handed an unwieldy word count, and thus had to keep staving off the climactic action until the fireworks promised on the back cover could actually occur.

At any rate, John Howard Stark is for the most part the central protagonist, and the novel opens with him visiting an old ‘Nam pal in Fuego. Stark is recovering from cancer – not sure if this was an element in the previous Stark novels – and he’s still a media notable, given all his battles against Mexican terrorists and drugdealers. His pal is the warden at Hell’s Gate Prison, near Fuego, and here a bunch of radical Islamic terrorists have been transported, the President finally having lived up to his promise to close down Guatanamo Bay (the novel is very prescient at times). Meanwhile the author presents us with our swarm of local characters, from the high school quarterback to the deputy with Down’s syndrome.

And meanwhile there’s Lucas Kincaid, the supposed badass, sitting in front of the computer in the prison library. He’ll be there for a good 300 pages or so. The mystery of his background is dangled throughout the novel, but in most regards he’s very similar to Stark, though younger – an Army Ranger, he expressly ignored orders and saved some of his comrades during some action in the Middle East. Now he’s in hiding, under the assumed name of “Lucas Kincaid” (meaning he chose his own badass name, which is pretty funny), and he decided to hole up in the nowheresville of Fuego, TX, even chosing to work at the prison’s library, because who would look for a wanted felon in a prison?

We also get many scenes from the point of view of the terrorists – which again lends the novel a Gold Eagle vibe – in particular Dr. Hamil, a well-known speaker of “Muslim issues” on the various cable news networks, where he insists that Islam is “the religion of peace.” However Hamil is in fact the leader of a terrorist cell – the novel predates the disgusting rise of ISIS, thus Al-Qaeda is often mentioned as the biggest Islamic terrorist faction – and he plots to destroy Fuego and free his jailed brethren as a message to the Americans. Yet he is also cagey enough to capitalize on the gullibility of the foolish liberal government – the author is careful to point out that Hamil and many of his followers are actually American-born citizens, raised in the country they secretly despised, wrapping themselves in the protective blanket of “progressive liberalism” to escape detection.

Representing the liberal front is uber-annoying Alexis Deveraux, a famous news journalist with a brick shithouse bod. Not sure if she too appeared in previous Stark novels, but she’s familiar with him and they dislike each other royally. Alexis has come to Fuego to document the recent transition of Muslim terrorists, whom she insists on referring to as “prisoners,” eager to point out how they’re being mistreated due to their religion and etc. Confusingly, though, she’s also brought along a Tom Brokaw-esque anchor to cover the story, despite the fact that Alexis herself is the one who keeps appearing in front of the camera, with the “anchor” relegated to announcing stuff like “We’re now entering the prison.” The author also seems unsure on how actual news broadcasting works – and humorously enough, so do the journalists themselves, with Alexis at one point not even knowing if they’re going out live across the country(??).

Around the halfway point things pick up. Hamil’s soldiers launch their attack on Fuego, and we read as various batches of slack-jawed yokels fight them off with hunting rifles and whatnot. The local cops for the most part carry the action here (Kincaid’s still pecking away at that library computer), with Stark meanwhile getting a tour of Hell’s Gate – just as Alexis and team have shown up to do their impromptu story. Handling the camera by the way is a sexy brunette named Riley who is not only a former Marine but also a Republican, something she keeps from her colleagues. (Humorously, calling someone a “Republican” is about the ultimate insult in this thoroughly liberalized near-future.) Riley, when she sees Kincaid in the library, recognizes him. By novel’s end they’re a couple, though the growing romance between them during the constant firefights which comprise the novel’s final quarter isn’t much explored and is hard to buy.

The finale sees the invading terrorist army heading for Hell’s Gate, where Stark and Kincaid muster the forces to stop them. It’s all very Assault On Precinct 13, and here some minor characters are killed off by Hamil as a sign of what will happen to those who oppose him – again, while Hamil and crew are presented as monsters, they are sadly nowhere near the level of our present reality; these guys are almost like Dr. Seuss when compared to ISIS. While Stark and Riley set up explosives, Kincaid marshals forces against the invading army, however the novel never does give me the scene I wanted, of a machine gun-toting Lucas Kincaid mowing down hordes of terrorists like a modern-day men’s adventure protagonist.

Oh and humorusly enough, when things finally start picking up in the last half and you figure Kincaid’s about to finally take over the show, the author doles out yet another badass who first takes on the terrorists, this one an old acquantance of Stark’s who commands an assault team which answers only to Texas senator Maria Delgado, serving as her personal (and private) army. Delgado is a strong female character, but because she’s a Republican she’s hated (sort of like how Maggie Thatcher doesn’t get any respect from the liberal feminists of today), and she instantly realizes something rotten’s going on in Fuego – I forgot to mention, but the President himself is behind the plot(!!). The author never describes him, but it’s intimated that he too is Muslim, or of Arabic descent – having gotten to the highest office by following the path paved by Barry Obama a decade before. 

But Delgado’s secret army is led by crusty Colonel Atkinson (whom Stark knew as a private in ‘Nam), and by novel’s end he has Stark on the force and Kincaid and Riley will also soon be asked to join. They are worried that a war against the government itself is on the way, and Stand Your Ground ends with Stark and Atkinson telling themselves that Fuego was “just the beginning.” No sequel has yet been published, but if one comes out it seems it will be about our heroes taking on the President himself.

Anyway, I did enjoy Stand Your Ground, but the barrage of characters and the constant forestalling of action got to be a drag. To the author’s credit, never once does he POV-hop, despite the plethora of characters; whenever he changes perspective, he either starts a new chapter or gives us a few lines of white space. I nearly wept in gratitude. And as I wrote above, the digressive attacks on liberalism were a “hoot,” as they say down here in Texas. In fact if anything I don’t think the author went far enough in this regard – the United States has only become more crazy in the two years since this novel was published.

The question remains whether William W. Johnstone himself would’ve enjoyed the novel, but one thing I can say without question is that this is a helluva lot better written than anything he could’ve done. And yet despite that Stand Your Ground misses the lovably bizarre amateurish quality Johnstone brought to his own works – not to mention the rampant sleaze. Here’s hoping Pinnacle asks its “J.A. Johnstones” to start veering closer to the style of sick Johnstone masterpieces like The Nursery – man, if the next Lucas Kincaid book is like that, I’ll snatch it up in a second!

Thursday, May 14, 2015

The Devil's Kiss (Devil's series #1)


The Devil's Kiss, by William W. Johnstone
No month stated, 1980  Zebra Books

Apparently William W. Johnstone devoted himself to writing for ten years before he finally got published, but reading The Devil’s Kiss you’d think it was more like ten minutes, and that’s with frequent breaks. But what do I know, because this, Johnstone’s first published novel, initiated a stream of a few hundred books published over the next twenty-plus years, with Johnstone still getting published today, even though he’s been dead for over a decade.

This was also the start of an untitled, unnumbered series which apparently has the same plot over and over again: Satan comes to Smalltown, USA, and God’s chosen Warrior blows a bunch of his followers away after debating about it for a few hundred pages. This was of course the exact same plot of The Nursery, which wasn’t part of this “Devil’s series.” But then, it would appear that the majority of Johnstone’s horror novels feature this same plot. If the formula works, why change it? At least, I guess that was Johnstone’s feeling. Either that or he just didn’t give a damn.

Running to 448 pages, The Devil’s Kiss is mostly comprised of exposition-laden dialog exchanges, brief detailings of the sordid shenanigans of a group of Satanists, and out-of-nowhere flashes of sex and/or sadism. Unlike The Nursery it takes a good long time to get going, and it isn’t nearly as over-the-top or trashy as that later masterpiece. But like The Nursery it’s heavier on telling than showing, with a gruff protagonist who acts almost like a reporter, going around his podunk town and basically interviewing every character he meets, with the reader treated to huge dollops of Christian Right sermonizing.

One difference is that The Devil’s Kiss takes place in 1958, but other than occasional mentions of the Korean War or “that new rock and roll music,” the novel could just as easily take place in 1980. What I mean to say is, there’s not really any attempt at capturing the styles of the period; our hero, Reverend Sam Balon, even sports “longish” hair, has tattoos, and acts in every way like the protagonist of a ‘70s or ‘80s novel. But he is a preacher, and here is the biggest drawback so far as The Devil’s Kiss is concerned, when compared to The Nursery; we must read as our reverend of a hero constantly berates himself for his “unChristianly thoughts” and the like. At times it’s almost like a burlier Ned Flanders with a gun.

But Sam, whose last name sounds a whole lot like “Bolan,” was part of the experimental UNPIK detachment in Korea, which we’re informed eventually became the Special Forces. In a vaguely-described backstory we learn that he came here to smalltown Whitfield, Nebraska at the behest of his super-hot wife, Michelle, who eagerly demanded that Sam take this particular parsonage from the list that was offered to him. But over the past few months Sam has noticed a darkness seeping into the little hamlet of Whitfield; in particular church attendance has been dropping across the full Judeo-Christian spectrum (there’s even a synagogue in this supposedly-small town!).

Yes friends, the rapid decline of church attendance is a huge concern of The Devil’s Kiss. In fact it gets even more narrative space and character concern than the murder of the two teens which opens the novel. There’s a fenced-off, notorious woodlands area of the town called Tyson’s Lake, and these kids cross over it one spring night to screw and whatnot, only to find themselves attacked by these sub-werewolves which are referred to as Beasts. They make a gory mess of the boy and intend to use the girl as a “breeder,” but she escapes, finds Sheriff Walter Addison, and tells him what happened…only for the sheriff and his deputies to take turns raping her before throwing her back over the fence to the Beasts!

A few months later and the disappearance of the kids has been brushed under the carpet. Sam begins the first of his reporter-like methods by asking the local police chief about it. Sam will spend the first 300 or so pages of the book driving around Whitfield and engaging various characters in incredibly long, drawn-out conversations. I thought Johnstone told more than he showed in The Nursery, but that was nothing compared to this! Honestly, the reader must be prepared to endure back-to-back sequences where Sam will sit down with some other preacher or priest or gun store owner and engage him in about twenty pages of deep conversation. Repetition is rife.

Another difference with this volume is that Johnstone doesn’t dwell as much on the local Satanists, who were much more to the fore in The Nursery. We only get a few brief cutover scenes to them; they’re lead by Black Wilder, ostensibly the chief professor behind “The Digging,” in which an ancient sculpture is being dug up near Tyson’s Lake. But Wilder is in reality the devil’s agent and is thousands of years old. He has brought with him his minions, and has turned basically the entire town over to the devil, save for a handful – we later learn that there are only 14 Christians left in the population of 2,500. The horror!!

One of Wilder’s top accomplices is none other than Michelle Balon, yet here Johnstone, who is so overly-detailed about trivial stuff, mysteriously drops the ball. I mean, he informs us halfway through the book that Michelle too is ancient, hundreds of years old…yet by this point Sam has learned of “the Mark of the Devil,” which states that if one is touched by the devil or one of the devil’s followers, that person is forever lost. Hence Sam keeps his wife from kissing him or touching him, etc. But, uh, if she’s a few hundred years old, and married Sam because she knew he’d one day be God’s Chosen Warrior (an actual Johnstone title), then hasn’t she already touched him?? Like many times?

Another thing I didn’t like about the Satanists in this one is that Johnstone stresses how dirty and smelly they are; we’re informed over and over again of the stench of Michelle’s room (she long ago moved out of the master bedroom), and when the Satanists get together for a Black Mass Johnstone writes of the “unHoly” smell of their unwashed bodies. I don’t seem to recall any of this in The Nursery; maybe Johnstone wisely realized that overhyping the stench of his otherwise super-hot Satanic chicks sort of ruined the escapist nature of it all. And besides, wasn’t it the pious Christians of the Dark Ages who thought bathing was a sin and thus gloried in their own funk?

But Sam’s sure that Michelle has gone over to the other side, which makes his growing feelings for hotstuff local blonde Jane Ann Burke all the easier to “endure.” For here’s all the “Sam berated himself for his thoughts” stuff I mentioned above; Jane Ann is good and horny for the preacher, and Sam increasingly feels the same for her, but keeps chastizing himself for this due to his being married and being a preacher and all. He’s the first person Jane Ann calls when some deputies try to smash in her door and rape her, though. Sam insists she move in with gun store owner Chester and his wife, and then returns to his impromptu interviews with the other Christians in Whitfield.

Two of the elder preachers in town, Reverend Lucas and Father Dubois, actually fought the devil years before, and they impart their wisdom to Sam and his reporter friend Wade (as well as Miles the Jew, whom Johnstone assures us is okay even though he isn’t Christian) in one of the longer conversation sequences. Here’s where Sam learns, about 200 pages in, that he’s likely been chosen to be God’s Warrior, and his mission will be to KILL EVERYONE. This in itself is hilarious, as Sam instinctively knows that he should not try to save any of the Satanists, that death is the only option for them. Kind of flies in the face of the entire concept of Christianity – wouldn’t a true Christian try to save their souls?

But nope, the only thing to do is load up on guns and ammo. (Actually, if history’s any indication, that is in fact a valid Christian response!) There’s a goofily maudlin scene where Sam and the others exchange crosses with Dubois and Lucas (they even give one to Miles the Jew!!); you can almost hear the saccharine choir on the soundtrack. Now it’s killin’ time! Oh wait, no it isn’t…we still have another 250 or so pages to go. No, it’s actually time for more discussion and impromptu interviews. Oh, and Sam trades in his car for a pickup truck. Humorously enough the used car salesman is also one of the last Christians in Whitfield.

All too infrequently Johnstone will cut over to Black Wilder and his fellow devil worshippers. We get a Black Mass sort of deal where they have a big ceremony in the fields at night, orgying and whatnot, culminating in a teenaged virgin (who refused to join them) being trussed up on a cross and gutted by Nydia, the raven-haired beauty who serves as Wilder’s chief aide. But again the unholy eroticism is ruined by the focus on the unwashed, smelly bodies of the Satanists. Also this time Johnstone doesn’t dwell on graphic sexual description, as in The Nursery. We’re just informed that lots of screwin’ occurs, including, gasp, homosexual stuff, which is the biggest sin so far as the still-Christian locals are concerned.

The hypocrisy of Johnstone’s vision is laughable; throughout the novel Sam condemns the devil-worshippers, or “Them,” as he soon calls them, because “[their] god says hate Christians.” And yet, Sam himself hates the devil worshippers so much that he relishes the opportunity to murder them: man, woman, and child. There is no attempt at mercy or salvation; even though he learns that the residents of Whitfield are under mind control, and perhaps not fully responsible for the evil beings they are becoming, Sam has no interest in saving them. Indeed, God basically tells him through his subconscious to forget about it. And even in death they won’t be saved; they’re going straight to hell.

Also of note is Johnstone’s view of women.  I don’t want to be the cliched modern reviewer who whines about “misogyny” and the like in old pulp fiction. Actually I think these now-outdated sentiments are part of the charm of these old books. But good grief Johnstone goes way beyond that and into a sort of Cro-Magnon realm; I lost track of the number of times Jane Ann or one of the other Christian women would sit quietly while Sam and the men were talking, only to finally get up and say, “I’ll go make us some sandwiches.”

Interesting then that the women are much more visible and important in the world of the devil worshippers. Nydia as mentioned is Black Wilder’s chief aide and takes central stage in the midnight ceremonies, sacrificing victims and lusting after new male (or female) conquests. Johnstone doesn’t outright state it, but it’s obvious that, per his skewed reasoning, this female empowerment is also part of what makes the Satanists so evil and so against God’s will. To prove this there comes a scene midway through where Sam finally attempts to do something about Michelle; finding her masturbating in her foul-smelling room, he pulls her into the shower and then calls over Father Dubois for an excorcism.

Bringing to mind the much superior (and much trashier) scene in The Nursery where the sodomy-lovin’ teenaged gal was called back to Jesus, here we have a similar sequence where a nude Michelle, tied down to Sam’s bed, curses God and spits at Sam and Dubois as they try to save her. But forget it – she’s too far gone, practically a vampire. Or something. Johnstone is vague, but Father Dubois, who has suddenly become Sam’s spiritual warfare advisor, states that the only option is a stake to the heart! After which they dump her corpse over the fence at Tyson’s Lake for the Beasts to eat.

This of course leads to more talking. Even when Sam, Chester, and Wade take up guns and make a sortie over the Tyson Lake fence, even there they engage in a long conversation. Here Johnstone just pulls out any idle thought from his head; we’re informed, for example, that there’s a nearby asylum which is filled with mutants, the radiation-twisted freaks of some nuclear test ten years ago. Sam and his buddies then shoot a few Beasts and talk about it. Then they go home and talk about it with the rest of their companions.

Then Sam finally decides to screw Jane Ann, right out in “the cheap showiness of nature,” to quote Rev. Lovejoy, and then what the hell, he officiates their own impromptu marriage. Around about this time Sam has suddenly started to realize he will die in the conflict, but his child will continue the war against the devil(?!). This seemingly spur-of-the-moment decision on Johnstone’s part comes increasingly to the fore in the narrative. But anyway he and Jane Ann have to be married as part of this last-moment prophecy, or something.

The final 200+ pages are given over to a days-long battle Sam and his followers wage against the devil worshippers of Fork County, which has been magically segregated from the rest of the world. There are many and frequent scenes of Sam gunning down Beasts and human worshippers with his Thompson submachine gun, Chester blasting away at his side with a Greaser. Johnstone doesn’t get very outrageous with the gore, though, and these “action” scenes get boring after a while, as there’s no variety to them. The Beasts and Satanists just rush pell-mell at Sam and his followers, who gun them down, and then mop up the survivors.

Johnstone loses track of all the stuff he’s spent a few hundred pages setting up…those asylum mutants, for example, show up and are anticlimactically blown away within a single paragraph! Long-time Whitfield residents are summarily killed by Sam and his cronies, and though Sam et all are shocked we readers have no idea who these characters are in the first place. Much better are the close-quarters moments where Sam will take a sharpened stake and go in some dark area to kill off one of the Undead, which are basically vampires. Johnstone has the glimmerings of some actual eerie stuff with murdered companions returning as zombie/vampires, but does nothing to capitalize on it.

As mentioned the “certainity” that Sam will die in the climax is further brought the fore, as well as a last-second development where hotstuff witch Nydia vows that she will sire a son through him. Johnstone, certain that he’ll get a contract for a sequel, introduces this concept that Sam will have a “good” son through Jane Ann and a “bad” son through Nydia, and they will fight each other thirty twenty-some years in the future. God unsurprisingly isn’t much help (he’s mysteriously absent whereas Satan is constantly beaming messages to his loyal followers), so Sam basically gives Jane Ann a goodbye kiss and goes off to meet his fate.

Johnstone doesn’t get as graphic in the infrequent sex scenes as he did in The Nursery, and for the Nydia/Sam encounter he doesn’t elaborate at all, yet ironically enough it features the best writing in the entire damn book. In fact Sam’s final moment has all the emotional power Johnstone has been trying to build over the entire endurance test of a novel, as Sam goes off to meet his God knowing somehow that he will have a son, a son that God will look over (which, judging at least from how the Christians are treated in this particular book, doesn’t really mean much).

In the end, Whitfield is in ruins, Sam and his companions having blasted most of it using handmade napalm (gasoline mixed with flour) and dynamite. Practically everyone is gunned down, the dozen Christians having killed a few thousand people. As for Black Wilder, he blithely gives in to his doom, having been ordered by Satan to give up, but Johnstone implies that the demon may return. Another potential return in the next volume would be a teenager named Jean, the only Satan worshipper who escapes Sam’s bloodbath; we’re informed that she eventually gets a job as a Government-sponsored psychiatrist (surely there’s yet another Johnstone-worldview message there).

Three years later Johnstone returned to the storyline with The Devil’s Heart, which brought events to the then-modern day, and apparently started off a series of four more books featuring Sam Jr. and his ceaseless battles against Satan. Once I have recovered sufficiently I will read it.

Finally, here’s a funny story Stephen Mertz told me, and with his permission I’d like to share it with the rest of you:

I met [William W. Johnstone] once. A biker buddy who enthusiastically collected his work once dragged me down to a book signing. Johnstone was on tour, promoting his Ashes series and he actually had two uniformed, armed off-duty cops with him, hired to stand in the background at the Hastings store as "security." (!?)

We chatted briefly and traded signed copies. I couldn't help myself. I nodded toward the cops. "What's this, Bill? You expecting the critics to show up?"

This brought a semblance of acknowledgement from a generally dour, guarded countenance.

Monday, January 6, 2014

The Nursery


The Nursery, by William W. Johnstone
No month stated, 1983  Zebra Books

As a men's adventure-reading kid, I was familiar with William W. Johnstone’s post-nuke pulp Ashes series, but there seemed to be like a hundred volumes and I could never find the first one, and once when I tried to start reading anyway with the earliest volume I could find, I was like, “Man, this writer sucks!", and mind you I was around 11 years old at the time.

But Johnstone was one prolific writer and turned out way too many novels before his death in 2004. His earliest ones (starting in 1980, with his first published novel The Devil’s Kiss), were mostly horror, published by the always-entertaining Zebra Books. After seeing Will Erickson’s post on some Johnstone paperbacks on Too Much Horror Fiction, I looked into the man’s work…only to discover that this guy put the “glorious” in “trash” (or vice versa). For here was an author who enjoyed going as far out as possible. The only unfortunate thing is that Johnstone’s horror novels are incredibly overpriced on the used books market.

In particular I saw some good things about The Nursery, how despite being a retread of practically ever other Johnstone horror novel (basically, Satan takes over some hamlet in the midwest and it’s up to some Right Wing former soldier to kill ‘em all in Jesus’s name) it was also brimming with all of the salacious stuff the man’s earliest novels were notorious for. Make no mistake, this is one profane novel, so lurid and exploitative as to be hilarious, filled with terms and phrases straight out of Penthouse Letters. There’s no way in hell a novel like this could be published in today’s Twilight world.

Anyway 43 year-old Mike Folsom is returning to the tiny town of Butler, Lousiana when we meet him; Mike has just retired from over 20 years in the army, where he kicked ass in 'Nam and later all over the world. He’s one of those types who could kill you with a newspaper or something. He hasn’t been home for a decade, coming here ten years before to handle his parents’s estate, as they’d both died rather suddenly. Mike is also wealthy, thanks to his dad’s various business efforts, and he’s pretty damn right-leaning in his views. However, as Johnstone reminds us again and again, Mike isn’t a redneck (or a Cajun) and also isn’t a hardcore Christian, rarely if ever going to church.

But something’s up in Butler, as Mike soon discovers. All of the main roads are closed off and people in town are just acting plain different. A few of them still seem normal, though, in particular Rana Drew, a super-hot 33 year-old blonde with a “sensational derriere” and “great breasts;” Rana has been in love with Mike since she was a little girl, and just happens to run into him shortly after he’s returned to Butler. She makes her interests immediately known, inviting Mike over for dinner. Meanwhile Rana’s daughter, 15 year-old Lisa (Rana’s ex-husband long out of the picture), is a wild child, as are all of the teens in Butler, and most of Rana and Mike’s initial conversations are given over to Rana explaining why she lets Lisa get away with how she acts and etc.

Johnstone is not the most competent of authors, and in fact you could even say he’s a lousy writer. He POV-hops, his characters are walking cliches, and at hardly any point does he show instead of tell. Indeed the majority of the novel is relayed through dialog, with Mike almost like some TV reporter as he goes around asking question after question. But then, when the dialog in this book contains lines like, “What is this preoccupation with anal sex?” the reader can hardly complain. But the Mike/Rana conversation goes on throughout the entire novel, with Mike barraging her with questions and Rana doling out huge blocks of expository background.

But anyway it develops that ol’ Satan himself has taken over Butler, in the personage of the reclusive and wealthy Becker, whose power and minions have firmly shut off the hamlet from the rest of the world. Through the front of a supposed church (run by the depraved satanic Reverend Ron Egan) Becker has taken over the children as well, with kids Lisa’s age and younger going there to engage in group sex and the like. The titular nursery, also known as “the womb room,” is where fetuses are kept in like storage containers in which they are fed 24/7 diatribes about Satan and etc; this element is really underdeveloped and in fact the nursery has hardly anything to do with the novel, maybe taking up 5% of the narrative.

Johnstone throws in so many characters and subplots that eventually he loses track of many of them. Central though is Mike and Rana, and Johnstone doesn’t hold back when it comes to their eventual sex scene – I’m talking full-on porn, here. But in addition we have Becker, who is apparently using Butler as the new resting place for The Old One, an ancient sort of demon which needs a few decades or so of sleep every once in a while, or something like that. To achieve this Becker has turned the town into Satansville, USA, and in addition to the brainwashed satanists we’ve got vampires and zombies running around.

There are also roving packs of teenagers, and here Johnstone really gets to unleash on the generation gap, serving up the greatest fears of the conservative middle class by making the teens literally soulless automatons of sadism and death. “Something to do, man,” is Johnstone’s hilarious recurring phrase to sum up the aimless yet merciless whims of these kids, who as the narrative ramps up go off on rape and killing sprees. In fact there’s so much rape in The Nursery that the reader soon becomes desensitized to it. But we get it in spades, complete with even fathers raping their daughters and sons raping their mothers – this last bit in an unforgettable scene where Mike, armed with a shotgun, watches in horror as his next door neighbors go at one another…Mike in shock, but Johnstone doling out the details, of course.

Mike, you see, gradually learns that he is “God’s Warrior,” divinely chosen to carry out the battle against Satan. One of the funniest things about The Nursery and most other “Christian paranoia” tales about the devil and the occult is that God rarely if ever speaks directly to his followers – and yet the followers of Satan are always directly in communion with their master. There are scenes where Becker will call up Ol’ Scratch, and other parts where Satan will send out telepathic messages to his servants. Yet God remains perennially silent. And on top of that, Satanism as presented here basically involves lots of sex and power…whereas the Christians are reduced to ramshackle packs. But then, this has been part and parcel of Christian fiction since the era of the Roman Empire – my own personal belief (as evidenced by the success of Left Behind et al) is that some Christians sort of get off on being persecuted.

But anyway, Mike has to discover for himself that he’s been chosen – and Johnstone really kills time until he goes into kill mode for God. The Nursery, like every other Zebra publication, is too long for its own good, coming in at nearly 400 pages. But it’s big print, and Johnstone’s writing is so simple yet fluid that you barrel right along…plus there’s all the dirty stuff. And Johnstone doesn’t shirk on the violence, either, with Mike either blowing mind-washed satanists away with his .41 mag revolver, a shotgun, or an AK-47, given to him by a mysterious and possibly divine intermediary who calls himself Ted Bernard.

The novel takes place over one harried weekend, and is jam-packed with lurid shenanigans. For one there’s teenager Lisa, who comes on to Mike with a mouth that would embarras a truck driver. One of the novel’s many highlights is when Mike pulls Lisa out of the satanic church and attempts to whip the devil out of the girl, only to find that Lisa royally gets off on it (easily the most outrageous scene in the entire novel). But God wins out and soon Lisa is renouncing her evil ways, though this doesn’t stop her from talking dirty or telling Mike that he’ll have to “fuck” her if Satan comes for her again, as that will be the only way to save her soul – though this is one of many subplots Johnstone completely forgets about.

There are so many jawdropping scenes that one doesn’t know where to start. From the corny to the depraved, Johnstone covers all the bases. I mean, how about when the Christians in Mike’s home feel the “thought-pushings” of Satan, which sounds as some unspecified music in their minds (I imagined it as something cool like Slayer’s “Hell Awaits”), calling them back to “The Master,” and Mike gets everyone to hold hands and sing Christian sermons to fight back? Or…how about when Mike feels a “dark presence,” and he reaches out for the Bible, and as soon as he touches it the presence fades away? There are many such scenes which, to me at least, are just plain laughable, but what’s awesome is you can tell Johnstone’s a True Believer…which makes his lurid stuff all the more impressive.

Everything finally builds to a thrilling climax, with Mike blitzing the town of Butler in a commandeered truck, blowing away teenagers and satanists with his AK-47. But Johnstone wraps up the Old One storyline very anticlimatically, with Satan realizing that God, acting through Mike, has won again, and thus pulls his forces out of Butler. You know how in most horror movies the credits roll after the villain has been killed? Johnstone proves why this is a smart idea, as for whatever reason he wastes our time with several pages of aftermath, where Mike, finally able to communicate with the outside world now that Becker’s forces have been defeated, calls in his old Army friends and they look over the destruction and try to make sense of it.

Back in my Phoenix reviews I wrote that the main thing I loved about David Alexander's style was how he came off like a sex and violence-obsessed 15 year-old with no conscience; well, Johnstone is in the same league, my friends. In fact, one could argue that he goes even further. This is a case where only quotes will give a full idea of what the reader is in for. From the bizarre to the just plain dirty, here are a few excerpts from The Nursery. Brace yourself!

Lisa put her head back and curled her toes, jerking in climax. Her sleek tanned legs were spread wide, trembling as the good doctor pulled out of her and reached for a towel. He cleaned himself and tossed another towel to Lisa, pointing toward the small bathroom.

“Go wipe your pussy,” he told her. “Get the smell of cum off you. And don’t forget your birth control pills.” -- pg. 31

“Lisa –” Mike managed to say, lips on hers.

“If she did come in – which she won’t – she’d probably ask you for some.”

Mike pulled back, shocked. “That’s a terrible thing to say about your daughter!”

“But true. Want to see the vibrator and King Dong dildo she thinks she keeps hidden from me?”

“Not particularly.”

“Good. Then shut up and make love to me.”

Mike could not imagine his own daughter shoving a rubber cock up in her. He hoped she didn’t, at least. -- pg. 74

Ava screamed hoarsely as pain lanced through her slender body. The crowd of men and women, all naked or clad in the barest of clothing, laughed at the girl’s wailings.

“Hurry up, Al,” a woman urged. “This has got me all sexed up. Let’s go to the barracks and fuck. I want you to fuck my ass.” -- pg. 87

"What is this preoccupation with anal sex?” Mike asked.

“Tight,” Lisa answered bluntly. She looked up at him. “I mean,” she shrugged, “so they tell me.”

Mike had grown accustomed to the teenager’s frankness. Familiarized to it, but not comfortable with it.

She said, “You mean, Mike, as worldly as you are, you’ve never gone in the back door of a woman?”

Her mother sighed and shook her head.

“No,” Mike replied, his face red.

“That’s really wild, man.” -- pg. 222

Nickie stood in confusion in the moonlight. She could not understand what had happened. Had she been screwed or was it all a dream? Yes, she thought, dipping her fingers into the fur between her legs, she had been well-screwed. But where did the men go?

So she had not been dreaming. Her asshole was sticky. No dream there, either. -- pg. 275