BOOK REVIEW--The Jury Series #1: Judgment by Lee Goldberg

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Vigilantes are a main staple—perhaps the main staple—of the men’s action-adventure genre. After all, who doesn't love a good, pulpy—that’s brain pulp, mind you—“justice from the barrel of a gun" vigilante story? When a badass with a big gun steps outside the law to dispense payback and retribution, I tend to stand up and cheer. Which is awkward when I’m trying to sneak in a few pages during the Sunday morning church service.

The Jury Series #1: Judgment was written back in the '80s heyday of the men's action-adventure craze and features everything carnage connoisseurs covet: a revenge-centric plot, a rough-and-tumble protagonist, heads blown off by heavy-caliber bullets, and dollops of ludicrous sex. (Interesting side-note: Goldberg originally wanted to make the hero impotent but the publisher poured cold water all over that idea. Remember, this was the era of macho men; limp dicks needed not apply for their own action series.)

The quality of prose makes Judgment rise above many of its contemporaries. Granted, not exactly Shakespearean, but definitely a cut above. Because let’s be honest, as much as we all devoured the Executioners and Penetrators and Destroyers and Butchers and the myriad other "-ers" that riddled truck stop book racks back in the day, the writing often left something to be desired. Revisiting some of those old series, even with the glint of nostalgia in my eye, I have realized they many of them were nowhere near as good as I believed them to be in my youth. 

That's why the skill Lee Goldberg—a college student at the time no less—brought to the game feels like a breath of fresh air: it's got all the gory goods, but they're well-written goods, with some slick phrasing and a welcome streak of humor. Who can’t help but chuckle at a backseat oral sex scene like this:

“When Stacy, in the midst of their fervent groping, unzipped his pants without coercion and dropper her head between his legs, Macklin almost fainted with surprise and anxiety. He had never expected her to do that, not in his wildest fantasies. When he opened his eyes afterwards, he expected to see powder burns on Stacy’s face, a hole in the Corvair’s ceiling, and a contrail in the night sky.”

So '80s it will kill you.

Sure, aside from the above-par writing, there is nothing original here, but if you're reading a book about a .357 vigilante (the novel's original title, by the way), do you really want much deviation from the expected norm? You've got the good guy blowing out the bad guys' brains while making quips and getting laid. And that sentence right there is all you need to know to judge whether or not you'll like this book. In fact, if at any point during this review you’ve thought this book sounded interesting, you owe it to yourself to give it a whirl. It might not be literary gold, but it's definitely a crown jewel of the guns ‘n’ guts genre.

BOOK REVIEW--The Executioner #429: Arctic Kill by Joshua Reynolds

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Back in the decade of hair metal and parachute pants (that’s the ‘80s, for you young’uns), I devoured The Executioner and all its various spin offs (Able Team, Phoenix Force, etc.). The literary gluttony started when I picked up The Executioner #128: Sudan Slaughter in a bait shop of all places, sandwiched between boxes of worms and a stack of dog-eared Grace Livingston Hill books. Granted, in retrospect, it wasn’t a high-caliber entry in the Mack Bolan canon, but my 16 year-old self thought it was the cat’s whiskers (whatever that means). I immediately tracked down the whole series, haunting used bookstores like a hungry addict.

But as the ‘90s rolled into town and the plots became monotonously "terrorist of the month" oriented, I abandoned the series and vowed it would be a cold day in Hell before I returned.

Well, lace up the ice skates and get ready to play hockey in Hades, because 20 years later I find myself once again drawn to the heroic, justice-serving, cool-cat warrior that is Mack Bolan. I queued Arctic Kill up on my Kindle and whipped through it in a couple of days. After two decades of Flynn and Thor and Clancy and all the political machinations that buffer the action in those thrillers, it was a refreshing change of pace to read a straight-forward action-adventure yarn again.

And for better or worse (you can make an argument either way), nothing has changed. Mack Bolan is exactly how I left him back in the mid-90s, right down to his aliases. (Seriously, shouldn’t he have some new ones at this point? Surely by now all the criminals and terrorists have at least heard of Striker/Cooper/Phoenix. But I digress…)

Anyway, the fact that I can jump back into this series 20 years and 100s of books later without getting lost is both its strength and weakness. Personally, with my graciousness boosted by nostalgia, I was happy that The Executioner seemed so familiar. But I would not challenge to a duel anyone who argued that such sameness exhibits stagnation. Then again, Big Macs haven’t changed much since their inception and people wolf them down by the millions. As for this particular entry, much like Bolan himself, it shows that the series hasn’t changed much: swiftly-paced, competently written, and action-packed.

Another thing that hasn’t changed, regrettably, is the sterility of the violence. One of the reasons I bailed on Bolan back before the turn of the millennium was because the series significantly tamped down on the explicitness of the action scenes. Maybe the writers changed or maybe it was an editorial decision, but bloody brain bits and dripping skull fragments no longer splashed the wall; instead, we got kills like, "The Beretta spoke and the target went down." In other words, The Executioner went PG-13 and frankly, it sucked donkey balls. 

Sad to say, judging from Arctic Kill, it appears 20 years later that nothing has changed in the carnage department. Not saying I need a splatter-punk-style gore-fest a la David Alexander’s Phoenix series (though I wouldn't complain!), but I do prefer my action scenes on the bloodier, R-rated end of the spectrum. This site is called Guns ‘n’ Guts for a reason.

But the series’ inability to meet my gore quotient is not a deal-breaker. I enjoyed my return to the bullets-blazing world of Bolan enough that I will certainly check out more of The Executioner's modern-day incarnation. Maybe man cannot live on Big Macs alone, but they sure are tasty every once in a while.