Death Merchant #6: The Albanian Connection

In the sixth number of Death Merchant, Joseph Rosenberger has his hero, Richard Camellion, in West Germany at the request of the CIA. The Spider, a world-wide organization of ex-Nazis who escaped Germany toward the end of WWII, have been plotting for 28 years (the book was published in 1973) to gain control of, and reunify, Germany and again seek domination of Europe.

The Spider has been paying millions to the tiny nation of Albania to have its headquarters in a huge cavern in the Alps. But the Albanians - and the rest of the world - are unaware of the true activity going on at Spider HQ: the Nazis are assembling seven atomic bombs, four of which are meant for London, Paris, New York, and Los Angeles, if they do not get their way.

"A fantastic scheme? Camellion readily agreed that it was. But then, the followers of Adolf Hitler had never been noted for having common sense, or any other human quality. The plan was just crazy enough to work."

Yes, Rosenberger actually wrote that last sentence. (Perhaps it wasn't such a cliche 41 years ago.)

The Nazis plan to smuggle in the last of the necessary plutonium - and Camellion's first task is to find and thwart that shipment. Camellion is a master of disguise and so he attends a meeting disguised as a Spider agent from London. However, the plan fails as he does not have the "microdot" - and Camellion has to fight his way out (which he does). He also gets info from one of the goons on when and from where the plutonium is being shipped. He heads to Marseilles and interrupts the shipment.

A few weeks later, Camellion plans to kidnap the Chief of Albania's Secret Police, Colonel General Epineska, and fly him to Greece in a stolen jet, to squeeze him for more information on the base. Two cars of men invade Epineska's country home and a terrific gun battle ends with the DM driving a tractor into the house and setting it on fire. Epineska escapes, so they take Lt. Korfuska as prisoner. (During the battle, the Death Merchant reveals to the Albanians that the Nazis are constructing atomic bombs in their Mount Karob hideaway.)

Epineska spends the next two weeks tearing the countryside apart, torturing and murdering innocent people for information, looking frantically for the DM. He also goes to Falcon I (the Nazis headquarters) for a surprise inspection. He orders the Nazis to dismantle their bombs, and they laugh at him. Meanwhile, Camellion meets with the heads of BND and outlines his plan to attack Falcon I. The other leaders call it a foolhardy plan - "why, such a venture is an affront to heaven". But can they sit idly by and/or negotiate with the Nazis? They cannot. Camellion's plan is to use only Russian arms and equipment, along with GRU-forged papers - so Russia will get the blame if the attack fails.

And so the Death Merchant and 15 others jump out of a plane in darkness, landing in the North Albanian Alps three or four miles away from the Falcon base. They initially plan on destroying a bridge along the one road up the mountain, cutting off the Nazis' supply lines. What the DM actually ends up doing is setting off a mammoth landslide, exploding thousands of tons of rock that come crashing down on tanks and trucks crossing the bridge, killing hundreds of "Heil Hitler halfwits" and "Master Race morons" and collapsing the bridge.

The DM and his men meet resistance when Epineska and about 80 soldiers land nearby and pour out of a helicopter, charging at the commandos. "The Albanians ran straight into a solid steel wall of 7.63 slugs, going down faster than haystacks in the path of a tornado!" The survivors get close enough that both sides are forced into hand-to-hand combat, with Camellion fighting Epineska, eventually throwing him off the edge of the cliff to his death.

When the fight is over and the Albanians dead, the question becomes: Can the Death Merchant fly the helicopter? Of course, he can! As they approach the Falcon base, it looks like a victorious Epineska is returning ... until the copter's guns open fire on the Nazis and tear shit up! After a rough landing, they commandeer two tanks and blast the mountain retreat's huge steel doors wide open and pour in, headed in with an armoured car and the tanks, guns a-blazing!

The Nazis are defeated. And although one atom bomb does explode afterwards, it is far enough underground or within the mountain that it apparently does no damage. Men on the surface feel only a "loud and mighty rumbling" of the ground. ... And the Death Merchant's mind is already filled with thoughts of his next mission - in Cuba.

Rosenberger outdoes himself when describing the Death Merchant's awesomeness:

He had heard about Le Marchard du Mort and didn't have to be reminded that the man before him was the world's deadliest man hunter and the most efficient killing machine in existence. ...

Camellion had an aura of violence around him that was almost physical, a power that left one confused and helpless. ... brooding, almost hypnotic eyes ... a power that was almost diabolical, a magnetism that was irresistible.

Rosenberger refers to Death as the "Pale Priest of the Mute People". It's an odd phrase. An internet search leads me to believe it's from Sir Frederic George Kenyon's poem "The Working Of Robert Browing":

Leave, as ye witness, all my wonted joy
In this dear dwelling. Ay - for here comes Death
Close on us of a sudden! who, pale priest
Of the mute people, means to bear his prey
To the house of Hades.

Although Rosenberger never gives readers any real idea of where the Death Merchant came from or why he does what he does, we learn in this book that Camellion lived in St. Louis, Missouri, as a young boy.

C.S. Lewis: Reading and "Escapism"

C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism (1961):

[W]hat shall we say about the stigma of "escapism"?

Now there is a clear sense in which all reading whatever is an escape. It involves a temporary transference of the mind from our actual surroundings to things merely imagined or conceived. This happens when we read history or science no less than when we read fictions. All such escape is from the same thing; immediate, concrete actuality. The important question is what we escape to. . . .

Escape, then, is common to many good and bad kinds of reading. By adding -ism to it, we suggest, I suppose, a confirmed habit of escaping too often, or for too long, or into the wrong things, or using escape as a substitute for action where action is appropriate, and thus neglecting real opportunities and evading real obligations. If so, we must judge each case on its merits. Escape is not necessarily joined to escapism. . . .

Since the charge of escapism against a very unrealistic work is sometimes varied or reinforced with that of childishness ... [t]wo points need to be made.

First, the association between fantasy and childhood, the belief that children are the proper readers for this sort of work or that it is the proper reading for children, is modern and local. Most of the great fantasies and fairy-tales were not addressed to children at all, but to everyone. . . . If few but children now read such stories, that is not because children, as such, have a special predilection for them, but because children are indifferent to literary fashions. What we see in them is not a specifically childish taste, but simply a normal and perennial human taste, temporarily atrophied in their elders by a fashion. It is we, not they, whose taste needs explanation. And even to say this is to say too much. We ought, in strict truth, to say that some children, as well as some adults, like this genre, and that many children, like many adults, do not. For we must not be deceived by the contemporary practice of sorting books out according to the 'age-groups' for which they are supposed to be appropriate. That work is done by people who are not very curious about the real nature of literature nor very well acquainted with its history. . . .

Secondly, if we are to use the words childish and infantile as terms of disapproval, we must make sure that they refer only to those characteristics of childhood which we become better and happier by outgrowing; not to those which every sane man would keep if he could and which some are fortunate for keeping. . . . [W]ho in his sense would not keep, if he could, that tireless curiosity, that intensity of imagination, that facility of suspending disbelief, that unspoiled appetite, that readiness to wonder, to pity, and to admire? The process of growing up is to be value for what we gain, not for what we lose. Not to acquire a taste for the realistic is childish in the bad sense; to have lost the taste for marvels and adventure is no more a matter for congratulation that losing out teeth, our hair, our palate, and finally, our hopes. . . .

When we accuse a work of infantilism we must, therefore, be careful what we mean. If we mean only that the taste for which it caters is one that usually appears early in life, that is nothing against the book. A taste is childish in the bad sense not because it develops at an early age but because, having some intrinsic defect in it, ought to disappear as soon as possible. We call such a taste 'childish' because only childhood can excuse it, not because childhood can often achieve it. . . . If you are going to call a taste for the marvellous childish in the same sense, you must similarly show its intrinsic badness. The dates at which our various traits develop are not a gauge of their value.

If they were, a very amusing result would follow. Nothing is more characteristically juvenile than contempt for juvenility. The eight-year-old despises the six-year-old and rejoices to be getting such a big boy; the schoolboy is very determined not to be a child, and the freshman not to be a schoolboy. If we are resolved to eradicate, without examining them on their merits, all the traits of our youth, we might begin with this – with youth’s characteristic chronological snobbery. And what then would become of the criticism which attaches so much importance to being adult and instills a fear and shame of any enjoyment we can share with the very young?

In On Three Ways of Writing for Children, Lewis - who wrote, as you may know, The Chronicles of Narnia (among many other books), mentions "that particular type of children's story which is dearest to my own taste, the fantasy or fairy tale":

Now the modern critical world uses 'adult' as a term of approval. . . . Hence a man who admits that dwarfs and giants and talking beasts and witches are still dear to him in his fifty-third year is now less likely to be praised for his perennial youth than scorned and pitied for arrested development. If I spend some little time defending myself against these charges, this is not so much because it matters greatly whether I am scorned and pitied as because the defence is germane to my whole view of the fairy tale and even of literature in general. . . .

Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

The modern view seems to me to involve a false conception of growth. They accuse us of arrested development because we have not lost a taste we had in childhood. But surely arrested development consists not in refusing to lose old things but in failing to add new things?

Death Merchant #5: Satan Strike

In Satan Strike, the dictator of Bonheur, a small Caribbean country, develops a highly-infectious and deadly virus he dubs "the Satan Virus".

Jean Pierre Duvessalines's plan is to release the fast-acting virus in a handful of Soviet cities and blame the United States for the millions of deaths. Russia will then retaliate against the U.S with nuclear weapons, and the U.S. will defend itself similarly. After the two superpowers are destroyed, the megalomaniac Duvessalines, armed with the virus as the ultimate weapon, will rule the planet.

While Duvessalines's plans for world domination are somewhat dubious, Joseph Rosenberger still comes through with a solid installment of The Death Merchant, mainly because several battle scenes are so good.

Bonheur shares a 129-mile border with the Dominican Republic, and is clearly meant as a stand-in for Haiti. Duvessalines gets his name from Jean-Jacques Dessalines (Haiti's first leader, who led the first successful slave army revolution, defeating the French at the Battle of Vertières in 1803) and François "Papa Doc" Duvalier, who ruled Haiti from 1957 until his death in 1971, a couple of years before this book was written. For anyone who has still missed the similarities, Duvessalines is nicknamed "Papa Pierre". (Also, the name of Duvessalines's virus recalls Alistair MacLean's The Satan Bug (1962), a thriller that also featured an infectious, fast-killing virus.)

Satan Strike begins with a bang, as Richard "DM" Camellion and a group of Libre Nationales are under heavy gunfire from the Tonton Macoutes as they try to break Joseph Parsi out of prison. Unfortunately, Parsi - who discovered the virus plot - dies before he can reveal any additional information about Duvessalines's plans.

The CIA has (in good faith) told the Russians about the existence of the plot and the two governments have agreed to secretly work together to stop Duvessalines. The two Russians agents are Boris Yushkik, who has a reputation nearly as famous (or infamous) as the Death Merchant, and Irina Golbov, who can speak seven languages and is "more than adept at the ageless art of seduction". I'm not clear why Rosenberger bothers to mention this, as it doesn't come into play at all (although she and the usual asexual Camellion do apparently mess around).

Camellion and Golbov pose as American tourists who have come to Bonheur to see and collect butterflies. After meeting up with Father Georges (one of the prime contacts in town for Libre Nationale) at the Holy Name Basilica, they are ambushed by six men in their hotel lobby. Camellion and Golbov spring immediately into action, using specialized weapons like a cane with a six-inch switchblade and a cigarette lighter that fires small caliber bullets. They lay waste to the hit men - "Irina made them jerk and jump to a staccato dance of death, chopping them to morgue meat with a dozen or more slugs" - and kill several more that rush into the hotel from hiding places outside. They also blow up a packed car. In all, more than 20 Comites are killed.

Meanwhile, Duvessalines and his former college friend, Dr. Eugene Vismer, both experts in biochemistry and bacteriology, are testing a possible antidote on innocent Bonheurnians who have been seized and strapped to a conveyor belt in the sealed testing room. After being inoculated with the Cx4 vaccine, they are exposed to the Satan Virus. Victims usually die within minutes, but these men and woman live for nearly two hours before dying. (The conveyor belt then transports them to a crematorium.) So it's back to the drawing board for the evil JPD, who is described as "a midget Hitler, only ten times as cruel".

Camellion susses out that the lab is most likely hidden in the Citadel de la Mantaire, a former tourist attraction that has been shut down. After a series of epic shootouts, including one at a remote plantation in which Camellion and a Libre Nationale member end up wiping out 113 Comites (!), Camellion announces that an armed assault on the fairly impregnable Citadel is essential or the virus will be loosed upon the world. The plan ends up being very similar to what Rosenberger dreamed up in his previous volume, with a number of jets strafing the area with napalm and bullets before a bunch of DM-led commandos land at the Citadel and shoot and fight their way up to the fifth-floor lab.

The Russian agents plan to let the Death Merchant do his thing and save the day, and then steal the formula for the virus for themselves! But Camellion anticipates their double-cross and ends up destroying the filing cabinet containing the paperwork on the virus and the vaccine, stating:

The world's better off without that Satan Virus. We've enough instant death with thousands of H-bombs!

We also know from various comments in the earlier books that Camellion (i.e., Rosenberger) is virulently anti-religion. Camellion and Golbov - out in their disguise as vacationing Americans - observe a voodoo ceremony performed for the tourists. Irina remarks that it's

paradoxical that voodoo can exist side by side with Christianity. ... But I suppose that's only natural. Religious superstition and priestcraft have always been used by the capitalists as a means of motivating and controlling the proletariat.

Camellion says that in Bonheur, voodoo supplements Christianity. He adds:

"Not that it makes any difference because only a dedicated masochist could believe in either one!"

"Precisely!" Irina said smugly. "Religion is the opiate of the people!"

The Death Merchant smiled. "Marx would have done better to take a bath more often instead of rattling about things he didn't really understand. Man had to invent God. As man progressed in education, as he began casting off his ignorance, the Renaissance shift from God to humanism followed the reasoning of classical Epicurean nihilism."

Then they walk off and the main story picks up again! (Later books in the series have Rosenberger interjecting his own opinions on a variety of matters, complete with footnotes!)

In the first five books, Rosenberger has not revealed much about Camellion's background or how and why he became the Death Merchant. In this volume, we learn a few small factoids: Camellion enjoys cold tomato juice and eating raisins out of the box.

Nostalgia Note: There is an advertisement for Kent cigarettes bound into the book between pages 96 and 97! This was once common practice for certain paperbacks in the 1970s, after a federal ban on cigarette advertising on television and radio was instituted in 1969.

Death Merchant #4: Chinese Conspiracy

Chinese Conspiracy - my favourite of the four Death Merchant books so far - begins in a roadhouse just outside of Du Quoin, Illinois, where Richard Camellion is enjoying a cold glass of tomato juice. The Death Merchant is actually on vacation, working (for some unstated reason) as a game operator in a travelling carnival, "a holiday from intrigue, violence and sudden death".

[We get a decent description of the Death Merchant early in the book. He's in his mid-30s, weighs about 170, not big but well-muscled. "Kind of an ordinary-looking guy ... wore his hair in a kind of flattop, like a roof, over a face that was strong, the jaw firm, the nose rather delicate." And don't forget the chilling stare from his "icy blue eyes". We also learn that, in addition to tomato juice, he likes apricot juice. Still no background on his life or how he became the merchant of death, though.]

An attractive local woman needs help with her car and Camellion volunteers to help. Once outside and surrounded by five armed men, he realizes he has fallen into a trap. The Death Merchant's vacation is over! Camellion works steadily, incapacitating each goon, before getting some assistance from a mysterious stranger, who calls Camellion by name and says they need to leave the roadhouse at once. The stranger is Vallie "The Eye" West, a top CIA agent, and he tells Camellion that the Russians tipped off the CIA about a week ago that China sought to kill the DM because of his possible involvement in a CIA mission against China.

That mission, which Camellion accepts (of course) involves the launch of a U.S. space shuttle called Toro I, which will become the world's first space station. Dr. Berthram Goddard, the head of Project Toro, was recently kidnapped from Cape Kennedy by a "private" spy group hired by the Chinese. (Rosenberger makes a big point of noting that the "Orientals" were unable to pull off the kidnapping themselves, because they couldn't infiltrate Cape Kennedy undetected; they needed to hire some "white" agents that could blend in.) The kidnappers are under the direction of ex-Nazi Hans Hugo Kronsleiter, who tangled with the Death Merchant in Argentina six years ago. (We learn about this incident and why Camellion burns to exact revenge on Kronsleiter much later in the book.)

The U.S. believes Kronsleiter will try to smuggle Goddard back to China via Canada. China will then announce that Goddard has defected because he supposedly opposes the U.S.'s "imperialistic" actions in Vietnam - people will buy this line because his son is a conscientious objector living in Montreal - and when China destroys the space shuttle via missiles shot from a nuclear sub in James Bay, they will claim Goddard assisted in giving them vital information. The destruction of Toro I will be a huge blow to the U.S. space program and a tremendous propaganda victory for China. It's up to the Death Merchant to rescue Goddard and foil the plot.

I enjoyed this installment more than the first three. Because it's a given that the DM (who actually is referred to as the "DM" a couple times!) will survive and succeed - and so far (outside of the very end of The Psychotron Plot), he has not even been seriously wounded, which requires a huge suspension of belief - the fun in reading these adventure pulps comes from the intricacy and momentum of Rosenberger's plots and the utterly over-the-top descriptions of the Death Merchant's assaults and the resultant gore. A typical example:

The Death Merchant tilted the .357 and fired through the financial page of the Moosonee Herald, the blunt-nosed slug popping the Chinaman's head. Chips of skull bone and fragments of brain splattered against the door frame as - almost without a head - Chang melted to the floor, spraying fountains of blood which made a mess of his snow-white parka. He had been born without hope, in a no-name spot of northern China. Now he died without a whimper.

The narrative in Chinese Conspiracy zips right along and Rosenberger gets creative while describing the violence: "... his belch gun chattering faster than an auctioneer ... the slugs ricocheting and zinging like steel popcorn".

One aspect of these books that could get ridiculous after awhile (or, more likely, already has) is how close Camellion comes to getting shot. His secret for survival is to always keep moving, so that when the enemy fires "a line of slugs" or a "river of hot steel", the bullets hit in the spot he vacated only a fraction of a second before. Slugs whizz past his cheek or he feels the bullet nearly part his hair; they never do more than graze him, inflicting painful, but minor, wounds.

Also, Rosenberger calls upon every Asian slur he can think of. Camellion sprays bullets from his Schmeisser machine gun like water from a garden hose, chopping the Chinese gunmen "into Oriental goulash" and "chunks of chop-suey" and sending them instantly to all their "rice-eating ancestors". Later, after Camellion kills a female member of the Chinese contingent, Rosenberger writes: "Sorry, sister, but you should have stayed back home in the rice paddies!" The face of one of the Chinese generals is "shining like pale butter" and someone else is described as "lemon-faced".

In the previous book, The Psychotron Plot, Rosenberger threw epithets at the evil Russians, but since the Soviets are working with the U.S. in this volume, he's completely silent in that regard. Instead of "lovers of Lenin", we get "Mao-morons". At one point, Rosenberger writes that Camellion's submachine gun "chattered loudly, the .45 slugs snarling a Japanese-sandman song of death". ... Yeah, Japanese, Chinese - same difference!

There are three epic, highly-entertaining gun battles in Chinese Conspiracy: at the Chinese embassy in Ottawa, at an abandoned Canadian weather station on North Twin Island on the southern end of Canada's Hudson Bay, and on Dragonfly, the nuclear submarine carrying the missiles intended to bring down Toro I. [Wikipedia says the actual North Twin Island is uninhabited, but Rosenberger has a small tribe of Ontagla Indians (a fictional tribe, apparently) living on one side of the island.]

Finally, one completely unexpected scene: Fairly early in the book, Camellion is knocked unconscious in a fight and wakes up in a casket in a funereal home basement, with his hands cuffed behind him. Despite his limitations, he is able to access some lock-picking equipment that he has conveniently stored in his rectum! He forces the container of tools out, opens it up, and uses the proper tool to pick the handcuff lock. Then he puts the container back up his rectum, and awaits the return of the bad guys. Rosenberger presents this as nonchalantly as if Camellion had simply reached into his pocket.

Death Merchant #3: The Psychotron Plot

The Russians have been doing significant research into "biochemistry, neurology, [and] electrical engineering" at a secret base in Egypt, experimenting with a machine known as the Psychotron - "a weapon that, by interfering with the electro-magnetic field of the human body, particularly of the brain, can cause delusions, hallucinations, and even death".

The Psychotron has already been tested on a small village in the Sinai desert, and more than 100 people were driven insane. At the present moment, the machine, colloquially known as the Mind Blaster, has a range of only 20-30 miles, but the Russians are working feverishly at expanding its range.

CIA Director Jacob Hemms, talking to Richard Camellion, aka the Death Merchant: "But I have more bad news ... When perfected, the Mind Blaster will be capable of telepathic hypnosis! Do I have to tell you what that means? Should the Russians ever be able to hypnotize thousands of people - even millions, to be able to turn entire populations into robots who would be complete mental slaves ... they could very easily enslave the entire world!"

Camellion is momentarily stunned at the thought of the Psychotron being aimed towards the large East Coast cities and tens of millions of Americans "helpless against the perverted will of their Communist masters". Hemms explains that the CIA wants the Death Merchant to travel to Israel and work with the Shin-Bet to (a) find the secret base in Egypt, (b) destroy the Psychotron, and (c) kidnap Dr. Yuri Popvikin, the machine's diabolical inventor.

The Russians attempt to kidnap the DM when he arrives in Tel-Aviv and while they get him in a car and drive away, he overpowers his attackers, killing one and taking the second gunman (and the driver) prisoner. When the kidnappers fail to arrive with Camellion in tow as expected, the Russians know something is up, and they fear the surviving gunman will talk. Camellion rightly intuits that the Russians will now close up their Tel-Aviv cell and "go deep black", setting back the CIA's search for the Psychotron; why the Israeli intelligence people do not also realize this obvious fact is a mystery.

The Death Merchant wants to raid the shop the Russians are running as a front ASAP. He and Israela Diamant, the head of the intelligence section in Jerusalem, pose an elderly couple, two tourists looking to purchase some religious items. (Camellion harbours serious doubts about working with a woman - they "were so damned undependable!" - but Diamant acquits herself well in the ensuing battle and the DM actually apologizes for doubting her!)

A voice of caution whispered within the Death Merchant's brain, quietly telling him that the Catholic Shop would not be easy to take, that the possibilities for the escape of the Russian agents were numerous. ... Richard knew that an old friend would be with him and Israela every second - DEATH!

Several "lovers of Lenin" are killed during the raid - one, shot in the head, "found himself in the middle of Hell, sitting stupidly on Stalin's hot lap" - and Camellion brings back two additional prisoners. One spills that the Russians are attempting to smuggle a portable Psychotron into Jerusalem. He also says only a few people know the location of the secret base: Colonel Kagorin and some of his aides, and Hasan El Assad, Egypt's Minister of the Interior (though El Assad doesn't know that he knows; he thinks the base is a meteorological station).

Someone laughingly suggests that all they need to do is go to Egypt, kidnap El Assad, and squeeze him for the location of the meteorological station.

"That's exactly what I plan to do!" the Death Merchant said ...

Five pairs of eyes turned to Camellion in amazement. "You can't - you're not really serious!" Langbein asked. "Such a wild scheme couldn't possibly succeed. Why, even you couldn't bring it off, Camellion."

Israela smiled softly to herself. She knew the Death Merchant meant what he said. He was that kind of man - to grab the impossible and twist it into reality!

It all works according to plan. A few more "hammer & sickle slobs" are wasted and, under threat of torture, El Assad gives the location of the supposed weather station.

A plan of attack on the Mind Blaster base is outlined. Five planes will attack the area with napalm and phosphorous bombs - "like avenging angels from some Jewish Apocalypse ... scattering death" - then three helicopters with roughly two dozen commandos will fly in for the ground attack.

Russians tanks greet the commandos, but our heroes have little problem blowing them up. They commandeer one tank and drive it into the compound. Amid the rubble of the base, Camellion spots a trap door that leads down into an anti-chamber and, further on, the Psychotron room. He says he'll go down alone: "I'll have more fun than a part-time sweet potato salesman". (??)

With the trap door closed behind him, it's pitch black, but Camellion has "The Box", a CIA radar penetration device that can see through brick and cement. It also works as an infra-red device, so he can see the various Russians hiding in the dark, waiting to pounce. He methodically kills the various agents (or "Ivans", as they are often called). "The Death Merchant almost felt pity for the Commie crackpots as he opened fire, his UZI chattering faster than a group of old maids discussing an X-rated movie!"

In the climatic battle, Camellion battles Colonel Kagorin in hand-to-hand combat before Kagorin falls back into the Psychotron's "furiously spinning balance wheel". His arm and leg are sliced off and he is decapitated, with his head flying across the room like "a comet with a spraying red tail". After Camellion's group apprehends Dr. Popvikin, the Death Merchant puts packs of explosives on the Psychtron and sets the timers.

The group has suffered casualties. Of the 27 commandos that began the fight, only seven remain, and all of them are wounded. Camellion himself has suffered several wounds, though none are life-threatening. However, soon after the copters take off, Camellion is hit with either a slug or shrapnel, and he passes out.

The story resumes as the Death Merchant decides he is well enough - he was taken to a hospital on a kibbutz and has been recovering from his wounds - and simply leaves the compound, literally walking off into the sunset, as the Chief of the Shin-Bet remarks:

It's a stupid world, a violent world filled with greed and hate and prejudice, but now and then there's a tiny flash of justice. I guess you could say that men like the Death Merchant are part of that justice.

This third installment sounded promising, but the book somehow never really got going. The back story of the Psychotron was weak - we don't see much of the Russians working on the machine at all - and the only time the narrative really came alive was during the climatic battle.

Death Merchant #2: Operation Overkill

Billionaire Cyrus Carey and the ultra right-wing group the Knights of Vigilance are plotting to assassinate the President and Vice President of the United States, and institute a fascist government. While the Halloway administration is aware of the plot, it does not have enough hard evidence to move on Carey or his group. So it's up to Richard Camellion - the Death Merchant! - to stop the planned bombing of Congress when the President opens the latest session in the fall.

After doing some dirty work for the Chicago Mafia in the previous book, Camellion is now working for the National Security Agency. He has spent six months attempting to infiltrate Group D in New York, the largest KoV cell in the United States. All that goes to shit, however, because there is a spy somewhere and Dana Redd, the leader of the Group D meeting, knows who Camellion is. While being taken down to the warehouse basement to be roughed up, the Death Merchant, who has a gun secreted on him, makes his move and slips out of the Knights' custody. A gun battle erupts in the warehouse and Camellion kills four men before setting fire to the whole place and escaping.

With his cover blown, the Death Merchant believes that his only option to prevent the assassination is to storm Carey's four-story stone castle, located on an island in Muscongus Bay, off the coast of Maine, a fortress the locals refer to as "our Alcatraz". But because of the existence of the spy, Camellion becomes tight-lipped about his plans, laying a cover story that he is lying low or perhaps even giving up. (The identity of the spy can be one of only three people, but Rosenberger draws out the mystery for nearly the entire book.)

Glorious Trash blogger Joe Kenney has reviewed a number of DM novels from much later in the series (as well as many other adventure series and assorted tawdry books from the '70s): "Rosenberger has a habit of using his books as forums for his own political and personal views." The action-adventure genre certainly leans towards U.S.-centric jingoism and gun-porn, so I assume that Rosenberger was seriously conservative. However, two books into the series may be too early to get a handle on Rosenberger's politics. Kenney also notes the similarities between the names Richard Joseph Camellion and Joseph Richard Rosenberger.

Because the book was published in 1972, communism takes more than its share of barbs. President Halloway is disturbed that "native-born Americans" are behind the assassination plan. "I can understand the Marxists and their subversive methods - but this!" Carey's plot will save America from "the hell of Socialism" that Halloway is trying to institute. Various high-ranking military officers, along with two Senators, are in on the plot, and at a meeting with Carey, they all bemoan the fact that America is losing to the Soviets because President Halloway has cut defense spending in favour of social programs and other reforms! (Man, this IS fiction!)

Carey wants to create the Nazi States of America. Under his rule, society's undesirables would be weeded out through a "Doctrine of Fatherly Neglect". Squads of Peace and Protection Watchers would limit dissent by machine-gunning protesters. It's all so over-the-top. I sensed a definite Dr. Strangelove vibe to this exchange:

Becoming emotional, Dana banged his fist on the table and half rose from his chair. "I'm telling all of you, we're going to take a lesson from what happened at Kent State! We're going to teach the college bastards that they can't revolt and throw bottles and bricks without expecting retaliation! I'm working on the practical theory that the only good revolutionary is a dead revolutionary. You cannot reason with violence. You stomp it out. You kill it!"

"Very logical," Senator Blair said with enthusiasm. He puffed contentedly on his cigar.

Camellion teams up with Luther Jackson, a former Vietnam vet and a sleeper agent running a pawn shop in Harlem as a front. Camellion shows up disguised as a black priest, having taken a pill - "a derivative of dichlorobenzene and benzenesulfonic acid" - that turns his skin pigment dark. (Jackson marvels: "You look more spade than I do!")

Camellion explains his high-risk plan to attack Carey's fortress. Jackson thinks he's totally nuts, but of course, he agrees to do it! Because of the Death Merchant's involvement in trying to smash the plot, Carey moves the assassination date up a week. At 3 AM of the day Holloway is to be murdered by two members of his Secret Service, Camellion and Jackson begin their mission. The two men scuba dive out to the island with various weapons, grenades, and whatnot. The attack goes smoothly, considering the supposed intensity of Carey's security team on the island, and is a bit anti-climatic.

Naturally, Camellion makes a mess of numerous goons throughout the book:

The big revolver boomed, and quite suddenly Scott Kaddle had only a part of a head! The big steel-jacketed slug slammed into his forehead, instantly erasing his ugly features and scrambling his brains like a couple of dozen eggs. ... Scott dropped from the world of the living, melting to the floor, then sliding into Hell with a swiftness that must have astonished the Fallen Angels.

The Death Merchant #1

The Death Merchant is the first book in a series of men's action-adventure paperbacks written by Joseph Rosenberger and published by Pinnacle Books during (mostly) the 1970s.

In this debut volume, from 1971, Richard Camellion - known and feared as a master of "death, destruction, and disguise" - is hired by the head of the Chicago Mafia (referred to as "the Group") to track down and kill James "Fats" Regollanto, a mobster under federal indictment for interstate racketeering, before he can spill the beans about the Group's illegal operations.

When the book opens, Camellion is flying from Detroit to Chicago to report back to Mafia Don Anthony Demero about his killing of Stephen "Numbers" Bianco, the business partner of Regollanto. Bianco was killed to send a message to Fats that he ought to keep quiet. But to be absolutely sure of Regollanto's silence, Demero wants the Death Merchant to find and eradicate Fats, as well. And he's willing to pay the DM $150,000.

(We don't learn much about the Camellion's past or the circumstances that led him to becoming the infamous Death Merchant. One of his earlier jobs was to assassinate Fidel Castro at the Waldorf-Astoria, but the hit was called off by the CIA at the last moment. He likes steaks and drinks V-8, and is is well-read. He also has three suitcases that he has bobby-trapped in his apartment. One contains his many disguises, the second holds numerous electronic bugging devices and a small chemical lab, and the third is packed with firearms, packets of RDX, and bomb-making materials.)

One subplot is that Demero's nephew, Charley-Lucky, has designs on the top spot in the Group and reasons that keeping Fats alive (and talking to the Feds) will bring Demero down. So Charley wants to get rid of the Death Merchant. He hires three former Syrian hitmen to break into Camellion's apartment and await his return. The hitmen are not bothered by the DM's reputation as a killing machine*, reasoning that "he'll spurt red like anyone else". But Camellion becomes aware of the intruders because his remote "Electronic Impulse Detector", a device set up in his apartment which detects if anyone has been prowling around, starts beeping. Thus tipped off, Camellion bursts in and kills all three men, playing possum to lure the final guy out of hiding, before blowing him away.

*: At one point, Camellion successfully evades the guards patrolling outside Demero's estate and simply walks into the mobster's house. Later, three of the guards come into the room where Camellion and Demero are talking. "The three soldiers gawked at Richard Camellion ... in awe - as a newly released soul from Purgatory must gaze in rapture at the radiance of the Creator ..."

Camellion asks Demero for information on all FBI agents in the Chicago office, and asks - on a hunch - if they own any second homes or vacation cabins. The mob does some further research into three possibilities and they report a lot of activity at a cabin owned by Charlotte Holtzer, the personal secretary of Special Agent Leonard Dill. The Death Merchant suspects the Feds are hiding Fats in Holtzer's cabin.

However, there is a double agent in Demero's group of advisers, who is tipping off the Feds about the Death Merchant's plans. The FBI knows that Camellion wants to rent a cabin on the lake to scout out the Holtzer cabin, so Dill makes sure that a nearby cabin is available. ("He had been fortunate in that a cabin was available. Perhaps too fortunate!")

While at the cabin, Camellion meets and becomes somewhat involved with Jo Ann Christopher, a disabled woman who recognizes him as the Death Merchant from his picture in the newspaper. While there is no sex in the book, Camellion develops feelings for Jo Ann, and the attraction is mutual. Nothing happens, but it seems as though that's because of the Jo Ann's disability rather than the Death Merchant's chosen profession.

The FBI plans to nab the Death Merchant when he makes his assault on the cabin. And when that happens, and the FBI has the DM surrounded, his only escape is to throw some grenades and smoke bombs and escape the area. He hijacks a watermelon truck and drives back to Chicago. Without his disguises, which are back at the cabin, he can't risk going to his apartment, so he shows up at Jo Ann's door. She takes him in and bandages his wounds.

Camellion sneaks out of Jo Ann's apartment building dressed as a woman and registers at another hotel. (Camellion ends up dressing as a woman to evade the watchful eyes of the FBI no less than three times in the book. Rosenberger describes Camellion as "a not unattractive woman" with an "almost pretty" face.)

Meanwhile, Charley-Lucky is telling his girlfriend, Edie, that he has another plan to kill the Death Merchant: he and three other goons will ambush him in the parking garage of his apartment building and gun him down. Because Edie is drinking, she taunts Charley about not being able to kill the DM. Furious, he throws hot coffee on her, severely burning her face. To get back at Charley, Edie shows up at the DM's apartment and warns Camellion about the upcoming ambush. Thus, Camellion is waiting in the shadows in the garage. Naturally, he wastes the wannabe killers, though he also has to shoot two innocent bystanders who witness some of the slaughter.

Camellion goes to Charlotte Holtzer's apartment and forces her to tell him Fats's new location - a nearby hospital. Camellion impersonates a doctor to get access to the hospital's fourth floor. He has little trouble killing Fats, before dressing up as an elderly priest to escape the police's lockdown of the hospital.

Camellion may be a cold-blooded killer, but he's no low brow. He whistles Ravel and Wagner while on the job, and he recognizes Sergei Prokofiev's "Le Pas d'Acier" playing on the radio. For his stake-out of Fats's cabin, he brings Rosseau's Discours sue l'origine de l'inegalite des hommes for reading material (and discusses it with Jo Ann over dinner).

At one point in the story, he spies a music store and goes in and buys "Sibelius' Concerto for Violin and Orchestra, a rendition by Eugene Ormandy, conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra, with Jacob Ferlasky playing the Violin." (Ormandy was a real guy; not sure about Ferlasky.) At the end of the book, the Death Merchant has claimed his reward from Demero and is on a plane to Miami, reading Charles Baudelaire's Flowers of Evil, "in French, a language Camellion loved".

Rosenberger clearly enjoys writing the intricate fight sequences and describing the carnage. The gore is described in vivid detail.

The Death Merchant's second slug had drilled into the chest of the other hood standing by the open door, jerking the man as though he were a giant puppet ... Again Camellion's Walther spit flame and this time sent a slug into the face of the dying hood. There was a sound that resembled an egg shell's being stepped on ... as blood, bone and brains splattered into space.

and

He dropped to the floor by halts and staggers, rolled over - belching blood - and the Big Blackness closed in.

Joe The Pole Smolenski dropped into hell coughing! Richard's bullet caught him in the left eye. His head snapped around and blood and brains flew in all directions. ...

Twice more the German Luger whispered its requiem, a mechanical Mass for the Dead that sent two slugs tearing into the slob ...

Frank died hard, jets of dark red jumping from the maw of his throat, each spurt weaker that its predecessor as his heart slowed. Then the heart said The Hell With It and stopped.

This first book was entertaining, although some of dialogue spoken by the bad guys is pretty silly, just a notch or two above "You'll never take me alive, Death Merchant!":

You're running the show, Charley, but you've got to admit that the sooner we knock off this Camellion joker the better off we'll be, and the faster we'll be able to take over the Group. For my dough, the Death Merchant's got a partnership with the Devil - and don't underestimate him! Even Hoover and his boys can't nail the bastard!

Stephen Harper's War On Democracy

Stephen Harper is waging war on elections and also broader mechanisms of democratic engagement.

Harper has interfered in elections—violating election law spending rules in the campaign that won him a minority government in 2006, and committing voter fraud in the election that won him a majority in 2011. He also shut down Parliament twice (for which he was found in contempt of Parliament in 2011) and is disenfranchising voters through the "Fair Elections Act."

Information and science

Harper is also restricting the information people need to make democratic decisions. He prorogued Parliament to avoid an inquiry into torture of Afghan civilians, and killed the Coordination of Access to Information Requests System—which the Canadian Association of Journalists said would "result in the public only getting information the government wants it to know."

Harper has muzzled government scientists, requiring them to submit a "message event proposal" before any public appearance, and have their responses pre-approved. In 2009, Harper cut science research funding by $138 million. Over the years, Harper has halted environmental impact assessments on nearly 3,000 projects across Canada, and is shutting down federal libraries and climate change adaptation programs.

Harper has waged war on the national media, treating it like an opposition voice that must be silenced. Mary Agnes Welch, the president of the Canadian Association of Journalists, stated that Harper has "built a pervasive government apparatus whose sole purpose is to strangle the flow of public information."

Civil liberties

At the same time as strangling public information, the Tories are strengthening the surveillance state through the Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC), Canada's version of the NSA. Of particular interest to CSEC and the RCMP are Indigenous, environmental, peace and civil liberties activists. Harper has tried and failed (four times) to implement mass internet surveillance, and allow the government access to private information without warrants or court oversight.

During the G20 protests Harper used $1 billion on the biggest mass arrest in Canadian history, part of his agenda to criminalize dissent. The cost of the country's federal prison system has risen nearly 100% since Harper became Prime Minister, growing from $1.6 billion in 2006 to $3.15 billion in 2013. Yet Harper eliminated funding for Sisters in Spirit, an internationally-praised organization dedicated to investigating 500+ cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls.

Harper has also supported undemocratic regimes around the world—defending Israeli apartheid, supporting the military regime in Egypt and selling weapons to the Saudi dictatorship. Harper has participated in war and occupations to stifle democracy—from Afghanistan to Libya. While building 15 new warships at a cost of over $100 billion (part of the half-trillion dollar Canada First Defence Strategy), Harper is treating veterans like garbage—cutting essential benefits and discharging injured soldiers before they are eligible for pensions.

Policies and organizations

These undemocratic methods are connected to the undemocratic policies Harper has implemented—including axing a national child care program, and scrapping the Kelowna Accord with First Nations. These cuts saw the transfer of resources from the 99% to the 1%, including cutting $1.2 billion from child care and reinstating $1.4 billion in tax breaks and subsides to oil companies.

Harper's undemocratic policies are connected to his attacks on self-determination—defunding women's organizations advocating for equality, defunding Sisters in Spirit that investigates missing and murdered Indigenous women, and attacking unions that provide a democratic defence of workers. We need to defend the democratic organizations of the 99% in workplaces, campuses and communities to resist Harper's war on democracy.

This article appeared in the April 2014 issue of Socialist Worker.

Stephen King: From A Buick 8 (2002)

Stephen King completed a draft of this novel before his June 1999 accident, but its eventual release was pushed back a few years, apparently because it involves a serious car crash somewhat similar to the one that nearly killed King. He published Dreamcatcher, Black House, and Everything's Eventual before sending From A Buick 8 out into the world.

The story begins in the summer of 1979, when a mysterious man in black abandons a vintage Buick Roadmaster at a rural Pennsylvania gas station. An examination of the car raises questions about its origins: the battery is not hooked up to the unorthodox engine, the exhaust system is made of glass, the dashboard instruments are fake, and the odometer reads 000000. The local police (Troop D) eventually tow the vehicle back to their barracks and store it in Shed B.

Weird things start happening. The temperature is often 10-20 degrees colder inside Shed B than outside. When it gets especially chilly, extraordinarily bright flashes of light (the officers call them "lightquakes") emanate from and envelope the Buick. Troop D officers observing the car through the shed's windows can often hear (and feel) a low humming sound. Finally, various creatures are ejected out of the car's trunk - which is eventually believed to be a portal to another world/dimension.

The book is set during one day in 2002, as various officers tell the story of the Buick to Ned Wilcox, the 18-year-old son of Curtis Wilcox, a former member of Troop D who was struck and killed by a drunk driver when Ned was very young. Ned hangs around the barracks, doing odd jobs; he has numerous questions about his father (who was obsessed with the Buick).

From A Buick 8's message is: life is unknowable, things happen for no particular reason, and we will not be given an answer to every one of our questions. In an Author's Note, King describes the book as "a meditation on the essentially indecipherable quality of life's events, and how impossible it is to find a coherent meaning in them". King says a book's message should "arise naturally from the tale itself", but in this case he hammers his basic point home over and over.

What if you're never able to solve for x? (page 123)

[Curt realized] that he was almost certainly never going to know what he wanted to know. (173)

There comes a time when most folks see the big picture and realize they're puckered up not to kiss smiling fate on the mouth but because life just slipped them a pill, and it tastes bitter. (173)

Sometimes there's nothing to learn, or no way to learn it, or no reason to even try. ... (179)

Nothing. In the end, that's what it comes down to. If there's a formula - some binomial theorem or quadratic equation or something like that - I don't see it. (198)

All he had was a lot of questions, and the naive belief that just because he felt he needed the answers, those answers would come. (212)

The world rarely finishes its conversations. (307)

The authors of The Complete Stephen King Universe call the novel a "subtle triumph". I disagree, though there is a solid short story tucked away in From A Buick 8. At 350 pages, however, the novel is far too long. King includes pages and pages about police procedure, taking great pains to illustrate the familial atmosphere of the Troop D barracks, but all of that is secondary to the main plot.

His tale is repetitious and dull. Several "lightquakes" are extensively described, although the same things happen during each one. Curt Wilcox ventures into Shed B (with a heavy rope tied around his waist in case his fellow officers need to yank him back out to safety) to conduct some experiments regarding the Buick not once, but several times. The creatures that "come through" the Buick's trunk are certainly disgusting, but they don't strike seem particularly horrific. King wants to make these otherworldly beings as repulsive as possible, but his descriptions seem half-hearted.

Along the way, though, there are a couple of descriptions that are pure King:

Matt Babicki's radio was an endless blare of static with a few voices sticking out of it like the feet or fingers of buried men. (89)

The sun, going down in a cauldron of blood ... (106)

If King had truly retired from publishing as he vowed to do while recovering from his accident, From A Buick 8 would have been his final non-Dark Tower novel. Thankfully, his extraordinary career did not fizzle to an end with this pallid offering.

Next: The Dark Tower V: Wolves Of The Calla.

Stephen King: Everything's Eventual (2002)

Stephen King's fourth collection of short fiction - subtitled "14 Dark Tales" - gathers up what feels like a lot of loose ends. Unlike his previous collections, Night Shift, Skeleton Crew, and Nightmares & Dreamscapes, all of these stories had been released before.

Five stories were first published in a signed limited edition called Six Stories, two were previously released on the audio book Blood and Smoke, and "Riding The Bullet" was the first mass market e-book release. Most interestingly, four stories are from The New Yorker, a magazine most readers might regard as an odd venue for King's work.

The two best stories in this collection - "All That You Love Will Be Carried Away" and "The Death Of Jack Hamilton" - are from The New Yorker, and have nothing to do with horror or the supernatural. King has done some of his best work when he has stepped outside his usual genres - Different Seasons is an obvious example - and these two tales showcase his talents as a storyteller.

"All That You Love Will Be Carried Away": Alfie Zimmer, a salesman of frozen gourmet foods, sits in a motel room near Lincoln, Nebraska, holding a revolver and thinking about suicide. Beside him is a notebook in which he has collected (over seven years) graffiti from the walls of public men's rooms. Alfie considers ways of disposing of the notebook, fearing being perceived as crazy when it is found. He eventually wanders outside, and contemplates the lights shining in a distant farmhouse.

"The Death Of Jack Hamilton": This brilliant narrative concerns the agonizing death of one member of John Dillinger's gang. Told in the first person by Homer Van Meter, who was in real life part of Dillinger's group, King nails the narrative voice perfectly. It never sounds as though there is a writer behind it. It's an inconsequential story, perhaps, but entertaining and well-executed.

"Autopsy Room Four": Howard Cottrell is bitten by a snake while looking in the weeds for his golf ball. Presumed to have suffered a fatal heart attack, Howard is in fact only paralyzed and unconscious. He awakens on the autopsy table in a morgue and realizes that he must somehow signal to the technicians that he is still alive before they begin cutting him up.

Also: "The Little Sisters Of Eluria" is a light, satisfying Dark Tower tale set after young Roland's adventures in Wizard & Glass and before we meet him on the trail of the Man in Black in The Gunslinger.

Despite the high points, King misses more often than he hits in this collection.

"The Road Virus Heads North" combines two ideas King has written about previously: a painting that both comes alive (Rose Madder) and changes its perspective ("The Sun Dog"). Amusing only for the details King throws in regarding the buyer of the painting. Richard Kinnell, the author of many "numbingly successful [horror] novels", lives in Derry in a mansion dubbed "The House That Gore Built". Mainstream critics compare Kinnell's excessive prose to "projectile vomiting on the page"; however, "most of those folks were ignoramuses, at least as far as his work went, and what was more, they treasured their ignorance".

"Riding The Bullet": Alan Parker, a student at the University of Maine, gets a message that his mother has suffered a stroke and is in the hospital, and he hitchhikes 120 miles to see her. One of the cars that picks him up is apparently driven by a recently deceased man. (That ride may be a dream, however.) The second half of the story concerns Alan's feelings about eventually losing his mother. King covered similar ground years ago (and with much deeper and personal emotions) in "The Woman In The Room" (Night Shift).

Other ideas - a haunted room in an old hotel ("1408") and a maniacal machete-wielding headwaiter in a cafe ("Lunch At The Gotham Cafe") - are too thin and cliched to truly work, despite King's admirable attempts to give them life.

Next: From A Buick 8.

Stephen King: Announces His Retirement (2002)

In January 2002, Stephen King, then 54 years old, told the Los Angeles Times that he was retiring from publishing books.

King explained he had a few books in the pipeline (Everything's Eventual, a collection of short stories, and From A Buick 8, which he had completed before his 1999 accident, and he wanted to finish the Dark Tower series.

"Then, that's it. I'm done. Done writing books. ... You get to a point where you get to the edges of a room, and you can go back and go where you've been, and basically recycle stuff. I've seen it in my own work. People when they read Buick Eight are going to think Christine. It's about a car that's not normal, OK? You say, 'I've said the things that I have to say, that are new and fresh and interesting to people.' Then you have a choice. You can either continue to go on, or say I left when I was still on top of my game. I left when I was still holding the ball, instead of it holding me."

King had also hinted at retirement back in 1998, after Bag of Bones was published, saying he feared drifting into self-parody.

The Onion weighed in:

Obviously, King never retired. Indeed, he barely slowed down.

In 2007, he explained his comments: "When I said to that lady from the L.A. Times I might retire, I was still recovering from the accident that I was in, I was in a lot of pain, and I was under the pressure of finishing The Dark Tower. At that point, retirement looked good. When the pain went away and The Dark Tower finished up, retirement started to look bad."

Still going strong at age 66, King will publish two novels this year (Mr. Mercedes in June and Revival in November).

Stephen King: Black House (with Peter Straub) (2001)

Seventeen years after co-writing The Talisman, Stephen King and Peter Straub reunited for a sequel. Jack Sawyer is a retired Los Angeles policeman now living in French Landing, Wisconsin. The small town is being menaced by a serial killer/cannibal, and Sawyer - initially reluctant to lend his prodigious talents to solving the case - eventually joins the hunt for the man nicknamed the Fisherman.

Black House is also an offshoot of King's Dark Tower series. The serial killer is also working for (and possessed by) an agent of the Crimson King. In exchange for special powers, including teleportation, the killer has agreed to turn over any special children that can be used as Breakers to weaken the Beams that keep the Dark Tower standing.

While much of Black House sounds and feels like a King novel, there are extensive literary flourishes, especially in the early chapters, that are likely more Straub's style. (Also, Straub is originally from Wisconsin.) The opening is similar to King's Needful Things, with a narrator taking us around the town, pointing out the geography and some of the residents. King later portrays the townspeople as extremely ghoulish as they arrive by the carload at an abandoned shack where the Fisherman has dumped one of his victims, hoping for a peek of something, before being turned away. "What kind of person sets off on a Saturday morning to take pictures of dead children?"

Black House started off strong enough, but the last third was a chore to get through. And since that's when the showdown with the serial killer occurs and Jack and members of the Thunder Five motorcycle gang venture into the infinite space of Black House and try to rescue a young boy from a life of slavery as a Breaker, that's a very bad sign. (Also, although the book is not a mystery, the identity of the killer - who has modeled his crimes on those of Albert Fish - is fairly easy to deduce long before it is revealed.)

King and Straub gives readers very little background information on Jack Sawyer, tossing in quick allusions to people, places, and events from The Talisman. Since settling in French Landing, Sawyer has done everything he can to forget his adventures crossing the country - and crossing over into the Territories - to find the Talisman. He will have to come to terms with his hazy memories, however, and re-visit the Territories again in order to solve this case.

The infamous and well-hidden Black House - "a place stacked with vileness and layered with secrets" - is actually portal to another world (though a different other world than the Territories):

In a very real sense, touring Black House is like touring the brain of a deranged madman, and in such a mental framework we can expect to find no plan for the future or memory of the past. In the brain of a madman only the fuming present exists, with its endless shouting urges, paranoid speculations, and grandiose assumptions.

Black House recalls the Marsten House from 'Salem's Lot, and through the many threads of the Dark Tower, King links Black House to two other novels. A Mr. Brautigan (Hearts in Atlantis) is mentioned as the leader of the Breakers and the word "opopanax" is mentioned numerous times (it appears in Wolves of the Calla, the 5th Dark Tower volume).

The title recalls Charles Dickens's Bleak House, but not having read the older book, I can't say if there are direct connections, beyond the fact that Jack Sawyer is reading the Dickens novel in installments to Henry Leyden, his blind friend.

Kevin Quigley writes that the literary allusion to Dickens "is not incidental; in fact, one particularly scary section in Black House parallels the foggy opening of [Bleak House]. Also recalling Dickens are the establishing chapters, which introduce the sprawling cast of characters." Entertainment Weekly's review states that "it's no coincidence" that the title echoes Bleak House, because of the book's size and scope and its large cast of characters. (That's really not much of a connection.)

Next: Everything's Eventual.

Harper's Latest Attack On Democracy: "Fair Elections Act"

Stephen Harper's latest assault on democracy is the Orwellianly-named "Fair Elections Act", which the Conservatives are trying to rush through Parliament with as little (or no) debate as possible. They recently killed an opposition motion to hold two months of hearings on the bill.

"We're talking about the rules for a federal general election," NDP Leader Tom Mulcair said during question period on February 24. "That's the foundation of our democracy. That's what they're trying to cheat on."

Far from making Canadian federal elections more fair, Bill C-23 – which Canada's Chief Electoral Officer has called "affront to democracy" – will likely disenfranchise large groups of voters while preventing the Commissioner of Elections from making full investigations into future cases of vote fraud.

Craig Scott, the Official Opposition Critic for Democratic and Parliamentary Reform, said Bill C-23 is "a concerted attempt to disenfranchise those with lower incomes or more transient lives with US-style voter suppression tactics".

Opposition groups state that C-23 violates Section 3 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which gives every Canadian citizen the right to vote. Jessica McCormick, National Chairperson of the Canadian Federation of Students, states the bill "aims to suppress the vote of groups that may not vote Conservative including students, Indigenous people, seniors, and people on low-incomes by eliminating the vouching system". The "vouching" system allows people who may not possess the necessary documentation to cast their vote if they go to their polling station with a friend or neighbour. Marc Mayrand, the Chief Electoral Officer, believes at least 100,000 Canadians would be disenfranchised if the vouching system is trashed.

While the Conservatives claim C-23 will "increase democracy", it would actually prohibit Mayrand from engaging in any public education or democratic outreach to groups that are less likely to vote. It would also eliminate Elections Canada's civics-outreach Student Vote Program.

After committing widespread voter suppression and fraud during the 2011 election, the Conservatives want to deny Elections Canada the power to compel testimony in fraud cases. C-23 would also place the office of the Commissioner of Elections Canada under the Director of Public Prosecutions, putting the agency's independent and non-partisan investigative powers under political party control.

While C-23 would prevent the commissioner of Canada elections from revealing that any investigation is under way, it would also give any member being investigated notification of such investigation, an unnecessary heads-up warning.

The Conservatives drafted Bill C-23 without any meaningful discussions with Elections Canada. The Tories' confrontational, resentful, and vindictive attitude towards Election Canada has been well-documented; as far back as 2000, Harper referred to EC officials as "jackasses".

Duff Conacher of Democracy Watch says the bill also "hikes donation limits, removes the ban on unlimited secret gifts to election candidates, and allows banks to make unlimited loans to candidates".

NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair stated that "it's unprecedented that a government would use its majority to shut down debate on fundamental changes to Canada's election law".

Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau said, "if we're willing to send international observers to see how the elections in Ukraine are going, we should probably be willing to send people across this country to look how our elections are doing here".

Harper's hostility to democracy is a sign of weakness. His pro-war, anti-environment, austerity-driven agenda does not have the support of the majority of people — so he has to resort to suppressing votes in order to get elected. This is masked by the fact that the Liberals share the Conservatives agenda and the NDP leadership has not provided an alternative. But movements across the country — against pipelines and in support of postal workers — can challenge Harper's agenda and expose the democratic deficit driving his voter suppression.

This article was written for Socialist Worker (Canada).

Stephen King: Dreamcatcher (2001)

Dreamcatcher was the first novel Stephen King published after his near-fatal accident in 1999. Because he was unable to sit at his desk for extended periods of time, he ended up writing the first draft of the novel by hand, in only six and a half months.

King states (in the afterword): "To write the first draft of such a long book by hand put me in touch with the language as I haven't been for years. I even wrote one night (during a power outage) by candlelight. One rarely finds such opportunities in the twenty-first century, and they are to be savored."

Dreamcatcher takes place over a few days in November 2001. A group of four old friends from Derry, Maine - Joe "Beaver" Clarendon, Pete Moore, Henry Devlin, and Gary "Jonesy" Jones - have gathered for their annual deer hunting trip at a cabin deep in the woods of the Jefferson Tract. There have been reports of strange lights in the sky - and things begin going wrong when they find a lost and disoriented hunter named McCarthy wandering through the woods.

McCarthy is in some serious distress - there is an alien presence growing in him that will be expelled only by moving his bowels (hence, the wonderful term for these invasive creatures: "shit-weasels"). King delights in describing McCarthy's (and a few other characters') odious farts and thunderous belches as the alien grows and moves within him: "brutal and meaty", with a "sulfurous rotten-egg odor", "a long, purring fart that sounded like ripping cloth", "a deflating rubber toy", "an untalented child blowing over a piccolo". One character's bad breath is "a mixture of ether and overripe bananas" and a belch sounds like "a factory machine which has been put under severe strain".

The men eventually learn that an alien spacecraft has crashed in the Maine woods and the surrounding area is now sealed off. Everyone in the area - residents and hunters - are rounded up and placed in a military camp, in an operation led by a military madman named Kurtz. Complicating matters is that a fierce snowstorm is on the way. Dreamcatcher is the story of how the aliens' desire to spread the virus across a larger area is eventually defeated. And it is up to the four men - who reunite with an old friend from their childhoods - to stop this murderous contamination.

So: Is Dreamcatcher the tale of five friends who must bond together to overcome an alien invasion? Is it a military/alien thriller? Is it a supernatural, multi-dimensional science-fiction tale with telepathic characters? It tries to be all three. And it has elements of It, The Tommyknockers, and "The Body".

Heidi Strengell, writing in Dissecting Stephen King: From The Gothic To Literary Naturalism:

Including both dream sequences and numerous shifts in time, the complex novel has three levels. It can be viewed as a science-fiction parody, as a tale of horror, and as a comment on the absence of responsibility.

Dreamcatcher never felt parodic to me, and despite the graphic descriptions of the cancerous "shit-weasels", it was neither horrific nor scary. Indeed, the race to prevent the alien virus from being dumped into a Massachusetts water reservoir unfolded almost in slow-motion. It was clear the aliens' plan would be thwarted; it was simply a matter of slogging through the pages to see how it happened.

I would agree with Strengell that King (once again, as he has several times throughout his lengthy career) highlights the government's lack of concern for its citizens and, in this novel, its willingness to murder hundreds of them to keep the true nature of the alien menace a secret. Commenting on both The Tommyknockers and Dreamcatcher, Strengell writes:

In doing so, he shows how technology for its own sake may not be progress at all and how little the government take responsibility for its citizens. By acknowledging that scientific progress has done little for humans as moral beings, King pleads for the restoration of the dignity of the human being.

Some other random notes:

Jonesy is an assistant professor of history at a small Boston college. He is a "lifelong connoisseur of horror movies, suspense novels, and mysteries" and was struck by a car earlier in the year (suffering injuries extremely similar to what King suffered). Having read elsewhere that King was on-point in his descriptions of Jonesy's pain and rehabilitation, I was surprised that there was so little of it in the novel.

In a nod to It, there are several mentions of how children often go missing in Derry. "There have been a lot of child disappearances here over the years ... but nobody talks much about it. It's as if the occasional missing kid is the price of living in such a nice, quiet place." That confused me, because I had thought, from reading It, that Derry was a disgusting town. Even in this novel, King says Derry was built on "what was once swampland shunned even by the Micmac Indians who lived all around it". (King also mentions Derry's "ancient and incredibly complex systems of drains and sewers".)

King is still capable of some great writing. When Henry Devlin inspires the captives to revolt against the military and attempt an escape, the narrative comes crackling to life, like a small fire after some lighter fluid has been tossed on it. The reader works furiously, taking in the words quickly, feverishly, as the action unfolds. King has always been good at describing utter chaos and the complete destruction of a compound, estate, town, country, etc. And King is an expert at showing the bonds of friendship between boys on the cusp of being teenagers, though his characterizations here remain a far cry from his best work: "The Body" and It.

Jonesy's body is inhabited (taken over, really) by one of the aliens, who Jonesy dubs Mr. Gray. Towards the end of the novel, King intimates that Mr. Gray never existed; he was simply a part of Jonesy:

Mr. Gray is the phantom limb you still feel, the one you could swear is still there. ... They never existed as actual creatures aliens, ETs. The grays as physical beings were always created out of the human imagination...

This raises several questions about King's narrative, since for hundreds of pages he has been writing as though the opposite was true. This - and other plot twists - gives a reader the impression that King is simply making up stuff as goes along, whether it jibes with earlier portions of the book or not. (Also, the use of telepathy between the characters is extremely convenient as characters can magically know things they have not actually experienced.)

Ultimately, the 617-page book is a dull mess. (One site ranked it #62 of King's 64 novels.) My biggest complaint is the extended Jonesy/Gray sequences do little to move the plot forward. King could have told this story in at least 200 fewer pages, perhaps 300 fewer.

The Stand and It are huge novels, and two of King's best works. (I also have a strange affection for the well-hated The Tommyknockers.) However, since the mid-80s, King's various doorstoppers - Needful Things, Insomnia, Desperation, and Dreamcatcher - have been a big disappointments. Instead, King has excelled only when writing on a smaller canvas: Dolores Claiborne, The Green Mile, and two-thirds of Rose Madder.

Next: Black House (written with Peter Straub).

Book Review: Building Sanctuary: The Movement To Support Vietnam War Resisters In Canada, 1965-73, By Jessica Squires

Building Sanctuary: The Movement to Support Vietnam War Resisters in Canada, 1965-73
(University of British Columbia, 2013)
By Jessica Squires

Many Canadians wish to think of their country as a peaceful nation, but that vision is an oversimplification, if not an outright fabrication. Author Jessica Squires writes that if Canada was ever a refuge from militarism, "it was a hard-fought and bitterly defended refuge as well as a contingent and partial one, at best".

Building Sanctuary is Squires's detailed academic study of the Canadian anti-draft movement and its fight to allow Vietnam War resisters from the United States to legally cross the border into Canada and apply for permanent residence in their new country. Squires relies on interviews with both activists and resisters, as well as newspaper accounts, police records, and government documents (both public and internal), to present a detailed history of the movement.

Squires defines a war resister in this context as "any American immigrant who came to Canada to avoid complicity in, or out of opposition to, their government's actions in Vietnam". Squires favours this broad, inclusive definition, because it takes in draft dodgers as well as deserters, and women who came north in protest of the U.S.'s murderous foreign policy.

As Squires expertly explains, support and acceptance of Vietnam War resisters in Canada was neither automatic nor unproblematic. While Canada encouraged immigration from the U.S. throughout the 1960s, the issue of draft dodgers coming north towards the end of that decade began to complicate things. While the U.S. was still regarded as a source of skilled workers, the Canadian government did not want to be seen as encouraging war resisters.

The first groups to offer assistance to Vietnam War resisters formed in late 1965 and early 1966 in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver, publishing pamphlets with information on hostel accommodations, tips on securing cheap housing and finding employment, information on immigration law, and how to apply for landed status in Canada. Many church groups and clergy also played an essential role, even if their church members did not support the cause. (Opponents complained about "unwashed cowards" and "long haired Johnnies with strong communist tendenc[ies]".)

In August 1967, Pierre Trudeau's White Paper on Immigration introduced a new points system for establishing the eligibility of potential immigrants. Applicants were awarded points in a variety of categories, including age, level of education, vocational training, occupational demand, and destination. Even with a system in place that was intended to eliminate bias from the process, there were reports of "conscious and explicit obstruction by immigration officers". Squires reports that false information was regularly given out at border crossings, airports, consulates, and immigration offices.

In early 1968, proof of military discharge was not required for applicants inside Canada, so deserters would come to Canada as visitors and apply for landed immigrant status once they were inside the country. In July 1968, the Trudeau government secretly ended this practice and allowed immigration officers to use their own "discretion" on whether to consider or disregard military status.

Squires notes that "internal departmental memos indicate that this regulation change was specifically intended to prevent deserters from entering Canada". In some cases, after refusing entry into Canada, Canadian officials then called U.S. border guards to inform them that a military deserter was on his way back. After this information became public - and the government was flooded with letters and telegrams of complaint (some of which Squires quotes) - the government relented and made the announcement in May 1969 that military status was irrelevant at the border.

Building Sanctuary also reports that most anti-draft groups were under constant surveillance for years by both the RCMP and local police forces, even after the border was opened in 1969. There were numerous raids on resisters and their supporters (searching for drugs was a common excuse). There were widespread assumptions in the movement that the RCMP shared information with the FBI; indeed, it appears that plainclothes FBI agents were allowed to operate on their own in Canada.

Squires also discusses some of the internal debates within the movement at the time, including whether some men were avoiding the draft because of anti-war sentiment or personal reasons, whether it was a better strategy for Americans to remain in the U.S. and work to end the war from there, and to what extent should resisters assimilate into Canadian society. One resister explains: "Emigrating to Canada was considered less heroic than going to jail - better than serving ... but still a cop-out". However, Joseph Jones, a draft dodger, states: "Anyone who presumed to judge how someone should resist was just plain ignorant."

The academic writing style of Building Sanctuary lacks the narrative drive of a conventional history, but it's an important work of Canadian political and anti-war history. As the movement to allow Iraq War resisters from the U.S. to remain in Canada begins its second decade, the hard work and successes of a previous generation of activists in shaping Canadian immigration policies can offer inspiration and hope.

This review was also published in Socialist Worker.

Stephen King: Hearts In Atlantis (1999)

According to the three authors of The Stephen King Universe, Hearts in Atlantis is King's "most ambitious literary novel ... an exploration of the many facets of the Vietnam War era and the way it has tarnished America's idea of itself".

Hearts in Atlantis is advertised as "new fiction" as opposed to "a novel". The book consists of two novellas and three short stories; it is a single narrative that spans 40 years and whose parts are linked by various characters.

The first novella, "Low Man in Yellow Coats", is set in 1960. Eleven-year-old Bobby Garfield lives with his mother in an apartment building in Harwich, Connecticut. In describing Bobby's friendships with Carol Gerber and John "Sully" Sullivan, King achieves the same warm, comfortable narrative he did in "The Body" (Different Seasons). Bobby befriends an older gentleman named Ted Brautigan, who moves into building's third floor apartment. Ted hires Bobby to read the newspaper to him and turns him on to various books, including "Lord of the Flies".

But this coming-of-age story takes an ominous turn. Ted also wants Bobby to keep watch around town for "low men in yellow coats", a group of people Ted is apparently on the run from. (Ted's background is connected with The Dark Tower series, and so the story eventually becomes more fantasy than Gothic.) When the terrifying low men finally converge on Ted and Bobby, the boy tearfully chooses to back down rather than fight. That decision is a harsh reality for Bobby to absorb; he may not be the person he thought he was. Also, there is an undercurrent of violence through the entire story. Bobby and Carol are menaced by three neighbourhood bullies (who later attack Carol with a baseball bat) and Bobby's mother is gang-raped by her boss and two other men during an out-of-town convention trip.

In "Hearts in Atlantis" (the novella), Pete Riley, a student at the University of Maine in 1966, becomes addicted to playing Hearts with his dorm buddies. Many of the boys forgo studying for these epic card marathons and miss numerous classes. Those that are on scholarships are in danger of losing them' being kicked out of college will greatly increase their chances of being drafted and sent to Vietnam.

King attended the same university during the same years as Riley, but how much of his own experience is in the narrative is unclear. I would venture that the account of seeing the first student with what looked like a "sparrow-track" on the back of his jacket - a peace sign - is probably close to the author's own experience.

King often refers to the games of Hearts in terms that could also apply to the war, an out-of-control event that is destroying the educational dreams of these boys: "the mad season had begun", "a kind of blind fatalism set in", "the suicidal pull of that third-floor lounge", "committing a kind of group suicide", "quitting the game was the only sane solution".

Pete becomes involved with Carol Gerber, who also attends the university and is active in the anti-war movement. Through her conversations, we learn a bit more about Bobby's childhood. And the three short stories bring the various threads up to the modern day.

In "Blind Willie", one of the boys who assaulted Carol went on to serve in Vietnam and witnessed various atrocities. By 1983, he lives in a suburb of New York City with his wife. Each day, dressed as a businessman, he commutes into the city, changes clothes, and begs for change near St. Patrick's Cathedral. He is consumed by guilt over what he did to Carol ("that occasion of sin has never left his mind") and has filled multiple bound ledgers with expressions of true regret ("penance is important to him").

In "Why We're In Vietnam" (a reference to Norman Mailer's 1967 novel Why Are We In Vietnam?), it's 1999 and John Sullivan is attending the funeral of a veteran he served with. At the funeral, he talks to his former commander, Dieffenbaker, at length about an incident in combat that could have easily devolved into another My Lai. Sullivan has never been able to truly leave his past behind, to truly leave Vietnam. Since the war, he has been haunted by an old woman that one of his fellow soldiers murdered during an attack on a village. While driving home from the funeral, he gets stuck in highway traffic, and suffers a fatal heart attack.

King seems disgusted with what much of his generation did with their anger and disillusionment. After their innocence was shattered during the 60s and early 70s, they simply gave up. Dieffenbaker tells Sullivan:

I loathe and despise my generation. ... We had an opportunity to change everything. We actually did. Instead we settled for designer jeans, two tickets to Mariah Carey at Radio City Music Hall, frequent-flier miles, James Cameron's Titanic, and retirement portfolios. ... You know the price of selling out the future, Sully? You can really never leave the past. You can never get over.

In "Heavenly Shades Of Night Are Falling", Bobby Garfield, now 50 years old, returns to Harwich for Sully's funeral. Carol is also there and we learn that she joined the Militant Students for Peace and was presumed dead after a faulty bomb set by the group killed several people. In truth, she changed her name and went underground. Unlike the other characters, Bobby and Carol each seem to have achieved some closure with their pasts.

In reading reviews of the book online, it seems that many readers felt the title novella was the weakest part of the book. I thought just the opposite. It shows that King can be an exceptional writer even when (or perhaps especially when?) he dispenses with his trademark fantasy and horror, although the fear and reality of being sent to Vietnam did not loom as darkly and intensely over the boys as I expected.

I enjoyed huge sections of Hearts in Atlantis a lot, but I also agree with the Chicago Tribune's review, which stated that the political and social concerns never truly resonate "because the horrors of the Vietnam War are never really confronted in a sustained manner, ultimately diminishing the book's power".

Next: Dreamcatcher.

Stephen King: June 19, 1999 (The Accident)

On the afternoon of June 19, 1999, ten weeks after the publication of The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, Stephen King was seriously injured (almost fatally) when he was hit by a minivan while walking along the side of a road in North Lovell, Maine. King, 51, was struck from behind when the van's driver was distracted and lost control of his vehicle.

Stephen King, On Writing:

The extent of the impact injuries is such that the doctors at Northern Cumberland Hospital decide they cannot treat me there; someone summons a LifeFlight helicopter to take me to Central Maine Medical Center in Lewiston. At this point my wife, older son, and daughter arrive. The kids are allowed a brief visit; my wife is allowed to stay longer. The doctors have assured her that I'm banged up, but I'll make it.

The lower half of my body has been covered. She isn't allowed to look at the interesting way my lap has shifted around to the right, but she is allowed to wash the blood off my face and pick some of the glass out of my hair. There's a long gash in my scalp, the result of my collision with Bryan Smith's windshield. This impact came at a point less than two inches from the steel, driver's-side support post. Had I struck that, I likely would have been killed or rendered permanently comatose, a vegetable with legs. Had I struck the rocks jutting out of the ground beyond the shoulder of Route 5, I likely also would have been killed or permanently paralysed. I didn't hit them; I was thrown over the van and 14ft in the air, but landed just shy of the rocks.

"You must have pivoted to the left just a little at the last second," Dr David Brown tells me later. "If you hadn't, we wouldn't be having this conversation." ...

My lower leg was broken in at least nine places - the orthopaedic surgeon who put me together again, the formidable David Brown, said that the region below my right knee had been reduced to "so many marbles in a sock."

The extent of those lower-leg injuries necessitated two deep incisions - they're called medial and lateral fasciatomies - to release the pressure caused by the exploded tibia and also to allow blood to flow back into the lower leg. Without the fasciatomies (or if the fasciatomies had been delayed), it probably would have been necessary to amputate the leg. My right knee itself was split almost directly down the middle; the technical term for the injury is "comminuted intra-articular tibial fracture". I also suffered an acetabular cup fracture of the right hip - a serious derailment, in other words - and an open femoral intertrochanteric fracture in the same area. My spine was chipped in eight places. Four ribs were broken. My right collarbone held, but the flesh above it was stripped raw. The laceration in my scalp took 20 or 30 stitches. ...

I came home to Bangor on 9 July, after a hospital stay of three weeks. I began a daily rehab program which includes stretching, bending, and crutch-walking. I tried to keep my courage and my spirits up. On 4 August, I went back to CMMC for another operation. When I woke up this time, the Schanz pins in my upper thigh were gone. I could bend my knee again. Dr Brown pronounced my recovery "on course" and sent me home for more rehab and physical therapy. And in the midst of all this, something else happened. On 24 July, five weeks after Bryan Smith hit me with his Dodge van, I began to write again.

Hearts in Atlantis was already in the publishing pipeline and was released in September 1999. At the time of the accident, King had completed From A Buick 8 and was in the middle of On Writing. Dreamcatcher would be the first novel he wrote post-accident.