Living the Gimmick (2022)

Retired pro 'rassler Alex Donovan just wants to run his bar in peace, but when his former tag team partner Ray "The Wild Child" Wilder shows up at his door, Donovan knows the drinks will flow and blood may spill. And if the boys wanna fight you better let em. But what's this?! Somebody wants Donovan's good buddy Ray DEAD! So much so that they're willing to blow Ray's brains out on Donovan's doorstep just to prove how serious they are at this murdering business. Donovan must have been blinded by some powder in the eyes or a heel manager distraction at ringside though, because he didn't get a clear shot of who the assassin actually was. Determined to get to the bottom of the case and equally determined to not let the police simply do their own investigation, Donovan sets out on a mission of vengeance to root out Ray Wilder's killer and bring them to justice... one sidewalk slam at a time.

It pains me to say that I struggled to get through this one. As evidenced by my review of Big Apple Takedown, I'm a big advocate of pro wrestling being featured in fiction. I feel like there's an untapped goldmine of potential stories you can get out of using pro wrestling as your main tableau to entertain fans of grapplers and gimmicks, but while Living the Gimmick is indeed a novel featuring pro wrestling as the backdrop, I feel that it isn't exactly written for wrestling fans. Allow me to explain my thinking here...

So much of what is described in the text of this novel by author Bobby Mathews are things that are already going to be well known to any wrestling fan worth their salt. And yet they are relayed to the reader at times in painstaking detail, as if to let an outsider in on the joke and fully explain what some of the insider lexicon actually means. That's why I have a hunch this novel is written primarily for crime and mystery fans who are complete neophytes to the world of pro wrestling or non-fans entirely. A wrestling fan today knows what a double cross is. A wrestling fan today knows what a run-in is. A wrestling fan today knows what a blade job is. These things are all doubly true in the internet smart mark era. At worst, some of the flashbacks we see to Donovan and Wilder's heyday in the waning 80's territory period that were supposed to set up potential suspects who might have enough of a grudge against Wilder to want to murder the dude decades later came across to me as cynical attempts to inflate the page count, such were the lengths of certain asides about pro wrestling minutiae and trivia.

I also found it incredibly strange that while the author has created his own fantasy world where one character is clearly meant to be a representation of Vince McMahon and another character is clearly meant to be a representation of Ric Flair and so on, there are occasional references to real life figures in wrestling history. It's frankly jarring to have all of these fictional counterparts and suddenly there's a reference to a real-life promoter like Paul Boesch show up in the text, or a reference to the Funks. Again, these are small things that a non-fan will never notice. My best guess is the author put the real-life names that the characters are based on into the text while he was writing drafts and then went through and replaced those names with their fictional counterparts later and perhaps forgot to replace a few names here and there. It's either that or he made the baffling decision to sprinkle a few real names in with the others, which in the immortal words of Hulk Hogan, "doesn't work for me, brother."

If you're looking at Living the Gimmick purely from the mystery and whodunnit angle, it does work a lot better. Donovan as a character works well as the inadvertent makeshift sleuth pressed into service for the sake of a fallen comrade in arms. He's got the same world-weariness and beatdown temperament as a grizzled cop style character without actually being a policeman. The main difference is, Donovan acquires his blackened soul from hard years on the road doing the pro wrestling circuit as opposed to hard years working a beat in a crime-ridden neighborhood. There is a mild sense of absurdity where instead of say, canvassing a neighborhood for clues regarding a crime as a police officer might in a more conventional mystery potboiler, Donovan is instead seen trawling through the locker rooms and back offices at a wrestling show searching for leads. This discord exists because the tone of Living the Gimmick is mostly on the serious side, leaning far more towards something like The Wrestler for inspiration than say, Body Slam or No Holds Barred.

For me, this one was a miss. (Or a Dusty Finish if you like.)

Batman (1989)

The Batman's arch-nemesis known as the Joker arrives on the scene in Gotham City to cause chaos and ensure you never rub another man's rhubarb. Hilarity ensues as a man dressed as a giant rodent and a man dressed as a killer clown trade fisticuffs across the city. Bam! Zok! Kapow! Hold on to your butts, boys and girls, it's time to dance with the devil in the pale moonlight!

Fantasy author Craig Shaw Gardner was no stranger to making a quick buck from the film novelization back in the day. Also penning novelizations for Back to the Future Part II and The Lost Boys, Gardner was probably a safe pair of hands to pick to write the novelization for 1989's Batman. There was no guarantee that Batman was going to be the marketing and merchandising juggernaut it eventually did become, but with Jack Nicholson attached to the project for a while and an in-demand Tim Burton directing, there were obvious signs, so this book coming to pass when it did should surprise no one.

After a night at the opera goes horribly wrong and turns Bruce Wayne into an orphan, the grown multi-millionaire cum entrepreneur cum philanthropist cum aloof playboy begins a crusade of fighting criminal scum across the streets of Gotham City disguised as the Batman. The Batman soon crosses paths with Jack Napier, second-in-command of a group of local mobsters with their hands firmly in the pockets of the Gotham City Police. A police raid on Napier and his men at Axis Chemicals turns into a chaotic shootout and although Batman tries to save as many lives as possible, he inadvertently causes Napier to fall into a vat of acid that causes horrible scarring and chemical burns. Napier emerges and dubs himself 'the Joker' and vows revenge on Batman, Gotham City, the police, his former mob associates, and anyone and everyone in between. Meanwhile, an astute photo-journalist named Vicki Vale finds herself drawn into covering the discord surrounding Batman and the Joker's war. Vicki can't quite put her finger on it, but the handsome millionaire Bruce Wayne seems to be connected to this story somehow...

As with many novelizations, what will intrigue diehard fans of the film are the little bits and pieces from whatever draft of the script the author was working from that were either cut from the film or excised altogether before shooting began. For instance, we have a sequence where Bruce Wayne slips on a ski mask in broad daylight to hide his identity and ziplines around Gotham to chase after the Joker and his goons at one point. The existence of such a sequence lends credence to the notion that director Tim Burton was heavily influenced by Frank Miller comics at the time, because Bruce in an impromptu ski mask disguise is something seen in 1987's Year One (and later used by Christopher Nolan in his own loose interpretation of Year One, 2005's Batman Begins). There's also an extended date scene with Bruce and Vicki Vale which includes the infamous horse riding scene that actress Sean Young, originally cast as Vicki, was practicing for when she injured herself and had to drop out of the film. None of this bonus content is essential to the story, but if you're a fan it's nice to have an expansion to a story that we're already familiar with.

And familiar you will be if you've seen the film. Most of everything else on offer in Gardner's book is a close interpretation of what you saw on screen. Batman and Joker fighting in the bell tower? Check. The Joker and his goons raiding the art gallery? Check. Batman being a doofus and revealing the Batcave and his secret identity to the first skirt that flashes her eyes at him? Check.

All of the above would normally be perfectly fine, but this is a novelization that struggles somewhat simply because of the medium it's trapped in. Certain things that make the film version of Batman so cool and so memorable are things that can't really be translated into the written word. One can't exactly channel the iconic Danny Elfman score or the kitschy Prince songs into a book. Nor can they accurately show off Tim Burton's visual flair with the art deco backdrops or the particular rain soaked patina of the Gotham City streets. The Joker's lines of dialogue come across as flat without Jack Nicholson's over-the-top panache in delivering them.

As such, unless you're someone who already collects older film novelizations, I would only recommend Gardner's Batman to absolute diehard fans who want to tear through this as a random curio of the era.

24 Declassified: Head Shot (2009)

Jack Bauer is sent to Colorado to deal with cultists, gunrunners, crooked cops, and stereotypical bikers from Hell - any and all of whom could be ready to take down a whole conference full of big business tycoons. And if you couldn't have guessed, it's gonna be another long day for Jack. Crazy vagrants! Shootouts in ghost towns! Hallucinogenic gas! Grizzly bears! My name is trashy book reviewer Dr. Mattaconda. And today... is the longest day of my life.

Well, despite the title, I found out rather quickly that Head Shot is sadly not a porn novel. Typical. Instead, it's part of a series of novels based off the hit espionage series 24, the show where everyone is double crossing everyone and regular characters are routinely killed off in order to save on paying the actors more for going past a certain number of appearances on screen... I mean... for the surprise factor! Yeah, that's it! It's long been a favorite show of mine and in all honesty is probably the last 'event' television series I actually watched as it was being transmitted. The novels were, to my estimation, a complete afterthought, were poorly advertised, and never seemed to generate much in the way of fan enthusiasm.

Set in a nebulous time before season one of the show, Special Agent Jack Bauer is dispatched to the mountains of Colorado to oversee potential security concerns surrounding a major business summit of high-powered industrialists. The mysterious disappearance of a cult making their domicile in the same proximity of the conference is bad enough, but then two ATF agents who were tracking said cult also turn up missing. On top of this, Jack's boss Ryan Chappelle has detected what he believes to be a stock market scam where someone with inside knowledge is rapidly selling off stocks of all the companies represented at the industrialist conference. Suffering from a bad case of altitude sickness and a killer headache, Jack prepares to unravel a conspiracy to destabilize the American economy and upend the status quo forevermore...

I can't find a whole lot of information on the David Jacobs that wrote this particular novel. He wrote a few of these 24 novels and he's also credited with a few true crime books, but other than that, information is scant. I suspect it may be a pen name and I might also guess he's British based on certain word choices ('trousers' instead of 'pants', for instance). I believe his take on the 24 novels are somewhat different than other authors in the series because instead of trying to follow an ensemble cast around like the television series did, Jacobs focuses strictly on the main character. This makes Head Shot read more like a typical adventure novel, which in my estimation is a good thing. In fact, I would go so far as to say despite the occasional moments of the laughable or absurd found in this book, if you could somehow rip out all of the 24 references and stick a schlocky piece of artwork featuring some beefsteak dude with a gun on the front cover, Head Shot would read as a perfectly acceptable men's action novel from the 70's or 80's.

Unfortunately, all of the 24 books I've read thus far seem to be shackled by the gimmicky notion of trying to mimic the television show's format of each episode taking place throughout an hour of 'real time', thus each chapter is supposed to be one hour of the day. Even as a diehard 24 fan, I don't think I would be offended if the format was abandoned for the novels and we just had traditional chapters that play out naturally. The reader really has to suspend disbelief in several chapter breaks to pretend the real time format is also at play in this book. For instance, one chapter ends with a character announcing to Jack that the bodies of two unfortunate agents were found. The very next chapter - the beginning of the next hour - sees Jack already at the crime scene doing his investigating thing. Studious fans have observed Jack and other characters making miraculous time on the freeways during the seasons of the show set in Los Angeles, but Jack is just straight-up teleporting in certain parts of Head Shot.

In keeping with the credo of the television series where any character could die at any given moment, plot armor be damned, Jack's initial partner, a member of the Denver branch of CTU, is quickly dispatched by the enemy. That character's replacement is a by-the-business blonde named Anne Armstrong who is perhaps more shockingly also dispatched after it seemed certain she was going to be Jack's backup throughout the rest of the novel. Instead, Jack's real backup arrives in the form of two rough and tumble bikers named Griff and Rowdy. No, I'm not making this up. Yes, it is incredibly goofy. But we get a little taste of what 24 might be like if it was crossed over with Sons of Anarchy in this novel, and that is a form of goofy I can get on board with.

I also learned in this novel that Jack Bauer takes his coffee black. I knew I always liked Jack for a reason.

I can't imagine anyone other than an ardent 24 fan ever picking this book up, but if by some chance you like the show and you're down with men's action novels, you might consider giving Head Shot a whirl.

Conan the Raider (1986)

Conan of Cimmeria is back and this time he's after a shiny trinket that could fetch him a king's ransom worth of gold. But in order to get his hands on his treasured prize, he'll have to join a band of sneaky tomb robbers, survive palace intrigues, and combat a vile prophet hellbent on raising an army of the dead. Snake wrestlers! Necromancers! Fat kings! S&M queens! Exotic dancers! Tomb raiding! Crom, if you do not like this review, then the hell with you!

Conan the Raider is one of eleven Conan novels produced by Leonard Carpenter, who has the distinction of publishing more Conan related material than even Conan's creator Robert E. Howard. I honestly don't know what the fan consensus is on Carpenter's work, although I can surmise he's not thought of as highly as the creator and some of the other pastiche authors, because I rarely see much discussion of his work on the series despite his prolific output.

Stranded in the desert after a botched attempt to recover the Star of Khorala, a jewel worth more than he could possibly imagine, Conan happens upon a band of tomb raiders led by the roguish innkeeper Otsgar and joins in their cause more out of survival rather than taking any great joy in skulking around ancient burial grounds for baubles. Also included in Ostgar's retinue are his second-in-command Isaiab, the firebrand youth Asrafel, and Ostgar's main squeeze, the exotic Stygian dancer Zafriti. After an Indiana Jones-style episode in a tomb rife with lizardmen, our group reconvenes at Ostgar's inn located in the city of Abaddrah. There, the group conspires to loot the nearly completed tomb of the cruel King Ebnezub... the only problem is, the corpulent Ebnezub isn't quite dead yet. It is, however, a poorly kept secret that the wicked Queen Nitokar is likely poisoning her husband every day, so the king's time is short. What the rumor mongers don't know is that Nitokar is aided in her scheme to take the throne by a dark prophet known as Horaspes, who has his own plans for Abaddrah once Nitokar is installed as solitary ruler. Conan stumbles onto a means to get himself hired on as a digger for Ebnezub's tomb, and the intrigues and turns only spiral from there...

One thing that immediately stands out about this novel is how episodic the structure is. Conan the Raider would make excellent serialized fare back in the heyday of pulp magazines, because Carpenter opted for several different stories all weaved into one longer narrative. I think this evokes Howard's originals more than a reader might first suspect. The initial foray into the desert tomb is akin to a James Bond film's pre-title sequence, then we have an adventure inside Ebnezub's almost-completed tomb, then we shift to a long sequence of Conan spirited away to the palace to perform as a gladiator and meet Ebnezub's legitimate heir Princess Afrit (who obviously has a built-in rivalry to the death with her stepmother Nitokar), then we have Conan actually working in the tombs and gathering inside knowledge of the layout and design of the place, then an escape and reunion with Ostgar's crew, the subsequent raid of Ebnezub's tomb, and a final act where Horaspes steps forward from the shadows and reveals what his sinister plan was all along. This was a novel where I appreciated the less traditional structure and was genuinely surprised at a few of the twists the plot took.

Concerning our hero, it's not the best characterization of pastiche Conan I've ever read, but it's not the worst either. I found Carpenter's Conan to be a little too wordy at times, doubly strange when you consider this is intended to be set not too long after Howard's short story "The Tower of the Elephant", which would mean Conan is still in his younger years and thus still learning the ropes and adjusting to the travails of the adventuring life. There are certain speeches Conan gives to the supporting characters that read more like a world-weary and experienced soldier of fortune than a younger man exploring the world for the first time. Personally, I wish some of the pastiche authors could have resisted the whole Conan chronology pushed by the likes of L. Sprague de Camp (among others) and simply presented us with standalone adventure yarns without concern for where the story truly fits in the character's chronology, but that's just me and my position on the endlessly autistic 'Conan timeline' debate.

Now onto the sex and violence front... well, I hate to disappoint you ravenous dogs, but Conan the Raider is more of a PG-13 affair, which again is not too far removed from Howard's style. There are plenty of battles and there are a few moments of extreme violence, but Carpenter doesn't revel in the gory or stay with it for too long. There's something truly terrible that happens to one minor character, but it occurs off-screen and the reader only briefly learns of the after-effects. The sex scenes are entirely glossed over and we're only treated to the 'smoking cigarettes in bed' kind of aftermath. There are some elements of mild eroticism on display; Carpenter must have had a thing for powerful women practicing extracurricular liaisons without their partners, because there are two of them in this novel. Queen Nitokar is clearly a sadist who openly taunts Conan about enjoying employing her whip on her playthings behind closed doors with the king's consent. And Zafriti is pretty much openly cuckolding Otsgar with some frequency, including at least once with Conan halfway through the novel. It's an interesting quirk in their relationship that Otsgar seems resigned to. I suppose Carpenter added it to either make readers think Otsgar was extra pathetic or that Zafriti was wanton and slightly wicked, but we kinda already knew these things from the moment we met them. The whole Otsgar/Zafriti/Conan situationship is made even more bizarre when we learn very late in the novel that another character has been pining after Zafriti from afar the entire time.

Nitpicks aside, I would definitely recommend Conan the Raider to anyone looking to explore some of the Conan novels if they've exhausted the originals. There are a few nadirs in the Tor series of Conan novels from what I remember, so this is one that easily sets itself aside from those thanks to its quick pace and sense of unexpected adventures. Hail and kill, Conan. Hail and kill.

Doctor Who and the Genesis of the Daleks (1976)

Cast your eyes back to a time when the Daleks were still scary! The notorious genocidal pepperpot monsters return to bring the Doctor more grief - and this time they have their madman of a creator in tow. Guns! Mutants! Climbing rockets! A Bohemian looking hero with a long scarf! Just add a few more pithy remarks and the usual wise-ass intro is finished. But have I the right... to review Genesis of the Daleks?

What can really be said about Genesis of the Daleks at this point? It often wins fan polls as the greatest Doctor Who television story of all-time (or at least ranks somewhere in the top five) and has been discussed ad nauseum over the decades as arguably the most important Dalek story since their introduction in the 1960's. Terry Nation's story is dark, exciting, and shocking even on repeat viewings. It's filmed like a high production action movie by David Maloney on an extremely limited BBC budget. And Tom Baker, still early in his long run as the Doctor, truly settles into the role and finds an extra layer of gravitas to add to his characterization. All things considered, Genesis is one of those lightning in a bottle moments in the show's history. So when it came time to do the novelization of this story, could any of the on-screen magic truly be captured by the written word or would it simply be a pale imitation?

Intercepted from a transmat beam at the end of his last adventure, a baffled Doctor emerges onto a fog-covered battlefield and meets with a shadowy emissary of the Time Lords who tasks the Doctor with a dangerous mission of utmost importance: travel back in time to a point in Skaro's past before the Daleks become a dominant force and either subvert their development or thwart their creation entirely. Upon accepting the mission, the Doctor finds his companions Harry Sullivan and Sarah Jane Smith have been sent along with him by the Time Lords. The three friends quickly become embroiled in the seemingly never-ending conflict between the Thals and the Kaleds - and also run afoul of the unfortunate 'Mutos' - the wasteland dwellers who are descended from the first wave of unfortunate souls mutated by chemical weapons at the outset of the war. However, nothing can prepare the Doctor for his first encounter with a scarred, wheelchair-bound Kaled scientist who has invented a seemingly indestructible living tank that will surely end the war with the Thals decisively...

For this read I went with the Pinnacle Books edition. In case you're unfamiliar, in the 1970's there was an attempt to bring the Doctor Who novelizations to an American audience shortly after the television show first started making appearances on various US based TV stations. Only ten novelizations were produced before Pinnacle canned the project, but the resulting books have nonetheless lived on as fun curios for Who enthusiasts and collectors. They are almost identical to the original Target Books novelizations, barring three things: one - new cover art and a new, unique Doctor Who logo that never appeared on any other merchandise throughout the show's history, two - a text introduction from science-fiction luminary Harlon Ellison in all of the books essentially introducing what might otherwise be an unfamiliar audience to the concept of Doctor Who and what the character entails (while also gleefully offending Star Wars and Star Trek fans like only a top-tier troll could), and three - various Americanizations of words or turns of phrase throughout the texts. The word 'trousers' becoming 'pants' is often cited as one such example, but the most infamous of these text alterations are the Doctor's bag of Jelly Babies becoming 'jelly beans' because American kids wouldn't know anything about Bassetts confectionary foods. It does kind of fascinate me to think that somewhere out there is a tiny subset of older American Doctor Who fans who's first exposure to the show was actually through these books.

Regardless of which version you're reading, Terrance Dicks is at the helm for this novelization, and his writing style is simply perfect for a fast-paced and action-oriented story like Genesis. In years past I used to eschew Terrance Dicks novels because I was a youthful snob who thought Dicks' writing was too basic and simple to offer anything of substance. Now older (but probably only slightly wiser), I understand why Terrance Dicks was so prolific in his day. Dare I say, Dicks is like the Elmore Leonard of science-fiction writers: he'll never use ten words in a sentence when only three or four will do. Brevity and pace are the cornerstones of his writing style. And that's what makes his novelization of Genesis of the Daleks a joy to read. You could easily blast through it in a long afternoon if you really wanted to. Even if you're like me and you've seen the television serial dozens of times and generally know what's going to happen, you may still find yourself rapidly turning pages to get to the climax.

Like many of the Who novelizations, there are some small deviations from the televised material: some longer fight scenes, some altered lines of dialogue, a brief glimpse at rejected Dalek designs, a scene between two of the supporting characters that was never filmed, and perhaps most tantalizingly, the incident which crippled Davros (a Thal nuclear strike) is given a brief mention here. Davros is arguably the main attraction of this book. Yes, he would later become something of a butt-monkey in the series (and apparently the current skinwalker version of the show that I refuse to acknowledge as legitimate won't even use him anymore because showing a villain in a wheelchair might upset a disabled person... or something? Excuse me while my eyes roll into the back of my skull...) but in his introductory adventure Davros is one mean, deranged, and obsessed son of a bitch. I particularly love the dialogue exchanges between Davros and the Doctor where their differences as both scientists and men are brought to the fore. And the Doctor inadvertently giving Davros knowledge of future events adds a brilliant wrinkle into an already well-layered story with unbelievably high stakes.

I haven't read all of the Target novelizations yet, but of the ones I've read so far, this one rates fairly high on the list. iIf you're only ever going to dip into a few of them, I would definitely recommend Genesis of the Daleks to be in that pile.

The Legacy (1992)

Dark elves, goblins, ettins, and more! Get ready to cast Magic Missile against the darkness, it's time for some Dungeons & Dragons themed fiction with your second or maybe third-favorite white haired dual wielding warrior: Drizzt.

Ready to be chronologically confused? The Legacy is technically the seventh novel by R.A. Salvatore featuring the exploits of the dark elf Drizzt Do'Urden, although it is the beginning of a new series of four novels known as the Legacy of the Drow. This series follows after the events of the Icewind Dale Trilogy chronologically. However, Salvatore wrote three novels known as the Dark Elf Trilogy after the Icewind Dale Trilogy was published that serve as a prequel series. Are you keeping up with this? I know I'm not. Can these fantasy authors just keep their shit together for a change? Regardless, seeing as how this is the start of a new series featuring the same cast of characters, one could probably start with The Legacy if they really wanted to, because the events of previous novels are routinely recapped by the author when necessary.

The drow elf edgelord Drizzt is on his way to Mithral Hall for a reunion with the dwarven king Bruenor Battlehammer and to attend the wedding of two former companions - the barbarian Wulfgar and plucky archer lady Catti-brie. Dubiously tagging along is the halfling thief Regis, meaning the whole gang from the previous adventures are back together again. But this reunion may be short-lived, for Drizzt's deranged sister Vierna is hellbent on capturing her wayward brother and sacrificing him to the spider goddess Lolth. Forming an alliance with the mercenary leader Jarlaxle and the assassin Artemis Entreri, Vierna leads her dark band through the subterranean tunnels underneath Mithral Hall. A clash between Clan Battlehammer and the drow elves marching upon dwarven lands now seems inevitable. Perhaps the wedding won't be happening after all...

I'd tried a Drizzt novel many years ago in my adolescent years and bounced off it extremely early on because it never seemed to grab me, but I still wanted to know what all the fuss was about with this character all these years later, especially since I've read and enjoyed a number of other books set within the Forgotten Realms series. Happenstance brought me to The Legacy, but to be honest I found it to be a bit of a chore to get through. I'd always heard that one of R.A. Salvatore's fortes was writing action scenes, but I found the non-stop minutiae of every battle to be absolute torture to sift through. The paperback edition I was reading was roughly 330 pages and I can almost guarantee if one were to strip this book of all of the myriad swordfights and army clashes you'd only be left with about a hundred pages of text. There's not a whole lot of meat to the plot here other than 'evil sister leads a dark band through some tunnels to get at her wayward brother'.

That's not to say The Legacy is a total waste, because it does have its moments. The character of Drizzt himself wasn't nearly as insufferable as I was led to believe he was (although you can clearly see the character has more than a little Elric influence about him). For me, the novel was carried by Drizzt's clashes with the assassin Entreri, who is utterly obsessed with besting Drizzt. The interplay between the band of villains was fun too. It's all too obvious the main players can't stand working with one another in their bid to capture Drizzt and it seems only a matter of time before one of them tries to defect and turn on the others.

What I didn't care for outside of the endless battle scenes were most of Drizzt's companions, in particular the girlboss Cattie-brie. She's written to be smarter and wiser than all of the males around her who have far more experience in war and she's apparently always right. So basically she's Rey in Disney Star Wars before that was even a thing. It's clear that the author has a thing for this character and, perhaps accidentally writing himself into a corner in previous outings by pairing her with the barbarian Wulfgar, wanted nothing more than to get the muscleheaded lunk out of the way so he could push Cattie and her annoying Irish accent towards becoming Drizzt's new waifu. Thus, poor Wulfgar literally gets a tunnel dropped on him without much fanfare in order to set the stage for a new romance.

As an aside, I think Salvatore also has a thing for killing off the brute characters by crushing them to death. I recall reading the first novel in the New Jedi Order series and facepalming as Chewbacca was killed off by having a freaking moon dropped on him. What's up with this recurring theme, Bob?

Anyway, I'm not sure if I'm going to delve into the next book in this series any time soon. Drizzt himself and his extraplanar panther friend are cool, but everything else around them in this novel was like a wight in D&D catching me with their energy drain. Not recommended.

Star Trek: Here There Be Dragons (1993)

It's the basement dwelling nerd from the 1990's ultimate fantasy - Star Trek meets Dungeons & Dragons! Gather the party - Riker the swordsman, Troi the buxom wench, Data the whip-wielding rogue, and Picard the bard. (Look at me, I made a rhyme.) Prepare thyself for the crew of the Enterprise to get medieval on your ass!

I mostly know of John Peel from his work within the Doctor Who range. He famously wrote Timewyrm: Genesys, the first novel in the Virgin New Adventures series, and was tapped to pen novelizations for some of the early Terry Nation Dalek stories such as The Chase and The Power of the Daleks in the 90's. So venturing into Here There Be Dragons I was interested to see what Peel could do for another storied sci-fi franchise.

While on a routine cataloguing expedition of a nebula, the Enterprise encounters a pleasure vessel that bizarrely opens fire on the Federation ship before self destructing. An escape pod reveals the only survivor from the cruise ship to be a long-haired rogue who got stuck with the name Castor Nayfack - presumably when the name generator website his parents were looking at crashed. Mr. Nayfack claims to be an undercover Federation intelligence agent tracking a group of big game hunters poaching large reptilian creatures said to resemble dragons from ancient Earth's mythology on a remote class M planet located inside the nebula.  Nayfack informs Picard that the planet is populated by humans apparently scooped up from 13th Century Germany ahead of the Black Death and placed on this remote world by the Preservers. Unable to resist a mystery and an apparent visit into a version of Earth's past, Picard leads an away team onto the surface to the settlement known as Diesen. Picard's team is only in Diesen for mere minutes before Nayfack gives them the slip and Graebel - the local black market man posing as an honest wine merchant - has drugged them and is preparing to sell the team into the slave trade. However, it is quickly revealed that Picard suspected treachery from Nayfack's too good to be true storytelling all along, as a second away team led by Riker materializes and begins following the tracker covertly placed on Nayfack's person by Dr. Crusher...

So it's not quite a fantasy novel as may have been initially teased by the setup, but many of the trappings of generic fantasy are there, including evil rulers, grim castles, dank dungeons, and the aforementioned 'dragons'. The dragons are revealed to be less the flying and fire-breathing variety and more like giant-sized cousins of the Komodo dragon, but they turn out to be a deadly obstacle nonetheless. As we get deeper into the novel, we discover the game hunting angle is only one aspect of criminal enterprise carried out by the gang Nayfack belongs to. This gang of ne'er-do-wells is also running a scam in the art world too - selling off goods purported to be from medieval Europe as artifacts to otherwise clueless collectors across the galaxy. For some reason, both the plot and the medieval flavoring of Here There Be Dragons reminded me of certain episodes of Stargate SG-1 where the SG-1 team would inevitably meet a human society still stuck in the distant past on a planet that looks remarkably like the forests of British Columbia.

As in many episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, there is a B-plot included here as well. Perhaps realizing a clash with a gang of thieves to be a relatively low stakes affair, the author included a subplot about the gang's leader bombarding the Enterprise with gravity bombs that threaten to tear the ship apart, which the likes of Geordi, Worf, Dr. Crusher, and Barclay have to deal with.

Yes, this is apparently a rare Trek novel featuring both semi-regulars Lieutenant Barclay and Ensign Ro as part of the main cast of characters. For the most part, Barclay is portrayed as the goofy and anxiety ridden geek from this era of TNG, but Ro on the other hand... I'm thinking John Peel must've had a thing for Ro's actress Michelle Forbes, because not only is he keen to point out how attractive other characters think she is (Riker I can see, but Picard would not give a shit), but when Picard's team is taken in by the slavers, Ro is separated from the others and sent to the evil Duke's private chambers to be kept as a sex slave. No, seriously... Ro literally mulls over her potential future as a living "sex toy" at one point. Now, this is still in a mostly PG-era of Star Trek, so nothing too terribly explicit or raunchy is allowed to happen, but Peel makes sure the reader knows Ro is stripped naked and given nothing but a too-short and too-tight dress with no shoes or underwear to parade around in for most of the rest of the story. I guess if you're looking for some good Ro fan service gooning material this book will be right up your alley.

We also learn in this novel that it's not just Sherlock Holmes that Data has an obsession with, it's also Indiana Jones, as he manages to snag one of the slavers whips and does some android ass kicking with weapon in hand. The part in the aftermath of battle where Data begins to autistically pontificate about the history of 20th Century film and Indiana Jones in particular and Picard facepalms and rudely cuts him off to save himself from a migraine is probably the most on the nose example of Peel perfectly capturing these characters in prose form.

I had a good time with Here There Be Dragons and found Peel's fast paced, no nonsense prose to work in accord with the Star Trek formula. Not only would this have made for a good standalone episode of the TV series, but it's a story that could have conceivably worked within the show's budget and special effects capabilities at the time. (The dragons would probably have to be dodgy CGI, but that was to be expected on occasion.) I give this one a Captain's commendation and recommend it be enjoyed alongside a cup of Earl Grey. Hot.