Icebreaker (1983)

Bond is sent to the snowbound reaches of Finland to team up with operatives from the CIA, Mossad, and the KGB in order to prevent weapons from reaching the hands of a socialist terror group looking to bring about a new world order. But wait! There's a double agent on the team who might be working with the terrorists! But wait! There could be another double agent on the team who might be working with the terrorists! But wait! There could be a triple agent on the team who only wants you to think that they're a double agent who might be working with the terrorists! But wait! The whole fucking team might be double agents who might be working with the terrorists! Ah, to hell with it, here's a snow plough chase scene! Da-da-DA-DA!

Here it is, ladies and gentlemen: the Icebreaker drinking game: take a shot every time John Gardner uses the word 'acid' or 'acidly' to describe someone speaking. Take a shot every time John Gardner uses the word 'slewed' to describe a vehicle in motion. Try not to die of alcohol poisoning.

I seem to remember enjoying this book many years ago when I originally read it (or at least regarding it as one of the better Gardner Bonds I'd read), but upon reaching the third novel in my amazing John Gardner 007 re-reading marathon, I found myself turning the pages of a rather ho-hum spy novel with little in the way of thrills or excitement.

I enjoyed seeing Bond in an arctic setting for a change of pace and it's evident John Gardner actually visited some of these spots in Finland for added descriptive flair, but just about everything else in Icebreaker is a big miss for me. The main baddies being a bunch of neo-Nazis trying to install a new wannabe Hitler as supreme leader had to be a tired trope even in the 80's when this thing was written, and the amount of ridiculous double and triple crosses from the secondary characters is enough to make a Mission: Impossible film blush.

Bond himself is less like the maturing spy Gardner tried to establish in his first two novels and turns into a bit of a boob, stumbling from the clutches of one double crosser to the next and seldom in control of anything. Here he's like Michael Caine's Harry Palmer character without any of the wit and he only escapes or saves the day because of happenstance instead of using his spycraft, combat prowess, or any of his detective skills. There's a torture sequence that is quite (pardon the Mr. Freeze style puns) chilling, but the impact is undercut and horribly unrealistic to have Bond wake up and be good as new a few pages later without suffering any long-term frostbite injuries. The poor bastard's balls would have fallen off, is what I'm saying here.

I will also point out the amount of space dedicated to the Saab Turbo and all the various bells and whistles the vehicle possesses makes me believe Gardner was definitely receiving some kind of annual stipend from Saab themselves. There's no way the author believed this grandad car was genuinely appropriate for what is supposed to be a suave gentleman spy like James Bond.

The first dud in the Gardner Bond series.

The Last Wish (1993)

Geralt - an edgy, mysterious white-haired swordsman with a dark side - battles against demons, vampires, assassins, mercenaries, and clichés while fighting off a bevy of Hot Topic babes after the mutagens in his pants if ya know what I mean and I think you do. But never mind all that! How about a round of cards? Gwent, specifically.

And so we come to Andrzej Sapkowski's Witcher series, the Wal-Mart Great Value brand of Michael Moorcock's Elric of Melniboné series. While the specter of plagiarism has surrounded Sapkowski's work over the last several years -  let's just say there are more than a few passing similarities between Sapkowski's Geralt and Moorcock's Elric - it ultimately did not hinder my enjoyment of The Last Wish. Yes, it's slightly annoying that the author seems to acknowledge every other luminary of fantasy fiction as an influence except the guy he appears to be the most influenced from, but hey, he's not the only one to borrow from one of the best.

Bulwarked by a clever Chaucer-esque frame story, The Last Wish is a collection of short stories Geralt regales the reader with as he convalesces after a life-threatening injury at the hands (er... claws?) of a monster. Some of my favorites include "A Grain of Truth" - in which Geralt encounters a cursed bandit and the aforementioned vampire and pulls a dirty trick in order to break the curse afflicting the bandit - and "The Edge of the World" - in which Geralt and his companion Dandelion encounter fae creatures and witches in an eerie countryside setting. The prose eschews the grandiose in favor of uncomplicated brevity. Whether this is by design or a result of the original text being translated over from its original Polish language, I couldn't say, but in a genre rife with pretension, some simplicity in the writing style is usually a breath of fresh air.

Something that perhaps sets Sapkowski apart from the Moorcock comparisons are the stories of The Last Wish lean into a lot more dark humor, presenting what some might consider a satire of traditional fantasy fiction. Classic fairy tales are referenced often, yet their expected twists and resolutions are often inverted. The women are not always the damsels and fair maidens of fantasy yarns but power-hungry and selfish schemers. The protagonist is not a handsome, fearless hero ready to throw down for king and country, but a scarred, grumpy, blue-collar soldier of fortune who only does the monster slaying gig to earn enough coin to shelter himself and feed his alchemical addictions.

Definitely worth a look if you're curious or if you've already read Elric and you just don't have enough magic-wielding albino edgelords on your reading list.

Doctor Who: The TV Movie (2021)

The Doctor is tricked by his oldest enemy - the Master - to land the TARDIS in a Canadian city San Francisco, where he is gunned down by some hoods with shitty trigger discipline. After regenerating into the guy from Withnail and I, the Doctor recruits a pretty young lady (gee, who would have guessed?) and formulates a plan to stop the Master from destroying the world. Motorcycles and Y2K hysteria abound! Would you like a jelly baby?

Because I fell off Doctor Who fandom for several years once it started to become Doctor Woke, I had no idea Target Books were publishing reprints of old Doctor Who novelizations until I recently ran across some by happenstance at a local bookstore. I picked up a few because I'm a cheap whore for nostalgia, and the first one I tore into was Gary Russell's The TV Movie - which I later discovered is an altered, souped up version of the original 1996 novelization which had the even more creative title of The Novel of the Film.

I suppose a word about the Doctor Who TV movie is in order before I proceed with talking about the novelization any further. Well... it's certainly a thing that happened. My stance on Doctor Who is that the series ended definitively in 1989 and never really returned. The original novels and later the Big Finish audio dramas kept the spirit of the series alive in an expanded universe format, but what we received in 2005 may have been called Doctor Who, but it was now loud and hyper-active and tended to eschew science-fiction in favor of emotional wankery. (And I won't even comment on the war crimes committed once Chris Chibnall got his claws into the show.) In between the actual series of Doctor Who and the pretender series we had this strange one-off television movie with all kinds of Americanized compromises on a decades old British institution. Of course it was never going to work. Even with the rose-tinted glasses on, it's still a tough watch all these years later. But there are moments of greatness. Okay, maybe that's a stretch. There are moments of potential greatness. Okay, that could be a stretch too. Well... there are moments.

This reprint has a chance to improve upon some issues contained within both the TV movie itself and the original novelization. Yep, it wasn't just the tele-movie that was a clusterfuck. The book was based upon an earlier draft of the script, which meant by the time it was released to the public there were quite a few discrepancies between the pages of the book and the events on-screen. So with the 2021 version we have a lot of lines of dialogue cleaned up to be more in line with the film and some minor continuity errors corrected. We also get a little mini-adventure with the Seventh Doctor actually collecting the Master's ashes on Skaro and comically evading a Dalek sentry while doing so. However, I think the one change most fans will be happy that this retooled version of the novelization rectified is the biggest flub from the tele-movie - you know exactly what I'm talking about, it's the stupid "half-human" line - which is now re-framed as the Doctor telling a joke. A near-perfect fix.

I actually enjoyed this book. The prose is about what you'd expect from an author highly influenced by the breezy style of Terrance Dicks and while it's nothing to really sink your teeth into, sometimes you're just looking for one of those carefree reads. I still think the plot is pretty threadbare and Grace, the Doctor's de-facto companion for this adventure, ultimately foils the villain's scheme by messing with some wires instead of the Doctor doing something clever or heroic to save the planet, but these are failings of the original script this book is based upon. There's still some moments of gravitas to savor, such as the Doctor trying to return to reality after a particularly traumatic regeneration or the horror scenes of the paramedic Bruce becoming the Master and then coldly offing his loving wife. If there's one thing I did genuinely enjoy about the TV movie, it's Eric Roberts hamming it up as the Master, so I appreciated all of his theatrical dialogue in this novel.

Dragons of Autumn Twilight (1984)

The Companions - who are in no way to be confused with the Fellowship - embark upon an epic quest to retrieve magical holy MacGuffins in order to set about restoring the True Gods to the world of Krynn. They then embark on an even more epic quest to Pax Tharkas, a fortress that should be the name of a power metal band. At Pax Tharkas, the Companions will engage in a deadly face-off with one of the architects of Krynn's darkest days, the bad hombre Dragon Highlord known as Verminaard. Roll for initiative!

So it's been quite a few years since I've read the first Dragonlance tome, Dragons of Autumn Twilight by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman. Truth be told, I don't recall being too high on this book. When it comes to all of the various Dungeons & Dragons settings (from the classic era when the game was still good, mind you), I don't think I ever quite 'got' the Dragonlance setting. I was definitely more drawn to the gothic horror of Ravenloft, the weirdness of Planescape, the post-apocalyptic stylings of Dark Sun, or even the regal pedigree of Greyhawk. What exactly defined Dragonlance? What was its gimmick besides magic lances that kill evil dragons and the vague Mormon overtones? These were the kind of things my younger self wrestled with and what presumably helped keep me away from the series.

I recently had a hankering to give the book another try though and, while I still don't think Autumn Twilight is anything remarkable in the fantasy genre, I at least enjoyed it slightly more than my initial reading all those years ago. I'm told the series does develop into something more interesting and better written as it goes on, but I believe this initial foray into the Dragonlance setting has its share of teething problems, although there is a certain charm to the proceedings too.

It's no secret this novel was based upon real-life D&D sessions ran by Weiss and Hickman and there are plenty of times during Autumn Twilight where, if you have a decent amount of role-playing game experience, you can tell it's a D&D session being transcribed to the page. Sometimes a character you think you have a handle on will make a boneheaded decision or experience some exceedingly bad luck during an intense battle, which screams 'the player of this character fucked up and rolled poorly'. As silly and annoying as this can be at times, it also contains some of that charm I alluded to, because what D&D nerd hasn't been there to either cause or witness a truly epic botched roll of the dice?

Where the book really shined for me this time around was in the character of Tanis. Sure, most fans of this series love emo-boy magician Raistlin, but Tanis is the Captain Kirk of the bunch, and maybe it was something I couldn't appreciate as much when I was younger, but now I can empathize with Tanis on just how much babysitting and putting up with bullshit he has to go through as the de-facto leader of the Companions and the constant peacemaker between the petty squabbles that seem to constantly flare up. He also has a little Chuck Norris style beard action going on, has a human babe and an elf side chick, and later on in the novel gets a cool magic sword. If you're a man of taste like me then Tanis has to be your guy.

What hurts Dragons of Autumn Twilight is both its sometimes flat prose and how beholden it appears to be to Lord of the Rings. It's not a note-for-note rip-off, but there are enough similarities - from the party composition to the general plot overview of 'take mythical magic item into dark land to do X' - that it makes everything a little stale and pedestrian. You might be wowed if this is one of your first fantasy novels, but if you've been around the block with the genre, nothing here is going to floor you.

I can't in good conscience give this a high rating, but it's 'kinda recommended' by me, particularly if you want to get into Dragonlance and see where everything began.

Big Apple Takedown (2006)

World Wrestling Entertainment chairman and paralegal connoisseur Vince McMahon is recruited into the NSA along with a team of top grapplers - John Cena, Triple H, Batista, Torrie Wilson, and Chavo Guerrero - to take down a big-time meth lab whose funds are being used to finance terrorist activities. I swear this is a real plot for a real book and I am not under the influence of any narcotics as I type this.

Books like Big Apple Takedown are one of the reasons I started doing these reviews in the first place. Because why, oh why, does this book even exist? Who exactly had the bright idea that a spy novel featuring a crack team of pro wrestlers carrying out Mission: Impossible style antics would have any kind of audience? It's not exactly written for youngsters because have you seen Torrie Wilson's tits emblazoned across the front cover? And it's not exactly written for a sophisticated adult audience because did you just read the above plot synopsis?

As far as the cast, we have Vince McMahon as the M character giving out the mission. Triple H is sort of the main Ethan Hunt type character. John Cena is the undercover guy. Torrie Wilson is the distracting eye candy. Batista is the rookie agent. And Chavo Guerrero is the Q man-in-the-van style tech expert. Because, as we all know, Chavo is an avid gamer. Right? Remember that particular piece of knowledge popping up on Monday Night Raw every week??? The wrestlers not having anything close to either their real-life personalities or their wrestling characters' personalities tells me the author has likely never actually watched a wrestling match in his life.

The problem here is with an absolutely absurd set-up like this, Big Apple Takedown should be a glorious so-bad-it's-good dumpster fire. The premise of a bunch of wrestlers embarking on an undercover superspy career has amazing potential for a cheesy good time. Instead we have this incredibly bland and generic romp that just kind of meanders for a while, gives us a few tepid action scenes, makes us cringe with bad dialogue, and then it's over. If I was author Rudy Josephs (who I refuse to believe is a real person), I would be ashamed of myself for failing to deliver any decent fight scenes in a novel starring pro wrestlers as your protagonists. It's kind of implied in what they do for a living that they should be good at fighting, no? We should be getting the literary equivalent of "Rowdy" Roddy Piper's fight scene in They Live with this many beefy men featured as main characters.

Perhaps the only highlight of Big Apple Takedown is a cameo towards the end where "Stone Cold" Steve Austin shows up, whoops some ass, and leaves. But it just makes me think we could have had a much better spy novel with Stone Cold as secret agent 3:16. It'd be even better if it was written by Steve Austin too.

For Special Services (1982)

Secret Agent 007 puts on his cowboy boots and heads to Texas to lock horns with an ice cream magnate (no, I'm serious!) who may or may not have revived Bond's old enemies - the SPECTRE organization. There's a car race, a woman with only one breast, a bizarre subplot where Bond is brainwashed into believing he's an American army general, and giant snakes. Whew, lad. Da-da-DA-DA.

Okay, so in my review for John Gardner's first Bond outing I gave praise to the author for not trying to ape Ian Fleming too much. However, Gardner's second outing takes things in a much different direction. While he's not trying to emulate Fleming's writing style, Gardner does turn For Special Services into something of a 'greatest hits' of Ian Fleming: we have Bond being undercover with the villains, an exotic fantasyland setting (the villain's ranch), the return of SPECTRE, Bond teaming up with a Leiter (albeit Felix's daughter Cedar), a load of gadgets, Bond besting the baddies at some kind of sporting activity (in this instance, auto racing), villains with grotesque disfigurements and physical defects, and a last minute plot twist that anyone half-awake could telegraph at least a hundred pages prior. Even the title itself - For Special Services - is a deep cut reference to a revolver that was gifted to Ian Fleming in the 1940's.

This novel seems to have a rather appalling reputation amongst fans of literary Bond, and some of it has to do with the villain being in the ice cream business. I suppose the idea is not exactly menacing or sinister for a potential Bond villain at face value - and it might even be a little silly, but it really didn't bother me. What matters is that the character of Markus Bismaquer uses his vast sums of wealth to collect art - specifically rare prints - in his spare time, since this is the hook to get Bond involved with him in the first place. Yeah, he could have been a rich businessman in just about any field, but given this is a greatest hits piece, I think Gardner may have tapped into Fleming's penchant for the peculiar with this decision.

The other major issue fans have is with a revelation towards the very end of the novel, where Felix Leiter essentially 'gifts' his friend James Bond with the uh... 'special services' of his daughter Cedar. A lot of this bellyaching comes from contemporary readers who are often looking for things to be perpetually outraged about and then try to 'cancel' because they are joyless homunculi with nary a creative bone in their bodies, buuuut.... I have to begrudgingly admit they might have a point here. Look, I'm a weirdo and I can get on board with some pretty strange and outlandish stuff, but why does this segment of the novel read like Felix pimping out his own daughter? There's also presumably a decent age gap between Bond and Cedar which really doesn't help this scenario feel any less creepy.

Despite this little bit of ickiness, For Special Services is still an enjoyable romp regardless if much of it has been done before. I actually liked it more than License Renewed, despite its lowly reputation.

Dan the Destructor - Barbarians of the Storm - Book I (2022)

Dan - an unassuming pussy from the Kingdom of South Florida - is zapped through a portal to another world and must team up with barbarian badass Fenrik in order to save the world from an evil sorcerer and maybe, just maybe, find a means of getting himself back home.

Dan the Destructor is a book that does not fuck around. We get the briefest of set-ups and then it's immediately into the adventure. I admit to being slightly thrown off by the present-tense style author Rob Rimes opted for here, but that feeling only lasted a page or two. The present-tense prose actually works in the book's favor and helps the story maintain its no nonsense quick pace. What we are left with is the epitome of a page turner.

In recent years I've become a big fan of creators who can successfully combine a bit of fantasy with science-fiction and still make their story work, so something I immediately appreciated about the Barbarians of the Storm setting Rob Rimes has created is he has zero fear of genre-bending. Barbarians, magic, undead fiends... it all co-exists with big guns, time portals, and post-apocalyptic brio. I can also appreciate how inserting what are ostensibly a few contemporary Earth characters into the mix allows the occasional well-placed pop culture reference to slip into the dialogue, be it pro wrestling or Death Wish 3 (the superior brand of Death Wish, I might add). I was half-expecting a cameo from the Beastmaster or Yor at a few points during the story...

Humor is also prevalent throughout Dan the Destructor, but it never overstays its welcome. For every moment of near-slapstick, there's a brutal fight scene to temper the tone. I would be remiss to not mention an extra short story at the end of the book that serves as a backstory for a character introduced towards the end of the adventure. This story leans even heavier into the brutal side of the scale and certainly concludes things on a strangely satisfying bloodthirsty note.

Perhaps the only minor quibble I can find is this story definitely has a case of sequel-bait syndrome. Of course, it's literally advertised as book one in the title, so I can't complain too much, but Dan the Destructor is obviously the start of a greater narrative and won't exactly be good standalone reading. As I said, it's a minor quibble and if you're anything like me you'll already be ordering the rest of the series before you're even finished with Dan the Destructor.