Guilty Pleasure No. 101: The Executioner Series (by Don Pendleton)

Posted on January 27, 2026 by Arleigh

The Executioner series by Don Pendleton is one of those long-running action sagas that practically defines the phrase “guilty pleasure.” Kicking off in 1969 with War Against the Mafia, it introduces Mack Bolan, a Vietnam veteran whose homecoming turns into a nightmare and pushes him into a one-man war against organized crime. With an astonishing total of over 600 books across the main series and its spin-offs, it stands as one of the most prolific runs in pulp fiction history, delivering a steady diet of ambushes, car bombs, and last-stand shootouts, all orbiting a hero who lives somewhere between soldier, avenger, and urban legend. It’s even seeing a resurgence lately, with many original titles now available as e-books through Open Road Media, drawing in a new wave of digital readers hungry for retro action thrills.

The hook is simple and primal. Bolan comes back from Vietnam to discover his family destroyed by Mafia loan sharks, their lives shattered by debt, intimidation, and violence. The man who survived jungle warfare as a sniper becomes a domestic insurgent, redirecting the tactics of war onto American soil. In War Against the Mafia and the early novels, there’s a grim, almost workmanlike edge as he stalks mobsters through streets and back alleys, treating cities like new combat zones. Chapters move quickly, with Pendleton leaning into clear, muscular prose: weapons described with fetishistic precision, tactics laid out like field reports, and action beats that rarely pause for introspection longer than a sentence or two.

Those first runs of books form a surprisingly cohesive arc. Bolan’s war starts local and then scales outward: first the hometown syndicate, then larger crime families, then international networks and political entanglements. Titles like Death Squad, Battle Mask, and Miami Massacre escalate the conflict, dropping Bolan into fresh arenas—new cities, new bosses, new layers of corruption—without ever really changing the fundamental formula. Each volume is basically a new operation: recon, infiltration, explosion. There’s comfort in that clockwork repetition, especially if you’re coming to the series for the thrill of seeing how Bolan will dismantle this week’s nest of villains, a pattern that sustains all 600-plus entries.

As pulp entertainment, the series doesn’t pretend to be anything but what it is: ruthlessly efficient action storytelling. Bolan isn’t written as a richly conflicted psychological study; he’s a vector. He thinks tactically, talks sparingly, and acts decisively. When he pauses to reflect, it’s usually to reaffirm his personal code—his obligation to protect innocents, his hatred for predators, his sense that the “jungle” followed him home from the war. That stripped-down approach makes the books read almost like mission logs. You don’t linger with him; you move with him, from weapon cache to kill zone to escape route.

The “guilty pleasure” part comes from how unapologetically the series indulges in its own extremes. Villains are drawn in thick strokes: sadistic enforcers, greedy bosses, corrupt officials, each more deserving of a bullet than the last. Bolan is judge, jury, and firing squad, and the narrative rarely questions whether that’s a good thing. The violence is frequent and often spectacular—blown-up cars, shredded safehouses, street battles that leave staggering body counts. It channels the same energy as grindhouse action cinema and ’70s vigilante films, but in prose form that you can tear through in a single sitting.

Taken purely as escapism, this is the series’ appeal: it offers a fantasy of absolute efficacy. Problems are solved through planning, courage, and overwhelming firepower, not through compromise or negotiation. If you’ve ever been frustrated with red tape and institutional inertia, Mack Bolan is the fantasy of ripping all that away and going straight to the source with a rifle. That’s also where the discomfort starts to creep in if you read the books with a more critical eye.

From a contemporary perspective, the vigilante ethos can feel both dated and unsettling. The books largely treat legal systems as ineffectual and police as either helpless, compromised, or quietly cheering Bolan from the sidelines. There’s little space for nuance when it comes to morality. That black-and-white worldview gives the action its propulsive drive, but it also flattens complexity: systemic issues collapse into a handful of “bad guys” to be eliminated. The series reflects the anxieties of its time—post-Vietnam disillusionment, fear of organized crime, distrust of institutions—but it rarely interrogates them.

Characterization is another weak spot, though it’s almost a feature of the genre. Outside of Bolan, most people function as types rather than fully realized individuals: the honorable cop, the tragic informant, the doomed love interest, the sneering mob lieutenant. Women, in particular, often feel like afterthoughts—romantic interludes, victims in need of saving, or temporary allies who don’t really alter the trajectory of Bolan’s mission. If you’re looking for layered relationships, you won’t find many here; the stories are built on momentum, not emotional intricacy.

As the series goes on and other writers take over, the tone and focus inevitably shift. The core template—lone warrior versus entrenched evil—remains, but the enemies expand from the Mafia to terrorists, cartels, rogue states, and shadowy conspiracies. Depending on your taste, that either keeps the concept fresh or dilutes Pendleton’s original blue-collar vendetta into something more generic and interchangeable with other men’s adventure titles. The early books carry a rough, personal edge; later entries sometimes feel more like franchise installments than deeply felt passion projects, stretched across hundreds of volumes.

All of that said, it’s hard to deny the series’ impact. Mack Bolan is a clear ancestor to a long line of fictional warriors and vigilantes, from paperback commandos to gun-toting comic book anti-heroes. You can see echoes of his DNA in countless characters who blend military skill with personal trauma and a private war against evil. In that sense, The Executioner isn’t just a pulpy distraction; it’s a foundational text for a whole corner of modern action storytelling.

Reading it today, the best way to approach The Executioner is with eyes open and expectations calibrated. It is not subtle, not especially nuanced, and not interested in long philosophical digressions about the nature of justice. It is fast, blunt, and engineered to scratch a very specific itch—now even more accessible thanks to Open Road Media’s e-book editions breathing fresh life into the saga. If you’re comfortable with that—if you want a hard-edged, morally stark, action-first series that feels like flipping through a stack of R-rated VHS tapes—then Mack Bolan’s war is easy to fall into and surprisingly hard to quit, even after 600 books.

If you’re curious, the ideal entry point is still the beginning: War Against the Mafia and the couple of books that follow. Those early volumes give you the raw version of the character and the template everyone else later imitates. If they don’t work for you, the rest of the series almost certainly won’t. But if you find yourself staying up late to squeeze in “just one more chapter,” that’s when you know the guilty pleasure has done its job.

Previous Guilty Pleasures

Guilty Pleasure No. 99: Death Merchant Series (by Joseph Rosenberger)

Posted on January 20, 2026 by Arleigh

The Death Merchant series by Joseph Rosenberger is a loud, relentless block of pulp action that feels less like a set of tidy thrillers and more like being dropped into a never-ending firefight powered by paranoia, gore, and fringe theorizing. It is the kind of series where your tolerance for over-the-top violence and unfiltered ideology will decide almost immediately whether you keep going or tap out after a book or two.

At the center of it all is Richard Camellion, the so-called Death Merchant: a master of disguise, martial arts, and “wet work” who usually contracts with off-the-books branches of Western intelligence for the jobs that are too dirty or politically dangerous to be handled in daylight. He is pitched as “a man without a face,” a professional who drifts from mission to mission, changing identities as easily as he swaps weapons, and charging serious money for operations that will leave plenty of bodies on the ground. Over the life of the series, he goes from taking on organized crime in the States to fighting terrorists, neo-Nazis, rogue generals, occult cults, and even plots involving aliens and lost civilizations. The world these books build is an anything-goes playground where paramilitary raids, Cold War spy games, and bizarre pseudo-science exist side by side, held together less by realism and more by sheer velocity and an obsession with tactics, gear, and mayhem.

Camellion, as a character, is deliberately underdeveloped in the conventional sense. There are fragments of backstory—St. Louis roots, an engineering degree, a Texas ranch with pet pigs, hints that he once taught history—but these details feel more like flavor text than emotional anchors. His real personality is defined by efficiency and detachment. He doesn’t agonize over moral lines; the mission objective comes first, and if that means innocent people or even cops get killed, so be it. The series is notably more nihilistic than many of its men’s-adventure peers, going so far as to show Camellion and his team gunning down large numbers of police officers when they get in the way of a job. There are gestures toward a personal code—he donates part of his fees to struggling students and the underprivileged in Texas—but that philanthropic angle never softens the basic reality that you’re dealing with a protagonist who treats lethal force as a casual tool rather than a last resort.

The real appeal, at least for fans, lies in the way Rosenberger stages and describes action. The violence is intensely graphic and highly technical, full of precise talk about trajectories, calibers, anatomy, and battlefield tactics. Shootouts and raids are broken down moment by moment, like a cross between a field manual and splatter prose, and they tend to go on long enough that you either settle into the rhythm or start to feel like you’re stuck in an endless report. Between all the bullets and explosions, the books frequently pause for gear talk—special gadgets, exotic weapons, improvised tech—and this side of the series is surprisingly imaginative, from microwave jammers to bizarre field devices that wouldn’t look out of place in a low-budget spy movie. When the stories drift into science-fiction or occult territory, that same almost deadpan, “here’s how it works” tone is applied to alien relics, psionic warfare, or secret cities, which only adds to the series’ strange charm.

Set against the broader landscape of 1970s–80s men’s adventure fiction, The Death Merchant both fits and mutates the template. It shares the basic chassis with series like The Executioner and The Destroyer: a super-competent operative, a paperback-per-mission structure, high body counts, and a constant churn of global crises. Where Mack Bolan’s saga leans on revenge, wounded honor, and a tangible sense of moral outrage, Camellion’s world is colder and more openly cynical; the emotional framing is thinner, and the books care much more about how an op is executed than about the psychological fallout. Compared to Remo Williams and his mentors in The Destroyer, the difference is tone. The Destroyer often treats its excesses with a wink, using satire and self-awareness to keep the carnage oddly light on its feet, while The Death Merchant plays things straight, even when plots involve cloning the hero, stumbling across Atlantean technology, or battling cults armed with mind-control drugs. In that sense, Rosenberger’s series feels like the genre with the safety off—less polished, less accessible, but also more unapologetic in how far it will chase its own wild ideas.

None of this would be quite so jarring if the worldview baked into the books weren’t as sharp-edged as it is. The series openly reflects the prejudices and anxieties of its time, and not in a subtle way: racism, sexism, and class hostility are frequent, along with a deep suspicion of almost everyone outside the protagonist’s narrow circle. Long digressions into politics, conspiracy theories, and metaphysics often read like the author stepping onto a soapbox, turning scenes into lectures that can be fascinating, infuriating, or simply exhausting depending on your mood. That ideological intensity, combined with the clinical violence and the lack of real emotional counterweight, makes the series a tough sell for readers looking for nuance or heroism in the more traditional sense. At the same time, it is exactly what gives these books their unmistakable flavor and helps explain why they’ve developed a cult following rather than vanishing completely into the used-book bins.

Taken together, The Death Merchant novels are wildly uneven, sometimes ridiculous, and frequently offensive, but they are also distinct and weirdly committed to their own warped vision of men’s adventure fiction. If you approach them as straightforward thrillers with the usual expectations of character arcs and tidy plotting, they will almost certainly disappoint. If you come to them as artifacts from the outer fringes of pulp—paperbacks that push violence, ideology, and high-concept plotting further than their more famous shelfmates—they become a fascinating, if abrasive, deep dive into what this genre looks like when nothing is toned down. For readers who like their action fiction loud, excessive, and unconcerned with respectability, there is a certain grim entertainment to be had in watching Richard Camellion move from one catastrophe to the next.

Below is a list of the main series titles, which gives a good sense of the range and escalating absurdity of Camellion’s missions:

1. The Death Merchant – Richard Camellion versus the Chicago mob.

2. Operation Overkill – The demented leaders of the Knights of Vigilance plan to assassinate the President and overthrow the government.

3. The Psychotron Plot – The Russians and Egyptians team up to use a brain-scrambling device on Israel.

4. Chinese Conspiracy – The Chinese plan to maneuver a submarine into Canadian waters and shoot a US space shuttle out of the sky.

5. Satan Strike – The CIA and GRU combine forces to stop a dictator of a Caribbean nation from using a potent and deadly super-virus.

6. The Albanian Connection – Neo-Nazis, bent on reunifying Germany and restoring the Reich, have assembled seven nuclear bombs to use against the U.S., Europe, and Russia.

7. The Castro File – The Russians plan to gain complete control of Cuba by assassinating Castro and having a lookalike take his place.

8. The Billionaire Mission – Cleveland Winston Silvestter, a paranoid billionaire, believes he is Satan’s chosen disciple and is hellbent on triggering World War III.

9. The Laser War – A Nazi super-laser is pursued.

10. The Mainline Plot – Communists in North Korea have created a super-potent, super-addictive strain of heroin called Peacock-4. By introducing the heroin into the U.S., they hope to enslave a generation of young adults.

11. Manhattan Wipeout – The Death Merchant causes trouble for the four mob families in New York City.

12. The KGB Frame – Flash! Camellion turns double agent. The target of both his colleagues and his enemies, the Death Merchant becomes the object of the most intense manhunt in the history of international espionage.

13. The Mato Grosso Horror – Camellion leads an expedition into the Brazilian jungle to locate a group of Nazis who are perfecting a mind-control drug.

14. Vengeance of the Golden Hawk – The DM is tasked with saving Tel Aviv from a rocket barrage containing a deadly nerve gas.

15. The Iron Swastika Plot – The Nazi organization known as the Spider returns!

16. Invasion of the Clones – Camellion versus five clones of himself in Africa.

17. The Zemlya Expedition – The Death Merchant attempts to rescue a scientist from an underwater Russian city/complex in the Arctic Ocean.

18. Nightmare in Algeria – Camellion battles two terrorist organizations who have joined forces: the Black Avengers and the Blood Sons of Allah.

19. Armageddon, USA! – A far-right group threatens to set off nukes in three American cities unless its demands are met.

20. Hell in Hindu Land – The Death Merchant leads an expedition to a Buddhist monastery in India, where the bodies of aliens (and the secrets of their civilization) may be hidden.

21. The Pole Star Secret – Camellion treks to the North Pole to investigate a possible alien world hidden under the ice cap.

22. The Kondrashev Chase – A highly placed spy behind the Iron Curtain has disappeared while trying to escape to the West, and Camellion must find and rescue him.

23. The Budapest Action – The Hungarians are working with the KGB to develop a hallucinogenic toxin to be released over American cities and the DM is tasked with stopping them.

24. The Kronos Plot – Fidel Castro plans to destroy the Panama Canal.

25. The Enigma Project – Spying on Russia under the cover of finding Noah’s Ark.

26. The Mexican Hit

27. The Surinam Affair

28. Nipponese Nightmare – Japanese terrorists try to frame the CIA for murder.

29. Fatal Formula – Tracking a man-made flu strain.

30. Shambhala Strike – An ancient maze of caverns means China could easily invade.

31. Operation Thunderbolt – A bomb-maker is captured by North Korean forces.

32. Deadly Manhunt – An ally betrays Camellion.

33. Alaska Conspiracy

34. Operation Mind-Murder

35. Massacre in Rome – A civilian seems to be able to predict the future.

36. The Cosmic Reality Kill – A cult leader is targeting kids.

37. The Bermuda Triangle Action – The Russians are drilling along a fault line in the Atlantic, where a few well-placed hydrogen bombs could cause catastrophe for the U.S.

38. The Burning Blue Death – A neo-Nazi group called the Brotherhood has created a device that can make a human being spontaneously combust.

39. The Fourth Reich – A neo-Nazi conspiracy to trigger an atom bomb (twice as powerful as Hiroshima) in Cairo is crushed.

40. Blueprint Invisibility – The Red Chinese have stolen a vital top secret U.S. file dealing with electronic camouflage.

41. Shamrock Smash – Someone is supplying the IRA with weapons and the CIA and SIS call on Richard Camellion to find out who.

42. High Command Murder – At the end of World War II, American soldiers stole 100 crates of Nazi gold and hid the loot in an abandoned mine shaft in northern France. The Death Merchant races the Nazis to find it.

43. The Devil’s Trashcan – Did the Nazis bury treasure at the bottom of Lake Toplitz during World War II? Camellion, et al. plan to find out.

44. Island of the Damned – Soviet forces develop mind-reading technology.

45. The Rim of Fire Conspiracy – The Russians hope to trigger volcanoes on the U.S. West Coast by exploding bombs along fault lines.

46. Blood Bath – Camellion assists South Africa’s ruling whites defeat groups of blacks demanding an end to apartheid.

47. Operation Skyhook

48. Psionics War

49. Night of the Peacock

50. The Hellbomb Theft – Camellion must stop two mini-nukes from falling into the hands of Kaddafi, the dictator of Libya.

51. The Inca File

52. The Flight of the Phoenix

53. The Judas Scrolls

54. Apocalypse, USA! – Libyan terrorists plan to spray deadly nerve gas across the Eastern Seaboard. Not if the Death Merchant has anything to say about it!

55. Slaughter in El Salvador – The Death Merchant heads to war-torn El Salvador, where he tangles with death squads and Communist Sandinista rebels, with predictable carnage.

56. Afghanistan Crashout

57. The Romanian Operation

58. The Silicon Valley Connection

59. The Burma Probe – The Death Merchant teams up with Thunderbolt Unit Omega and Lester Vernon “The Widowmaker” Cole to stop a Chinese territory grab.

60. The Methuselah Factor

61. The Bulgarian Termination

62. The Soul Search Project – Camellion pursues a scientist who can talk to the dead. The protagonist and his allies willingly kill several dozen NYPD officers.

63. The Pakistan Mission – A Communist plan to invade Pakistan.

64. The Atlantean Horror – Camellion is in Antarctica, trying to keep an “energy converter” (buried 70,000 years ago by scientists from Atlantis) out of the hands of the Russians.

65. Mission Deadly Snow – The Death Merchant must destroy a South American drug cartel intent on supplying Fidel Castro with thousands of pounds of cocaine.

66. The Cobra Chase – Camellion tracks the Cobra, who escaped from the cocaine processing plant in the previous book.

67. Escape From Gulag Taria – A Soviet physicist who specializes in weather modification wants to defect.

68. The Hindu Trinity Caper – Camellion tracks down an East German spy who has stolen some parts to a nuclear weapon.

69. The Miracle Mission – The Shroud of Turin is stolen by an Arab terrorist group. Camellion’s job is to get it back.

70. The Greenland Mission – Camellion and his crew investigate a ‘U.F.O.’ in Greenland.

Previous Guilty Pleasures

The Killing Joke, Book Review by Case Wright

Posted on October 31, 2025 by casewright

This was a hard book to review. I had avoided reading it for years because there’s an SA, but also- A CLOWN! Look, clowns are out to murder you! I mean for real they are clowns – see below

Why would you think these creatures would not want to murder your face?! Yes, they have balloon animals, but that that’s just to lure you into for their feeding!
“The Killing Joke” is a Joker origin story and how he was born out of one bad day. We begin with Joker as a struggling comedian with a child on the way. He is desperate for cash and decides to participate in a heist to get out of poverty. The crooks that he teamed up with to do the heist target the Joker’s former job at a chemical plant had always planned on making him the fall guy for the heist. His wife dies by a product malfunction, sending Joker spiraling. Technically, Joker is not born until after he falls into the chemicals, but we see his name pre-Joker; so, maybe he was always Joker? I’m not sure.

The origin story is interwoven with the Joker shooting and SAing Commissioner Gordan’s daughter and generally driving him insane. There is also A LOT of nudity that I wasn’t prepared for with a fair amount of leather. Joker kidnaps Gordan, strips him nude, puts some leather on him, and then makes him look at horrify images of the SA. Honestly, why not just kill Joker? Of course, we would. We’d shoot him on sight as a terrorist. Instead of doing the normal choice and having Joker killed, Gordan wants him taken alive. WHY? Really, why? What more does he have to do? They make a point that Joker wants to show that anyone could be driven insane by one bad day, but the real insanity is not shooting all of these super villains on sight!

The book ends with a joke with the symbolism that life itself and all of the evil he committed was also a joke. It was purposefully ambiguous, but it did scare me- BECAUSE CLOWNS!

Tommyknockers, Book Review, by Case Wright

Posted on October 4, 2025 by casewright

Stephen King has had addiction issues his entire adult life. He’s very open about it. In fact, there are at least three books he’s said that he doesn’t remember writing because he was using more blow than Julie on The Love Boat- the books are The Shining, Misery, and The Tommyknockers.

The plot is that a spaceship crashed long ago in Maine and it takes over the brains of the lifeforms who interact with it. The main characters are Roberta AKA Bobbi who literally stumbles on part of the ship, starting the plot because it starts infecting the town. Gard, a four alarm alcoholic/poet and Bobbi’s former lover, comes to help her and is immune to the ship’s affect because of a steel plate in his head.

As the story progresses, the ship changes the town folk both mentally and physically. The townies make all kinds of wacky and interesting inventions without knowing how they work, lose most of their teeth, and they develop pig-like faces. I told you that he did a lot of cocaine when he wrote this book.

The townies use Gard to help them dig out the ship and there are MANY chapters on the digging logistics. It’s fair to say that Gard spent most of his time in this book as an alcoholic day laborer (maybe he even did some work on my upstairs bathroom because that was done really shitty). I think that you could actually say they were entire chapters just devoted to his digging and things like that; man, Stephen really needs an editor with a spine.

A classic Stephen King plot device is that there are people who power up a haunted house and Tommyknockers uses that to an extreme! Even before I became an engineer, I wonder if Stephen understood how batteries worked? Can you imagine what he did to his kid’s Christmas toys?!

While his stories have recurring plot devices, the heroic journey for his characters changed with his personal change in fortune. The stories in Night Shift and the others from the early part of his career were all about failure: failing your loved ones and failing to maintain control over your life. In those years, the heroes could only succeed by sacrificing their life. The way to stop from harming everyone around them was through suicide because “blood calls to blood” i.e. the family curse. I think that it is clear that the Blood is alcoholism and drug abuse- it’s inherited. When he was failing in life, suicide was described as the only option because the hero was the doorway to misery and I can tell you from my childhood an alcoholic father is definitely the doorway to misery.

After 1979, his career took off and his bank account to pay for copious amounts of cocaine. However, the happy endings became the standard. Money can cure a lot problems, but blood calls to blood and the demons will always remain, but that is what made this book stand out because like his novels in the early part of his career- the hero dies. He can’t save Bobbi and this book was at a high point of addiction. It seems clear to me that it crossed his mind that he couldn’t live with his addiction and that death was the only exit.

Tommyknockers is a messy beach read that is mostly entertaining. If you’re like on a vacation with some real downtime and the Wi-Fi is broken or you’re really into aliens, give it a read.

“If Chins Could Kill” and “Hail to the Chin” Quasi-book reviews by Case Wright

Posted on June 22, 2025 by casewright

Bruce Campbell is the of Elvis of horror and independent film; in fact, he did play Elvis in “Bubba Ho-Tep”. If you’re into independent filmmaking, genre films, and artistic struggles both of these books “If chins could kill” and “Hail to the chin” are must reads and they are also fantastic audiobooks read by the man himself. Sidenote: I never thought his chin was weird- just manly. I enjoyed these books so much that I read them and then I listened to the audiobooks as well, which allowed me to re-experience the books like a favorite Uncle sharing his adventures with me. His entire life is laid bare in his own words: his successes, struggles, and failures. The second book picks up right after the end of the first one. NB: neither book is ghostwritten- a rarity. Sidenote 2: the audiobook really reveals Bruce’s skill at impersonations- he could do a career just doing that.

Bruce sat down and wrote both of these memoirs and if you’re an “Evil Dead” fan he discusses every single aspect of how the “Evil Dead” films were made. He goes into the same detail with every single show and film he has ever done. It’s not just how the sausage was made, it is the equivalent of discussing the history of the pig breed, how the pigs were raised, the tools they used for slaughtering, when they were made into sausage, the spices used, and the marketing to sell the sausage (Both books are available on Audible). The purpose of this article isn’t to grade these books because it’s just weird to grade a Man’s memories as long as the writing is half-way decent; instead of that very weird thing, I will discuss chronologically the moments that I’ve thought about for years in this uniquely American story.

His early years would be the central casting description of a midwestern “Theater Geek”. I never particularly liked that term, but it’s fairly apt because he lived for the dramatic arts, but NEVER complained or thought any job was beneath him- Refreshing. His entire focus in high school was theater and if he had graduated from college, he would’ve been a drama teacher. Luckily for us, Bruce became a college dropout after 6 months and began working on Evil Dead.

Evil Dead

Evil Dead was created by everyone that any connection to Bruce and his comrades, but there were also guilt feelings. Family members helped, parents helped, law firms helped, and probably even the Easter Bunny contributed to making “Evil Dead”. In the filming, everyone on the film was everywhere all the time and lived like they were quasi-homeless in the abandoned house that any horror fan would recognize. It was amazing to me how they had power to run their equipment. The way he describes it has all the intensity of a man remembering in perfect detail that he knew in his soul that this moment would be life-defining. He was right.

One thing that stood out to me was the guilt that Bruce had for asking his father, who was going through a divorce, for funds for the film. As a dad, I can tell that we want our children to be happy and that doesn’t end because you’re getting divorced, sickness, or even death- we always want our children to succeed. Can parental support get out of hand and make us annoyed? Yes, but this was well within the normal limits for a dad. If Bruce reads this article, I hope that he knows that his dad cherishes every dollar he contributed to his son’s dream. Unless of course, you had a dad like mine- in which case, how is it in the fire/police department, EMT, or Armed Forces these days?

Evil Dead 2 and 3

When he described Evil Dead 2 and 3, it was different because he had become a man. He was married and soon to be divorced. He described the work and the filmmaking the way a master carpenter describes his experience and steps making a $10,000 walnut table from a single piece of wood. Neither Bruce’s nor Sam Raimi’s careers had taken off yet and like many of us facing defeat – they went home. Home was of course with the old crew to make Evil Dead 2. Evil Dead over the years on a budget of $375,000 made $30 million….WHOA, but it was clear that Hollywood didn’t understand what they had- this was decades before Blair Witch and Paranormal Activity. It seems that Army of Darkness solidified Bruce as a name. One moment I remember about his memories of Army of Darkness was how he tried to mentor the extras about the importance of never complaining and hustling on the set. They didn’t listen. In fact, two of the extras defiled the set by having coitus in their costumes between takes…..ew. Maybe they were the first furries…. double ew. Or maybe the extras misunderstood the term “Hustling”?

The 90s

The 90s was Bruce Campbell’s decade. Hollywood finally realized with the success of the X-Files and Pulp Fiction that the audience for off kilter actors and stories was not just large- it had money to spend. Bruce found three things: steady work with Hercules and Xena, his soulmate- his second wife Ida Gearon, and his best friend – Lucy Lawless (Xena). He describes his friendship with Lucy like a brother describes the love and pride he has in a sister who made valedictorian. The Bruce/Lucy friendship spans decades and I hope they become neighbors one day. He describes it with such fondness and admiration; it proves that men and women can have platonic and beautiful friendships that last a lifetime. I’m not crying, you’re crying….leave me alone.

2000s through Burn Notice
Bruce had come into his own and was getting cast in A LOT of genre films. He had become a bona fide working actor. I will note that he gets into thorough detail about every single film that he made during this time period. However, I think that many Gen-Z and Millennials discovered him through Burn Notice and if you’re thinking he spills the tea about any on set drama- HE DOES NOT. He talks about how he enjoys dive bars and the different bartender pours. He describes in detail his experience with the show. I enjoyed the second book a lot, but it got personal for me because he convinced his Co-Star Jeffrey Donavan to visit the troops in Iraq. I give them both a lot of credit for that out of all of the great moments in the second book that’s what I think about the most often.

I am a fan of Bruce Campbell’s obviously, but what stood out to me in this uniquely American story is that you really can be anything here if you work at it.

Happy Birthday, Bruce!

A Book For The Weekend (6/20/25)

Posted on June 20, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Wow, I thought as I read Howard Hughes: The Secret Life, was there anyone Howard Hughes didn’t have sex with?

Actually, I imagine there was. Charles Higham’s 1993 biography, which I found in a used bookstore in Pensacola, is full of all sorts of “scandalous” details about Howard Hughes’s life and the decadent Golden Age of Hollywood but it’s not always convincing. Hughes, who was the subject of Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator, was undoubtedly an eccentric and I have no doubt that he treated a lot people badly but the book itself tends put a lot of faith in gossip and rumors. As such, we get the established stories of Hughes bringing his control freak tendencies to Hollywood and having affairs with Katharine Hepburn and Ava Gardner mixed with stories about Hughes’s being involved with the Watergate break-in and also carrying on clandestine affairs with everyone from Errol Flynn to Tyrone Power, Jr. The book goes as far as to suggest Hughes died of AIDs, using an evidence the word of a doctor who didn’t examine Hughes but who did apparently read a list of symptoms that Hughes was rumored to have during his final days. That’s really the way that Higham approaches the majority of Hughes’s life. The established facts are mixed with rumor and speculation on the part of the author. It’s not always convincing but then again, since when does gossip have to be believable?

In short, the book is trashy but readable. It’s one of those books that one should probably read with a healthy sense of skepticism but, at the same time, one can appreciate the sheer number of personalities that Higham manages to weave into his narrative. Hughes goes from aviation to Hollywood to politics and he meets everyone who was anyone. It’s a history nerd’s dream.

Two Books To Read This Weekend (5/23/25)

Posted on May 23, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

This weekend, I will be reading Jake Tapper and Alex Thomas’s Original Sin, their look at the Biden presidency and how Joe Biden’s (or really, Joe Biden’s aides and family’s) insistence that he run for a second term led to Donald Trump returning to the White House. Actually, I will be continuing to read it as I started it last night. So far, it’s an interesting read, even though I think that those who claim that Tapper is a bit too quick to let himself off the hook have got a point. It’s definitely got me thinking about how many of our elected officials are “all there” and how many of them are just repeating whatever their staff tells them to say and do.

Now, if you feel that you don’t have time to read Tapper and Thompson’s 300-page book, you can always check out the Mockbuster version, Uncharted Fight: The Original Sin Of Biden, The Hubris of Harris, The Trump Comeback, & The Shadow of Project 2025 by — *ahem* — Jonathan Chris Tapper. This 198 page book, which actually came out a month before Original Sin, basically just takes everything that was leaked about Original Sin and that was included in previous books by Chris Whipple and Jonathan Allen & Amie Parnes and repeats it. The book was obviously put together quickly to capitalize on the interest around the books that hace been coming out about Biden’s withdrawal and the 2024 election. There’s no original reporting, beyond the fact that somebody flipped through all of the other books and jotted down their main points. If I had to guess, I’d say there is no “Jonathan Chris Tapper.” It’s a grift, one that feels like a uniquely 2025 sort of thing. The main reason any of these books are being published is to make money so why shouldn’t “Jonathan Chris Tapper” give it a shot? And, to be honest, Uncharted Fight a quick read that gives you the basics so if you don’t want to spend money on four books about the election, it’s there for you, I guess. Of course, you could probably just ask one of the many online AI programs to give you a quick summary and get the same information for far less money. (In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if “Jonathan Chris Tapper” is an AI system.)

(Personally, I went ahead and spent money on Original Sin, Uncharted History, Chris Whipple’s Unchartered, Alex Eistenstadt’s Revenge, and Jonathan Allen’s and Amie Parness’s Fight because I’m a history nerd and I think you can never have enough sources!)

Novel Review: Mazes and Monsters by Rona Jaffe

Posted on January 5, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

The 1981 novel, Mazes and Monsters, tells the story of four wealthy college students who deal with the ennui of being rich and privileged by obsessively playing a role-playing game called Mazes and Monsters.

That’s right! The game is Mazes and Monsters and most definitely not Dungeons and Dragons, even though both games are basically about people wandering around in dungeons and fighting monsters and searching for treasure. (For the record, I’ve never played Dungeons and Dragons or any other role playing game and I’ve never really had any desire too. That said, I did enjoy those episodes of Freaks and Geeks and Community.) One of the four players is Robbie Wheeling, who has never recovered from the death of his brother. When the players decide to move their game into the tunnels underneath their college, Robbie has a total break from reality and thinking that he actually is his M&M character, he flees to New York and lives on the streets. Desperate for money and food, he turns to prostitution but ends up stabbing the first man who picks him up. Agck! He never should have played that game!

Mazes and Monsters is usually described as being one of the key works of the 80s Satanic Panic and there’s certainly an element of that to be found in the plot. But the game is actually a fairly small part of the book. The majority of the book just deals with teenagers struggling with the transition of adulthood and figuring out where they belong in the world. The book isn’t quite as hysterical as its been described. If anything, the book almost makes the case that the game is helpful to the players in that it gives them an escape from all the ennui. Robbie was mentally unstable long before he played the game and it’s hard not to feel that something would have eventually set him off.

This is a rare case where the movie version is better than the book, if just because the movie features Tom Hanks as Robbie. Robbie mistaking a man for a demon and stabbing him? That’s really sad. Tom Hanks doing it? That’s cinematic magic!

Book Review: Undercover by Danielle Steel

Posted on August 1, 2022 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Marshall Everett was an undercover DEA agent who spent years infiltrating the drug cartels of South America. When he got too close to the people that he was supposed to be investigating, he was yanked from the assignment and sent to work for the Secret Service. After he took a bullet protecting the President’s wife, he retired to Paris, a city that is known for being welcoming to former members of American law enforcement.

Ariana Gregory was the daughter of the U.S. Ambassador to Argentina. When she was kidnapped by communist revolutionaries, she tried to resist the charms of their charismatic leader. But, before you could say Patty Hearst, she was pregnant and brainwashed. Fortunately, she was eventually rescued by the American forces. Unfortunately, her lover died, her father died, and she eventually had a miscarriage. A year has passed and she’s still dealing with the trauma. And where better to deal with trauma than in Paris?

When Marshall and Ariana meet …. THEY SOLVE CRIMES!

Well, actually, they bond over the fact that neither one of them feels as if they belong in their home country anymore. Both of them lost their identities in South America and now, in Europe, they can build brand new identities. They can also fall in love! Yay! Unfortunately, they’re also going to have watch their step because the brother of Ariana’s revolutionary lover is looking to kill both of them.

This a typical Danielle Steel novel, one that I found in my aunt’s collection of paperbacks and which I read two weeks ago. Though I do enjoy a good romance, I’ve never been a huge fan of Danielle Steel’s. Her prose rarely sings. The dialogue rarely crackles. The characters never really feel all that developed. That said, it’s kind of hard not to appreciate the shamelessness of Steel’s plotting. Any romance writer could come up with a story of two lost souls meeting in Paris and finding personal and spiritual redemption through their love. However, it takes a Danielle Steel to make them two lost souls who are recovering from being brainwashed in South America. It takes a Danielle Steel to ask, “What if Donnie Brasco and Patty Hearst met and fell in love?” It takes a Danielle Steel to write about the inner workings of both an international drug cartel and a left-wing revolutionary cell, despite apparently not knowing much about either. There’s an almost random, “just toss it in” feeling to the plot of Undercover that is definitely entertaining.

I guess my point is that, while I was reading Undercover, there were a lot of moments where I dramatically rolled my eyes. (Anyone who has ever watched me read a book can tell you about how much I enjoy rolling my eyes.) But the story held my interest and I certainly didn’t put the book down until I finished it. Whatever else you may want to say about the book and Steel’s style of writing, it definitely got the job done and, it should be noted, I didn’t get brainwashed while reading it. That’s the important thing.

Novel Review: Scarface by Armitage Trail

Posted on January 18, 2022 by Lisa Marie Bowman

First published in 1930, Scarface tells the story of Tony Guarino. Tony was an 18 year-old hoodlum, working his way through the Chicago rackets. Unfortunately, for Tony, he started to draw too much attention from the cops and his gangster boss told Tony to stop hanging around so much. Miffed, Tony decided to join the Army.

Tony served with a valor in World War I. He was natural leader and had no hesitation when it came to killing people. He was “a good soldier,” as the novel puts it. When he’s wounded in battle, he’s left with a facial scar that changes his appearance to the extent that even his own family doesn’t recognize him when he returns to Chicago. Of course, due to a clerical mistake, they also think that Tony’s dead. After killing his former mistress and her new lover, Tony somewhat randomly decides to change his name to Tony Camonte and take over the Chicago underworld.

He gets a job working for Johnny Love. Scarface Tony, as he is called now, works his way up. Soon, Tony is in charge of the Lovo mob and he even has a girlfriend, a former “gun girl” named Jane. Unfortunately, Tony also has a lot of enemies. Captain Flanagan may take Tony’s money but he still wants to put Tony behind bars. The DA may take Tony’s money but he still wants to put Tony behind bars. The cops way take Tony’s money but …. well, okay, you get the idea. Tony can’t trust anyone. Complicating things is that his older brother is moving his way up in the police force and his younger sister has been hanging out with Tony’s main gunman. And there’s a new gang boss in town. His nickname is Schemer. You know he has to be bad with a nickname like that!

I read Scarface yesterday. It’s only 181 pages long and it’s a quick read. It’s also not a particularly well-written book. The prose is often clunky. The dialogue is awkward. Tony really doesn’t have any motivation beyond the fact that he’s a jerk. We’re continually told that Tony has become one of the most powerful gangsters in the country but we don’t really see any evidence of it. One of the basic rules is that it’s better to show than to tell and this novel is all about telling instead of showing. What there is of a plot feels like it was made up on the spot. For instance, with the exception of an off-hand mention of her in the first chapter, the character of Tony’s sister doesn’t even figure into the story until it is nearly done and, yet, the story’s conclusion pretty much hinges on her existence. Though not as well-written, Scarface is still a bit like The Epic of Gilgamesh. Writer Armitage Trail just kept coming up with complications until he finally ran out of tablets and had no choice but to abruptly end things.

That said, the book is notable in that it served as the inspiration for Howard Hawks’s 1932 film, Scarface. The Hawks film, which only loosely follows the plot of Trail’s book and which wisely abandons some of the less credible plot points, would later be remade by Brian De Palma, with Al Pacino stepping into the role of Tony.

And the rest, as they say, is history.