Review: Transmetropolitan Vol. 2 – Lust for Life

Posted on August 21, 2026 by Arleigh

“You people don’t know what the truth is! It’s there, just under their bullshit, but you never look! That’s what I hate most about this fucking city—lies are news and the truth is obsolete!” — Spider Jerusalem

When you crack open the second volume of Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson’s Transmetropolitan, collected as Lust for Life, you’re not just getting another fix of cyberpunk chaos. You’re getting a book that solidifies exactly why this series is so brutally timeless. The first volume, Back on the Street, introduced us to the magnificent, drug-fueled trainwreck that is Spider Jerusalem and the grotesque, sprawling City he calls home. The second volume, however, is where the series finds its real footing. It’s not just about the loud, visceral shock value—though there’s plenty of that—but about deepening the world and its characters in a way that hits uncomfortably close to home.

Spider Jerusalem is, and always will be, the heart of this series. He’s a chain-smoking, drug-abusing, perpetually enraged journalist in the mold of Hunter S. Thompson, armed with a bowel disruptor and a vicious tongue. He’s a complete and utter bastard to almost everyone he meets, prone to violent outbursts and scatological tirades. And yet, he’s our hero because he’s one of the few people in this future who actually gives a damn. His entire reason for being is his unwavering, almost religious, dedication to “The Truth.” He despises the apathy of the masses as much as the corruption of the powerful, and he’s willing to burn his life down to expose both. This volume showcases that beautifully, adding a layer of vulnerability that prevents him from becoming a one-note caricature. He’s a misanthrope who somehow still cares, and that tension is what makes him so compelling.

Lust for Life collects issues thirteen through twenty-four, and it’s structured more as a series of vignettes than a single, driving narrative. This is actually its greatest strength, as it allows Ellis and Robertson to expand the world and build the supporting cast in ways a more focused plot wouldn’t allow. A major chunk of the book is dedicated to the insane adventure of the frozen head of Spider’s ex-wife being stolen. It’s a gloriously bizarre plot, full of the kind of absurd, high-stakes chaos that Transmetropolitan does so well.

But the real emotional heft of Lust for Life comes from the quieter, more tragic stories woven between the gunfights and drug-induced rants. One of the most powerful sequences focuses on Channon, Spider’s long-suffering assistant. She’s a pillar of strength, constantly cleaning up Spider’s messes, but this volume shows her vulnerability. Her boyfriend decides to undergo a process to become a “gaseous vapor,” leaving his body behind for a formless existence. It’s a concept that sounds completely outlandish, but the execution is devastating. Ellis writes it not as a sci-fi gimmick but as a heartbreaking exploration of letting go, of watching someone you love choose a path you can’t follow. Channon’s pain and helplessness are palpable, grounding the over-the-top world in real human emotion.

Then there’s the story of Mary, a woman from our recent past who was cryogenically frozen and wakes up in the City. She’s presented as a historical relic, a simple photographer from the twentieth century who is completely out of her depth in this frantic, hyper-consumerist future. This is where the book delivers its most potent gut-punch. Mary is us. She’s the reader, trying to make sense of this alien world, and she fails. The City is a claustrophobic nightmare even for the people who were born into it, but for Mary, it’s a terrifying prison of isolation and confusion. Her story is a bleak reminder that this “progress” we’re supposedly heading toward often comes at the cost of our humanity. It’s a deeply existential and sad tale that serves as a harsh critique of the very future we might be trying to build.

Now, while Transmetropolitan is set in a hyper-exaggerated, grotesque future, the reason it remains so relevant is that the satire has proven to be uncomfortably prophetic. The City is a sprawling, neon-drenched hellscape where the line between news and entertainment has completely dissolved, where handheld devices connect everyone to a digital stream of information, and where journalism has devolved into a race for ratings and eyeballs. It’s a world where media personalities are more influential than politicians, and political leaders are cynical, manipulative populists who are experts at gaming the system. Sound familiar?

The landscape of modern journalism feels like a grim step toward this world. The “Death of Truth” that Spider rails against is a concept that has become a cornerstone of our current political and media discourse. The Beast and The Smiler, the corrupt politicians in the series, aren’t just cartoon villains; they’re mirrors reflecting a world of political spin, gerrymandering, and where the “villains” are often the ones controlling the narrative. Spider’s constant, violent struggle to get the real story feels less like a sci-fi fantasy and more like a desperate wish-fulfillment for anyone frustrated with the spin and half-truths of modern politics.

When Spider writes his column, “I Hate It Here,” he’s speaking for a populace that feels powerless and manipulated, a populace nicknamed “The New Scum” by the establishment. This social commentary hits hard because you can see its echoes everywhere today. The series suggests that technology has advanced, but human nature—our greed, our apathy, our susceptibility to manipulation—has not. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but it’s what gives the book its power.

Transmetropolitan Vol. 2: Lust for Life might be a little light on overarching plot for some readers’ tastes. It’s not a major political arc; it’s more of a character study of the city and its inhabitants. But that’s precisely why it’s so effective. It proves that the series isn’t just a one-trick pony of cyberpunk fury. It has a heart, a soul, and a searing intelligence that cuts to the bone of our own societal failings. It’s a book that will make you laugh at its absurdity one minute and then leave you staring at the wall in quiet contemplation the next. It reinforces that even a nihilistic, drug-addled, foul-mouthed bastard like Spider Jerusalem is exactly the kind of hero we need to remind us of what we’re losing.

Transmetropolitan Volume Reviews

Volume 1: Back on the Street

Review: Transmetropolitan Vol. 1 – Back on the Street

Posted on August 14, 2026 by Arleigh

“Journalism is just a gun. It’s only got one bullet in it, but if you aim right, that’s all you need. Aim it right, and you can blow a kneecap off the world.” — Spider Jerusalem

There is a particular kind of jolt that comes from revisiting a story written decades earlier and realizing it was not so much predicting the future as identifying a sickness already taking hold. Written by Warren Ellis and illustrated by Darick Robertson, Transmetropolitan Vol. 1: Back on the Street is exactly that kind of book. It is loud, filthy, hilarious, and vicious in all the ways it needs to be, and it lands differently now than it likely did in the late nineties. What once read primarily as a wild, hyperbolic satire of politics, media, consumerism, and public numbness now can feel unnervingly close to reportage with the names changed. Its 23rd-century City remains an over-the-top cyberpunk nightmare, but the institutions, personalities, and manufactured distractions running it feel very familiar.

The volume begins with Spider Jerusalem living in isolation, hiding in the mountains after abandoning the City and the career that made him famous. He has a book contract to fulfill, a pile of debts to settle, and no actual desire to rejoin civilized life. Unfortunately for him, the people financing his escape have had enough. Spider is forced back into the City, a vast, overcrowded cyberpunk metropolis that seems to have taken every bad impulse of contemporary society and pushed it beyond all reasonable limits. His return is not a heroic homecoming. It is more like dropping an angry, drug-addled, heavily armed journalist into the middle of a garbage fire and asking him to write a column about the smoke.

Spider’s immediate appeal is that he has no interest in performing respectability. He is rude, vindictive, profane, selfish, and fully capable of treating even his friends terribly. He uses violence too casually, insults everyone around him, and carries a bowel disruptor gun that can incapacitate people in the most humiliating manner imaginable. In another book, these traits might make him an unbearable edgelord. Back on the Street, however, understands that Spider’s ugliness is part of a larger contradiction. He is not cruel because he does not care; he is cruel because he cares too much and has no healthy way of processing how badly the world fails ordinary people.

That is what makes him more than a Hunter S. Thompson imitation with futuristic sunglasses. Spider is a gonzo journalist, but his journalism is not merely an excuse for a manic lifestyle or a stage for his personality. At his best, he is driven by an almost old-fashioned moral belief that the truth matters, that citizens deserve to know what is being done in their name, and that powerful people should not be allowed to bury their crimes under public-relations language. The series positions journalism as something active rather than passive. Spider does not just report what happens; he investigates, provokes, exposes, and refuses to let the comfortable look away.

His column, “I Hate It Here,” captures the character’s relationship with the City. Spider hates it because he sees it clearly. He sees the absurdity of its consumer culture, the cruelty hiding behind political slogans, and the way people are taught to accept exploitation as normal. Yet he also understands the City in a way that few other characters do. It is full of strange, desperate, damaged people trying to survive in a system that is too big, too loud, and too indifferent to care whether they live with dignity. Spider’s contempt is not aimed equally at everyone. He has little patience for complacency, hypocrisy, and stupidity, but he shows genuine anger when vulnerable people are victimized by police, politicians, corporations, or public indifference. His idealism is twisted, abrasive, and buried beneath several layers of chemical abuse, but it is still idealism.

The City itself is the book’s other major character. Robertson’s art sells its overwhelming scale and ugliness. Every street looks packed with signs, body modifications, crowds, trash, strange fashion, predatory businesses, and people whose lives have been reshaped by technology in ways both liberating and grotesque. The future is not sleek in the familiar science-fiction sense. It is grubby, crowded, commercial, and deeply human. People can alter their bodies, change their identities, pursue bizarre new faiths, and live inside an endless stream of media stimulation, but none of those developments have solved poverty, loneliness, corruption, or abuse of power.

That is why the book has aged more effectively than many stories set in a supposedly distant future. Its technology is exaggerated, but its social anxieties feel much closer now. The City is saturated with information, yet its people are often less informed than ever. Everyone has access to spectacle, outrage, personality-driven media, and instant distractions, but the institutions shaping their lives remain opaque and unaccountable. The comic’s dystopia is not based on the idea that technology automatically destroys humanity. Instead, it suggests that technology amplifies the priorities already built into society. If a culture values profit, spectacle, division, and convenience over empathy and truth, more advanced technology simply gives those impulses more efficient tools.

The political material in this first volume is especially pointed. Ellis is interested in the gap between public image and actual power. Politicians do not need to be secretly subtle or brilliant to be dangerous; they only need to understand how to manipulate fear, identity, frustration, and media attention. The institutions around them—police, corporate media, wealthy interests, and political operatives—help sustain the illusion that ordinary people have meaningful control while making sure the system remains insulated from consequences. The book’s vision of power can be blunt, but bluntness is part of its style. Transmetropolitan does not whisper its anger. It shouts because it believes politeness is often one of the tools that lets abuse continue unchallenged.

At the same time, Back on the Street is not flawless. Its satire can be so broad that it occasionally feels like the story is pointing at a target with both hands and yelling until the reader gets it. Some of the shock humor and sexual material carry an intentionally trashy late-nineties edge that may feel juvenile or dated. The supporting cast is still taking shape, so many people primarily exist as foils for Spider’s verbal attacks or examples of the City’s bizarre social landscape. The book’s relentless attitude can also wear readers down if they need a more emotionally grounded entry point.

Still, the excess is usually purposeful. This is a world where the boundaries between entertainment, propaganda, commerce, and personal identity have all but collapsed, so subtle world-building would almost be dishonest. The visual and verbal overload puts the reader in Spider’s position: constantly assaulted by nonsense, constantly asked to separate meaningful horror from everyday noise. The absurdity makes the real injustice sharper. A city can be full of outrageous fashion, talking animals, hallucinogens, and body-modification trends, yet its most disturbing feature remains how easily human suffering is turned into content, data, or a political talking point.

Ultimately, Transmetropolitan Vol. 1: Back on the Street works because Spider Jerusalem is not presented as a clean solution to a corrupt society. He is a mess, an irritant, and sometimes a monster in miniature. But he is also someone who refuses to be numb. In a world built to keep people distracted, passive, and exhausted, that refusal has real value. The book’s cyberpunk future remains wildly over-the-top, but its central warning feels uncomfortably familiar: the most dangerous dystopias are not always the ones with impossible technology. Sometimes they are the ones where the public is flooded with noise, the powerful face no consequences, and telling the truth becomes an act of open rebellion.

Review: 100 Bullets Vol. 3 – Hang Up on the Hang Low

Posted on August 10, 2026 by Arleigh

“I never told you to kill him. I just gave you the opportunity.” — Agent Graves

With Hang Up on the Hang Low, Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso continue to prove that 100 Bullets is far more than a series about revenge fantasies and mysterious briefcases. The first two collections introduced the basic concept of Agent Graves approaching damaged people with a gun, one hundred untraceable bullets, and proof of who ruined their lives. That premise was already strong, but this third volume starts showing just how much uglier and more complicated the world around Graves really is. This is where the series begins to feel less like a set of loosely connected crime stories and more like a large, carefully constructed noir epic. The revenge angle is still present, but it is no longer the whole point. The people who receive Graves’s offer are getting pulled into a much bigger machine, whether they realize it or not.

The main character this time is Loop Hughes, a young man who has spent much of his life acting tougher, smarter, and more connected than he actually is. He is a small-time street hustler, someone who talks a good game but clearly has no real direction in life. That makes him an interesting choice for Agent Graves. Loop is not someone who has already been crushed by a terrible tragedy in the same direct way as Dizzy Cordova or Lee Dolan. His grievance is more personal and more complicated: his father, a man known as the Rain, abandoned him and his mother when he was still a child. Loop has built up years of anger around that absence, even if he has never really known what to do with it.

When Graves gives Loop one of his trademark attaché cases, it seems at first like another straightforward setup. Loop has the gun, the bullets, the evidence, and the freedom to act without legal consequences. The temptation is there, and Azzarello makes it easy to understand why Loop would want to pull the trigger. The Rain did not just leave; he left a hole in Loop’s life that the younger man has filled with insecurity, bravado, and bad decisions. But the story becomes much more interesting when Loop finally finds his father and discovers that the Rain is not some helpless old man waiting to be punished. He is deeply involved with dangerous people and has his own place in the criminal underworld.

That is where Hang Up on the Hang Low really finds its momentum. Rather than immediately becoming a story about a son taking revenge on his father, it turns into a story about Loop being drawn into the world that helped create his father in the first place. The Rain is connected to organized crime, old grudges, and the kind of people who can make a murder look like business as usual. Loop thinks he is finally getting some answers, but every answer only opens another door to something worse. He is in well over his head almost from the beginning, and the book does a great job of making the reader feel that constant pressure.

Loop is one of the more sympathetic characters in the series so far because, underneath all of his posturing, he does seem to have a conscience. He is not innocent, exactly, and he certainly makes some dumb choices, but he is not naturally cruel. He wants respect, money, and an explanation for why his father left, but he also cares about people in a way that many of the hardened gangsters around him do not. Azzarello does not turn him into a saint, though. Loop is still immature and easily manipulated, which is exactly why his journey through this volume becomes so tragic. He keeps thinking he has found a way to gain control over his life, only to learn that somebody else has already decided the terms.

Agent Graves remains the most fascinating figure in the book. In the early volumes, he could be seen as a mysterious avenger or a kind of grim wish-fulfillment figure, handing victims the tools to get justice on their own terms. This collection makes him feel more unsettling than heroic. Graves is not necessarily lying to Loop, but he is absolutely steering him toward a result that serves some larger purpose. He is a man who sees people as pieces on a board, and even when he gives them a choice, it is hard to believe that he does not already have an idea of how they will respond. The briefcase may offer freedom from prosecution, but it never offers freedom from consequences.

The book also continues expanding the larger mythology involving the Trust and the Minutemen. Azzarello is still not explaining everything, and that can be frustrating if someone wants clean answers right away. At the same time, the lack of full explanation is part of what gives 100 Bullets its pull. The reader gets the sense that every crime boss, stray conversation, and seemingly random killing could matter later. People who initially seem like minor players keep revealing hidden ties to the larger conspiracy. Even the deaths and betrayals carry an extra weight because they do not feel random. This series is building toward something, and by the end of this volume it is clear that Graves has been setting events in motion for a long time.

Eduardo Risso’s artwork continues to be one of the best things about the series. His characters look stylized without ever feeling too cartoonish, and he gives every person a distinct physical presence. You can tell who is dangerous just by the way they stand in a room. You can tell who is nervous by the way they avoid eye contact. Risso’s visual storytelling is especially effective in the bar scenes, street confrontations, and quiet moments when characters are trying to decide whether to trust someone. He knows how to make a room feel crowded, seedy, and tense without overloading the page with unnecessary detail.

Risso also has a great eye for the ugly atmosphere of this world. The bars look worn down, the apartments feel cramped, and the city streets always seem like they are one bad decision away from turning violent. The noir influence is obvious, but it does not feel like a cheap imitation of old detective stories. It feels more like a modern crime story filtered through noir imagery: low lighting, cigarette smoke, suspicious looks, crooked power structures, and people who keep trying to escape the past only to be dragged deeper into it. The coloring helps the art stand out as well, giving the grimy environments and tense confrontations a little extra visual bite without making the book look overly polished.

The ending is what really makes the volume stick. Azzarello does not rely on a giant surprise twist so much as a sense of inevitability. You can see the bad outcome coming, but that does not make it any easier to watch. Loop spends most of the story trying to become somebody who matters, somebody with control and power, and the cruel part is that the criminal world is more than happy to let him feel that way for a little while. By the time reality catches up with him, he has learned that the people offering him opportunity were never offering him a real way out.

100 Bullets Vol. 3: Hang Up on the Hang Low is the strongest collection in the series so far. It has a more focused central story than Split Second Chance, while still pushing the wider conspiracy forward in a meaningful way. Loop is a memorable lead because he is flawed, angry, and trying desperately to look fearless when he is really just lost. Azzarello keeps the dialogue sharp and streetwise, Risso keeps every page visually charged, and the larger story continues to get more dangerous the more we learn about it. This is the point where 100 Bullets stops merely promising that it has a major story to tell and starts delivering on that promise.

100 Bullets Volume Reviews

Review: 100 Bullets Vol. 2 – Split Second Chance

Posted on July 31, 2026 by Arleigh

“Asking questions is free… but the answers—they can cost you your life.” — Agent Graves

In the first volume of 100 Bullets, Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso laid down a stunning thesis for their magnum opus: a world where the wronged are offered the ultimate temptation of consequence-free vengeance. That volume, First Shot, Last Call, functioned as a potent thematic introduction, establishing the series’ central moral quandary through self-contained stories. With Split Second Chance, the creative team makes a crucial pivot. This collection, gathering issues #6-14, successfully preserves the gritty, anthology-style explorations of revenge while beginning to weave a much larger, more intricate conspiracy that feels poised to consume everything in its path. If the first book was a promise, this second volume is the first, gripping step toward its fulfillment, even if it occasionally stumbles under the weight of its own ambition.

The volume opens with “Short Con, Long Odds,” a two-part story that initially feels like familiar territory. We are introduced to Chucky, a small-time gambler fresh out of prison, who is approached by Agent Graves. As before, Graves offers incontrovertible proof of a betrayal and the tools for retribution—this time against Chucky’s childhood friend, Pony, who has seemingly built a successful gambling empire on his partner’s misery. What makes this story stand out is its focus on the petty, desperate world of gambling. Risso’s art is especially potent here, capturing the sad, seedy underbelly of street-corner hustles and back-alley games. The story’s conclusion, which unfolds off-panel, is a masterclass in implication, leaving the reader to piece together the grim aftermath. It is a solid entry that reinforces the series’ core premise, but its real purpose becomes clear retroactively as the larger plot comes into focus.

This is the volume where the series’ title begins to earn its meaning. Agent Graves is no longer just a cipher; he is revealed to be a man with a history, and Split Second Chance doles out those histories with deliberate, tantalizing precision. The most significant revelation comes in “Day, Hour, Minute… Man,” where we learn about The Trust and the enigmatic Minutemen. This arc peels back the curtain, suggesting that Graves and his associate, Mr. Shepherd, were once part of this shadowy organization before faking their deaths to escape its clutches. The introduction of Lono, the chilling hitman from the first volume’s “The Samurai,” becomes far more significant. His meeting with Graves is charged with a dangerous, unspoken history, confirming that Graves’s “gifts” are a part of a larger, more personal agenda. The plot is thickening nicely, and the promise of a sprawling, interconnected narrative starts to feel exhilaratingly real.

However, it is in the standalone stories that Azzarello’s writing truly shines, showcasing his ability to extract raw, human emotion from his noir framework. The standout is undoubtedly “Heartbreak, Sunnyside Up,” a single-issue story that follows a hard-working diner waitress named Rose. Rose’s life is a grinding cycle of poverty and worry for her runaway daughter. When Agent Graves appears, he doesn’t just offer her a gun and a target; he delivers a slow, agonizing explanation of how her daughter became a heroin-addicted prostitute after being molested by her own father. It is a moment of pure, unflinching tragedy. The brilliance of the story lies not in the revenge itself, but in the horror of the revelation. Azzarello forces the reader and the character to sit with the unbearable truth, making the subsequent act of violence feel less like empowerment and more like a desperate, last resort. It serves as a powerful reminder that “sometimes evil is closer to home than we think.”

“The Right Ear, Left in the Cold” offers a fascinating twist on the formula by introducing Cole Burns, a deadly assassin living undercover as a neighborhood ice cream man. This story introduces the concept of the “sleeper agent,” a tool that Graves and Shepherd can “reactivate” for their own ends. Cole is a more capable and cold-blooded protagonist than the average victim, which makes his story less about moral choice and more about professional obligation. Yet, it deepens the mythology, showing that Graves has an entire network of operatives at his disposal, further blurring the line between righteous avenger and puppet master. His ultimate task of retrieving the briefcase from Dizzy Cordova in the final arc, “Parlez Kung Vous,” masterfully ties this new plot thread back to the series’ very first protagonist.

Throughout it all, Eduardo Risso’s artwork remains the series’ undeniable and consistent anchor. His style, which perfectly captured the cold, deliberate mood in the first volume, continues to excel in Split Second Chance. Risso’s panels have a cinematic rhythm; his compositions are economical yet expressive, using deep shadows and stark contrasts to build a world that feels dangerous and morally unstable. He excels at conveying unspoken tension and character attitude through posture and expression, a vital skill for a noir story where much is left unsaid. While some readers may find the depiction of female characters hyper-sexualized, Risso and colorist Grant Goleash unquestionably create a visual language that is sleek, uneasy, and unmistakably noir. The story’s pace may occasionally lag, but the art is always arresting.

100 Bullets: Split Second Chance is a more challenging and rewarding book than its predecessor. It sacrifices some of the first volume’s focus and self-contained impact to lay the foundation for something much grander. This is the volume where the series starts to earn its reputation for dense, interwoven plotting. It is a work of deliberate, intricate world-building that asks the reader to be patient and pay close attention. It is not without its flaws—some stories feel more like necessary setups than complete narratives, and the unrelentingly grim tone can be exhausting. Yet, the moments of genuine human tragedy, like Rose’s story, and the thrilling expansion of the central mystery make Split Second Chance an essential step in the journey. It confidently expands the world of 100 Bullets, deepening its mythology and proving that this is a saga built for the long haul.

100 Bullets Volume Reviews

Volume 1: First Shot, Last Call

Guilty Pleasure No. 125: In Death Series (by J.D. Robb)

Posted on July 30, 2026 by Arleigh

If you’ve ever wondered what would happen if you mashed up a gritty police procedural with a futuristic New York City and a slow-burn romance that somehow never gets old, J.D. Robb’s In Death series is your answer. Now 62 books deep and still going strong, this series is a masterclass in how to take well-worn tropes—brilliant but emotionally closed-off detective, deadly serial killers, found family, and a romance that simmers across dozens of books—and make them feel fresh, addictive, and weirdly comforting every single time. It’s the kind of series you can binge like comfort food, but with a side of cybernetic enhancements and murder so creative it’ll make you side-eye your toaster. And yes, it’s absolutely a guilty pleasure—but not because it’s badly written or because Robb has lost her touch. It’s a guilty pleasure like that extra slice of pie you know you shouldn’t have but can’t resist, or buying a lottery ticket despite the astronomical odds. You know it’s not good for you in the grand scheme of things, but dang it, it feels good in the moment.

The series kicks off with Naked in Death, where we meet Lieutenant Eve Dallas, a homicide detective in 2058 New York who’s all sharp edges and zero patience for nonsense. She’s the kind of cop who’d rather work a double shift than talk about her feelings, which is convenient because her past is a landmine of trauma she’d prefer to ignore. Enter Roarke, the Irish billionaire with a shady past, a face that could melt glaciers, long black hair, deep blue sea eyes, and an Irish brogue that could charm the pants off a saint. He’s the billionaire playboy whose dubious criminal past built his legitimate business empire, and he’s the perfect foil to Eve’s law-abiding, no-nonsense demeanor. Their dynamic is the heart of the series and the ultimate embodiment of the “opposites attract” trope. Here you have two diametrically opposed characters—a by-the-book cop and a former criminal turned businessman—who somehow end up being perfect for each other. Their push-and-pull of trust, loyalty, and simmering tension is what makes their relationship so compelling. Robb (a pseudonym for Nora Roberts) takes her time with Eve and Roarke’s romance, letting it develop over the first handful of books in a way that makes their eventual partnership feel earned. And even when they’re officially together, their relationship keeps evolving—through marriage, career shifts, and the occasional murderous ex-lover trying to ruin their day. It’s the kind of slow-burn romance that makes you sigh happily every time they share a quiet moment, even if you know it’s all a little ridiculous.

What’s wild about In Death is how effortlessly it blends its genres while still finding new ways to retell similar stories. The sci-fi elements are often window dressing—hover cars, androids, and off-planet travel exist, but the focus is always on the murders, the investigation, and the people solving (or committing) them. The police procedural side is where the series shines, and Robb’s ability to take familiar setups (a killer targeting a specific demographic, a conspiracy within the police force, a cold case resurfacing) and twist them into something fresh is impressive. You’d think after 60-plus books, the well would run dry, but Robb consistently finds inventive angles, whether it’s the method of murder, the killer’s motive, or the personal stakes for Eve and her team. The supporting cast is a huge part of the charm, too. There’s Delia Peabody, Eve’s former rookie turned trusted partner, whose growth from wide-eyed newbie to seasoned detective is one of the series’ most rewarding arcs. Then there’s Captain Ryan Feeney, the gruff but lovable former cop turned consultant, whose gruff exterior hides a heart of gold (and a love for old-school tech). Even the villains often have depth, with motives that range from tragically relatable to straight-up unhinged.

But let’s talk about the tropes, because In Death has them in spades—and yet, they never feel lazy. Eve and Roarke are the poster children for the “opposites attract” trope, and it works because Robb gives them enough depth and chemistry to make their connection feel real. Eve is the classic “genius detective with a dark past” trope, but Robb gives her enough nuance and growth that she never feels like a caricature. She’s stubborn, yes, but she also learns—slowly—to let people in, to trust her team, and to accept that she doesn’t have to carry the weight of the world alone. Roarke, for his part, could easily have been a one-note “rich love interest” character, but instead, he’s a fully realized partner who respects Eve’s independence while also being unapologetically protective. Their relationship is built on mutual admiration and a shared sense of justice, and it’s refreshing to see a romance in a long-running series that doesn’t devolve into drama for drama’s sake. Even the recurring themes—like Eve’s struggle with her abusive childhood, or the way her job constantly tests her emotional boundaries—are handled with a deft touch that keeps them from feeling repetitive.

The series isn’t without its quirks, though. Some of the later books can feel a bit formulaic, with Eve and her team solving cases in a way that starts to resemble a well-oiled machine. And let’s be real: the number of times Eve gets into physical altercations with suspects who are way bigger and stronger than her, only to come out on top, starts to stretch credibility after a while. But these are minor nitpicks in the grand scheme of things. The real magic of In Death is how it makes you care about these characters, even when the plots start to blur together. There’s a comfort in returning to Eve’s world, where you know you’re going to get a solid mystery, a few laughs, and a healthy dose of heart. The series also does a great job of evolving its characters over time. Peabody’s rise through the ranks, for example, is a slow burn that pays off in satisfying ways, and even side characters like Dr. Morris, the medical examiner, get their moments to shine.

Another standout feature of the series is its ability to balance tone. One minute, you’re knee-deep in a gruesome murder investigation, and the next, you’re laughing at Eve’s sarcastic inner monologue or Roarke’s dry humor. The dialogue is sharp, the banter is frequent, and the chemistry between the characters—both romantic and platonic—keeps the pages turning. And while the sci-fi elements might not be the most hard-hitting or innovative, they serve their purpose: creating a world that feels just different enough from our own to be intriguing, but familiar enough to be relatable. New York in 2058 is still New York, just with more gadgets and a few extra layers of bureaucracy. It’s a world you want to escape into, even if you know it’s all a little indulgent.

At its core, In Death is a series about resilience. Eve’s journey from a traumatized orphan to a woman who’s found love, purpose, and a sense of belonging is the emotional backbone of the series. And while the mysteries are often the driving force of individual books, it’s the characters and their relationships that keep readers coming back. Robb’s ability to weave together sci-fi, police procedural, and romance into a cohesive, engaging whole is no small feat. It’s a testament to her skill as a storyteller that a series this long can still feel so vibrant and alive, even when it leans on familiar tropes. In a genre landscape where so many series fizzle out after a few books, In Death is a rare beast: a long-running saga that manages to stay fresh, fun, and deeply satisfying, book after book. Whether you’re here for the murders, the romance, or the sheer joy of watching Eve Dallas evolve, there’s plenty to love—and plenty more to dive into. And if anyone judges you for binging 10 books in a row? Well, they clearly haven’t experienced the simple joy of curling up with a new In Death novel and letting the rest of the world fade away.

Previous Guilty Pleasures

Review: Heart of Darkness (by Joseph Conrad)

Posted on May 16, 2026 by Arleigh

“The mind of man is capable of anything.” — Charles Marlow

There’s a strange, magnetic pull to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness that keeps readers coming back, even when the book itself seems determined to repel you. Published in 1899, this novella is often taught as a classic of colonial critique, but spending time with it feels less like a lecture and more like a slow, feverish drift up a murky river. The plot is deceptively simple: a British sailor named Marlow takes a job piloting a steamboat for an ivory trading company in the Belgian Congo. His real mission, however, is to find Kurtz, a charismatic, brilliant agent who has supposedly gone mad and set himself up as a god among the natives. What Marlow finds instead is a hollow man whose final whisper—“The horror! The horror!”—becomes one of literature’s most chilling epitaphs.

Conrad’s prose is dense and atmospheric, almost claustrophobic. He writes in long, looping sentences that circle back on themselves, mimicking the tangled jungle and Marlow’s own spiraling psyche. You don’t read this novella so much as wade through it, feeling the heat, the flies, and the creeping sense of moral decay. The frame narrative—Marlow telling his story to a group of sailors on the Thames—adds a layer of ironic distance. London, the heart of empire, is presented as another kind of darkness, a civilized wilderness that has simply learned to hide its savagery behind suits and ledgers. This structural choice is brilliant because it forces you to ask: is the “darkness” really in Africa, or is it something Europe shipped downriver?

That said, any honest review has to address the elephant in the room: the book’s treatment of race. For decades, the Nigerian writer and critic Chinua Achebe has mounted the most devastating case against Heart of Darkness. In his landmark 1975 lecture “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,” Achebe argues that Conrad, despite ostensibly critiquing Belgian colonialism, produced a work that is fundamentally racist—a piece of literature born directly from the imperial colonial era and its dehumanizing ideologies. Achebe’s point is sharp and uncomfortable: the novella seeks to expose the dangers and horrors of imperialism, yet it simultaneously perpetuates the very racist ideas it should be dismantling. Conrad denies nearly every African character a name, a voice, or an interior life. They appear as limbs, grunts, or “savages” performing ominous rituals on the shore. Africa itself is reduced to “a place of darkness,” “the prehistoric earth,” and a blank space on the map waiting for European meaning. The sole exception is a well-dressed native man who works as a cook—and even he is reduced to a clumsy, almost comic figure. Marlow is more disturbed by the sight of “improper” cannibals restraining themselves than he is by the company’s brutal exploitation.

Achebe’s critique cuts to the bone: Conrad may have hated the cruelty of colonialism, but he couldn’t imagine Africans as fully human. He traded one set of stereotypes for another, offering a critique of empire that remains trapped inside empire’s own racial logic. You can argue that Conrad is exposing racism by showing Marlow’s limited perspective, but the text gives us no alternative viewpoint. The Congolese remain scenery for a white man’s existential crisis. That’s not just dated; it’s a structural flaw that makes the book feel less like a universal tragedy and more like a monologue delivered in a vacuum—and, as Achebe famously wrote, “a book which parades in the most vulgar fashion prejudices and insults from which a section of mankind has suffered untold agonies and atrocities should not be called a great work of art.” So while the novella wants to critique colonial violence, it cannot see the violence of its own representational strategies. The very language Conrad uses to evoke horror—the “savage” drums, the “prehistoric” shores—ends up reinforcing the racist hierarchies he pretends to question. Overt insults mix with subtle, almost unconscious dehumanization, creating a text that is as morally compromised as the ivory traders it condemns.

Where Heart of Darkness still stings is in its psychological precision, even as Achebe’s critique complicates any easy admiration. Kurtz is a masterpiece of ambiguity: a poet, a painter, a journalist who wrote a report on “civilizing” the natives, only to scribble at the bottom, “Exterminate all the brutes!” He represents the lie at the core of imperialism—the idea that Europe brings light to darkness, when in fact it brings greed, violence, and an insatiable hunger for ivory. The novella’s real horror isn’t the jungle or the cannibals; it’s how easily a man with noble ideals can become a skull-decorating tyrant. Conrad, who himself worked in the Congo, understood that the heart of darkness is not a place but a capacity we all carry. Yet Achebe would counter that this “we” is tellingly selective—the capacity for darkness is explored in Kurtz and Marlow, while actual African people are merely the backdrop against which that darkness is measured.

Despite its flaws—or perhaps because of their uncomfortable rawness—Heart of Darkness has proven enormously influential since its publication. Its DNA can be found in everything from T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (which originally quoted Kurtz’s “horror” as an epigraph) to Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God. But the best and most famous example is Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 film Apocalypse Now, which transplants the story from colonial Congo to the Vietnam War. Captain Willard stands in for Marlow, and the rogue Colonel Kurtz (famously played by Marlon Brando) becomes the ivory trader’s spiritual twin—a decorated American operative who has set up his own brutal kingdom in the Cambodian jungle. Coppola keeps Conrad’s core structure: a river journey into madness, a whispered report on “unsound methods,” and a final, intimate confrontation with a man who has seen too much. What makes Apocalypse Now such a brilliant adaptation is that it doesn’t just copy the plot; it captures the feverish, hallucinatory tone. The film’s famous line—“I love the smell of napalm in the morning”—echoes Kurtz’s seductive, terrifying embrace of violence. By updating the setting, Coppola proved that Heart of Darkness was never really about the Congo. It was about the darkness any empire carries inside itself. Yet even here, Achebe’s shadow lingers: the film, like the novella, largely sidelines the Vietnamese and Cambodian people, turning them into anonymous threats or scenery for an American psychodrama.

So, is this a book you should read? Yes, but with caution and critical awareness. It’s short—under 40,000 words—but it’s not an easy afternoon’s entertainment. Read it alongside Achebe’s essay “An Image of Africa” or a historical account of Leopold II’s atrocities. Treat Marlow as an unreliable narrator, not a prophet, and recognize that Conrad’s attempt to critique empire is fatally compromised by the very racial imagination he never managed to escape. The prose can be maddeningly vague, and the pacing sometimes stalls under the weight of its own symbolism. Yet for all its flaws, Heart of Darkness refuses to fade away, in part because artists from Conrad to Coppola keep finding new horrors to pour into its shape, and in part because critics like Achebe force us to read it honestly—as both a searing study of evil and an uncomfortable document of that same evil’s persistence. It’s a mirror held up to the worst of us, and whether you see a portrait of colonialism, a study of madness, a racist artifact, or all three at once, you won’t forget what stares back.

Guilty Pleasure No. 107: Ironwood (by Bill Willingham)

Posted on March 15, 2026 by Arleigh

Bill Willingham’s Ironwood is the sort of graphic novel that lives in the uneasy space between bawdy escapism and unexpectedly thoughtful worldbuilding, making it a quintessential guilty pleasure that some readers insist on treating as near–high art. It is at once shamelessly pornographic and surprisingly committed to telling a coherent sword‑and‑sorcery story, which means your mileage will depend heavily on whether you can accept explicit sex as an integral—often dominant—part of the narrative rather than a tacked‑on indulgence.

Published by Eros Comix in the early 1990s, Ironwood ran for eleven issues and was later collected into two trade paperbacks that have acquired a minor cult status among fans of erotic fantasy comics. The premise follows Dave Dragovon, a juvenile dragon who appears entirely human because he has not yet matured into his full draconic form, as he is hired by the beautiful and cursed Pandora Breedlswight to seek out the wizard Gnaric and break the spell on her. It is a familiar quest hook—hero, sorcerer, cursed damsel—but Willingham uses it as a loose scaffold on which to hang an almost nonstop parade of sexual encounters, bawdy gags, and bursts of fantastical incident.

As a narrative, Ironwood is better than its reputation as “porn with plot” might suggest, though that label is not entirely unfair. The story is consciously serialized in the classic fantasy‑adventure mode: Dave and Pandora move from one locale to another, encountering wizards, monsters, political schemes, and rival factions, all while the central quest to undo Pandora’s curse gives a sense of forward momentum. Various readers have pointed out that there is genuine political intrigue and thought given to motivations, and you can see Willingham testing out the sort of layered plotting and character dynamics he would later refine in Fables, even if here they are wrapped around mandatory explicit scenes. There are moments when the story is engaging enough that the sex almost feels like an interruption, a dynamic Willingham himself has reportedly acknowledged when noting that fitting in each issue’s required sex scene could break the flow.

Tonally, the book leans heavily into adult humor, but it is not mean‑spirited. The jokes range from clever wordplay and situational comedy to unabashedly adolescent gags, the sort that make you groan even as you recognize they fit this world of oversexed dragons, lecherous wizards, and magically enhanced perversions. In this regard, Ironwood is very much a product of its era: a 1990s underground/alt sensibility that treats fantasy tropes and sexual taboos with the same irreverent shrug. When the humor lands, it gives the book a disarming charm, but when it doesn’t, the dialogue can feel like an overlong dirty joke that mistakes sheer explicitness for wit. Still, there is a lightness here—especially in Dave’s reactions and the deadpan absurdity of certain magical mishaps—that keeps the series from tipping into grim or exploitative darkness, despite its plentiful kinks.

Visually, Willingham’s art is the most persuasive argument for why some readers champion Ironwood as something more than disposable smut. His linework is clean and expressive, with a confident sense of anatomy, staging, and page composition that gives both the action and the erotic scenes a fluid, readable rhythm. The fantasy settings are detailed without being cluttered; taverns, towers, and mystical landscapes all feel like lived‑in spaces rather than generic backdrops for sex scenes. The character designs, especially Pandora and the various magical oddballs, show a cartoonist relishing the chance to exaggerate physicality and personality in equal measure, which goes a long way toward making these figures feel like characters rather than mere bodies.

That said, the erotic content is not merely frequent—it is foundational, and that is where Ironwood becomes a textbook guilty pleasure. This is an unabashedly hardcore series: explicit sex acts, imaginative uses of magic for sexual purposes, and sequences that leave nothing to implication. Devices like a hydra‑head spell repurposed so a character can pleasure multiple partners at once are emblematic of the book’s gleeful “power perversion potential,” embracing the logic of a sex‑obsessed Dungeons & Dragons campaign. For readers comfortable with that premise, there is an undeniable energy in the way Willingham integrates erotic spectacle into battles, spells, and negotiations; for others, the same material will read as juvenile, repetitive, or simply exhausting.

Reception among those who have sought out the collected volumes tends to be surprisingly positive, with many praising Ironwood as one of the rare “sex comics” where the story can stand on its own, even if stripped of the explicit content. Fans often note the balance between story, humor, and eroticism, arguing that the plot is engaging enough that the sex becomes a bonus rather than the sole reason to read. This is where the “high art” argument creeps in: within certain circles of fantasy and underground comics readers, Ironwood is celebrated as an early sign of Willingham’s strengths as a writer and artist, and as an example of how erotic comics can pursue worldbuilding and character arcs rather than simple vignettes. Yet that enthusiasm coexists with acknowledgment that, without the sex, this would largely be a light, sometimes flimsy adventure—a fun romp, but not a lost masterpiece of the medium.

In a broader context, Ironwood sits at an interesting crossroads in Willingham’s career and in the evolution of adult comics. Knowing his later mainstream success, you can see how this early project let him experiment with long‑form storytelling, recurring cast chemistry, and a blend of mythic and mundane concerns, all while operating in a corner of the market that gave him almost total creative freedom. That creative freedom is both the book’s greatest strength and its biggest barrier to entry: it delivers exactly the kind of unfiltered fantasy‑erotica hybrid it promises, but that same purity of purpose locks it firmly into the realm of niche appetite.

Ultimately, Ironwood is best approached with clear expectations and a sense of humor. As a graphic novel, it is technically accomplished, often funny, and occasionally more narratively ambitious than its reputation suggests, which explains why some fans will defend it as a minor classic of erotic fantasy comics. At the same time, its relentless explicitness, adolescent impulses, and lightweight core plot mark it firmly as a guilty pleasure—one that knows exactly what it is and never pretends otherwise, even as a devoted subset of readers insists on elevating it to the status of “high art.”

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Guilty Pleasure No. 106: The Troubles of Janice (by Erich von Götha)

Posted on February 19, 2026 by Arleigh

The Troubles of Janice by Erich von Götha remains one of the most infamous works in erotic comics, a multi-volume series spanning 1987 to 1996 that draws readers into a vivid world of sadomasochistic intrigue amid the lavish decay of 18th-century England. Janice McCormick, a curvaceous young woman released from Newgate Prison, soon finds herself ensnared by the sadistic Duke Viscount Vauxhall of Nether Wallop, whose experiments in female discipline propel her through a cascade of blackmail, assassinations, and sensual escapades—from the clandestine Hellfire Club to the shimmering waterways of Venice. Serialized initially in French magazines and later compiled into albums such as Parts 1 through 4, the narrative echoes the spirit of the Marquis de Sade’s Philosophy in the Bedroom, pitting innocence against unbridled authority in panels brimming with exaggerated forms and explicit encounters that straddle the edge of terror and desire.

This series thrives squarely in guilty pleasure territory, offering a procession of BDSM scenarios tailored for indulgent, after-hours reading—Janice bound and enduring floggings, group violations, and ceremonial degradations at the hands of depraved aristocrats, clergy, and a imposing black servant named Horace, whose prominence marks the early chapters. The artwork begins with a raw, straightforward style, its stark lines accentuating phallic prominence and voluptuous contours, but evolves across the run into more refined techniques, incorporating nuanced shading, occasional full-color pages, and fluid compositions that convey genuine motion. Under the pseudonym of British artist Robin Ray, von Götha refined his craft from earlier projects like the sporadic Torrid comic of the 1980s, achieving here a theatrical intensity that elevates rote erotica into something akin to a decadent opera. Janice’s subjugation under Vauxhall builds to extravagant bacchanals, her figure a stage for boundless transgression, sustained by slender plotlines: a doomed union with Lord Mitchcombe, clerical extortion of her fortune, and a desperate flight to Venice. It delivers unvarnished pornographic fantasy, where non-consent heightens the illicit allure, interwoven with dated racism, sexism, and brutality that clash with contemporary standards.

Nevertheless, amid its sensationalism, The Troubles of Janice carries a sly undercurrent that resonates as guilty pleasure, while dedicated admirers in specialized erotica and Sadean circles regard it as elevated art for its bold dissection of dominance and moral corruption. Enthusiasts praise von Götha’s fidelity to historical particulars—powdered periwigs, flickering chambers, and rigid social strata—which grounds the excess in authenticity, recasting Janice’s sufferings as a pictorial meditation on control and yielding. The work’s longevity, evidenced by deluxe reprints into 2008 via publishers like Dynamite and Priaprism/Last Gasp, underscores this devoted following, as initial stark visuals mature into polished depictions of perspiration, anguish, and rapture rendered with technical finesse. Partnership with writer Bernard Joubert lends philosophical weight reminiscent of Sade’s justifications for indulgence, complemented by von Götha’s advertising and design heritage, which infuses each frame with compelling, voyeuristic magnetism.

The episodic structure fosters escalating drama without pause: Janice’s journey from captive to bereaved inheritor to elusive temptress parallels gothic archetypes, her physique weathering not only corporal trials but subtle emotional fissures that suggest deeper psyche amid the torment. Venetian interludes in subsequent volumes add worldly elegance, with Janice alluring period luminaries amid carnivalesque revels and canal rendezvous, a momentary reprieve prior to recapture. Visually, the shift from monochrome austerity to vivid palettes enlivens flesh tones and intensifies ominous depths. Fair assessment reveals shortcomings, however: proportions veer toward the grotesque, recurring motifs dull the initial impact, and pervasive misogyny, though fitting the fantastical milieu, borders on excess even for 1980s sensibilities. Stereotypes such as Horace’s portrayal jar in modern light, affirming its roots in London’s pre-PC erotic underbelly.

Within insular communities, such elements paradoxically enhance its stature—collectors and forums acclaim von Götha as a virtuoso of restraint, his standalone prints and mythic illustrations perpetuating the legacy, bolstered by exhibitions in Bologna and Paris that confer artistic validity. To the broader audience, it embodies quintessential guilty pleasure—discreetly concealed material that fulfills taboo yearnings sans apology. The Troubles of Janice persists by unflinchingly engaging the subconscious, compelling confrontation with shadowed impulses through line and shade. Whether approached for its carnality or its Sadean resonances, The Troubles of Janice endures as a divisive masterpiece, ideally encountered with caution.

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Guilty Pleasure No. 104: The Parker Series (by Richard Stark)

Posted on February 15, 2026 by Arleigh

Richard Stark’s Parker novels are the kind of crime fiction that feel like they’re bad for you in all the right ways: lean, mean, amoral heist stories that work as both clinical studies of professional thieves and utterly shameless page‑turners. Taken across the 24-book run, from The Hunter in 1962 through Dirty Money in 2008, the series is remarkably consistent, yet also strange and jagged enough that you never quite relax into it. Reading Parker is like chain‑smoking noir paperbacks—self‑aware guilty pleasure with just enough bite and bleakness that you can pretend it’s good for you.

The basic premise barely changes, and that’s part of the appeal. Parker is a professional robber who prefers big, high‑yield scores: armored cars, payrolls, entire towns temporarily cut off from the world. He’s not an antihero in the modern prestige‑TV sense so much as a working stiff whose job happens to be violent crime, a man who approaches robbery with the same cold professionalism most people reserve for accounting. In The Hunter, the novel that kicks everything off, he’s double‑crossed by his wife and partner, shot, and left for dead, and the story is essentially one long act of payback as he claws his way back to New York and into the orbit of the Outfit, the crime syndicate that ultimately ends up with his money. That mix of stripped‑down revenge and procedural detail sets the tone for almost everything that follows, even when the later books drift away from personal vendetta into cleaner, job‑of‑the‑week capers.

What makes the series work—what makes it weirdly addictive—is how mercilessly Donald Westlake (under the Stark pseudonym) commits to Parker as an almost inhuman constant in a chaotic world. He’s often described by fans as a kind of force of nature, and that tracks with how he moves through these books: stoic, unadorned, perpetually assessing angles, crew members, and exit routes. Traditional redeeming qualities—sentimentality, guilt, even much curiosity about other people—just aren’t there; what you get instead is a kind of brutal efficiency that, perversely, becomes its own charisma. The guilty‑pleasure element kicks in because the novels quietly invite you to enjoy watching a ruthless pro outthink and outmuscle everyone in his path, even though the moral framework is closer to nihilism than romantic outlaw fantasy. There’s pleasure in the competence and in the clean lines of the plotting, even as you’re aware you’re rooting for someone who treats human beings like moving parts in a job.

Formally, the books have a recognizable skeleton that Stark keeps returning to and subtly bending. Most of the novels are divided into four sections: first, Parker’s point of view as he’s planning or executing a job; second, a continuation that usually ends with a betrayal or reversal; third, a shift into the perspective of whoever is double‑crossing or hunting him; and finally, a return to Parker as he fixes what’s gone wrong and settles accounts. This architecture does a couple things. It gives the series a strong procedural rhythm that fans can relax into—you know there will be a job, a screw‑up, and a payback—but it also keeps the tension high by delaying gratification until that fourth‑quarter rampage. You get both the chess match and the inevitable explosion. It’s formulaic in the same way a great blues progression is formulaic: you come for the structure, you stay for the particular variations each time.

The prose is another major part of the series’ guilty‑pleasure charge. Westlake pares the language down to something close to bare steel; the description is sparse, the sentences short, the dialogue practical and unfussy. Reviewers frequently point to how there’s “not a wasted word,” and that seems right: you feel like every line is there to move money, people, or bullets into position. In an age where a lot of thriller writing leans on verbosity and constant internal monologue, Parker’s tight focus can feel almost cleansing. At the same time, that same spareness means the violence can land with an extra jolt—there’s no cushioning around it, no moral throat‑clearing, just the fact of what Parker decides to do when someone gets in his way.

Across the series, the quality is not perfectly even, and that’s where a fair, balanced take has to admit some dips. The early stretch—The Hunter, The Man with the Getaway Face, The Outfit, The Score, and The Jugger—has a raw momentum and a sense of discovery as Westlake works out how far he can push a protagonist this cold. Later titles, especially in the first run up to Butcher’s Moon, often expand the canvas, giving more time to side characters and to elaborate, multi‑phase heists. Some readers and critics consider The Score, with its audacious robbery of an entire mining town, a high‑water mark; others see it as simply a particularly well‑executed entry in a series where the baseline is already high. Then, after the long break between the 1970s and the 1990s revival with Comeback and Backflash, you can feel Westlake adjusting the formula to a slightly different era, with Parker still fundamentally the same but the world around him updated. Those later books are often solid and occasionally excellent, but the sheer shock of the early ones is hard to recapture.

From a modern perspective, one of the more interesting tensions in reading Parker is the question of identification. The books are not satire, and they aren’t quite celebrations; they’re closer to case files written with a strong sense of style. The theme that emerges most strongly is the amoral logic of criminal enterprise: loyalty is provisional, greed is constant, and institutions—whether the Outfit or banks or small‑town cops—are just different power systems to be exploited. There’s no sentimental criminal code here, only practical rules about not talking, not freelancing, and not getting sloppy. That worldview can be bracing and, frankly, kind of fun to inhabit for a few hundred pages at a time, particularly because Westlake doesn’t ask you to endorse it; he just drops you in and lets you watch how it operates.

At the same time, that detachment and hardboiled minimalism can turn some readers off. If you need emotional growth, redemptive arcs, or a sense that the universe punishes the wicked, Parker is going to feel either empty or actively hostile to your expectations. The closest the series comes to sentiment is in Parker’s occasional, grudging respect for other professionals who do their job well—safecrackers, drivers, heist planners—and even that is strictly bounded by the demands of survival and profit. Women, in particular, can feel underwritten or instrumental in some entries, especially the earlier books, reflecting both the genre conventions of the time and the series’ focus on Parker’s narrow, self‑interested worldview. It’s possible to argue that this is part of the point—these are Parker’s stories, and he does not care about anybody’s inner life—but it does mean the books can feel airless if you’re reading a bunch in a row.

Still, that’s the strange magic of Parker: for all the limitations and repetitions, you finish one and almost immediately think about the next job, the next crew, the next betrayal. The series taps into a very specific pleasure center: watching a ruthlessly competent person navigate systems stacked with corruption and stupidity, using only planning, discipline, and a willingness to hit back harder than anyone expects. It’s not aspirational, and it’s not comforting, but it is undeniably gripping. If you can accept an unapologetically amoral center and you have a taste for stripped‑down crime fiction with a strong procedural spine, Parker is easy to devour and just as easy to feel a little guilty about enjoying as much as you do.

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Guilty Pleasure No. 102: The Destroyer Series (by Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir)

Posted on January 31, 2026 by Arleigh

The Destroyer series, launched in 1971 by Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir and later chiefly associated with Murphy, is the kind of long‑running action franchise that practically defines “guilty pleasure.” Spanning more than 150 paperback entries and various continuations, it rarely pretends to be anything other than what it is: fast, frequently outrageous pulp about a government assassin and his irascible Korean mentor saving the world by killing people who, in the moral logic of the series, really need killing.

At the center is Remo Williams, a former Newark cop framed for murder, executed on death row, and then quietly “resurrected” to become the enforcement arm for a secret U.S. organization called CURE. The first novel, Created, The Destroyer, uses this grim premise almost as a prologue; the series is far less interested in legal nuance than in setting up a clean break from Remo’s past so he can be remade as a weapon. His new life is one of deniability and isolation, and the books lean into that fantasy of the invisible man behind the headlines, quietly eliminating threats that conventional systems can’t touch. It’s not realistic, and it isn’t trying to be; the appeal lies in how cheerfully the series weaponizes that premise for brisk, punchy adventure.

The real hook, though, is Remo’s training in the Korean assassination art of Sinanju, and his relationship with its current master, Chiun. Chiun, drawn from a secretive village of assassins who have supposedly served emperors and leaders for millennia, turns the usual mentor trope into a running act of ethnic, generational, and cultural clash. He’s vain, mercenary, and spectacularly contemptuous of Americans, and a lot of the series’ humor comes from his withering commentary on U.S. culture, politics, and Remo’s stubbornly ordinary tastes. Remo calls him “Little Father,” and as the books go on, the bickering most often reads like a truly dysfunctional but oddly affectionate family argument played against a backdrop of exploding supervillain lairs. That dynamic is where the series unexpectedly finds a core of warmth amid all the cartoon violence.

On the action front, The Destroyer exists squarely in the men’s adventure boom of the 1970s, alongside series like Don Pendleton’s The Executioner, but evolves into something stranger and more openly satirical. Early on, Remo’s feats are at least vaguely grounded in martial arts exaggeration, but as the volumes pile up, Sinanju becomes almost superheroic: running up walls, shredding steel, and dispatching opponents with fingertips and casual nose‑ripping brutality. The series’ foes range from mobsters to mad scientists, corrupt officials, rogue militaries, and outright parodies of real‑world figures, and the books gleefully mix crime fiction with borderline science fiction and spy‑thriller gadgets. A lot of the fun is in watching Murphy escalate the stakes from book to book, then resolving everything with hands‑on mayhem because Sinanju doctrine disdains guns as spiritually unclean. When it clicks, it has the energy of a comic book written in pure pulp prose.

What keeps The Destroyer from feeling like just another relic of that boom is its tonal tightrope walk between earnest action and broad satire. CURE itself, the secret agency that “does not exist,” is a kind of bureaucratic joke: a tiny office, a frail director, and a mandate to do the dirtiest jobs in the name of national security. The series frequently aims its sharpest barbs at American government, media, and corporate greed, using Remo and Chiun as caustic outsiders who see through the patriotic rhetoric. Later installments lean even harder into political and cultural satire, lampooning televangelists, tech capitalism, and global politics in ways that are sometimes genuinely clever and sometimes just loud. Even when the targets feel dated or obvious, there’s a sense that Murphy is using the form of a disposable action paperback to smuggle in a surprisingly crabby worldview.

That said, this is also where the “guilty” part of the guilty pleasure label comes roaring in. By modern standards, The Destroyer is extremely non‑PC; race, gender, and nationality are all fodder for jokes that range from sharp‑edged caricature to material that many readers will reasonably find offensive. Chiun’s constant stereotyping of Americans and others is sometimes framed as a way of turning prejudice back on the majority culture, but the books often indulge in broad ethnic humor far beyond him. Women in many entries are treated primarily as scenery, sexual opportunities, or victims, though there are exceptions where they’re more capable players in the plot. If you’re reading with a contemporary lens, you’re likely to hit passages that stop you cold, and the series doesn’t apologize for any of it. Enjoyment here often requires compartmentalizing, acknowledging that the books reflect their era’s blind spots and biases while deciding whether the action and satire still outweigh that discomfort.

In terms of prose and pacing, the series is better crafted than its garish covers suggest but still rooted in the rhythms of fast‑turnaround paperbacks. The dialogue between Remo and Chiun has a crackling, insult‑laced snap that does a lot of heavy lifting in keeping you turning pages. Scenes of action are clear, efficient, and often imaginative in how Sinanju is used, even as the body count mounts to cartoonish levels. The humor, when it lands, blends deadpan absurdity with savage put‑downs, and the books occasionally deliver a line or a situational gag that feels sharper than their reputation would indicate. At the same time, the sheer volume of entries means unevenness is inevitable; some later volumes feel like they are coasting on formula, recycling set pieces and political targets with less bite. As with many long series, the high points are scattered, and part of the experience is learning which eras and authors click with you.

For readers who love action fiction, The Destroyer remains oddly addictive precisely because it refuses to be respectable. It revels in outlandish violence, outsize personalities, and unapologetic satire, while occasionally brushing up against genuine character moments in the Remo–Chiun relationship. The mythology of Sinanju, with its ancient lineage and mercenary code, gives the series a mythic backbone that most of its peers never bothered to build. At the same time, the dated politics, crude humor, and casual cruelty mean it’s not a series you recommend without caveats; it’s something you confess to loving, then immediately start explaining. If you can navigate those contradictions, The Destroyer offers exactly what its best covers promise: a relentless, often ridiculous, sometimes sharp pulp ride that you may not be proud of finishing, but will probably reach for again anyway.

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