Phoenix #3: Death Quest
David Alexander
Leisure, 1988
ISBN: 0-8439-2571-X
David Alexander is a pulp writer that got the message of ‘80s Post-Nuke Pulp. He was on board, he was chomping at the bit, and he was ready to storm the front lines of pulp. The nuclear apocalypse was all over the place in the ‘80s. The mounting fear of the U.S.S.R. and all that. Not to mention Mad Max and all the (sometimes glorious) knock-offs that followed. Several paperback series popped up around then too. Some very good, but none can hold a candle to the outrageousness of the saga of Magnus Trench, aka Phoenix, the Schwarzenegger-ian hero of the burnt out world depicted in The Phoenix Series.
David Alexander was in a real groove by book three here. The first two of the series are obviously filled with some set-up. Lucas Enoch, a televangelist-type has caused the end of the world for bad guy reasons and with an overly-complicated bad guy plot. Magnus Trench is headed from California to New York to see if his family is still alive. The world is full of Enoch’s mercenary forces, bikers, resistance fighters, victims and mutants. That’s all set-up well in the first two books, but that’s not to say those two are bogged down in exposition. No, they are full-tilt-boogie books that rock ‘n’ roll along at a breakneck (pun intended) pace with action told in gory detail.
All that to say, this one MOVES FASTER. It’s really a mini-miracle of pulp writing, this is a totally lean book (save the fetishistic description of guns and bullets and such) that are nearly all action, except for the prerequisite sex scenes. A standard feature for books like this at the time. Mangus was captured at the end of the last book and now we find out that he is immune from the radiation and gross stuff of the wasteland. And unfortunately for bad-guy Enoch he’s not and he’s almost full-blown-mutant and has to live in a contamination suit. Bummer for him. They want Magnus’s blood to try and cure Enoch.
Don’t worry about Magnus, he’s already escaped before you know it by free falling out of a plane and then having to mow down some bikers before continuing his good-guy murdering spree. It’s clear Alexander is having a bit of fun with the formula, it’s all cranked up to 11 and his tongue is in his cheek so hardit’s about to rip a hole. There’s just wave after wave of bad dudes to mow down, and eventually the whole thing took me back to the arcade days, playing an old light gun game that’s just getting progressively harder and harder as a hoard of 16-bit baddies just keeps coming at you. But you don’t have to keep feeding quarters into the book to keep going.
This series is becoming like a dream of an action movie you saw when you were young on cable in the middle of the night in a haze. It's full of every wild thing you ever saw in your life and it’s all mashed together with the grimy feel of an Italian exploitation film and you vaguely feel like you shouldn’t be watching it, in fear that your mother will catch you. Nothing quite makes sense but the images contained are so strong you don’t think about it. In a word, it’s badass.
Roy Nugen is an award-winning writer, producer, property master, plus actor. He comes from a family of musicians, engineers, wildcatters, cops, lion tamers, and carpet salesmen. Evil Dead II changed his life and he once partied with Lloyd Kaufman.
He has written 15 short films including Bag Full of Trouble, Potboiler, Handle With Care, Death in Lavender, Hole in the Ground, and the feature film Arrive Alive, many of which have played across the country. He has been the property master on 17 short films and 2 feature films.
Roy is also a prolific book reviewer and collector of vintage pulp paperback books. You can read his reviews on his blog Bloody, Spicy Books and multiple magazines including Paperback Fanatic, Hot Lead and Sleazy Reader. He has also written afterwards for novels and for various websites. He lives in the only city that once arrested L. Ron Hubbard with his wife and cats.