Disposable Lit Reviews

Leisure Books, 1987
221 pp.
ISBN 0-8439-2462-4

Out of Print
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Unlike the majority of post-apocalyptic series adventure novels churned out in the 1980’s (and who would have guessed that that would ever become a well-represented subgenre?), the story of the Phoenix series doesn’t begin years after the nuclear holocaust, with the remnant barbarian cultures and mutant species well-established. No, the nuclear exchange takes place at the end of the first chapter of the first book, Dark Messiah, after we’ve been introduced to our title character, aka Magnus Trench, former ‘Nam-era supercommando turned corporate wheeler-dealer. Trench is on the West Coast on a business trip that leaves him leeway for a few days of survival camping before returning to his wife and child in New York City. Then things go boom.

The war, we’re told in alternating chapters, is the handiwork of Luther Enoch, an insane vaguely-Christian militant fundamentalist who has arranged for Muslim extremists to assassinate the President, thus allowing the VP — an Enoch puppet — to take us right to Defcon 1 and beyond. As befits someone who would blow up most of the western world’s civilization in order to bring about the Great Apocalypse on his watch, Enoch is cartoonishly, inhumanly evil, dedicated to nefariousness for its own sake, and his sadistic lieutenant Tallon is even worse. A good counterpoint to the driven post-apocalyptic avenger that Magnus Trench becomes. (as you can tell, nobody with innocuous names like “Anderson” or “Jones” survives the Big One.)

It just so happens that the first person Trench meets as he emerges from the protective forest days later is a U.S. agent who had infiltrated Enoch shock troops that have taken control of what remains. This gives Trench access to all the information that the intervening chapters have revealed to us, and let’s him know who his enemy is. Trench’s main driving goal at this point is mostly to make it to the East Coast and find out whether his wife and child are indeed dead (O longshot of longshots), but since he starts to make mincemeat of all of Enoch’s troops he runs across, his arch-nemesis is going to figure strongly into his quest.

And then there’s everybody else to deal with. It’s good to know that, if it all goes belly-up, survivors all know the roles expected of them. You can either be:

a) a minion of the dark overlord;
b) a member of a small conclave of idealists trying to preserve human knowledge against encroaching barbarism;
c) an encroaching barbarian, usually a member of a biker gang using the devastation around him as an excuse to get REALLY nasty for once; or
d) a mutant.

Wait, you ask, how could there be mutants all ready if Armageddon was, like, three weeks ago? Simple: Biological warfare mixed in with the nukes. Survivors have a depressing chance of being infected with the plague and becoming “Contams,” with boils and pustules leading quickly to major deformations and brainless rages. And you thought the hardest challenge facing survivors would be growing crops in irradiated topsoil…

The majority of post-apocalyptic novel series take their cues from the well-established men’s adventure novel genre, and Phoenix is no exception. With a protagonist who, like the author, is a specialist ‘Nam vet, you can be sure that weapons, vehicles, and every other engineered object will be detailed right down to the serial numbers on bullets in flight:

Phoenix dropped the wires and pointed the MINIMI at the goon crew coming on fast from behind. A trigger-squeeze unleashed withering SS 109 calibre autofire from the machinegun’s muzzle. NATO fragmentation rounds wailed from the M249’s flame-blossoming mouth, instantly dropping a brace of uglies in their tracks.

It’s not just the hero’s armaments that gets identified to such specifics, mind; every single weapon that wanders into the narrative is detailed with such precision that one can imagine the pop-up fact balloons. What’s the proper term for this kind of attention to armament detail? “Armament wankery”? Or maybe just “spec porn”? (Not surprisingly, author “David Alexander” is also “John Sievert,” author of the C.A.D.S. novels. a post-apocalyptic adventure series with perhaps slightly less of a fixation on serial numbers.)

That doesn’t mean the prose is therefore dry and fact-laden. No, David Alexander gives himself space to churn out some apocalyptically-purple description:

Phoenix dove behind a wrecked stationwagon containing a matched pair of mummified French poodles, rolled, and came up clutching two fistfuls of black death.

MAC and MINIMI sang a blazing duet in the key of destruction as a figure eight frag burst turned Pagan Center into a human Swiss cheese.

…followed by two longer paragraphs detailing the exact damage to organs internal and external. “A blazing duet in the key of destruction”? It looks like subtlety is the first casualty of World War Three.

All of which teaches me some valuable truths about survival in a nuclear-ravaged, Contam-overrun America:

I’d be so screwed.

Nathan Shumate