Showing posts with label Gerald Montgomery. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Gerald Montgomery. Show all posts

Thursday, September 20, 2018

The Executioner #266: Ultimate Price


The Executioner #266: Ultimate Price, by Gerald Montgomery
January, 2001  Gold Eagle Books

I’d pretty much forgotten all about the COMCON trilogy, that sci-fi horror hybrid thing courtesy short-time Executioner scribe Gerald Montgomery that started with #262: Trigger Point, with its brainwashed teenaged Terminators and its high-tech Nazi cabal bent on global domination, continued with #264: Iron Fist, with its genetically-modified superman and its Chutulluh-esque demons, and now concludes with this tepid climax which has clearly been rewritten by some nervous Gold Eagle editor.

Personally I like to imagine that whoever was editing the Executioner line was on vacation when the first two books in the trilogy hit the bookstores, and upon his or her return nearly had a coronary upon seeing what had been released to the masses – Mack Bolan up against bio-engineered soldiers, sci-fi weaponry, and even demons? Some editorial maneuvering was in order, and fast. Not only that, but let’s end it right now – forget about any and all plans to stretch this “COMCON” stuff out into a multi-volume storyline.

A job like this requires a hatchet, and that appears to be what’s been taken to Gerald Montgomery’s manuscript. Characters are introduced with much fanfare – then dead a few pages later. The COMCON villains, a global enterprise comrpised of former Nazis and their genetically-modified henchmen, are disposed of – all of them – within a few chapters; conveniently enough all of the high-ranking members gather together in one spot so Bolan can blitz them into eternity. The message is clear that someone at Gold Eagle ordered all this nonsense to be ended, posthaste; likely they wanted to just forget about it, so it’s to their credit that they even gave us a concluding volume.

Anyway it’s like a month or two after the previous book – we’re informed later on that Trigger Point occurred in “May” – and Bolan when we meet him is, believe it or not, actually having sex! Humorously, Montgomery doesn’t even bother to inform us who Bolan is screwing; all we get is a mention that someone named “Price” is beneath him. Eventually we’ll learn it’s Barbara Price, apparently the Smurfette of Stony Man or something, I don’t know. Here we get our first taste of editorial tinkering, which surely must be the only way to explain this bizarre passage:

She smelled like a woman untouched by modesty. Her perfume was sweat, musk and hot breath, and [Bolan’s] inner animal responded accordingly. And had been most of the night. She didn’t try to mask the smells God gave her. She practiced proper hygiene but beyond that she was an all-natural woman. 

And Mack Bolan was an all-American man.

Sadly they’re interrupted mid-boink by an attack on Stony Man itself – which by the way Montgomery doesn’t much explain or describe, relying on the fact that he’s writing this for longtime readers who know the setup and etc. But for people like me coming into this cold, ie people who only think of the Don Pendleton originals when we think of “Mack Bolan,” I didn’t really know what the hell was what. Not that it much matters, as it’s just your typical Gold Eagle action scene, with “fire teams” running around and shooting at each other with detailed gun descriptions. But this time there are these high-tech black helicopters as well; of course, it’s those wily COMCON bastards, looking to even up the score from Iron Fist.

The Stony Man commandos fend off the COMCON assault, and Barbara Price even gets in on it, wearing a “form-fitting combat blacksuit” and toting a cut-down M-60. Montgomery’s action scenes sort of have a David Alexander flair to them, minus sadly the gore factor. He also goes for more of a military fiction feel at times, sticking to more realistic description. He does occasionally have the movie-style action bit, like when Bolan fires his shotgun at some grenades that have been launched at him, and the buckshot deflects the grenades!

Returning COMCON villain Joe Newport is given more narrative spotlight this time; indeed a bit too much, as he almost takes up more of the reader’s time than Bolan himself does. But this is another indication of editorial tinkering, because Newport is built up at great length – and then his sendoff, which is of coruse expected because this is the finale of the trilogy, is rendered so anticlimactically that you actually have to go back and re-read it to ensure you didn’t miss something. And what’s worse, he and Bolan never even meet! So my assumption is this Newport subplot, which has the former COMCON executive killing off his competitors and reinstating himself as a big guy in the evil organization, was intended to give him more precedence in future COMCON storylines that were never to be.

Newport basically uses Bolan as the instrument of his vengeance, sending him coded intel and hoping Bolan will start blitzing away, doing Newport the favor of getting rid of his enemies. This means that there’s a bit more action in Ultimate Price than in the first volume of the series, but it does come off as padding. Montgomery does manage to call back to the Pendleton glory years, with Bolan going in “Black Ace” mode, ie the role camoflauge he used so successfully – and perhaps a bit too often – in the Pendleton originals. Basically, Bolan poses as a member of the enemy, a rather arrogant, high-ranking one, and the gullible enemy troops buy it hook, line and sinker.

As we’ll recall, COMCON is tied in with FEMA, which in Montgomery’s world is an un-Constitutional construct engineered by former Nazis which, if fully activated, could take over the country. It’s made up of black-suited goons in mirrored shades and Newport gives Bolan phony credentials that allow him to pose as a high-level contractor, hired specifically to take out this current COMCON menace: Mack Bolan. So it’s very much in the Pendleton mold as Bolan, posing as a hired killer, goes around warning a bunch of thugs that Mack Bolan’s on the way to kill them all and they’d better do what he says if they want to live. Even though Montgomery’s Bolan comes off like the cipher familiar from the majority of the Gold Eagle books, lacking the personality of Pendleton’s original, he does here sometimes remind the reader of the real thing.

Bolan’s Black Acery coincides with a bona fide sex-slave auction the COMCON boys are running in a hotel in Vegas, all of them as mentioned conveniently rounding up to bid big bucks on freshly-abducted and midnwashed young women. There’s a bit more of a Pendleton vibe with the brief intro of Gabriel Aquarius, a “turkey doctor of the mind,” ie Pendleton’s term for Mafia sadists who took torture to an art form. We get a peek into Aquarius’s brainwashing tactics, much of this calling back to the first installment of the trilogy, where we saw a few of his subjects at work, activated into killing machines by phone calls.

It’s a bit more lurid than the Gold Eagle norm as these half-nude babes are auctioned off to the highest bidder, Aquarius running the show. We get to see his mind-controlled girls at work again, as during the inevitable action scene Aquarius activates them and Bolan, assisted by Jack Grimaldi, goes out of his way not to kill any of the women. Probably the only novel in the franchise in which someone is carefully knocked out by a helicopter landing rail, or whatever those things are called. Otherwise the scene is of a piece with the other action sequences in the trilogy, with Bolan mowing down legions of “Men In Black.” But it’s all so abrupt and anticlimactic as to be hilarious, particularly given that Bolan here is wiping out the entirety of the COMCON elite.

And that abrupt nature is real hilarious at times – like the spectaculary-inept appearance of Lauren Hunter, the commando spy-babe introduced in Iron Fist. She’s given this elabrate intro, taking care of an obnoxious guy who tries to hit on her, then she fixes her commando beret and checks her gun and storms into the Vegas hotel she’s heard Bolan might be in, prepared to help him take on COMCON – and she’s dead one page later! I had to re-read this part just to see what the hell was going on, but of everything in Ultimate Price I’d say this is the biggest indication of some editorial hatcheting. Lauren Hunter likely was intended to be a big player in future volumes, but must’ve been deemed expendable with the abrupt conclusion of the storyline.

Speaking of which, there’s also the fate of Joe Newport. It’s nearly as ridiculous as Lauren Hunter’s, perhaps even more so, as here Montgomery goes as full into sci-fi as he did into horror in the previous volume (ie the friggin’ demon that showed up at the end). Our favorite villain has reinstated himself into his rightful place as the head of COMCON, bossing around his underlings, and he’s with a bunch of them in one of those ubiquitous black helicopters…then this “zeppelin” thing of farflung advanced, perhaps even alien technology, zaps him out of the sky – “Joe Newport did not like his death. It came much too soon.” If that isn’t Montgomery cursing through the text I don’t know what is.

There is, given all the obvious editorial revising and tinkering, a dispirited air to Ultimate Price. This is a shame because the previous two volumes, in particular Iron Fist, weren’t bad, and promised to take The Executioner in a much different direction. Iron Fist was especially cool in that regard, what with its Hunter Thompson stand-in (a character who is sadly missing this time around). 

Montgomery must’ve been willing to try again, though, as a few volumes later he returned with Leviathan, which appears to be Bolan vs. a sea monster. Unsurprisingly, Leviathan would prove to be Montgomery’s final book for Gold Eagle.

Thursday, November 15, 2012

The Executioner #264: Iron Fist


The Executioner #264: Iron Fist, by Gerald Montgomery
November, 2000  Gold Eagle Books

This is the second volume of Gerald Montgomery’s COMCON trilogy, which began with #262: Trigger Point. To recap that previous volume, Nazis insinuated themselves into the US government after World War II, their ultimate goal the removal of the US constitution and the eventual domination of the country…and then the world! Iron Fist backs down a little from the political conspiracy aspect of that previous volume, but in a good way…rather than being portaryed as crypto-fascits, COMCON is now a friggin’ Chutulu-worshipping cult who breeds Hulk-sized supersoldiers with advanced nanotechnology!

Again, the biggest surprise here is that Gold Eagle even published these books. They have nothing in common with other books in the Executioner line, filled with sci-fi weaponry and Lovecratian references. Hell, there’s even a Hunter Thompson analogue running around. What’s even more surprising is that Montgomery pulls it all off. His writing is strong, with a better focus on action than before – and he hardly delves into any gun-porn, other than a few instances here and there. (The most egregious example is where he goes on for a few pages about the C-5 plane…not technically “gun-porn,” but close.)

The novel opens with a nonstop action scene that goes on for around fifty pages; a tour de force of lurid gore as Splatterpunk, COMCON-created nanotech-powered monster, is dropped into Denver and begins killing women, all in a play to get Bolan’s attention. After busting up COMCON in the previous volume, Bolan is now COMCON's most wanted, and from what little they know about him, they’re certain that the murdering of unprotected, innocent women will draw his attention quick.

The only problem is, this opening scene outdoes the rest of the novel. Bolan is always two steps behind Splatterpunk, who has the strength of a few men and cannot be killed. Or at least it appears so. His super-tough skin deflects most weapons, even bullets, and those that do break free smash apart on his metal-like skeleton. Not only that, but it’s later learned that his body breaks down embedded ammo-bits into his bloodstream. This is all way beyond the normal Executioner ilk, which understandably might be off-putting for some. But for me, it was a wonder to even read such stuff in a Mack Bolan novel.

Splatterpunk leaves a trail of murdered women in his wake, even killing one right in front of a powerless Bolan. Montgomery does a grand job heightening the tension throughout this scene, with Bolan chasing after Splatterpunk, the cops chasing after Bolan, and chaos in general overtaking Denver. Meanwhile Montgomery often hopscotches over to Harlan T. Garrison, the aforementioned Hunter Thompson analogue, who himself is on COMCON’s trail, blasting through Denver in a permanent chemical fog, recording his thoughts into a reel-to-reel recorder for posterity, his gorgeous female assistant Brandee Wine (!) barrelling their vintage muscle car through the streets like a daredevil.

Bolan finally gets the drop on Splatterpunk, and the novel settles down, if only for a bit. Part of the problem with Trigger Point was that so much of it was dedicated to world-building, to setting up Montgomery’s elaborate plot. He does a much better job here, keeping the story moving while still doling out conspiracy-mongering backstory. Again Bolan discovers that COMCON is well beyond current technology; Montgomery even works in alien/UFO stuff, when one of the Stony Man lab assistants, after studying Splatterpunk’s inert form, swears that alien technology is behind this – she even brings up that hoary old rumor that the Nazis supposedly had alien assistance in WWII.

The most memorable character is Harlan T. Ellison, such a spot-on spoof of Hunter Thompson that you almost feel as if you’re reading a Gold Eagle rewrite of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I bet this character in particular truly set off the average Gold Eagle reader, who wondered why he was being given so much attention – for the non-Gold Eagle fan, though, the character is a blast of relief from the typical type you encounter in this imprint’s books. I suspect though that Gold Eagle probably cut out some of Harlan’s proclivities from Montgomery’s orginal manuscript; though Harlan often makes mention of drugs and the like, we suspiciously never see him partaking of anything stronger than a few cans of beer.

Splatterpunk too is a great character, and Montgomery goes the opposite route from the expected confrontation with Bolan, instead delving into a metaphysical bit where Splatterpunk, unconscious after his opening battle with Bolan, meets up with a goddess who reminds him who he once was, before COMCON turned him into the monster known as Splatterpunk. (There’s a lot of subtle goddess-worship at play here, with female deities providing salvation…Harlan’s assistant, Brandee, even makes several references to “Great Goddess” being with her.) The end result being a reborn Splatterpunk offering to lead Bolan to the Spread, the mysterious COMCON-owned place where he was created, so that together they may destroy it.

Montgomery gets even further out with the closing sequence at the Spread. Here, in addition to blazing action, we are treated to a wealth of Lovecraft-inspired stuff, with occultic orgies (black-robed priests there to soak up the “orgone energy”), baby sacrifice, and even a tentacle-headed demon, for crying out loud, though Montgomery has the characters assume it’s just someone in an animatronic mask. The implication however is that the demon is quite real.

Action-wise the novel is strong, with the gun-porn well worked into the narrative. Splatterpunk unleashes hell on Denver, and Montgomery doesn’t shy on the gore, nor does he in the several other action scenes, particularly the climax, where Bolan storms the Spread with members of both Phoenix Force and Able Team in tow. Montgomery even proves himself adept at writing the mandatory Able Team banter. In fact, dialog is pretty strong throughout Iron Fist.

We’re obviously far beyond the world of Don Pendleton here, but Montgomery’s conviction really sells the tale. It would be hard to imagine any other Gold Eagle ghostwriter coming up with such a far-out storyline, that’s for sure; little wonder, then, that other than one other standalone Bolan novel, the COMCON trilogy was all Montgomery ever wrote for Gold Eagle. I’m really looking forward to the next and final installment of the trilogy, though word has it Montgomery’s manuscript was drastically changed before publication. Again, though, it’s a wonder Gold Eagle even published it in the first place.

Monday, June 4, 2012

The Executioner #262: Trigger Point


The Executioner #262: Trigger Point, by Gerald Montgomery
September, 2000 Gold Eagle Books

I've been meaning to read this book for twelve years now. Back in late 2000, during a brief spark of re-interest in the men's adventure genre (which I hadn't read since I was a kid), I found myself on mackbolan.com, where this recently-published volume was being hotly debated on the forum. (This was also when I discovered that Gar Wilson didn't exist.) After reading the comments I went right out to a WaldenBooks store and bought a copy of Trigger Point...and it's sat unread in a box until now.

This was the first installment of a trilogy entitled "COMCON," written by first-time Gold Eagle ghostwriter Gerald Montgomery. It was also the first of only four books Montgomery wrote for the publisher; by all accounts he had some issues with them, as apparently Montgomery wanted to take Mack "Executioner" Bolan into different places than the usual terrorist-wasting storylines. It seems Gold Eagle started off on the same page as Montgomery; it's a wonder Trigger Point was even published, as it's basically an overhaul of the entire Bolan mythos, putting the Executioner up against a globe-spanning army of neo-Nazis who plan to destroy the US Constitution and take over the world.

The group goes by the name COMCON -- the Committee to destroy the Constitution -- and they mask themselves under the guise of real-life federal agency FEMA. Be preprared for a whole hell of a lot of FEMA-bashing in this book. Over and over again we are told that FEMA is basically an un-Constitutional agency, a government division created to take over the country in case of emergencies. In other words, if the emergency was great enough, FEMA could end all democratic freedoms and place the entire country under marshall law.

But Montgomery has it that FEMA is the brainchild of Nazis who came to America after WWII as part of "Operation Paperclip," in which the US imported all kinds of Nazi elite and put them to work in various governmental institutions and agencies, both to use their knowledge and also to keep them from the Soviets.

So, these Nazis have spawned their own vast army of black-garbed neo-Nazis, true fascists all, who plan to subvert the US Constitution and take over the country, initiating a New World Order (cue the Ministry track). Not only that, but they have high-tech military equipment that's beyond anything in the US arsenal; Montgomery doesn't get into details in this first volume, but apparently the COMCON guys run out of infamous Area 51, where it seems they have come upon some "advanced" weaponry. In Trigger Point this is displayed in their sleek gunship helicopters which are nuclear powered.

To recap: Nazis came to America after the war and got jobs within the government, they secretly banded together with plans to continue the Reich, they called themselves "COMCON" after their plans to destroy the Constitution, and they hid their activities behind the mantle of FEMA, which they themselves created. They now have endless legions of armed minions and command various secret bases, and also, due to their FEMA powers, can mandate "emergencies" wherever they want, thereby taking over entire towns with Federal authority. They in fact supercede the authority of the President, who meanwhile they have firmly in the pocket anyway.

The obvious question is, if COMCON is so powerful and so prevalent, how in the hell has it taken Bolan so long to come across them? To Montgomery's credit, he does answer this, having Bolan guess that some of the "shadowy government-type" organizations he's dealt with in the past were most likely COMCON agents. In other words, he's fought them before, he just didn't know who they were. But still, it's a bit far-fetched. I'm not saying it's bad or anything, it's just all very sci-fi and crazy, and thus a bit hard to swallow after the "real-world" banality of most other Gold Eagle Executioner novels.

But as I've mentioned many times, I like the crazy shit. Trigger Point gets pretty crazy, with COMCON-brainwashed teenagers (mostly girls) becoming Terminators, blitzing their way through schools and etc. This is how Bolan gets into it; there have been a rash of school shootings in the US, all of them perpetrated by teens who then killed themselves.

A government official (believe it or not, a Democrat!), who is aware of COMCON and is determined to stop them, realizes that this is the neo-Nazis's master plan finally becoming a reality: they intend to use these school shootings to engender mass protests across the US, for people to call on a ban of assault weapons, so that once the weapons are out of the public's hands COMCON will have little resistance when they finally move in to create their NWO.

I remember when this novel came out, Montgomery had a website (now gone) where he stated that his two favorite authors were Don Pendleton and Hunter Thompson. I also remember he stated it was his intention to return the Pendleton spirit to the Gold Eagle novels. Strangely though, Bolan is in full-on cipher mode in Trigger Point. There's nothing about him different from any other stoic men's adventure protagonist; he's just a stone-cold patriot determined to destroy COMCON and thus save the US Republic. Pendleton's Bolan was human, but then, it's my contention that the Gold Eagle Bolan should just be considered a wholly different character from Pendleton's original.

After being called in, Bolan meets with the COMCON-opposed diplomat and the two are promptly attacked by those nuke-powered helicopters and a legion of COMCON commandos. This is probably the best action sequence in the book, with Bolan taking on the gunship and the troops with his handy M-16/grenade launcher combo. Montgomery doesn't go too far out in the gore department, just delivering taut action scenes.

One thing I didn't enjoy as much however is that Montgomery tends to write his action scenes like military fiction. In particular the finale, in which Bolan leads a group of Rangers on an assault on COMCON's "Tranquility Base." It all comes off like Blackhawk Down, with Bolan directing fire squads and mortar rounds and etc. I'm assuming that Montgomery has some military experience, as he knows of what he writes, but personally I prefer it when action scenes have all the reality of Arnold Schwarzenegger's Commando.

The best element here though is that Tranquility Base stuff -- it's a secret COMCON base which poses as a Christian teen-rehabilitation center. Here a Nazi-lovin' brainwashing genius oversees the staff, and any kid who comes in who has a history of being sexually assaulted is shunted off to the secret underground lair, where they are promptly brainwashed. They're given multiple personalities, from assault troops to intel couriers. Montgomery gets pretty lurid here, and there's also a cool scene where Bolan performs a "soft probe" of the base; shades of Death Merchant #36: The Cosmic Reality Kill.

Really though, the majority of Trigger Point is given over to setting up the ensuing volumes. There are a lot of scenes of Bolan and his fellow Stony Man commandos learning about COMCON and FEMA, but Montgomery does spice it up every once in a while with an action scene -- there's also another good sequence where Bolan and his fellows take on one of those reprogrammed teenage girls. This must be the only scene in a Bolan novel where the Executioner goes up against a machine gun-toting schoolgirl. Another good scene is later on where Bolan poses as a COMCON "man in black" and meets a gorgeous female agent who is against COMCON; not sure if she shows up again, but her presence was a nice touch in the male-centric Gold Eagle world.

I know the trilogy only got the crazier as it went on -- the next one, Iron Fist, has Bolan going up against a nanotech-powered COMCON monster. After a decade-plus I went out and finally bought the rest of the trilogy, as well as Montgomery's fourth and final novel for Gold Eagle. While Trigger Point didn't blow me away, it was nice to see a Gold Eagle ghostwriter trying to do something different with the series, so I look forward to reading the rest of his work.