Showing posts with label Steel Lightning. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Steel Lightning. Show all posts

Thursday, August 2, 2018

Steel Lightning: Slash And Burn (Steel Lightning #3)


Steel Lightning: Slash And Burn, by Kevin Sherrill
January, 1992  Zebra Books

The never-titled men’s adventure series that I call “Steel Lightning” reaches its third and final volume, sporting basically the same cover as the previous volume (only with “Slash and Burn” lamely added beneath the title) and jumping over to the Zebra imprint, which at this point was the same house as previous imprint Pinnacle.

Like those earlier two books, Slash And Burn is just way too friggin’ long for the genre, coming in at 256 pages. And the helluva it is, most of it’s padding. For once again Kevin Sherrill keeps his main characters on the sideline for the duration, only occasionally livening things up with some action – but even then the action is a bit bloodless when compared to the previous volumes. A sort of blandness has settled on things, and there’s no mystery why there was never a fourth volume.

To make it worse, the opening of the book promises something a lot crazier than we actually get – we meet a teen girl as she’s tripping on Delight, the new drug that’s basically Ecstasy on steroids; pop a pill and you’re a living orgasm or something. Well this girl takes a bunch and prety soon she’s sucking and fucking away, right in the middle of a New York nightclub that’s blasting techno music (the book is very “early ‘90s”)…and then she goes into a massive seizure (one of those unfortunate Delight side-effects), a seizure so, uh, climactic that it makes her entire body seize up, so quickly and so savagely that she severs off the dicks of the guys who happen to be inside the various orifices of her body! And plus she’s dead, too, another of those unfortunate Delight side-effects.

Meanwhile hot brunette Barbara Cohen, former druggie-hooker-pornstar-legal assistant-rape victim(!), current “Street Machine” smurfette, is jogging through the hellzones of New York (it’s the pre-Guliani era, baby), hoping to lure out the latest group of reprobrates her brothers in the Street Machine urban combat unit can wipe out. She lures out some teens with bats and we’re constantly informed how clean-cut they look, how hard it is for Barb (or “Cohen,” as Sherrill arbitrarily refers to her; the dude as ever can’t stay consistent) to grasp that these kids are trying to rape and kill her. This goes on for quite a while and finally Street Machine come out to even the odds…only here does Sherrill realize that he failed to inform us that these kids are “all black,” whereas previously he seemed to be describing like a roving pack of kids just escaped from a rerun of Leave It To Beaver

But “sloppy writing” is the name of the game in the Steel Lightning series, so we’re prepared for this sort of thing. However we are not prepared for the endless dirge of dialog that ensues here, as the members of the team, all hoisting subguns and suited up in their black kevlar uniforms, argue over whether or not they should kill these hoodlums. Here we are quickly re-introduced to the team: there’s JD Dinatale, the gruff and unlikable leader; Moses White, aka “the black guy,” a pro football linebacker once known as “Dr. Pain;” Miguel Negron, aka “the Hispanic one,” a former jazz trumpeter or something; Joseph Vernick, the stout WWII vet; and finally Brian Benson, the wraithlike force of malevolence who was burned to a crisp in the first volume. And of course we’ve already met “Barb,” she of the checkered, hard-to-understand past.

As usual though, Sherrill refers to these characters by a host of different names in the narrative, often making it hard as friggin’ hell to understand who he is referring to. As I’ve mentioned before, “main character” Dinatale is referred to as “J.D.,” “Dinatale,” or sometimes as just “John,” and it’s even worse when new characters enter the fold. And Sherrill is very much a “you missed the earlier volume, you’re shit outta luck” kind of a writer, as he doesn’t much re-introduce any of these characters and just thrusts them at the reader, arbitrarily referring to them by a variety of names with little concern for reader comprehension.

You’d think by this point someone at the publisher would call Sherrill and tell him, “Mr. Sherrill, consistency is your friend. All this referring to your characters by multiple names in the narrative, particularly when you’ve just introduced the character and haven’t given him proper setup, is most confusing for the reader. Could you please consider just referring to your characters by one name in the narrative to avoid such confusion?” To which Sherrill would respond, “Hey, fuck you, man – I don’t need this shit. I’m Kevin Sherrill!! If I wanna refer to my characters by a hundred different names, I will! Now suck it!” “Yes, Mr. Sherrill, I’m sorry to trouble you,” the publisher would say, but he’d be talking to silence because Sherill had already hung up. At which point the publisher would call up his chief editor: “Look, we’re cancelling Steel Lighnting. I can’t take anymore of this diva Kevin Sherrill, not to mention his lack of consistency in character naming.” “Cancel Steel Lightning? Are you crazy?” The chief editor would explode. “We’ve got Sherrill all lined up for Carson – he’s gonna be one of the last guests!” To which the publisher would respond, “Listen, I’m Mr. Zebra – if I say Steel Lightning is cancelled, it’s cancelled! Now suck it!”

But anyway our heroes have lured out these creeps and now they’re all rarin’ to gun ‘em down, just clean this scum right off the face of the earth, but instead they get in a long debate about it. Just back and forth, right in front of the punks who moments ago were chasing Barb with the intent of raping and killing her. And it goes on and on…with Moses White figuring maybe the punks should get a break and Vernick agreeing, and even Barb agreeing, but Brian’s over there chomping at the bit to kill ‘em all. It’s up to Dinatale to come up with the novel idea of beating them all up to a pulp.

The book as mentioned is too bloated for its own good, so we don’t get to the main villain until later: his name is Levi Golden, he’s an old Jewish man who escaped to America from the Nazi horrors of the ‘40s, and he’s behind the Delight scheme. In a bit of continuity we also learn he was the boss of the main villain in the previous volume. But man, talk about sending mixed signals. The back cover hypes Golden as “sadistic,” but when we meet him we’re treated to an overlong backstory showing all the horrors and misery he endured…escaping Germany as a young man with his wife and coming to New York, where he found even worse horrors, his wife raped and his daughter turned a hooker-junkie and his son killed and his wife left a catatonic wreck – and I mean all this before it’s even 1947!

So are we supposed to hate this guy or feel sorry for him? At any rate in a “tribute” to The Godfather, Golden a la Don Corleone had to get tough to face toughness, thus resolved to becoming more monstrous than those who preyed upon him. He set up a mafia of other escaped Jews and now, in 1992 (and we’re told this is all in December of ’92, right before Christmas, in other words a few months after the book was published – the future!!), Levi Golden is a kingpin of crime. But he has no marks on his record, and indeed his cover is as a harmless New York tailor, and he’s so successful in this pose that when Dinatale visits his shop later in the book only Dinatale’s cop-born sixth sense tells him the harmless old man is anything but harmless.

Sherrill though just wants to bide his time for the majority of the book; we endure all kinds of padding, from more Delight-spawned deaths to arbitrary action scenes starring Golden’s top henchman, Turk. When we get back to the Street Machine themselves, it’s usually to encounter them in mundane aspects – again arguing over the justness of their cause (three volumes in!!), or like with Vernick pulling the plug on his vegetable wife, or Dinatale bullyng an old nemesis of his from the force named Reimer who is clearly set up as a dude who will attempt to take down the Street Machine in some future volume that never happened.

While Slash And Burn is padded to the extreme, to Sherrill’s credit he writes as if it’s ten years earlier and not 1992; which is to say, the novel’s as un-PC as one could demand from the genre. This is mostly relayed via dialog, in particular from Dinatale; for example there’s a part early on where Maitland, the millionaire who secretly funds Street Machine, tells Dinatale that his team has picked up the notoriety of Batman and Robin in the underworld. To which Dinatale gruffly responds: “Two flaming queens if there were ever any.”

Speaking of sleazy stuff, the moment you’ve waited for has finally arrived, friends – Dinatale and Barb do it. As we’ll recall, our former hooker-pornstar-rape victim-crook asskicker has been doubting if she’s truly a lesbian; the thought of a man touching her makes her flesh crawl, after the gang-rape she endured in the first volume…any man, that is, except for Dinatale. As we learned last time Barb was wondering if she wanted to say to hell with it and do the guy – this time, after a failed hit attempt on Dinatale and Barb by Turk, the two repair to Metro Meats, ie the towering Street Machine headquarters, and clean up each other’s wounds before giving in to temptation. Sherrill really stretches this way out, long-simmer to the max, but after lots of talk, including the two smelling each other (seriously!), when they finally get to the down and dirty screwin’ Sherrill cuts away: “It went on like that for hours.”

After this Barb is now “the leader’s woman,” but nothing much else plays out on this subplot. It’s made clear though that it’s true love between the two and they would’ve remained an item in future installments. And the others othe team take it all in quite pragmatically, which is to say there are no ripples caused. I guess the only change is the two now worry over each other in the action scenes – which, finally, we get to in the final quarter. So in that way Slash And Burn is identical in its construct to the previous two volumes: an opening action scene, lots of padding, and then a final harried climactic action scene. Gee, I wonder if the fourth volume would’ve followed the same path…?

And the big finale is more goofy than anything: Golden’s secret Delight-manufacturing location is a fortress of a building deep in Chinatown, which we are informed is a no-man’s land along the lines of Beirut or something – such a no man’s land that Dinatale tells his troops they can go in with guns blasting, no silencers needed this time. And hell let’s bring a couple LAW rocket launchers along, too! But just when it goes down it all gets super ridiculous…Moses’s knee goes out on him due to an injury he’s been dealing with the entire book, and his massive frame crashes into the garbage the team’s hiding in, alerting Golden, Turk, and their entourage that it’s an ambush. And meanwhile Barb, apropos of nothing, goes into a seizure and starts freaking out!

Golden doesn’t have like an army or anything, so for the most part it’s just the Street Machine hiding in refuse and springing up to fire off a shot or two. We do get just a bit of gun-porn, not as much as previous volumes though, and as mentioned the gore is much toned down. In fact it’s all so bland I can’t even remember if Golden is given a big sendoff. About all I remember is all this occurs on Christmas Eve, and the book ends with a lame “Bah, humbug” joke from Brian Benson, and that’s all she wrote for the Steel Lightning series.

I recall the thrill I experienced when I discovered this series a few years ago, trawling Amazon for anything published by Pinnacle in the latter ‘80s, in particular any obscure men’s adventure books. I remember seeing “Midnight Lightning” listed, with no details provided, and then researching further and realizing it was indeed a men’s adventure novel – and that there were two more volumes! But sadly the series just never amounted to much, and my only suspicion is that Sherrill was given poor direction by the publisher…the books are always promising to go all-out, but never quite do, as if the publisher wanted a “real” novel, and not just a crazy action spectacle.

Monday, November 23, 2015

Steel Lightning (Steel Lightning #2)


Steel Lightning, by Kevin Sherrill
September, 1991  Pinnacle/Zebra Books

One of the more obscure men’s adventure series continues with Steel Lightning, the second installment of an un-named, un-numbered series that began with Midnight Lightning. I’ve decided to call this series “Steel Lightning”, given that the third and final volume retains this name, but for what it’s worth the series protagonists refer to themselves as “Street Machine.” 

Whatever the name, Steel Lightning was a chore to get through. At 302 pages of smallish print, each and every page packed with dense blocks of paragraphs, it was an uphill struggle. Once again Kevin Sherrill, apparently a real person, crushes forward momentum with constant backpedalling, inconsequential digressions, repetitive situations, and, this time at least, lots and lots of racist invective. A book like this would cause the mollycoddled college students of today to walk out in protest and their spineless president to resign. It’s hardcore stuff, but honestly just as goofily over-the-top as the sort of shit David Alexander wrote in Swastika.

It comes courtesy the villains of the installment, a group of neo-Nazis operating out of Alphabet City, one of the (then) more dangerous sections of New York. (An irony about this series is how it’s predicated on the rampant and growing crime rate in New York, whereas in real life the ‘90s saw such a dropoff in crime that New York is now considered one of the safest places in the country to live. Wait, maybe that was thanks to the efforts of the Street Machine!) The neo-Nazi scum leader is Niles “Psycho” Dorfman, and he himself reports to a mysterious, never-named bigwig who calls all the shots. Sherrill keeps the bigwig’s identity secret for a “surprise” reveal you can see coming miles away, but meanwhile the back cover copy blows the entire secret, anyway – it’s really a politician who is campaigning for mayor named Rolf Deverak.

Psycho’s crew is the same who caused Street Machine member Moses White so much grief in the first volume, shooting him and leaving him for dead. Moses’s vengeance was left unquenched by the end of that first volume, and I see now why: Sherrill likely planned to center each installment around a specific team member’s revenge. The first volume (gradually) got around to the vengeance of Brian Benson, who had been burned to a crisp by a trio of sadistic bikers. All that was six or so months ago, and when we meet them this time around the Street Machine is busy taking care of business, taking out a crack manufacturing plant in New York.

Speaking of David Alexander, Sherrill again comes off very similarly to the guy, to the point where I again wonder if Sherrill and Alexander were one and the same. But if so, this is a toned down Alexander, for Sherrill only delivers a handful of action scenes. When he does, though, he goes full-blast, with plentiful chaos and gore, and he also shows a penchant for the goofy alliteration Alexander specializes in. And yet for all that, so much of this book is comprised of boring chaff that I figure there’s no way it could be Alexander; 90% of this fat book is a flat-out bore, where hardly anything happens other than constant and repetitive declarations of bad-assed intent from the various members of Street Machine.

Also, Sherrill does himself no favors by, once again, referring to his sundry characters by a variety of names in the narrative. God, this is confusing as hell. Psycho is referred to as “Psycho,” “Niles,” and “Dorfman” before we are finally clued that Sherrill’s only referring to a single character. Likewise the Street Machine heroes are arbitrarily referred to in the narrative by either their first names, last names, or nicknames. Team leader John Dinatale is probably the worst recipient of this confusing mish-mash of narrative naming, sometimes “Dinatale,” sometimes “John,” sometimes even “J.D.” 

Anyway, this opening action scene is appropriately chaotic, but not only is it over way too soon but it’s also one of the very few action scenes in the novel. The Street Machine members hop in their armored Ford panel truck (which Sherrill refers to as “the war wagon,” lifting the concept from Don Pendleton) and escape the cops who are finally rushing onto the scene. Dinatale’s concern that his team will one day be captured by the police is almost realized in Steel Lightning, particularly thanks to an old enemy of Dinatale’s on the force, who has been given orders to find out who is behind this group of guerrilla vigilantes and to bring them all in.

From here the novel stalls for about two hundred or so pages. I thought the previous volume was slow-going, what with the tedious amount of time devoted to the various backstories of each character, as well as the forming of the team, followed by their endless training by Dinatale…I mean you’d think with all of that taken care of, Sherrill could get with the action and gore and have the Street Machine busting heads all over NYC. But no. Steel Lightning is even slower-going than its predecessor, comrpised mainly of the main characters sitting around and flashing back to this or that event, while re-affirming their intent to sow vengeance, the law be damned.

I should give Sherrill the benefit of the doubt, though. My assumption is some editor at Pinnacle/Zebra told him to “elongate” his manuscript (to quote the still-hilarious “Carsenio” skit from SNL). At this point Zebra owned the Pinnacle imprint and Zebra was known for men’s adventure books that were well beyond the page length of the genre norm. Maybe Sherrill’s manuscript suffered from this. Where Steel Lightning should blast full-tilt from first page to last, it instead just treads water, mimicking the first volume in how it’s so listless throughout until finally cutting loose in the very last pages.

There are a few highlights. For one Dinatale’s team gets in an endless chase with the cops, who spot them heading onto the job in their armored Ford truck. While it should be exciting, this sequence just keeps going on and on and on, with Dinatale steering the trusty old Ford through the back alleys of Manhattan until he successfully loses the tail. Then there’s a gruesome, over-the-top sequence, again reminiscent of the work of David Alexander, where Psycho and his Nazis massacre a bunch of people in Chinatown, making it look like a hate crime perpetrated by blacks (they even wear blackface as part of the ruse…!). Sherrill even devotes an entire paragraph to the paths of various bullets as they slam through a pretty young Chinese woman.

Speaking of women, Psycho’s crew has some veritable neo-Nazi She Devils in it, though they’re nothing like their pulpier forebears in the old men's mags. These ones are scurvy, gross harlots with likely poor hygeine; one of them, Heidi, has the pulpy aspect of a swastika tattooed between her breasts, with an SS tattooed on each nipple, but she’s such a nonentity of a character you barely notice her. She, like the other few girls, devotes slavish attention to Psycho, usually reprimanded, beaten, and raped by him for the most minor of infractions. However it must be said that Dinatale, toward the finale, apparently rapes Heidi to death in order to get some desired info out of her. 

Sherrill is at pains to make John Dinatale seem more unhinged and sadistic than the worst “slags” in all of New York (“slags” by the way being a word repeated about a billion times in the novel). Raping a neo-Nazi chick to death (off-page or not) is just one indication of this; hell, Dinatale’s live-in girlfriend is specifically stated as being a teenager. And she brings over another teenager, also a former hooker, and Dinatale bangs ‘em both at the same time. (This too happens off-page; in fact all the sex happens off-page in this volume.) Throughout the novel Dinatale keeps swearing bloody vengeance, and when the shit hits the fan in the final pages he murders neo-Nazis whether they be male or female, armed or unarmed. Some hero.

Meanwhile Barbara Cohen, the Smurfette of the group, is growing feelings for Dinatale, wondering if he’s going to be the stud who gets her off the lesbian bandwagon she jumped on after being raped and tortured in the previous volume. Barbara as we’ll recall is a former porno actress turned model turned rape victim turned District Attorney’s assistant(!!), and she’s getting a case of hot pants for Mr. Dinatale. But this subplot, as interesting as it is, is just another that Sherrill stretches to the breaking point throughout the novel, with nothing resolved by story’s end. By the finale of Steel Lightning Barbara has basically decided that she’s going to tell her girlfriend to take a hike so she can bang Dinatale.  Or will she?

Sadly, this soap operatic bullshit is more interesting than the meat of the tale. As stated, for the most part Steel Lightning is just endless scenes of the various members of the Street Machine stating their vow to fight crime, regardless the cost, while abritrarily cutting over to Psyscho or Deverak spouting racist vitriol. When things do promise to happen – like Moses’s wife accosted by Psycho and gang – it instead leads to a heated argument within the Street Machine, Moses wanting vengeance asap and Dinatale telling him he’ll get vengeance when Dinatale say’s he’ll get vengeance.

Why they don’t barge down Psycho’s doors and blast him and his goons away is obvious: Sherrill has several thousand more words to go before he meets his requirement. Instead it’s back to the stalling and delaying; finally Dinatale orders the troops in when Moses’s wife is abducted. After a gory fight in a neo-Nazi bar, Dinatale corners Heidi, swearing he’ll get the info out of her while screwing her…to death. Next chapter and Dinatale knows where Moses’s wife is being held, and he also intimates that Heidi is in fact dead, so good gravy who knows what happened there. More importantly, the insanity promised by the cover is finally about to be unleashed.

The gun-porn also returns with copious descriptions of the various firearms the team uses. The big, long-awaited action scene sees the Street Machine assaulting Psycho’s headquarters in Alphabet City, machine guns blazing. However there are more neo-Nazis here than expected, so the team is quickly outnumbered. Barbara and WWII vet Joseph Vernick are both shot, though protected by the “Kevlar underwear” Dinatale insists the team members wear. Moses, himself injured, manages to free his wife, but wouldn’t you guess it – Psycho escapes.

Humorously, having gone most of the novel without any action, we are graced with another action scene immediately after this one; Dinatale finds out where Deverak has his secret neo-Nazi meetings, and he and the team grab a bunch of frag grenades and head there. They blast away yet more Nazi scum, and Psycho and Deverak are shot about fifty times each in the melee. It’s at least a memorable finale, but good grief did it take forever to get there.

Steel Lightning could’ve been a rollercoaster of a ride, but it’s just a boring digression. Let’s hope the next volume, which was to be the last, improves things.

Monday, February 9, 2015

Midnight Lightning (Steel Lightning #1)


Midnight Lightning, by Kevin Sherrill
August, 1989  Pinnacle/Zebra Books

About as obscure as a paperback original can be, Midnight Lightning is one of those late ‘80s publications that bears the Pinnacle imprint but in reality is a Zebra publication. It’s also the first of a three-volume men’s adventure series,* even though there was no series title or volume numbers. (The spine however labels the book as “Men’s Adventure.”)

Kevin Sherrill appears to have been a real person, as the book is copyright him. Style-wise he proves himself capable of doling out the OTT thrills the genre demands, though ultimately the book is stymied by its exorbitant page count – 351 pages, the typically-overblown Zebra paperback length. And the guy POV-hops like crazy, sometimes even changing the character perspective in the middle of a sentence He commits almost as great a sin by referring to his characters by various names in the narrative, which can really confuse a reader.

The novel comes off like an ‘80s take on Death Wish, a total Canon Group type of movie idea, where a gang of New Yorkers, their lives ruined by acts of crime, band together beneath the guidance of a tough veteran cop and become a well-armed, well-trained urban vigilante squad. Be warned though that the vast majority of Midnight Lightning is all about the training; the actual vigilante stuff doesn’t even get started until around page 300. Glances through future volumes indicate that they more quickly get to the good stuff.

When Sherrill gets going, he proves himself in the caliber of David Alexander, and there were times I wondered if “Kevin Sherrill” was the pseudonym of our old Phoenix-authoring pal. This similarity is mostly displayed in the opening pages, which purport to illustrate the cruelties that our heroes suffer, the injustices which make them become vigilantes. But it’s all done so over the top that it comes off as farce.

First we have Barbara Cohen, an attractive young lady with one bizarre backstory, a backstory which Sherrill appears to change as he goes along. I also couldn’t figure out if she was a brunette or a blonde, as I think she’s described both ways. Anyhow, poor Barbara is on the way from work late one evening, where she apparently serves as the assistant to the DA or something. (And yet, we’re also informed she was once a hooker…as well as a drug-addicted porn star??) A pair of men ambush her outside of her Lower East Side apartment, take her away, and proceed to rape and abuse her for pages, even slicing her up in unspecified ways. Indeed, Barbara’s injuries are never fully described, which makes it all the more unsettling, as it plays on your mind.

Next there’s Joseph Vernick, a WWII vet who ownes a small grocery store in the Lower East Side. One night a gang of hispanic youth come in and terrorize the place. When burly and beefy Vernick fights them off, one of them whips out a pistol – and shoots Vernick’s wife. Now the elderly lady has been rendered to a vegetable, life support the only thing that keeps her alive.

Moses White is a former pro footballer, where he acquired the nickname “Dr. Pain.” But that was years ago, and now Moses is happy living with his white girlfriend. The fact that Moses is black is very upsetting to a group of neo-Nazis, all of whom begin terrorizing him. This has its beginnings one afternoon when Moses is ambushed by a group of them, including some Nazi girls. Moses fights them off, but is shot several times by the leader of the gang. As with the others, the cops/legal system prove incapable of bringing them to justice.

Next there’s Miguel Negron, a streetwise hispanic who grew up in the Lower East Side and has avoided the gangs and the drugs. His joy in life is playing the saxophone, which he does on the street corner for small change. He’s mugged one night and when the men try to take his precious sax, he goes nuts. When they threaten to slice off his lips, he goes even more nuts. But the thugs end up mutilating his lips anyway, slicing them in half and thus ruining Miguel’s chances of ever playing sax again.

Finally there’s Brian Benson, whose sad backstory is the most horrific of all, which is to say it’s also the most farcial. A closeted gay and incredibly shy and introverted, Brian lives alone and works as a data programmer. One night he comes home to find three burly bikers waiting in his apartment. The men proceed to rape him horribly, culminating in their lighting Brian on fire. But despite the flames which engulf him, Brian lives on, even staring the bikers down as they flee the burning apartment.

Meanwhile we are introduced to John DiNatale, a 40-something veteran NYC cop and ‘Nam vet. Sherrill seems to have clearly had Bruce Willis in mind here, as DiNatale’s balding pate is often mentioned – just like Bruce Willis’s hairline circa 1989. Despite his awesome record, DiNatale was kicked off the force for outright murdering a serial killer/pedophile, shooting the man point-blank during a police interrogation. This in addition to his other flagrances of the law (also depicted via overlong flashbacks) finally resulted in DiNatale’s dismissal.

But in a retread of the earlier Hawker series, DiNatale is contacted by a wealthy businessman who offers to fund a private war on crime. Just as in that earlier series, DiNatale will be set up with state-of-the-art technology and weapons, and will get to be field commander of an army he creates. Now he just has to find his soldiers. Walking through the Lower East Side one night, DiNatale comes upon a public gathering where the locals are listening to a speech by the police commissioner, who promises to curtail the rampant crime, something which brings forth a lot of laughter.

DiNatale encounters our unfortunate victims, every single one of whom has gathered here tonight, “as if by fate.” Now, Sherrill never says exactly how long ago each of them suffered their horrors, but they’re all healed up enough to be out and about. Even Barbara Cohen, who was apparently beaten and cut to the state of being unrecognizable, is back to looking like her usual hotstuff self. And Brian Benson is there, a scarred, skeletal shambles of a man whom Sherrill will exploit throughout the narrative, comparing him to a monster.

Anyway, DiNatale knows he’s found his soldiers as soon as he sees them. They meet at a bar, where he offers them the chance to strike back at crime. Brian even shows up, and we readers see that he has become a completely different character, consumed with vengeance. He’s almost been burnt to a crisp, and wears dark glasses. He also enjoys exploiting his own “freakish appearance” by scaring people who openly stare at him. He speaks in a ragged whisper, and seems more like a figure from a horror movie than a real person.

Now begins the Dirty Dozen-esque training, which serves to take up the majority of the narrative. Sherrill hopscotches around his large cast of characters, making for a bumpy ride, because the dude POV-hops like a mother. One paragraph we’re in say DiNatale’s thoughts, and the next paragraph (or even sentence) we’re suddenly in say Barbara’s thoughts – no white space or anything to clue to the reader that the perspective has changed.

Worse yet, Sherill lacks consistency with character names: DiNatale is referred to as “DiNatale,” “John,” and even “J.D.;” Moses is “Mose,” “Moses,” and “White,” and most confusing of all Miquel is referred to as “Miquel,” “Negron,” and even “Micky!” And all this in the narrative, mind you; it’s fine for the characters to refer to each other by various names, I mean that’s just like in real life. But when the narrative itself jumps around – sometimes without even warning you, like with the “J.D.” and “Micky” stuff – you can get easily confused.

Anyway the training stuff goes on and on, from DiNatale teaching them how to defend themselves with martial arts to even laughable stuff where he teaches them how to use ninja throwing stars – part of every New York cop’s bag of tricks, I guess. Finally the gun-porn arrives and goes on for quite some time, with each of the characters picking up their own favored piece. Most memorable is Brian, who takes to a .44 Magnum with relish, furthering his image as a sort of shadowy personification of Death itself.

True to Zebra form the book is vastly overblown, meaning there’s all kinds of shit Sherrill likely added to meet his word count. In addition to the rampant and unecessary flashbacks that pepper the first half of the book, there’s also lame and bizarre stuff past the midway point like where DiNatale takes his “troops” out into the no man’s land of Brooklyn and has them get in a chase with some cops. Even more time-wasting is a part where he takes them out to the Catskills, to run across a field while they’re shot at by cannons fired by a psychotic old ‘Nam pal of DiNatale’s who’s become a mercenary.

It’s not until page 300 that we get to the actual revenge – and even then it’s only minimally dealt out, Brian being the only one who gets to take vengeance on his tormentors. Meanwhile the scum who destroyed the lives of the others go free; in particular Sherrill leaves a whole subplot unexplored, where neo-Nazis are terrorizing Moses and his wife. Perhaps this stuff will be dealt with in the next novel, but still you sort of wish Sherrill had skipped all of the time-wasting stuff and just gotten down to the gory revenge scenario promised by the front and back covers.

I forgot to mention the gadgets and gear DiNatale supplies his team with. First there’s the “war truck,” or watever you want to call it; a ‘40s Dodge panel truck that’s been armored and remodeled into a tank on wheels. There’s even a gadget in the dashboard that foils police scanners into misreading the truck’s actual speed. The team is outfitted with state-of-the art weaponry and endless ammo, and they operate out of the Meat Locker, a Lower East Side tenement that spans three floors and has been converted into basically an army base; DiNatale lives there with his girlfriend. Finally the team has been outfitted with “Kevlar suits,” which while not fully bulletproof should prevent major harm.

Brian’s tormentors are chosen as the first to taste the wrath of DiNatale’s unnamed group of vigilantes. These are a group of degenerate bikers who run out of a condemned building where they sometimes bring back kidnapped children to drug and rape! And of course the courts and police can do nothing to stop them due to the usual action-novel nonsense. Currently they’re in the process of debasing and degrading a preteen runaway whom they plan to kill off once they’re sick of her. One thing’s for sure, Sherrill really makes the reader want to see these motherfuckers pay.

In the final pages we get a violent action scene as Brian first taunts out the bikers who tortured and raped him – and opens up on them with a flamethrower! After which the rest of the troops bust into the burning building and raise hell on full auto. In these sequences Sherrill finally cuts loose, and it’s unfortunate he doesn’t more often in the novel. As it is, only the opening and closing portions of Midnight Lightning reach the lurid excess this genre demands. But when Sherill’s on, he’s on, almost up there with David Alexander – he even has that author’s penchant for veering into straight-up homoerotica when writing about guns:

[Brian] now wore his “Dirty Harry Special” all the time. And the fully-charged stunner was never far from his hand. He could haul his big rod out and shoot a load or two or more at the least provocation. His rod felt hot in its holster because the men to whom he had promised an Instant Replay weren’t far away at all.

He’s talking about his .44 Magnum, of course!

Speaking of erotica, Sherrill even delivers a fairly-explicit sex scene, as DiNatale graphically bangs his live-in girlfriend, an incredibly young druggie/hooker or something. This girl doesn’t deliver much to the proceedings, other than to call up DiNatale on the Meat Locker’s intercom and ask him to come over to her room for a quick fuck. We also get some stuff about Barbara Cohen now being a lesbian, unable to think of men “that way” anymore after her horrific rape…so Sherrill compensates by throwing in an out-of-nowhere flashback/dream sequence to her days as a porn star.

As mentioned, only Brian gets his vengeance in this first novel, and its bloody (and fiery) vengeance indeed. But by the time DiNatale’s troops roar out in their armored trucks, just as the cops show, the novel’s already come to an end – and the other criminals are still out there. Here’s hoping the next novel delivers, and also that it isn’t hampered like this one was by pointless digressions and padding.

*Midnight Lightning was followed in 1991 by Steel Lightning. The series concluded in 1992 with the similarly-titled Steel Lightning: Slash and Burn. To make it even more confusing, these two novels had identical covers, only with “Slash And Burn” on the cover of the third volume differentiating the two. (Also, this third volume was published under the Zebra imprint, whereas the first two bore the Pinnacle imprint.)