Overload #7: Rolling Vengeance

Overload #7: Rolling Vengeance, by Bob Ham

October, 1990  Bantam Books

“I love men’s adventure novels – and I love truckin’!” said no one ever, yet regardless the Overload series, which combined men’s adventure with trucking, ran for several volumes in the late ‘80s. I’ve only got three of those volumes, and the only other one I’ve read was #2: The Wrath, but this isn’t a series where I’m desperate to fill in the gaps in my colletion. In truth I found Rolling Vengeance tedious, “overloaded” with “gee-wiz” high-tech trivialities and way too many characters…and way too many pages. At 238 pages, the novel’s too damn long for a men’s adventure novel. But then per the cover it’s a “Super Edition,” which I assume was Bantam’s attempt at making the books stand out. 

Actually the marketing department at Bantam was on point with this one. Graphic Audio, which years later would do audio adaptaions of several men’s adventure novels, supposedly did very well with…truck drivers. So perhaps truckers made up a significant segment of men’s adventure readership in the ‘80s, too. Of course it would be hard to read and drive your truck, so maybe Graphic Audio does so well with truckers because all you have to do is listen as the miles roll by. Bantam at least tried to keep the men’s adventure flame burning in the late ‘80s, as the genre was dying out…though Rolling Vengeance itself points the way to the bloated “techno-thrillers” that would soon be occupying the bookstore shelves that men’s adventure novels once did. 

So I’m missing a bunch of volumes since the last one I read, but it’s no big deal. About the main development in the series is that co-protagonists Marc Lee and Carl Browne now work for the government…indeed, they work directly for the President of the United States! “Shall we send in the Marines, Mr. President?” “No – get me those two truckers!” As we’ll recall, Lee and Browne run Leeco, a bona fide trucking outfit…but now they also have an armada of souped-up rigs and whatnot. Their main one, at least this volume, is an “offroader” that’s completely bulletproof, run by a computer, and armed with a friggin’ rocket launcher. Not to mention the “HDTV videotape” it can record on its front-mounted high definition cameras. Author Bob Ham will demonstrate this and other souped-up vehicles in action throughout Rolling Vengeance, in dry copy that could just as easily have come out of Popular Mechanics. 

And see that’s the thing. Because folks we have here a novel about two former Delta Force commandos who have an armed and armored truck and go around the country busting up criminals for the President, but Ham writes the novel with his tongue nowhere in the vicinity of his cheek. In fact, he seems straight-up serious about the whole thing, and that seriousness extends to the narrative…which means that Rolling Vengeance isn’t much fun at all. It’s dry, saddled with too many characters and way too much exposition and technical detail, and again seems more like something that should have “Tom Clancy Presents” on the cover instead of a drawing of a guy and a girl blasting away. The novel is humorless, is what I’m trying to say, with Ham treating everything with a sort of gravitas. There’s none of the fun wildness you would expect given the setup. Perhaps this too is evidence of the change men’s adventure went through in its death-throes; no longer could the genre be the gory, sex-filled escapism it once was…now it must be “serious,” with characters more prone to ponder and much less prone to engage in sex…because there isn’t a single sex scene in the book, nor even any of the genre’s customary exploitation of the female characters. 

Because the female characters are empowered now – another indication of the way things would soon be going. Another change to the series since The Wrath is that Marc Lee’s girlfriend Jill is now a kick-ass commando herself, thanks to a “Federal training center in Georgia” which taught her how to handle combat and whatnot. She takes part in the climactic action sequence, but since she’s still a girl and stuff she does get a little upset over how she’s killed a few men. That presumably is her on the cover, but there’s another empowered babe in the pages of Rolling Vengeance: Allison Riker, “a highly attractive and feisty blond truck driver” who brings Lee and Browne onto this latest case. And note too the spelling of “blond,” which was spelled “blonde” in earlier, more testosterone-driven times; indeed, “blonde” is now considered an offensive spelling, along with about two billion other previously-acceptable words. 

Allison runs an outfit for independent truckers, and she comes to Leeco for help with a guy named Luis Partida, who is horning in on her outfit. Now the back cover has it that Luis Partida is a coke kingpin, but the novel itself makes more issue out of how Partida runs illegals up from Mexico. He is intended to be the villain of the piece, but for some curious reason Ham spends the entire novel showing Partida trying to save himself from a group of truckers who are trying to kill him. What I mean to say is, Partida is constantly being attacked and left for dead, and Ham will end the section on a cliffhanger, as if we readers are desperate to know whether Partida has survived. But he’s the villain, a guy who when we meet him has just got out of prison, and we also know he’s bad because in an early sequence, when Partida is running away from the first group of truckers who try to kill him, the bastard blows away a poor little black kid – for no other reason than the innocent kid helpfully picked up a suitcase filled with Partida’s money. 

That’s one thing that remains from the previous volume I read, the constant cutting to and fro. In my review of The Wrath I described this as “cinematic,” and that really seems to be the vibe Ham is going for. The entire book is like that…we’ll cut from scenes with Allison to ones with Partida to ones with Marc Lee or Carl Browne, to ones with the teenaged daughter of an FBI agent who is target number one in Partida’s revenge scheme. So much of this stuff could’ve been cut and the book would have benefitted. And yes, despite being under the gun literally from his introduction into the text, Partida himself is attempting revenge – on the FBI agent who sent him up the river years ago. This would be Harvey Harrison, presumably a series regular in that he is aware of Lee and Browne and has worked with them before. 

But it’s Harrison’s daughter Lisa who factors more into the narrative. In what is an unfathomable waste of pages, Lisa Harrison features in constant cutaway sequences in which we see her be abducted, escape, be chased, end up with another group of men who intend her harm, etc, etc. I had bad flashbacks to the second season of 24, which featured the same go-nowhere sort of subplot, with Jack Bauer’s busty blonde daughter being captured, chased, etc. But in its own way this tiresome material with Lisa Harrison is indicative of the problem overall with Rolling Vengeance: an overly “serious” attempt at suspense as the poor girl tries to get away from her various captors. Again, it’s the sort of thing that would be more at home in a padded-out thriller novel….not in the seventh installment of a series about “gun-totin’ truckers.” 

All these various characters and subplots gradually – very gradually – weave together. Partida carries the brunt of the action in the first half, seeing as how he dodges attempts by a group of truckers who want to kill him. This entire bit is ludicrous because Partida is supposed to be the villain! Yet we constantly see him in danger! Meanwhile Lee and Browne do their own research of Partida, running into various thugs and whatnot, in particular the street gang he has employed to do his dirty work. There’s only one somewhat badass part in the book, where Browne confronts some drug-dealing punks and makes one of them eat a fistful of “crack rocks.” Given that Browne’s the muscular black dude in the series, it almost has the vibe of Blaxploitation…but Ham doesn’t do much with it, as things devolve into a gunfight. And the gore is pretty much nonexistent. This is very much a “get shot and fall down” sort of novel, with the mandatory violence of the genre having been, uh, gutted. 

Instead, we get endless exposition detailing the capabilities of the various gizmos Lee and Browne’s trucks have been outfitted with. I don’t exaggerate when I say a lot of the book is given over to this sort of thing…I mean it’s like sleaze for people with a truck-tech fetish: 

This dry, tedious vibe extends to the action scenes: 

And yet for all this striving for a serious vibe, Ham still doles out lines like, “The Highway Warriors got up on their knees and turned to stand.” I don’t know why, but that line cracked me up. You could say it “crack rocked” me up, but that would be lame. But then “lame” would be the sole word I’d use to summarize Rolling Vengeance…a novel so misguided that the villain is constantly shown as being in jeopardy, and which features countless pages in which a 17 year-old girl, who has nothing to do with the series overall, runs and hides from various thugs. 

How Overload ran for 12 volumes is anyone’s guess. I’m sure there are those out there who might enjoy it – heck, people had to enjoy it for the series to run so long – but I can’t say I’m one of them.

Overload #2: The Wrath

Overload #2: The Wrath, by Bob Ham
July, 1989  Bantam Books

You have to give Bantam Books credit: they tried to give the men’s adventure genre a shot in the arm as it was dying, releasing a few new series in the late ‘80s. Overload was one of them, and went on to run for a surprising twelve volumes. The concept of this series was aptly summed up by Zwolf: “gun-totin’ truckers.”

Seriously, if Overload was a movie it would probably feature Meatloaf in a role. But author Bob Ham – a real name, not a pseudonym – is very serious here. And Bantam is fully committed as well; the back of the book even features an ad for Overdrive Magaine, “the Professional Journal for Successful Trucking.” But the author and publisher must’ve tapped a nerve, as this series went on a lot longer than you’d expect.

I’m missing the first volume, Personal War, but ironically enough someone emailed me just before I started reading this second volume, telling me that the first book was “the most homoerotic thing ever.” Well friends, that vibe is also apparent in The Wrath, which features long scenes of our heroes, Marc Lee and Carl Browne, driving around in a truck and discussing their feelings. Oh, and they apparently live together.

Lee and Browne are often referred to as “the Delta Warriors” by Ham, given that they’re both in Delta Force – the toughest bastards in the outfit, of course. Lee’s the son of a Dallas truck company owner and Browne’s the muscular black guy. The first volume apparently detailed the battle between the Lee family company Leeco and the mafia warriors of a New York capo named Segalini. In the climax of it Marc Lee’s father ended up in a coma (he’s now in a hospital in Dallas, under heavy security) and the Segalinis ended up dead.

But as The Wrath opens, we are informed that Segalini’s son survived. This is Bruno Segalini, who is now confined to a wheelchair, his achilles tendons having been severed by Lee and Browne in the first book! Apparently the “Delta Warriors” thought they killed Bruno in the climax of that book, but he escaped; now, assisted by his muscular henchman Ceps (as in “Biceps”), Segalini plots the utter destruction of Leeco. To do this he has retained the services of B.D., aka “Bad Dude,” a ‘Nam psychopath biker who leads a sadistic gang of bikers called Lobo.

It’s all very B-movie, but Ham peppers the book with acronyms and brandnames, proving to us that he’s done his research. If paramedics show up on a scene, for example, we’ll get long detail on what exactly it is they’ll do to save a life. If there’s a bomb to be disarmed, he’ll tell us how it’s done, step by step. He also wants to tell us all about then-current communications technology, as well as technical details of the various firearms employed. And yet this is a book that contains lines of dialog like, “I have to make a choice to either be in the trucking business or stay in Delta Force.”

Ham also goes for a cinematic feel, with constant cutting to and fro. We’ll have Lee and Browne in Dallas, trying to deal with a sudden fire at the Leeco headquarters, and then we’ll jump over to B.D., who cuts a swathe of sadism through the Smoky Mountains. Then we’ll cut over to Bruno Segalini, who sits in a house in Myrtle Beach and trades inane “my vengeance will be sweet” banter with Ceps. Then later we’ll cut over to Jill, Marc Lee’s girlfriend, who sits in the hospital with Marc’s comatose father and tells him about her dreams(!?).

But despite this attempt to goose the narrative with a cinematic feel, The Wrath instead comes off as rather sluggish. It’s not helped by Ham’s tendency to overdescribe. For example the opening conflagration at the Leeco HQ goes on way too long, with some mystery fire starting on the premises before the bomb squad shows up. He also has too many characters in play, and has to keep going back to them lest we forget about them: Segalini and Ceps are about as immaterial to the plot as you can get, thus the constant cutovers to them are a bit trying.

Oh, and meanwhile Lee and Browne are being ordered back on duty; turns out there’s some action down in Central America and their squad has been ordered to move in. But Lee and Browne ignore the summons, thus officially going AWOL. Strangely, their Delta Force commander is aware of their vigilante activities in the first book, however he draws the line when they don’t report for duty! This ultimately builds up a storyline which will continue in the next volume, as Lee and Browne manage to get themselves in the sights of the federal government thanks to their private warfaring.

The stuff with B.D. and his gang is probably the highlight of the book. In fact he provides the brunt of the novel’s action, and is also the titular “Wrath,” a name he acquired back in ‘Nam. B.D. personally wants to kill Lee and Browne, as their activities in the first book resulted in the death of the man who provided B.D. with his cocaine. Now he and his Lobos run amok in the Smoky Mountains, getting in occasional fights with truckers. There’s a goofy, endless subplot where they kill one trucker in revenge for the death of a fallen Lobo and then later get in a running fight with more truckers.

While the violence in The Wrath isn’t excessive (and nor is the sex), there is a sadistic vibe. The novel opens with the capture of a Leeco trucker, who is strung up in the Lobo camp and slowly tortured. At one point parts of his flesh are sliced off and eaten. But he does get laid at least – this courtesy Rapture, the dirty blonde mama of the bikers. Rapture mostly drives the van that follows the Lobo’s Harleys and as the novel progresses she becomes more and more disenfranchised with B.D. due to his penchant for cruelty.

Lee and Browne really don’t get active until well over halfway through, when they decide to take the war to Segalini. Ham is one of those authors who doesn’t mind shoehorning stuff in to meet his word count or to add a little action, like for example a totally irrelevant part where some woman drives into a lake as Lee and Browne are passing by, and the two men dive in to save her. This whole section is such a waste of the reader’s time as to be hilarious, but it does meet the likely goal of adding about twenty pages to the book.

After a couple failed hits in various diners, Lee and Browne survive unscathed and get word from their cop contact back in Dallas that B.D. is somewhere in the Smoky Mountains. Despite pages and pages of buildup, Ham delivers a bit of an anticlimax. The Lobos have M-60s and LAW rocket launchers, but our two heroes manage to get the lockdown on them, barrelling through camp and firing machine guns out of their big rig. Then B.D. and Lee get in a knockdown, dragout fight – but neither of them dies.

Then Segalini and Ceps show up and are basically killed in a paragraph, even though Ham has spent so much time making the reader savor the moment that they’ll die. Instead, they’re merely shot and then their car is blown up. When will these men’s adventure writers learn that we readers want to see the main villains sliced, diced, and gutted?? B.D.’s fate is a little better, if unbelievable; we’re to believe that one of his gang is actually an undercover FBI agent and has been going along with his barbarism all this time so as to gather evidence. But now it’s payback time!

As mentioned, Lee and Browne come under attack by the Feds by novel’s end, and it looks like it will be off to the slammer for them – transporting highly-illegal weapons across state lines, engaging in open warfare, and going AWOL from the army. My suspicion though is that in the next novel they’ll instead get hired to work for the government as, well…gun-totin’ truckers.

I’ve got a few more volumes of Overload, so eventually I’ll find out.