Christmas Slaughter (aka Mutants Amok #5)

Mutants Amok, by Mark Grant
December, 1991  Avon Books

The Mutants Amok series comes to a close with this final volume, the sole installment written by Bruce King (to whom the book is also copyright). Curiously “Mutants Amok” isn’t mentioned anywhere on or in the book, other than an ad for the previous four volumes. It makes one wonder if Avon intended to drop the volume numbering and just continue with standalone titles, or if by this point the writing was already on the wall, the series was cancelled, and they were just publishing this final book to be done with it. Given the scarcity of Christmas Slaughter, I think that might be the case – I’m figuring this fifth volume had a lower print run than the prior four.

King follows a different tack than David Bischoff did in volumes 1-4. Whereas Bischoff created an almost Loony Tunes-esque world of lowbrow, cartoonish humor followed by slapstick gore, King delivers a mostly straight piece of men’s adventure, complete with genre-mandatory gun-porn. There’s more firearms detail in Christmas Slaughter than the previous four books combined. Not that King overlooks the comedic angle; as with the Bischoff installments, there’s a fair bit “crazy mutant world” afoot in this one, but it’s undermined by the way King writes it.

Whereas Bischoff for the most part showed us the mutant insanity, King instead tells us about it, usually shoehorning exposition into the narrative or having characters baldly exposit on various things, even if they happen to be in the midst of a firefight. In this way the book reminds me of the recent misfire Go, Mutants! (coincidentally another book with “mutant” in the title; what are the odds??), which also tried but failed to be funny thanks to the same mistake. Like Go, Mutants!, Christmas Slaughter will have some punchline about mutant whackiness, and then King will spend a few paragraphs on backstory and/or exposition to explain the joke.

The characters are also a bit different. Rebel leader Max Turkel is no longer the clod of the first four books but is now a post-holocaust badass. In fact we learn here that his nickname among humans is “Mad Max.” Teen hero Jack Bender has lost much of his naïve nature, coming off like Max Turkel Junior. Only egghead Phil Potts stays mostly the same, and King appears to favor him the most of all the characters. However it’s via Potts that King delivers his most eggregious exposition, with Phil going on about arcane lore no matter the situation they’re in.

And speaking of which – just like I just did, King arbitrarily refers to his characters by first and last name in the narrative, which as far as I’m concerned is a no-no for professional authors (but just fine for unpaid bloggers who have gotten about two hours of sleep last night thanks to a crying newborn). But seriously, it’ll be “Turkel” one sentence and “Max” the next, and King does it for all the characters from beginning to end, resulting in a few bumps along the reading road.

Many of the subplots Bischoff built up are not only jettisoned but not even mentioned. For example, the alpha female rebel leader Max Turkel had developed a relationship with in the past few books doesn’t appear here and isn’t referenced once. And speaking of another Turkel subplot, the deal with BrainGeneral Harten monitoring Turkel via the robotic spleen (a sicko Loony Tunes-esque bit if ever there was one in this series) is dropped within the first few pages; sluglike Emperor Charlegmane announces that he knows Harten is a traitor and has the BrainGeneral “returned to his vat.” Speaking of Charlegmane, for the first hundred or so pages King will jump over to him and his cronies, and it’s here that we get most of the attempts at “comedy.” But luckily after this King focuses solely on our human heroes.

As the novel opens Max, Jack, and Phil are scouting the sewers beneath New San Francisco, investigating the latest mutant plot, which apparently will see a “final solution to the subhuman problem,” ie an eradication of human beings entirely. Here we get lots of details on the various guns our heroes are equipped with. They get in a gory firefight with “faders,” aka mutant zombies, and King proves that one thing he’s retained from the Bischoff books is the hardcore violence and gore. 

And also like Bischoff we have weird strains of mutantkind who are intended as goofy spoofs of humans; in the Haight-Ashbury district our heroes encounter “counter-culture muties,” including a bunch of “mutant Krishna monks,” who go around chanting for peace – Turkel et al slaughter them. Indeed, the “slaughter” in the novel’s title actually refers to the slaughtering the heroes perpetrate. One begins to feel bad for the mutants, who we learn are crazy about Christmas; thus it’s a bit of a downer in the many scenes where Turkel and the others will jump up out of sewers and mow down hordes of unarmed, harmless mutants who are singing Christmas carols or shopping for presents.

The novel takes place during the few days leading up to Christmas, and our heroes gradually learn that Charlegmane’s “final solution” has to do with taking the essence from humans (asexual mutants needing the procreation abilities of humans to survive) so that the actual humans are no longer needed. Thus Planned Genocide, Inc. is opened (surely the author’s spoofing of Planned Parenthood??), with its towering pyramidal HQ located in New San Francisco. The place is guarded by NZ mutants, aka blonde Nazis in black uniforms.

King adds a new character to the series who would’ve gone on to be a regular: Sue, a mega-babe redhead with a phenomenal bod which she shows off in a spandex leotard that follows the same color pattern as Supergirl’s costume (which geek Phil notices). She saves our heroes before the NZs can take them out, driving a hearse and firing an Uzi one-handed at pursuing NZ vehicles. They go back to her place, where Sue reveals that she’s actually “S.U. 912,” aka Seduction Unit 912, a cyborg (she prefers the term “replicant”) specifically created to bed Max Turkel – and then kill him.

But Sue was granted sentience and within seconds of being able to think for herself she realized the mutants were awful leaders. She wants to join the human revolution. She proves her devotion posthaste, killing hordes of NZ troops who attack her house, handing out Thompson submachine guns with heat-seeker bullets(!) to her new friends. Here King shows the lowbrow tastes of the Bischoff books, with a bonkers capoff where our heroes find a mutant corpse with a blown-off dick impaled through its forehead. (On a similar note we earlier have learned that Charlegmane only knows the word “schlong” for the male anatomy; this after a few pages of various penis euphimisms.)

In the second half Max and friends hook up with the Cleavers, a group of merciless human rebels who have taken their name from Eldridge Cleaver. They’re mostly black and are led by Hosannah Brown, a gorgeous lady who goes around with way-too-many guns strapped to her nubile form, which is properly displayed thanks to the black studded leather outfits she and the rest of the Cleavers wear. After initial hostilities the two rebel factions decide to work together. Meanwhile Hosannah takes an unexpected shine to Phil Potts, and also meanwhile Sue asks Max, “Don’t you think it’s about time we fucked?” And King delivers on another of Bischoff’s mainstays: a super-explicit sex scene that leaves nothing undescribed. (After which Sue announces her intention to go next door and screw Jack, to keep any jealousies from forming within their group!)

The titular slaughtering occurs on Christmas Eve, our “heroes” just blitzing unarmed mutants and watching as their bodies explode into gory ruin. But they’re all caught while trying to break into the Planned Genocide pyramid. Here Max is strapped to a table and a sexy human lady gives him a blowjob; then a machine comes in to “collect” his specimen right before the moment of truth. Sue meanwhile is about to be raped by a BrainGeneral who has no idea he is interrogating a cyborg; she rips his heart out with her bare hands.

The finale sees Max and Sue hooking up with a commando squad of the rebel army and launching an assault on the PG pyramid, flying helicopters and bringing along a tactical nuke. Max Turkel finally does some badass stuff, toting a flamethrower and crisping hordes of NZ soldiers. For the epilogue, King again shows that Phil Potts must’ve been his favorite character, having the nerdish bookworm in bed with Sue, who tells Phil that he’s her favorite of all the humans – a finale that has no setup anywhere in the novel and which comes off as a rather awkward way to end the book, not to mention the series.

And that was it for Mutants Amok. It would’ve been interesting to see where King might’ve taken the series; as I say, it certainly would’ve been in more of a men’s adventure-esque direction. But there’s no resolution to any of the main plotlines: Emperor Charlegmane is still alive and the humans are still the slaves of the mutants. This only gives more indication that the series was cancelled. Overall I enjoyed the five volumes of this series, but the dichotomy of lowbrow humor and gory ultraviolence proved unwieldy in the long run, as if the two authors couldn’t figure out the series they wanted to write. Perhaps this is why Mutants Amok never gained enough of a market to last beyond five volumes.

Mutants Amok #4: Holocaust Horror

Mutants Amok #4: Holocaust Horror, by Mark Grant
September, 1991  Avon Books

David Bischoff turns in his final installment of Mutants Amok, though the series would last for one more volume after his departure. Bischoff goes out the same way he came in, delivering a goofy splatterfest that comes off like a sci-fi Looney Tunes with sex and gore. However, Holocaust Horror displays the signs of an author who is getting burned out with his series.

Just a day or two after the third volume, our heroes are still in California, wondering what to do next. Having lost the former love of his life (who went off to live happily ever after with a dapper mutant), Jack Bender is now “stuck” with Jill Morningstar, the American Indian beauty he first hooked up with in the second volume. For just as Bischoff got sick of Jenny, Jack’s first girlfriend, he’s also gotten sick of Jill; cue lots of whining on Jack’s part of how Jill is a “bitch” and how she constantly disagrees with him. Even oafish “rebel leader” Max Turkel is sick of Jill.

This is pretty sad, as Jill Morningstar previously was a fun character, a self-proclaimed post-apocalypse babe. But it’s clear Bischoff has gotten tired of her, and you can see poor Jill’s fate coming a mile away; it’s practically announced from her first appearance in Holocaust Horror. Perhaps this is why there were seldom recurring female characters in men’s adventure series; maybe the whole appeal of these books is a new lay each volume. Duh, what the hell am I saying? Of course that’s part of the appeal! But anyway, I have to admit I felt a little bad for the narrative short-shrift Jill was given.

Meanwhile the novel opens with the appearance of a new female character: Captain Martha “Marty” Abrahams, a hot-stuff brunette who leads an army of human rebels in the Arizona desert. They’re busy getting their asses kicked by some new-type cyborg mutants when we meet them, and also there’s word of certain a-doin’s transpirin’ in the nearby mountains. Later we’ll learn this is courtesy human freak Dr. Edward Wilkens, great-grandson of a man who helped invent the atomic bomb. Wilkens, confined to a wheelchair due to various diseases that have deformed him, is even more maniacal than the mutants and serves them due to his hatred of his own kind; he was mocked by fellow humans as a child given his warped appearance.

Bischoff delivers more of his patented freakish mutants this time, mostly through human baby-rat hybrids who plague the hell out of our heroes through the first half of the novel. While Holocaust Horror does occasionally get as gory as its predecessors, there is on the whole a sort of subdued or perhaps even defeated air to the whole thing, and Bischoff clearly page-fills throughout. He’s very fond of the single-line paragraph, for example. But also there is a lot of stalling and repetition and precious little of the whacked-out, gory insanity of the previous three books.

The borderline comedy material is still here, though, maybe not to the outrageous slapstick level of the third volume, but close. Wilkens and his “halfsie” assistant for example provide a lot of this; the halfsie is an “igor” class halfsie, which means that it looks identical to the Igor of the Frankenstein films, with a hunchback and everything – and the hunchback even has an extra brain. This recalls the goofy “hobbit” halfsies of the first volume and is just another indication of the Looney Tunes vibe of this entire series. (At one point Jack even watches a bunch of Looney Tunes cartoons in this volume, thus bringing it all together.)

Action is mostly sporadic. Turkel et al get out of one tough situation only to land in another; escaping a mutant squad they come to a complex built beneath the California desert, where they’re attacked that very night by those rat-babies. While Jack is graphically humping Jill, I should mention. As ever Bischoff gets down and dirty with the sex scenes; Jack might be getting sick of Jill’s temper and how she argues with everyone all the time, but he sure can’t complain about her skills in the sack.

After escaping the rat-babies our heroes end up joining forces with Marty Abrahams and her army. It’s instant hate between her and Turkel, but any idiot can see that these two will of course soon be jumping in bed themselves. Before we get there though we have another action sequence, where a stubborn Marty insists that they can easily defeat the nearby mutant base, which they’ve just discovered is the home of Dr. Wilkens and his atom bomb research. Wilkens by the way is here because his great-grandfather apparently hid some actual A-bombs in these mountains, and he’s searching for them.

Jack and Turkel and geek Phil Potts all say this attack will be suicide, and vote against it; you guessed it, Jill votes for the attack, mostly so as just to disagree with them and be contrary. And guess who gets killed in a major way the next morning? Yep, poor Jill is torn apart by a massive robot in the aftermath of the “attack,” which turns out to be a total rout. It’s a trap, Wilkens and his mutant leaders knowing the humans were planning an attack and having lots of nasty stuff waiting for them. All of the main heroes except for Jill manage to escape, of course.

A depressed Jack spends the next two weeks watching cartoons while Phil heads down to a local bar and meets some halfies(?). One of them he’s certain is working with Wilkens; he’s right, and it turns out to be the igor, who is named Trevor. Also Phil meanwhile manages to get his own babe, a bodacious blonde who first tries to hop in bed with Jack. Our teenaged hero gets her all worked up in another explicit scene, asks her “Do you want to fuck?”, and then sends her off to Phil’s room!

And also meanwhile Turkel and Marty Abrahams get it on, doing the deed on a pool table no less, but in a recurring theme they are interrupted right as Turkel has reached the climactic moment – by the robotic spleen in Turkel’s guts popping out and saying hello. Bischoff appears to have been remolding the series as a mission-based sort of thing, as rather than the free-form nature of the first books, this one has BrainGeneral Harten, Turkel’s for-now colleague, issuing orders through the robotic spleen. Harten and the other BrainGenerals want Wilkens stoped, as atomic power could be the end of the world, but insane Emperor Charlegmane is all for it and kills any BrainGenerals who disagree with him.

But it’s all a lot of padding. There’s a part where Wilkens discovers the cavern where his ancestor stored the atomic bombs, and it just goes on and on. There is on the whole just a feeling of boredom to the whole thing. More focus is placed on Trevor the igor’s fear of atomic armageddon, and after a few misadventures he ends up assisting our heroes – that is, his hump does, which has been sliced off by one of Wilkens’s new super-robots, advanced versions of the one that almost ripped Turkel apart in the second volume.

The finale sees a staged assault on Wilkens’s cavern complex, the rebels using high-tech “Reagan” tanks. They prove ineffective against the titanic robots, and Turkel goes running around with a LAW rocket launcher. It all has the feel of the future scenes in The Terminator. I thought maybe one of the main characters would get killed, like a big sendoff from Bischoff, but nope – Jack and Phil manage to escape while Trevor’s hump reattaches itself to the rest of his body and he tortures Wilkens before the atomic bomb explodes, Wilkens having set it to blow up in case his forces were overrun.

Lacking overall the gory, bizarre charm of the first three books, Holocaust Horror comes off as kind of limp and uninvolving. It’s also a little clumsy, with many subplots and characters brought up and then abruptly dropped. It does get back on the course of the storyline developing in the first two books – and here we are told again that early series villain BrainGeneral Torx really is dead – but unfortunately it just lacks the spark of those earlier volumes.

Only one more book was to follow, though, courtesy Bruce King: Christmas Slaughter, which is also the most scarce volume of the series. My guess is sales were low and thus it had a low print run. Anyway I’ll get to it eventually.

Mutants Amok #3: Rebel Attack

Mutants Amok #3: Rebel Attack, by Mark Grant
June, 1991  Avon Books

The Mutants Amok series continues to be a gross-out splatterfest of gore, projectile vomiting, explicit sex, and literal shit eating with this third volume, which once again sees author David Bischoff (ie “Mark Grant”) not taking his material seriously in the least.

Rebel Attack picks up soon after the previous volume, but a few questions from that one remain unanswered – like if BrainGeneral Torx, the main villain of the series, is truly dead. As we’ll recall, he had a climactic sword fight with loser hero Max Turkel in Mutant Hell, but we never saw the finale of it; instead, Turkel just informed the others that he’d chopped off Torx’s hands and the mutant sadist then plummeted to his doom.

Turkel’s sticking to his story this volume, with the added info that Torx apparently blabbed lots of info before falling off that mountain; like for example how he sold hotstuff blonde Jennifer Anderson to a mutant movie producer named Algernon Waugh. Jennifer is the true love of teenaged hero Jack Bender, who meanwhile has gotten serious with sexually-insatiable Jill Morningstar, the classic rock-listening, M-16 wielding American Indian beauty he met in the previous volume.

Jennifer Anderson, missing since the first volume, plays the central role in Rebel Attack, which makes for a problem, because she’s naïve, bland, and boring. Also, the material with her skirts too far over the line of satire and into slapstick, as Jennifer finds herself in Hollywood, now renamed “Hollyweird,” which has been taken over by mutants. It’s all just like the Hollywood of old, with despotic mutant moguls and lowly screenwriters who are treated like shit (even forced to eat it), and it’s all about as unhinged as a Looney Tunes cartoon.

Anyway, Jennifer is brought to the attention of famous mutant director Foxtrot Bennington-Spleen, who takes one look at Jennifer’s blonde hair and big breasts and announces that she’ll be perfect for his new film, Blade Babes of Babylon. Spleen is British, just like Waugh – for some reason Bischoff has the ruling elite of Hollyweird all be British mutants – but whereas Waugh is dandified and “cute,” Spleen is an overbearing drunk. Jennifer agrees to the film, caught up in the excitement of being a star, not realizing that this will be a snuff film and she, like all other human actors, will be killed for real in the finale.

Meanwhile, in one of the novel’s top gross-out moments, Max Turkel discovers that he now has a robotic liver. Secretly put in him in the previous volume by his “ally,” BrainGeneral Harten, the liver announces itself to Turkel in a gory Alien hommage as it pops out of his abdomen, stating that it does not like alcohol – which explains why Turkel’s been puking so much. The liver is also a conduit to Harten, who demands that Turkel head on into Hollywood and kill the mutants who have Jennifer Anderson.

It turns out that Foxtrot and Waugh are involved with mutant movie mogul Hairy Kahn (seriously) in a black market gene-splicing initiative. Their goal is harvesting the genes of famous celebrities of the past, mixing them with the genes of healthy modern humans, and whipping up perfect actors! (Don’t laugh, this is exactly how Serpentor was created.) But this gene-splicing deal is pretty dangerous, so far as Harten is concerned, and he explains to Turkel that it’s in Turkel’s best interest to do his request, mostly because it’ll give Turkel the chance to kill a bunch of mutants.

The gang appropriates a mutant “MV,” aka motorized vehicle, which is described as an “armored Winnebago.” Curiously, despite being built up so much, the MV doesn’t even feature it in the climactic assault on Kahn’s fortress, as Turkel et al must find a new ride when the MV’s wheels are stolen in LA. Bischoff does this throughout, building up characters/incidents and then brushing them aside, like the late introduction of a “halfsie” named Joe Brown who looks identical to Elvis (having been created by an Elvis-obsessed mad scientist), a character who seems like he’s going to be a lot more important than he actually turns out to be.

Action scenes are a little more limited this volume. More focus is placed on the surreal, violently slapstick world of Hollyweird, which comes off as a scatalogical spoof of the real Hollywood. We have Hairy Kahn walking around in his “sleazure suit,” making writers named after Ernest Hemmingway literally eat shit, as well as Kahn flunkies who do reenactments of Hollywood’s more sordid stories, like Herman Makiewicz puking at dinner and then delivering an immediate quip, or even more grisly bits like the Black Dahlia murder.

But it’s all just so intentionally goofy; I mean, Turkel’s robotic spleen, when it returns into his body, even bats its mechanical eyes and says “Th-that’s all, folks!” Even the minor details are goofy, with tidbits like “mutant Reebok shoes” and even “Mutant Top Forty” radio, which as described sounds a lot like modern death metal. (Jack becomes a huge fan of it during the long drive to LA.) While some of this is funny, ultimately it robs from the novel, as you can’t take it seriously. A little jokery is great, but too much and the entire edifice will collapse. That basically happens in Rebel Attack.

Oh, and meanwhile Jennifer falls in love with Algernon Waugh, the mutant. We never get a thorough description of Waugh, but apparently he’s “cute” and a pure gentleman, very refined and British – so refined in fact that his Hollyweird pals think he’s gay. But Waugh proves himself very much straight in the novel’s longest and most explicit sex scene, as Jennifer practically throws herself on him. We get thorough graphic detail here, just as in the sex scenes of previous installments.

To Bischoff’s credit, you can see where he understands that Jennifer is a boring character, and thus has come up with a good way to write her out of the series: have her fall in love with someone other than old sweetheart Jack Bender. Luckily, he has created a much more interesting female character in Jill Morningstar, who is every post-nuke male’s dream – and, in yet another of the novel’s many overtly comedic touches, declares herself as such.

Things ramp up as Hairy Kahn informs Foxtrot Bennington-Spleen that he’ll have to finish Blade Babes Of Babylon much earlier than expected. Poor Jennifer doesn’t realize that her hectic last day of filming will be her last day on earth. It all culminates in a huge massacre, the mutants killing one another in a fight for the cameras, and then a mutant Hitler is about to gut Jennifer on camera – that is, after he’s sung “Springtime for Hitler.” Then Waug swoops in on a jungle vine, wooping like Johnny Weismuller as he comes to Jennifer’s rescue.

So yeah, it’s all just really dumb. But it sure is gory, with heads juicily exploding, guts pouring out, and so forth. By the time Jack, Turkel, Jill, and geek Phil Potts arrive, all the mutants on the set are dead, and the four heroes now must hurry to the secret vat in which the gene-splicing experiments take place, Jennifer having been rushed there by Hairy Kahn. But it’s Waugh to the rescue again, fencing with Foxtrot and again saving Jennifer. In fact, the humans don’t do all that much.

Rebel Attack ends with Jennifer and Waugh now a couple, and the two planning to leave for New York, where Waugh has just gotten a job at “Evian Books,” which “even has its own cosmetics line.” (Note who publishes Mutants Amok…!) Bidding goodbye to his former sweetheart, Jack Bender resigns himself to a life of mutant killing and “raw sex” with Jill Morningstar…and meanwhile, none of the elements introduced in the previous two volumes are much explored in this one, so here’s hoping the next volume gets things back in focus.

Mutants Amok #2: Mutant Hell

Mutants Amok #2: Mutant Hell, by Mark Grant
March, 1991  Avon Books

If ever there was a series aimed like a heatseeker for the minds of preteen boys, then Mutants Amok would be it. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not talking about neutered garbage like Harry Potter or Twilight or whatever other metrosexual banality that's currently hot in the teen fiction marketplace; I’m talking about books with graphic sex, violence, and juvenile prose. These would be the perfect books to give to some punk kid who claims to not be interested in reading. And no wonder he isn’t – the shit today sucks!!

Mutant Hell is even more brain-addled than its predecessor, and I mean that as a compliment. This is a book that leaves no lowbrow stone unturned, from characters puking and pissing on each other to hyper-explicit sex scenes to gutchurningly gory action sequences. And hell, buried beneath the extreme material there’s actually a theme, one any kid could get behind: rebellion, and learning to think for oneself.

But anyway, the Mutants Amok series is still pretty dumbheaded. It’s more cartoonish than serious, and what with its teenage protagonists (well, two of them are at least) and their naïve mindsets, it just seems to me that this series was really designed for and catered to preteen and teen males. I was around 16 years old when these novels were published, and I’m kicking myself that I didn’t know about them at the time, as doubtless I would’ve loved them.

This installment picks up immediately after the first, so you’d do well to read that one first, as Mutants Amok is a continuity-heavy series. Jack Bender and pal Phil Potts have escaped their human slave farm and Jack’s flying an airplane which belongs to Max Turkel, freedom fighter extraordinaire. Turkel has been captured, though, taken to mutant headquarters in the Rocky Mountains, and Jack and Phil are on the way to rescue him. Plus Jack is burning with rage because he wants vengeance for the murder last volume of his girlfriend Jenny – though Jack does not yet know that Jenny is in fact still alive.

Turkel meanwhile is in deep shit. He’s strapped to a colossal robot that tortures him for the amusement of a VIP audience, among them Emperor Charlemagne, ruler of the mutants. Charlemagne, relishing the long-awaited capture of the infamous Max Turkel, spits on him; here’s an example of the lowbrow, grossout mindset I mentioned above:

The Emperor hawked and hemmed noisily and then spat a voluminous quantity of lumpy phlegm into Max Turkel’s face.

It was like getting slapped with mucus pie. The malodorous stuff, chockful of noisome green and brown chunks of effluvia, slimed down Turkel’s face, rivered down his shirted chest and legs, and then hung like a mutated Christmas tree ornament to the ends of his shoes.

And check out how the still-bound Turkel, having managed to unzip his fly, gets his revenge:

The urine arced up, a fountain of gold, spilling down in a racehorse rush directly on the side of Emperor Charlemagne’s face.

“Ah,” said Max Turkel.

He directed the stream to make sure that he got the most out of this, probably his penultimate statement, knowing that his last would be a strangled death rattle.

The pee poured yellow and hot into the large, hideous face. Into the eyes it streamed, trickling down into the splayed nostrils and wide fish mouth.

The Emperor spluttered with astonishment and anger.

The room of mutant attendants was absolutely silent with horror and shock.

And the piss just kept on coming.

Of course Turkel isn’t killed outright; the mutants want to extract intel from his brain, like where the human rebels hide and etc. Here we get a few flashbacks into Turkel’s past, growing up with freedom fighters, falling in love, and losing his girl in a raid on a mutant camp. Jack and Phil meanwhile land the plane in the midwest, in need of fuel; they stop outside of a farm of “halfsies,” aka mutant/human hybrids who are not violently opposed to humans like the mutants are.

The halfsie family is the cliched farmland folk, and of course there’s the gorgeous farmer’s daughter, who you wouldn’t be surprised to know comes to Jack’s bed that night. We get the beginnings of a hot and heavy scene, but Jack suspects something’s up and turns the girl away. So she goes to Phil Potts’s room, and nearly screws the guy to death – turns out her goal is to zap men of all their sperm, which she stores in a special cavity, to later be sold for vast profits (mutants and halfsies being unable to reproduce, hence the reason why humans still exist).

After a gory battle Jack and Phil are on their way again, and in their next stop, outside the Rockies, they meet up with American Indians who live free from the mutant yoke. They play ‘60s rock and dole out hippie prattle, and among them is Jill Morningstar, a petite young woman whom Jack instantly falls for. And guess what, that night Jill comes to Jack’s bed! (If there’s one thing I learned from Mutant Hell, it’s that if you are a single guy traveling around and stay as a guest in some stranger’s house, a gorgeous woman will come into your room and offer herself to you that night…but then, I’ve learned this lesson many times over from personal experience.)

The goofy, juvenile tone extends to the (otherwise quite explicit) sex scenes as well:

Standing up from the bed, he slipped his pants off. His penis was already swollen and ready, and Jill Morningstar licked her lips as she reached out and slid her fingers gently up the scrotum and then along the length of the rod. “I can’t wait for you to put that in me,” she said enthusiastically.

“Neither can it!”

Meanwhile BrainGeneral Torx, the mutant sadist who adbucted Jenny in the previous volume, bides his time at mutant HQ, using human captives as moving targets for his new collection of firearms. Another BrainGeneral appears here, Harten, who is part of a plot with Torx to oust the insane Charlemagne. But for whatever reason Torx is delaying their plan, so Harten does the unexpected and reaches out to Max Turkel.

Here David Bischoff (aka “Mark Grant”) adds a new layer to the previously black-and-white series; Harten doesn’t hate humans, and in fact intimates that one day they should be free. In a neat bit he turns Turkel’s own racism back on him; after Turkel keeps arguing that humans should be free and rule the planet alone, Harten points out the hypocrisy of Turkel’s heavy-handed pleas for “freedom.” Anyway Turkel accepts the offer and beats a gory retreat from mutant HQ, thanks to some weapons Harten leaves for him.

Jenny’s fate remains a mystery, and Jack learns she’s still alive in the very last paragraph of the novel, which we are to understand will cause some trouble, given that he’s now also fallen in love with Jill Morningstar. Jack finds out about Jenny thanks to Turkel, who apparently got the information from Torx himself – the climatic action scene of the novel sees Torx and Turkel going mano e mutant with broadswords, and at great length (and page count) Turkel gets the better of Torx. Plus he chops off his hands, but whether Torx lives or dies is something else left a mystery.

Anyway, while this series isn’t great literature by any means, I still say it would be the perfect gateway drug for some kid to get into the world of men’s adventure. And even beyond that, it’s just a lot of dumb, gory, sex-filled fun.

Mutants Amok #1

Mutants Amok #1, by Mark Grant
March, 1991 Avon Books

I was unfamiliar with this five-volume series until I read about it over on Zwolf's blog, The Mighty Blowhole. The concept sounded pretty goofy -- a future America where human-created mutants have enslaved the human population, all of it relayed in an appropriately over-the-top style.

"Just wacky," as Zwolf put it in his review. Which is exactly what the book turned out to be. To be sure, Mutants Amok is a violent, sex-filled trip into a funhouse future America, but it's told with a definite tongue in cheek vibe. I mean, there's a part in here where the main mutant villain stomps on (and crushes) the head of a baby, and it's played for laughs!

Before we get to the meat of the review, a bit of background: Mark Grant is a house name, and this first volume as well as the next three were written by David Bischoff, a noted sci-fi author with reams of books published under his own name and a variety of psuedonyms. The fifth and final volume, Christmas Slaughter, was written by Bruce King, though it too carried the "Mark Grant" by-line. (And speaking of which, Christmas Slaughter is by far the most rare and expensive volume in the series, so act now if you're interested, before it disappears -- or before online sellers jack up the prices of their copies to even more absurd levels.)

As mentioned, Mutants Amok occurs in a future America which is now enslaved by mutants. There are a variety of "muties," from Braingenerals to foot soldiers to even cybernetically-enhanced monstrosities (in the guise of Charlegmagne, ruler of America). There are mutants who have been created for specific and menial duties, others that are bred solely for war. Humankind has been reduced to slavery, working on farms or other areas, overseen constantly by mutant overlords who have total authority over their lives.

However, the mutants are complete idiots.

What on the surface sounds like a dystopian trawl into some hellish future world (which is how the back cover even tries to hype the novel) is really more akin to a fantasy sequence from The Simpsons or the average episode of Futurama. I'm not sure if Bischoff created the series concept or someone at Avon did, but at any rate when it came time to the actual execution of the tale, Bischoff must've thought to himself, "This is just goofy, and I'm gonna write it goofy."

So then the mutant rulers are incredibly cruel and vicious but in such an over-the-top, cliched way that it's all just a plain comedy. And yet, there's so much in-fighting among them, with bosses killing off their underlings for no reason, that one begins to wonder how in the hell the mutants were able to take over the world in the first place. From first page to last the mutants, even the ones bred for war, are presented as incompetents, bungling everything. They're incredibly stupid and lazy, unaware that their human captors are carrying on secret lives right beneath their noses.

Which again seems to indicate that the book, if not the entire series, is just a light-hearted spoof. But a spoof with a punch; the action scenes here, even though there are only a few of them, are filled with gore, and there are also a handful of purple-prosed sex scenes. In short, Mutants Amok seems designed to appeal to sex and action-obsessed teenage boys, and given that I was such a teenage boy when it was published, it saddens me that I wasn't aware of the series back then.

The "hero" of the tale is Max Turkel, a famed human rebel who, when we meet him, is in the process of escaping from his latest assault on mutantkind. Hacking up a few mutant soldiers in gory fashion, Max takes off in a plane, getting shot a few times for his troubles. He crashes in a forest near a mutant-controlled agricultural center, where young field-worker Jack Bender catches sight of Turkel's plane as it's going down. Convenientely enough, Bender has a veritable treehouse palace hidden out in that very same forest, where he goes to get away from his abusive mutant owner, and Turkel's plane has crashed near it.

The majority of the novel is given over to the awakening of Jack's rebel spirit as he cares for the stricken Turkel, whom he hides up in the treehouse. Jack likes his life on the farm, even if he is a slave; plus there's Jenny Anderson, a gorgeous blond Jack has frequent (and explicit) sex scenes with. Meanwhile he listens to Turkel's rants against mutantkind, also putting up with the man's cynical remarks, drunkeness, and sexual advice(!). (The scene where Turkel, hiding up on the treehouse roof, provides Jack with tips on cunnilingus -- while Jenny is downstairs waiting for him -- is especially priceless.) Turkel comes off more like the annoying neighbor in a sitcom, but he's presented to us as the stoic hero of the human freedom movement -- yet more indication that the entire book is just a goof.

In a sideplot we see the activities of Braingeneral Torx as he searches for Turkel. Emperor Charlegmagne has demanded Turkel's head, or else he will have Torx's, and to demonstrate this the emperor has a few mutants killed in front of Torx. (Not that it makes much of a difference, as Torx himself kills a few of his underlings as the novel proceeds.) Torx is the aforementioned baby-stomper, and it's another sign of the book's spirit that he comes off as the most memorable character in the cast. The very walking cliche of a jack-booted ruler, Torx storms and stomps through the novel, determined to capture Turkel. ("Braingenerals" by the way were the original line of human-created mutants, designed and bred for military strategy genius; Torx is yet more proof that the experiment was a grand failure.)

There's also a building subplot in which the mutants are harvesting humans and dissecting them, in the hopes that they can figure out how to create self-replicating mutants; the only reason the mutants keep humans around, despite the menial labor, is because the mutants themselves are sterile. This subplot builds up until it's the turning point in Jack's relation to Turkel and the movement, and appears to carry over into the next volume; this first one ends on a cliffhanger.

But it's all very sci-fi, if overly goofy. There are robots and cyborgs, even a friggin' race of hobbits which the mutants designed! (The hobbit though provides another fun opportunity for Torx to display his mercilessness.) Battles however are staged with the weapons of today, ie machine guns and pistols and Uzis, not to mention knives and even chainsaws. Bischoff takes special relish in describing the impact of each and every bullet into the hides of his mutant villains.

I've actually picked up the rest of the series, and I enjoyed this first volume enough that I'm looking forward to reading the rest.