The Undertaker #3: The Thin Black Line

The Undertaker #3: The Thin Black Line, by John Doe

February, 2026  Tocsin Press

Great news, everyone – the third volume of The Undertaker is finally here! Published by Tocsin Press, The Thin Black Line sees everyone’s favorite funeral director-slash-executioner Victor “The Undertaker” Underhill return for more darkly-humorous payback…and this time his sights are set on contraband and human trafficking, the immensely talented John Doe delivering a plot that takes in ICE, Border Patrol, and the Cartels. 

You’ll want to just order the book, but I’ll go ahead and rave about it anyway. This one comes off like a combo of Death Transition in that it has a serious plot that is treated with dark humor, and only later on does it bring in the slapstick vibe of Black Lives Murder. It’s also slightly longer than the previous books, but Doe does a phenomenal job of ramping up the tension as the book progresses, expertly bringing together the various strands of plot. 

One thing I was surprised about was that ICE protesters are not given much narrative space; after the pitch-perfect gutting of the BLM and antifa cannon fodder in the previous book, I figured we’d get more spoofery of people who are so deluded that they carry around “No Kings” signs without it occurring to them that they live in a society where they actually have the freedom to carry “No Kings” signs. Instead, Doe’s focus is on ICE, Border Patrol, and the Cartels, and the protesters are mostly in the background – save for a hilarious part where redheaded dufus Deputy Harris, returning from the previous two books (and the guy who so humorously re-enacted the George Floyd situation in the previous book, though Harris was just trying to give a special Vietnamese massage), acts as ICE liason during a protest. 

It’s a year after Black Lives Murder, and series protagonist Ivan Gore, a deputy in charge of homicide in Milton, is proud of himself that he’s gone all this time without encountering Victor “The Undertaker” Underhill, that John Milton-quoting funeral director with a penchant for disguise and for avenging the dead – an interesting take for sure, in that unlike most lone wolf men’s adventure protagonists, Underhill isn’t so much concerned about the living as he is about the dead. 

John Doe also elaborates on a sort of metapysical bond between Underhill and Gore; that Gore has the same sort of potential as Underhill. As I’ve said before, The Undertaker is very much a Destroyer for today, and it seems clear that Ivan Gore will eventually become the Remo to Underhill’s Chiun, but I could be wrong. The Thin Black Line is cool because it focuses on how Gore keeps trying to ignore his “true self,” even though he and Underhill only share a few pages together in the book. 

As we’ll recall, Gore has a history in the funeral business himself, given that his family ran a funeral home; Doe delivers a great prologue in which we see young Gore helping his uncle with the pilot light on a cremator – which so beautifully sets up a tense moment in the climax that I won’t spoil it. But now Gore is in his 30s and is a homicide detective for the sheriff’s department in Milton, and he’s trying not to think about Underhill anymore – and also not to think about Underhill’s sexy assistant, Alyssa Jensen, who was introduced in the previous volume and has a much larger role in this one. 

As ever the series is set in the present day, and Doe brings in the current hot topic of ICE, which has shown up in Milton and nearby blue city Pandemont. Gore gets involved in ICE action when he responds to a call for cars, and he sees an Hispanic guy shot down by ICE as the guy is frantically knocking on the door of a house in a residential area – setting up a recurring “ringing ears” syndrome that plagues Gore through the book. That, and Gore’s certainty that something rotten is going on. 

Taking up the dead man’s cell phone while no one is looking, Gore eventually goes to Alyssa, knowing she’ll be able to break into it. Meanwhile we readers learn via a variety of new characters that the cartels are involved, and – again not giving anything away – it also involves childcare services and human trafficking. The main character for a long stretch of the novel is none other than Deputy Harris, who is desperate to join ICE so he can be a big man; Doe’s humor is particularly acidic as the bumbling Harris is witness to all sorts of illegal activity, but is blissfully unaware of what he is really seeing. The Warren Murphy vibe is very strong in the scenes with Harris. 

There are also great parts where Gore’s devotion to his wife, Amanda, is sorely tested. Out of state with family for the weekend, Amanda leaves Gore home alone, and he’s plagued by those ringing ears and his certainty that something rotten is going on, but struggling with whether he should go to Underhill with it. This sets up a great part where Gore first tries to take his mind off things by reading a “dog-eared copy” of a Super Cop Joe Blitz novel – probably the best imprint in-jokery since that night watchman mentioned that he had been reading too many volumes of The Executioner in The Penetrator #5 – and then later Gore must fend off the clear advances of Alyssa Jensen, who shows up with a bottle of wine and wants to talk about Underhill. 

John Doe has long hinted that there is something special about Gore, which allows him to “be like Underhill,” per Alyssa, with the possibility dangling that there is a supernatural bent to The Undertaker. The implication is that Underhill, looking at a corpse, can detect whether the corpse was murdered or came to death via foul means, and thus goes out in vengeance. The difference here is that Gore is more concerned with preventing murders, which sets up a nicely-handled confrontation between Gore and Underhill. 

This volume introduces a slightly more risque vibe with the Harris storyline; hanging out with some ICE agents – who curiously are all Mexican, sport tattoos, and appear to be former criminals – Harris sets his sights on a hotstuff Latina babe who takes him into her room for some drug-fueled shenanigans. This subplot has a great payoff later in the book, when Harris first goes to the massage parlor to proudly boast to his Vietnamese girlfriend that he’s now with ICE – which sets off a massage-parlor girl freak-out that could come right out of The Benny Hill Show – and then later Harris finds out he’s in hot water with the Latina babe, as well. 

This however sets up an even more humorous situation, which to continue with the ‘70s TV comparisons is full-on Three’s Company: in one of the goofy misundertandings that was central to the comedy on that show, Gore makes a panicked call to Harris, having figured out that the cartel is trafficking “girls,” and Harris misunderstands Gore and thinks the “girls” he means are the Vietnamese massage-parlor girls, all of whom are here illegally. This brings more of the risque vibe in a houseful of naked or semi-naked Vietnamese girls, many of whom are just looking for their panties. A very funny slapstick scene, up there with anything in Black Lives Murder. 

It isn’t all laughs, though; Gore’s painstaking trackdown of who the murdered Hispanic was and how he ties into another murdered Hispanic (this one a girl, who is coldly killed off in an affecting opening scene), is skillfully handled and the reader soon wants to see the villains pay, no matter what the reader’s politics or feelings about ICE may be. I thought this was incredibly pulled off, as John Doe makes the reader care about two illegals…both of whom are already dead. 

Milton County is again brought to life – I loved the goofy Krispy-Tako place Gore eats at – and series regulars Sheriff Bullard and Deputy Jackson also appear, bringing a lot of continuity to the books. The one character who does not appear much is the title character; as with Death Transition, Victor Underhill is behind-the-scenes taking care of business, only appearing infrequently to dole out poetic justice. His hearse also plays into the finale, and once again his gift for disguise makes for a lot of surprise appearances. That said, when Underhill does appear, he always makes for the most memorable character. 

The novel ends with Gore finding out something from his past that might indicate which side of the “thin black line” he’s on. And also, if he was concerned about his feelings about Alyssa Jensen before, its’ nothing compared to how he feels about her by novel’s end. She features with Gore in a great climax, which again I promise not to spoil, in which John Doe brings together the entire plot and the mechanics of cremation, even tying back to the opening scene with young Ivan Gore. 

All told, this was a great novel, and again Doe brings in a slight bit of a Don Pendleton vibe to the narrative, from periodic one-sentence paragraphs to paragraphs that begin with “Yeah.” He also does that Pendleton-esque stylistic gimmick of introducing a phrase early in the book and then periodically referring back to it; in the case of The Thin Black Line it’s how Gore, as a child, would stubbornly run through wild kudzu, and this becomes a metaphor of the overwhelming corruption and red tape the adult Gore still tries to run through. 

Overall, The Thin Black Line is another highly-recommended novel in The Undertaker, and you should head over to Tocsin Press to pick it up…and the first two volumes, if you haven’t already! Once again I’ve failed to get across how truly a gifted of a writer John Doe is…despite coming in at 270+ pages, the novel never lags, and the insanity builds and builds to such a feverish pitch that you’ll be wrapped up in it by the end. Here’s hoping it doesn’t take another four years for the next volume!!

Announcing Tocsin Press

I’m interrupting the usual review schedule to let you all know that Tocsin Press is up and running – those two awesome novels The Undertaker #1 and The Undertaker #2 are now available for purchase. 

A quick background note…the books are slightly different than the versions I reviewed. Not in content, but the actual paperbacks themselves. John Doe wanted to follow the same “handcrafted” aesthetic of the copies he sent me – printed on actual pulp paper like an oldschool men’s adventure paperback – but it proved to be impossible. For one, the pulp paper he originally used is no longer available. And secondly, it would’ve been unfeasible for John Doe to handcraft every single copy he sells…printing and assembling each book, gluing the binding, shipping the books out, etc. A pretty serious time commitment for someone who already has a fulltime job! 

So in the end, Mr. Doe has decided the Amazon route makes the most sense, and the Buy Now buttons on the Tocsin Press site will take you to the individual Amazon pages for each title, where you can preview contents and order a copy. He’s gotten the books as close to the look of the original handcrafted editions as possible: glossy covers, the same physical dimensions as a ‘70s men’s adventure paperback, and typesetting that looks very close to the print in those ‘70s paperbacks. 

I’m only providing this behind-the-scenes info because I raved about the pulp paper of the handcrafted editions John Doe sent me a few months ago, and I didn’t want anyone to be disappointed that the versions they’ll receive from Amazon are a little different. The important thing is that the text has not been changed…and folks Death Transition and Black Lives Murder were two of the best novels I’ve read in years. I give them my highest recommendation. 

Currently there’s one other title available at Tocsin, by a different author: John Falcon Infiltrator: The Hollow Earth. Here’s the cover: 

You could think of this one as a “lost” installment of John Eagle Expeditor – perhaps even the novel that The Ice Goddess should have been… 

So currently there are three titles at Tocsin Press, and I am certain you all will enjoy each of them! But like the old Pinnacle house ads said, there’s “more to come,” so when more titles are listed I’ll do another post here on the blog. 

And if you read any of the books, please leave a review on Amazon or drop a note here to let us know what you think!

The Undertaker #2: Black Lives Murder

The Undertaker #2: Black Lives Murder, by John Doe

“January, 1968”  Pernicious Books

John Doe wasn’t joking when he told me that this second volume of The Undertaker was “more fun” than the first volume. Don’t get me wrong, Death Transition was a lot of fun, and I enjoyed the hell out of it. But Black Lives Murder is hilarious from start to finish; the Destroyer similarities are even stronger this time, at least so far as the spoofy nature goes. With the important caveat that one again things are important to the characters, and not just a joke like things are in The Destroyer. 

As with Death Transition, this second volume retains the “vintage replica” gimmick, with the paperback being the exact measurement of one from the 1970s and sporting the same pulpy paper. It even has the same bogus publication date as Death Transition. But I’d say the title is also reminiscent of those old paperbacks. Something that has occurred to me is how fearless the paperback imprints were in the ’70s. They’d routinely publish stuff like The Savage Women, or have their action-series protagonists darken their skin to go undercover among black criminals. There were no concerns about offending anyone; if there was a societal trend, they’d exploit it. If the “summer of love” had occurred in 1974 instead of 2020, you can be sure Pinnacle or Leisure or Manor would’ve done a book that showed the ”peaceful protesters” as villains to be mopped up by some hero. Since no book publisher today has the guts to do so, it’s up to John Doe and his Pernicious Books.  (Actually it’s now Tocsin Press, but more on that later.)

And boy does he deliver. If Warren Murphy had been around during those BLM and antifa riots in the summer of 2020, I want to believe he would’ve written a Destroyer novel with a plot similar to Black Lives Murder. If you too boiled with rage as “peaceful protesters” burned, looted, and murdered across the US during that summer, then you’ll definitely enjoy this novel – I mean, even if there was no retribution in the real world, at least we can experience it vicariously as Victor Underhill, The Undertaker, dispenses some much-needed justice on the “woke horde.” While series co-protagonist Deputy Ivan Gore’s hands are tied by city officials who are bizarrely enough on the side of the rioters, The Undertaker as ever is free to mete out the proper punishment to those who defile society. Plus this time we learn that he has a hotstuff assistant, a buxom brunette named Alyssa who is aware of Underhill’s secret role as The Undertaker. 

Whereas Death Transition was more of a suspenseful police procedural with darkly comic overtones, John Doe opens up the narrative for this second volume, giving us a broader look at the progressivised hellhole that is the city of Pandemont. The character relationships are also expanded upon; we learn that Deputy Harris, Gore’s bumbling redheaded colleague, is in love with a Vietnamese gal who works in a massage parlor. There’s also pretty Deputy Jackson, a black lady who teaches “diversity class” for the department but rails against BLM and the rioters who are ripping up the city – and quits the force when she learns the city is more concerned with protecting them than stopping them. Most importantly, Gore and Underhill have more of a relationship here; while they only met once in the previous volume, we learn that now Gore will purposely give business cards for Underhill’s funeral home to the families of victims…victims who have been killed be perpetrators outside the law. This is Gore’s signal to Underhill that vengeance needs to be sown by The Undertaker. It’s now four months after Death Transition, and Gore is at war with himself over how, due to this, he’s no longer a “good cop.” Rather than arrest Underhill, Gore keeps going back to him, “like a dog returning to its vomit.” 

Underhill himself is more of a character in Black Lives Murder. In the first book he was a shadowy figure, usually appearing as “the man in black” or in some other disguise as he went about sowing bloody vengeance. It was only toward the end of the novel that we learned how Underhill, an elderly funeral home director, grew incensed enough at the social ravages of wokeism that he decided to become The Undertaker and mete out savage justice. This time he’s fully unleashed; with his trench coat, serrated blades, and tendency to quote Paradise Lot he reminds me more of Hannibal Lecter than a men’s adventure hero. And yet that’s precisely the point, as this volume Gore realizes that Underhill is “insane.” Throughout Black Lives Murder Underhill almost casually – and gorily – dispatches several antifa and BLM thugs. 

If you spent the summer of 2020 wondering how all those blue cities could keep burning, with no one doing anything to stop the rioting and looting, Doe presents a very compelling explanation. We learn through the corrupt commissioner of Pandemont, Nancy Palisades, that an “organization” approached various city leaders a few months before the summer, selling “packages” based off an “inciting incident” that would soon sweep across the country. With scripts to follow, promised air time with Rachel Maddow on MSNBC, and various levels of services (based on how much you pay, of course), this organization promised to use the “incident” to catapult the various city leaders into lucrative political careers. The “directors” of the affair would chose some race-based incident and “make it big,” after which teams of organizers would oversee rioting in the various cities – ensuring a proper racial mix of rioters so there’d be enough blacks there chanting for social justice – with even guidelines for the police to follow to give protection to the rioters. Despite her own corruption, even Palisades is taken aback by the organization’s goal to encourage looting: 

In other words, the entire “peaceful protest” movement is a callous marketing initiative, complete with scene-setters straight out of Hollywood who converge upon participating cities and orchestrate the chaos for the best TV coverage. At no point is the “plight” of black Americans ever a concern; it’s all about money, political power, and TV ratings. The riots have already started in Pandemont when the novel begins, but they haven’t reached the levels of New York or Chicago or Los Angeles – because, we’ll soon learn, Commissioner Palisades didn’t pay as much as those cities. It isn’t even the rioting that makes Gore decide to call in Underhill this time; in an eerie opening scene that recalls the horror vibe of Death Transition, Deputies Gore and Harris discover the corpse of a pretty young black girl in a desolate church…and Gore is sickened to discover that she has been branded with a demonic face and a pentagram. When the woke “fish-lipped lump” of a coroner refuses to denigrate a “minority religious group” in his report (ie Satanism), Gore sends the grieving mother to the Milton Funeral Home, which ultimately brings The Undertaker onto the scene. 

There are hilarious setpieces throughout Black Lives Murder. One in particular occurs early on, when Gore and the rest of the deputies are assembled for a briefing, and their assumption is they’ll be given the go-ahead to take down the rioters. Instead, the city managers and the FBI tell them that the real threat they need to be on the lookout for is white supremacists (complete with the FBI agent showing a photo of a KKK member in the 1800s). They also play a video recording of some rioting in the city…and what they’re upset about is the “All Lives Matter” sign that is visible in the footage. The leaders are shocked that this “hate speech” got by the Pandemont police; unfortunately the building it was spraypainted on was burned down by the rioters, so they won’t be able to find out who spraypainted it. All this is properly hilarious, but with a bitter aftertaste, as one can’t help but suspect that it’s a reflection of the real briefings that took place in precincts across the US in the summer of 2020. I also loved how the city officials kept referring to black Deputy Jackson as “the deputy of color.” 

Gore sees a lot more action this time. Boisterous Sherrif Bullard resents the order from Commissioner Palisades that his deputies stand down and not impede the rioters, and thus Bullard sends Gore on an “unofficial” surveillance of the MAZ. Yes, Doe even works in a parody of the “Temporary Autonomous Zone” that existed in Seattle during that fateful summer…and I recall wondering at the time if I was one of the few “normal” people who knew that the entire concept was lifted from Hakim Bey’s book of the same name. (I was always drawn to the wacky ideas of Bey, aka Peter Lamborn Wilson, in particular his writings on “pirate utopias,” but that didn’t mean I thought those wacky ideas would ever work in the real world.) This is another highly entertaining sequence, as Gore gets a glimpse of the “peaceful protesters” in the MAZ…in particular the girls: 

While the antifa crew is mostly comprised of pasty-skinned white guys with too much estrogen in their diet, Gore sees that out in the periphery lurks the real muscle: a contingent of hulking black guys. All this is very Warren Murphy-esque as these thugs literally come out of the darkness to grab the white girls away from their antifa boyfriends and take them off to be gang-banged. Indeed, to “fuck the white privilege” out of them. And when the girls complain about being sore, the hulking black guy in charge goes into racial grievances, about how his people still had to work, even after they were whipped and beaten by their white owners: “I can feels it in my bones!” The absurd modern notion of people who were never slaves demanding “repartations” from those who never owned slaves is well and fully mocked in this novel. Gore, despite being undercover, can’t sit by while a girl is gang-raped against her will, and follows after. He finds that a mattress store has been transitioned into a rape den, and watches in shock: 

Overall there is a more risque vibe to this second volume, which I always appreciate. In particular there is Rachel Palisades, mentioned in the excerpt above, beautiful blonde daughter of Commissioner Nancy Palisades. She’s a depraved wanton who is obsessed with black men, and she somewhat reminded me of the similarly-depraved twin girls in The Destroyer #5. Given to wearing “Black Size Matters” shirts and starring in porn videos titled “Built For BBC,” Rachel has created a veritable cottage industry in Pandemont, filming herself having sex with an endless tide of black men. The MAZ exists due to her demanding one from the organizers of the protests, even though the “package” Rachel’s mother bought for Pandemont didn’t include one. 

Probably the most humorous – and craziest – sequence in the novel is an actual, would-you-believe-it parody of an infamous incident in recent U.S. history. I won’t get into the full details, as it’s my hope this novel will soon be available for others to purchase and enjoy for themselves, but Doe so skillfully plays this out that it only slowly dawned on me that it was a parody. I’ll just say that it features the ever-bumbling Deputy Harris desperately trying to give a mortally-wounded black thug a massage, using a special Vietnamese massage style Harris learned from his girlfriend…all while dumbfounded rioters get the act on livestream. This scene seriously had me laughing. Yet another hilarious Warren Murphy-esque sendup of reality that wouldn’t have been out of place in a vintage Destroyer novel. 

The livestream of Harris makes Pandemont the “epicenter” of the cross-country protests, with more rioters converging on the city and every major news outlet promptly sending down crews. (“CNN had flown in both their homosexual news anchors.”) Doe really pulls out all the stops in the final quarter, with Gore’s wife Amanda nearly being raped by “peaceful protesters” and Underhill showing up on the scene to raise further hell. Turns out my hunch in Death Transition was correct, as Underhill really is a sort of modern-day pulp hero, a la The Spider, with a seemingly-limitless supply of gadgets and accessories, including even a “souped-up hearse retrofitted with flamethrowers.” This vehicle features in another humorously dark bit where Underhill runs into (so to speak) a gaggle of BLM and antifa who are blocking an intersection. The finale is even more wild, and I can’t give any of it away, as Doe skillfully ties up all his threads in fitting fashion…complete with Underhill himself posing as a BLM activist and pushing the rioting throng in a very unexpected direction. 

I’ll be honest, folks, I’ve been pretty bummed these past several months over the sad and pathetic state of our country, in which the moronic virus that is wokeism has infiltrated almost every area of life (even kindergarten classrooms!). Not to mention the shutdown of any voices that speak out against the insanity. It makes me very, very happy that there are talented, smart, and hilarious people like John Doe out there who are on the side of rationality and who are capable of writing books like this. It honestly gives me hope for the future. I mean the entirety of Black Lives Murder is genius-level satire. And the writing is strong to boot. There are memorable prhases throughout, with evocative imagery. Like in the climax, when the spirit of the rioters has been gutted and “[Their] chanting became discordant and confused, like the bleating of sheep whose shepherd has wandered away.” 

The “more to come” faux advertisement page at the back of the book states that the third Undertaker will be titled The Thin Black Line. This is a phrase mentioned at the denoument of Black Lives Murder; Gore considers himself a representative of “the thin blue line,” being in law enforcement. Allysa, Underhill’s sexy assistant with the “hypnotic smile,” tells Gore that she and Underhill – and soon, she suspects, Gore himself – are actually on the “black” line. So my assumption is this third installment will further demonstrate Gore’s moving over to Underhill’s philosopy of just killing people “who are already dead,” ie the mindless woke horde that is destroying Pandemont (and Western civilization itself). I also know from John Doe that the third volume might touch on the capricious Covid mandates, and boy that leaves all kinds of room for Doe’s biting satire – I’d love to see what Underhill has to say about “following the science,” which of course seems to change based on the latest polling results. 

It was a definite pleasure to read these two volumes of The Undertaker. I can only thank John Doe for sending them to me.  And he is currently working on a way to get the books out to a wider audience.  As mentioned above, Pernicious Books has become Tocsin Press (Pernicious Books was already taken, it turns out).  I think this is just as fitting a name, as tocsin is an archaic word meaning “an alarm bell or signal,” per the Oxford Dictionary.  Indeed, “a tocsin to warn of the danger of dictatorship.” John Doe has just set up a website: Tocsin Press.  There you will find listings for the two volumes of The Undertaker...as well as another book by a different author.  Hopefully more titles will be listed soon, and John Doe is working out the mechanisms of ordering and payment.  His excellent copy on the site well sums up the aim of Tocsin Press, and gives one an idea of the similarly-gifted narrative style that graces the two volumes of The Undertaker.  Here's hoping there will be many more volumes to come!

Finally, here’s the back cover of Black Lives Murder:

The Undertaker: Death Transition (The Undertaker #1)

The Undertaker: Death Transition, by John Doe

“January, 1968”  Pernicious Books

Over the years I’ve gotten frequent emails from people asking me if I’d be interested in reviewing their book; in most cases the novel in question is a modern thriller and usually it’s an ebook. That’s cool, and I would never want to dash the dreams of a writer, but I’ve got my own ebooks I never mention on the blog. This first volume of The Undertaker however is a completely different thing. Not only is it inspired by vintage men’s adventure novels, but it is an exact replica of them, from the physical dimensions of the book, to the length (187 big-print pages), to the feel of the pulpy paper it’s printed on. There’s even a pseudo-“More to come” advertisement page at the back of the book! Indeed, the vibe I got when I received this book was that someone had invented a time machine, gone back to 1974 or thereabouts, and grabbed a paperback off the rack in a bus station. I’ve put together quite a collection of vintage paperbacks, but this is the first time I’ve ever gotten the impression of what one of them looked like when they were brand new. 

So, just to clarify from the outset, this review will be unusual in that Death Transition is not a novel you can find on Amazon or Abebooks or etc. (Yet?) Only a few copies of Death Transition exist, and my copy was a gift to me from the auhtor, John Doe, who in fact wasn’t even certain he wanted me to review the novel on the blog. But I just had to; this is a necessary book, and series protagonist The Undertaker is the hero we need in today’s crazy world. My only hope is that this review generates enough interest that Pernicious Books becomes a real thing, with a website where you can order this initial novel and the ensuing volumes… 

So far there is only one other volume, and author John Doe kindly sent me a copy of it, too. In an email he mentioned to me that the books are “supposed to be satirical. But, in today’s climate…well, there’s no such thing as satire.” Mr. Doe also told me that his inspiration for the series was The Destroyer, and this is quite evident throughout Death Transition. Thankfully not in the spoofy, overly-satirical vibe of that series, but in the madcap, almost surreal nature of the events. But the big difference here is that no matter how satirical things get in Death Transition, the events are still serious to the characters themselves. My main problem with The Destroyer has always been that everything in those books seems like a joke, with neither the authors nor the characters taking anything seriously. Things are deadly serious in Death Transition, but the situations and supporting characters are so over-the-top that it all feels like a natural successor to something like Last War Dance. 

There’s no number in the title, but this is the first volume of The Undertaker. You will not find an origin story here, however. Indeed the titular Undertaker does not make his actual appearance until late in the novel. And also I’m bummed to inform you that the cover is more symbolic than literal; at least in this first volume, The Undertaker does not wear a skull mask, a la some newfangled pulp hero. He is a master of disguise, though, and John Doe capably builds the character up so that he is very believable. But then, Doe proves himself to be a fine writer throughout the book; even the pseudonym he’s given himself for this series is apropos, in that “John Doe” is the generic name for an unidentified male corpse. This lends the entire affair a metatextual vibe, as the titular Undertaker is literally…an undertaker. One who is more comfortable around corpses than he is in the world of the living. 

Another thing that gives this series a unique spin on classic men’s adventure novels is that The Undertaker isn’t devoted to taking on the Mafia or terrorists or the like: instead, he is devoted to destroying the woke mob. Whereas vintage mob-busters like Mack Bolan or Ben Martin got their start due to some personal loss, The Undertaker has become enraged at the maddened state of the world and the woke ideology that has gotten us here. I’ve frequently mentioned a site I enjoy: Ace Of Spades HQ. While the site might be given the dreaded “alt-right” tag, in reality it’s a sort of commentary on the insanity of today, using actual news stories as evidence. If the Ace of Spades website was a novel, it would be Death Transition. Even the mordant sense of humor is the same. I mean if you can’t laugh at the collapse of Western civilization, what can you laugh at?  But if you only read one post at that site, make it this one, as it is very related to the plot of Death Transition. 

The copyright page facetiously states “January 1968” as the publication date, but this is just part of the “vintage” schtick that extends to the entire paperback; in reality, Death Transition takes place in October of 2021. The majority of it takes place on the specific date of October 30th; Doe plays interesting tricks with time, jumping around to various times on this particular day. We are in the height of the Covid era, with masks being virtuously worn by the woke and “social distancing” practiced even at funerals. Which is how the novel opens, and in fact is how I knew I was going to love this book. Because folks never in my life did I think I’d ever read an opening chapter that takes place at a child’s funeral…and find myself laughing. Within a few pages I already knew that John Doe had written the book I needed to read in these shitty times, with a poor little girl dead and the mourning “parents” at her funeral more concerned about people keeping their masks on. It became even more darkly humorous when the information was gradually revealed that the dead child had committed suicide…and also that “she” had been born a boy. And her mourning parents were really a pair of lesbians. 

In his email John Doe told me that Death Transition was “horribly homophobic…that’s the entire theme, in fact.” And boy does he carry this theme through to hilarious extent. This is almost the equivalent of Boy Wonder in how a gifted author displays his savage humor, without any apology. No doubt Death Transition would offend many…and yet at the same time, the virtues our hero The Undertaker espouses were considered common decency at one time. But we live in clown world now, where down is up and right is wrong…where everything once considered indecent is championed. And thanks to the cancel culture that is part and parcel of this woke revolution, a person can’t even voice his opinon unless it is completely aligned with the approved messaging. 

The plot of the novel seems to be inspired by the real-world case of a man here in Texas who has been fighting against his ex over possession of his son. And again it’s a matter of where you get your news from that will determine how you understand the story. The mainstream outlets will tell you that the father constantly “misgenders” his son…who is being transitioned into a girl, which is what the father is fighting against. What makes the story even crazier is that it’s not even the child’s biological mother who is pushing for the transition. There’s more to the story, and I admit I haven’t fully researched it (you can read about it here...and, uh, get a glimpse of the opposing party), but I know enough to guess that Death Transition is inspired by it. With one small change: the poor child is dead at novel’s opening. But when the corpse is taken to the Milton Funeral Home, the killings begin…the killings of anyone who played a part in the child’s transition. 

This is the setup, but Death Transition is more of a police procedural, in that we are brought into the madness via a new recruit on the Milton County Sheriff’s Department: Deputy Ivan Gore. Recently moved from his native Georgia to the never-named state in which the novel is set, Gore is a 27 year-old married man who starts the novel as a concerned cop but ends it as a guy who wonders what has happened to the world…and whether The Undertaker is a murderer or a hero. If the Destroyer parallel plays out in future volumes, then Gore will certainly be the Remo to The Undertaker’s Chiun; author John Doe craftily weaves his theme into the backround, with Gore’s family having run a funeral home in Georgia. This all is masterfully played out in a dialog exchange toward the end of the novel; Gore only has one face-to-face meeting with The Undertaker, at novel’s end, but it definitely creates anticipation for their next meeting. 

Gore is called to the scene of the first killing, in which the lesbian parents have been murdered…and mutilated. Gore and his colleague, a redhead named Harris, inspect the scene with mounting revulsion; the two female corpses have been posthumously “transitioned” themselves, with hacked-off bodyparts being used as sexual appendages. It’s so horrific that Harris pukes – a recurring joke, as he pukes again at the next gory crime scene. John Doe definitely has a knack for memorable characters; there’s also Gore’s boss, boisterous Sheriff Bullard, who spends the entire novel worrying about early voting. There’s also a hilarious part where the Sheriff orders Gore to attend diversity training, and then obliviously goes on about how “black girls wear their hair in Georgia.” This is the sort of thing I mean with the Destroyer similarities; the characters in this novel are caricatures, but they’re fun caricatures, and very believable to boot. Particularly the woke ideologues who are behind the depravity that has befallen the city. 

Doe’s critical eye extends to the legal realm, with another hilarious bit involving a social justice judge who has literally replaced the US flags in her coutroom with rainbow flags. She and her effete assistant will be the next victims of The Undertaker; the link here is that the judge’s virtue-signalling directives are what caused the little boy to be transitioned, despite the father’s protests that the boy displayed no evidence of wanting to be a girl. Doe plays this sequence out skilfully, with The Undertaker posing as a photographer from a woke website and having the two stage his photo…while also staging themselves for the kill. Another violent scene that causes Deputy Harris to puke, and where Gore will be the only cop who suspects something mysterious about these murder scenes. In fact, Gore is the only cop who even manages to deduce what’s really going on…more evidence that he will ultimately become the Remo figure of the series. 

The most darkly humorous sequence in Death Transition follows soon thereafter. John Doe spoofs that inexplicable fad of today: drag queen story hour, in which transvestites read books to children. The Undertaker attends such a reading, his revulsion mounting – as does the transvestite’s tumescence as he has the little kids touch him while he reads. This leads to another grisly climax, as The Undertaker makes short and bloody work of Twinkle the drag queen. Before that happens, though, there’s a hilarious running dialog among some of the mothers that’s so Warren Murphy-esque I had to share it:

The capital city of Milton County is Pandemont, a metropolis that’s much different than the small town Gore was previously a cop in. But Pandemont also acts as an amalgamation of every “blue city” in the US, so devoted to wokeism that society itself has been transformed. During the investigation of these murders, Gore finds himself more taken aback at the situation that led to the murders than the murders themselves. He cannot believe the depravity that is out in the open; in particular he is revolted when he learns of the commonplace practice among teenaged Pandemont girls of getting pregnant so their breasts will get larger, and then having an abortion. Gore’s growing confusion of what is really wrong is nicely summarized when he calls up his wife and realizes he doesn’t want to keep the gory crimes from her so much as he does the nature of Pandemont itself: 

The novel climaxes with a tense sequence in which, as mentioned, Gore and The Undertaker finally meet. The buildup to this is masterfully done; I was really caught up in this novel, and found myself putting off other things to keep reading it. There’s also a great reveal, which I won’t spoil, in which the reader spends the majority of the novel thinking that a particular character is someone else entirely. While there isn’t any Executioner-type gun-blazing action in Death Transition, it still has the vibe of a vintage men’s adventure publication, only brought into our modern miserable age. And man did it make me excited to read the next volume, which per John Doe is “more fun.” And hey, with an inflammatory title like Black Lives Murder (!), how could it not be? 

Finally, here’s one last look at Death Transition: the back cover, which is an exact replica of something Pinnacle might have published. Of course it goes without saying that no publisher would have the guts to release something like this today: