Having lived through at least some of the satanic panic, and in Michigan at that, I was pretty well prepared to discount much of what was in this bookHaving lived through at least some of the satanic panic, and in Michigan at that, I was pretty well prepared to discount much of what was in this book. What I did not realize in advance was just how outlandish and silly this book about the tragic life of Dallas Egbert was going to be. William Dear seems like...quite a character. Whether its the picture of him posing with his tommy gun on the back cover or the *many* anecdotes about increasingly ludicrous events in his life and 'crime fighting' career...an un-uniformed paid law enforcement official at 16? an official leo at 17? fighting off more than two dozen cultists with his bare hands? these are just a few examples from the text. There's also all the talk of the extremely (for the time) sophisticated and outlandishly expensive equipment from the more 'mundane' things like private planes and helicopters to what would likely have still been spy and leo gear at the time. This reads a lot less like true crime and a lot more like a mashup of a pulpy detective/p.i. and a bond-esque adventure story. And if you read it as such, instead of as a true crime book, its actually not that bad and probably falls into the realm of all those taught spy thrillers you always see for sale in bookstores that men of a certain age seem to be really into. I found myself telling my partner that, in more modern terms, this wouldn't be out of place as a solid episode of something like a Criminal Minds or CSI. If you don't read it that way, its going to be rough. Its hard to take Dear seriously (let alone as seriously as he tries to take himself). Sure, the dialogue is pretty terrible, especially considering these are supposed to be quotes from real people and real events...I can't think of a single character that talks the way real people do. However, the pacing and tension is solid. And the clear mythologizing and lore building about himself could be easily excused in fiction. I actually think he could have had a solid career writing these sorts of stories....more
Volume 2 of the extensive and long running shared universe Wild Cards series. We mostly have the same authors as volume 1, and *most* of the characterVolume 2 of the extensive and long running shared universe Wild Cards series. We mostly have the same authors as volume 1, and *most* of the characters made at least some appearance in volume 1 no matter how small, though there are a few new characters. Volume 2 takes place entirely within the 80s, mostly divorced from real world events at the time, which I think the book suffers for to some extent. Social commentary is one of the strong suits of alternate history, and of the first volume. Volume 2 also diverges in that it tries to focus on a single over-arching plot across the various short stories by different authors. In fact, it tries to focus on more than one single, over-arching plot, which again is a bit of a detriment. We have a big bad in the form of Dr. Tachyon's people coming back to earth, but wait, that's not really the big bad...we have a masonic cult!...but that's not really the big bad, they're just trying to call down their god to ravage the earth who is in fact...another alien species (think starship troopers bugs or starcraft zerg)!...but wait there's also a whole bunch of alien races who actually tried to engineer the situation from a few hundred years back...Interspersed with smaller scale bad guys and situations that while typically more interesting all somehow end up connected to aforementioned big bad. Its...tiresome. There's also a bit of a red herring in the form of a black sphere that features in what initially is a pretty amusing series of almost slapstick comedy-of-errors sequences but which also becomes tiresome as it keeps coming back up throughout the book. The smaller scale stories, when divorced from the over-arching plot, are easily the most interesting, with the most character development. There's some great stuff with the Turtle and Croyd. It was fun learning more about some barely mentioned characters from volume 1. Even the material expanding on the Takisians and the Walrus was satisfying and expanded the world. But the book either needed to *less* focused and give us more snapshots of the world, or *more* focused and lose the bizarre and overly intricate plot. The stuff with the masonic cult was especially repetitive, unengaging, and frustrating. The book was slow to start because of this, as it felt like it was desperately trying to pull together disparate threads in an ineffective way, it almost lost me 25% in. If I find subsequent volumes cheap in the wild like I did the first 2, I'll keep reading, but I desperately hope they don't involve the stupid Egyptian/Masonic cult....more
This was a lot of fun. I never read these back when they were coming out, though I have a distinct memory of seeing them on the bookstore shelves. I wThis was a lot of fun. I never read these back when they were coming out, though I have a distinct memory of seeing them on the bookstore shelves. I was a big comicbook fan, and probably would have loved them had I realized the connection. Its a shared world, only loosely organized by George R. R. Martin and a host of other famous genre writers, originally based on their role playing game sessions. This is in the height of the era of some gaming systems which would later get labeled as 'slipstream'...things Rifts, GURPS, and others (of which this particular game is). The world of Wild Cards, is, well, *wild*. An alien comes, to try to save us from an alien virus, that a bunch of organized criminals decide to release for profit. It kills many people, mutates others (giving some powers and others not) into a variety of disturbing forms ala Marvel's morlocks (jokers), and gives others wondrous powers of various kinds without the terrible downsides. This first book skips through decades of time from World War 2 up through the end of the 70s and early 80s, giving us a very Watchmen-esque (but predating Watchmen) narrative of how these power afflicted individuals and one human effect the course of modern human history. We also get some pretty interesting and more personal stories. Definitely recommended....more
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