Books
Chariots in the Bedroom
Paperback books! Their covers promise tales of bloody adventure, lurid sex, flying saucers, and passionate romance. And, believe it or not, they deliver.
(Page 2 of 2)
Today's hero, judging by the paperback thrillers that are selling the most, is a different breed. He is Mack Bolan "The Executioner," Remo Williams "The Destroyer," Richard Camellion "The Death Merchant," Robert Biganti "The Assassin," Franco Arronelli "The Arrow," or the black Louis Luther King "The Murder Master." Each of these pulp figures has his own growing series of books. Each has sworn a private war against the Mafia for reasons of his own, usually the murder or degradation by the Mafia of a close relative. The hero proceeds to murder Mafiosi through book after book with numbing brutality: "He sighted the .44 automag and blew the don's head off, literally." Of course it's pretty hard to blow someone's head off, figuratively.
The Executioner was the first of these series and is still the one with the most sales. War Against the Mafia, the first book in the now 16-book series, has six million copies in print. The Executioner is Vietnam veteran Mack Bolan who thinks of himself as a "duty killer": "He saw a cancerous leech at the throat of America, and he saw the inability or the indisposition of American institutions to deal with it." So Bolan deals with it by taking it upon himself to murder every Mafioso he can bring within his sights. But the Mafia must be a pretty hardy organization since through these 16 books Bolan has accounted for the death, literally or figuratively, of thousands of their members. Yet there are apparently enough left for future books. The Executioner's rationale is simple: "Life was just an overgrown game of cowboys and Indians. There were good guys, and there were bad guys. The bad guys had to lose." We later learn he's Polish. Well, what if he is? The Happy Hooker is Jewish and it didn't seem to slow her down any either.
Unlike the hard-boiled detective who walked the streets of his city with an eye for dames with a nice set of gams, Mack Bolan the Executioner roams from town to town and is outraged by any citified woman: "High fashion could cram it." In one incident he shoots out the window of a plane so that one such woman is sucked through the opening to her death. The hard-boiled detective would revive himself after a tough night with a cup of java, the harsh, acrid smoke from a few Luckies, and a belt of whiskey. The Executioner employs more exotic methods. In Sicilian Slaughter, the current book in the series, Mack has already stopped his bleeding by covering his wounds with spider webs when he "forced open the case of medical supplies and went to work on himself. First a transfusion of albumin to replace lost blood. He bound himself up in tight and proper fashion. He found the bottles and took a handful of vitamin B-12 and almost as many vitamin E pills. He shot a half million units of penicillin into his butt. He crammed his mouth full of high energy chocolate bar rations, munching as he worked." What a guy! In a little while he took off again with his "night vision unimpaired."
The hard-boiled detective was always sentimental about something, about a woman (though not usually about women), about his code, about a dead buddy. Or, as in Mike Roscoe, about kids: "The idea of the kid growing up in an orphan asylum didn't set any better with me than the idea of his mother's death. I kept quiet and hated." In the Executioner sentimentality has been replaced by arrogance: "There had been a certain friendship between them. The least Bolan could do was to look him in the eye as he killed him."
A slightly different arrogance possesses Hal Lindsey, author of The Late Great Planet Earth, and Erich von Daniken, author of Chariots of the Gods. Either book could be subtitled Dagwood in Occultland but both seem to be saying some indiscernible right thing at just the right time. Planet Earth, originally published by a small religious house, is now a Bantam paperback with over two million copies in print. It is taught in more Sunday schools than is healthy to think about and during the last of my infrequent visits with a minister was held up to me as essential reading for modern man. Chariots has been sanctified by sales in excess of three million, a Rod Serling television special (that man simply hasn't any shame) and a host of sequels and imitations like Gods From Outer Space, The Gold of the Gods, The Bible and Flying Saucers, and, the tackiest of them all, God Drives a Flying Saucer. Now really.
These are the books expressing contemporary paranoia I mentioned earlier. Hal Lindsey's Planet Earth claims, among so many other incredible things, that the Bible predicts a dictator will soon arise to brand the number 666 on every man, woman, and child in the world. The Bible further predicts that sometime in the future there are going to be "144,000 Jewish Billy Grahams turned loose on this earth." Furthermore, Biblical prophesy explained the present Middle East crisis, not only predicting that it would happen but showing us that Israel will be invaded by both Russia and China (there are even maps Lindsey offers of the attack routes predicted in the Bible) not too long after which there will be a nuclear holocaust followed by a Second Coming. The dictator is going to crop up somewhere along in there and will rise to power by promising peace (could it be Kissinger? had even the ancient prophets heard of Kissinger?) but since this dictator will be the tool of Satan we ought to be careful of anyone promoting peace in the world. I told you it was paranoid.
Of course there's no way to prove that these assertions are wrong, but why does anyone want to waste his time worrying that there may be some demon with a 666 stamp lurking in the shadows? Or why while away your time thinking about this: "Imagine what would have happened if the president of the United States, after being shot and declared dead, had come to life again." Sounds like the kind of thing the press would play up way out of proportion. Lindsey also says, after previously asserting "Christianity is not a religion," that "you shouldn't be surprised when Christ returns to take you with him. Unfortunately this does not refer to all believers. We may have to go over to some of them and say, 'I told you so friend.'" Now if I had just been condemned to an eternity of the torments of Hell and some sanctimonious little twit came over and said, "I told you so," I'd abuse him enough to last me through an eternity of sinful gloating. Lindsey says "blaspheme" means "bad-mouth." He should get his terms straight. What I've been doing here is bad-mouthing; what he's been doing is the blasphemy.
Daniken, in case you haven't heard, claims that not only events in the Bible but virtually every accomplishment of ancient man is the result of visitations from wise creatures from outer space. Here again, there's no way to prove this never happened and it might even be fun to let roll around in your mind when you're trying to drop off to sleep. But why take it seriously? Even Daniken says, "Admittedly this speculation is still full of holes."
And indeed it is. The man is either a fraud or a fool, a rich fraud or rich fool by now, but still one or the other. Daniken just has never realized there's such a thing as imagination: "The epic of Gilgamesh also contains descriptions of extraordinary things that could not have been made up by any intelligence living at the time tablets were written." Or, "Where did the narrators of the thousand and one nights get their staggering wealth of ideas? How did anyone come to describe a lamp from which a magician spoke when the owner wished?" Obviously the only possible answer is the idea came from spacemen. At one point he claims that Jonathan Swift, of all people, was visited by spacemen who gave him the idea for Gulliver's Travels.
Daniken makes no bones about shading the truth. "Without actually consulting Exodus," he says on one page, although he quotes Exodus at length in the very next paragraph, "I seem to remember that the Ark was often surrounded by flashing sparks." Of course Exodus says no such thing, which is why he says he didn't consult it. But the Ark had to be surrounded by sparks, you see, because the Ark was really a spaceship and who but visitors from another planet could have known how to build it? "Petrified excrement, possibly not of human origin," he says later on, "was found at the same place." And, sure enough, I found excrement possibly not of human origin in the kitty litter just this morning. Summing up, he says, "Quite simply what I mean is that everything, both myth and actual experience, makes up the history of a people. No more. But even that, I claim, is quite a lot." If you understand what that means, just keep it to yourself.
But the deepest paranoid fears Chariots touches have to do with our precious bodily fluids. Speaking of early man, Daniken claims the visiting spacemen "annihilated" the degenerate stock. In another context he asks "Does not this seriously pose the question whether the human race is not an act of deliberate breeding by unknown beings from outer space?" It sounds like a theme he copped from Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End; but wouldn't that be an uncomfortable little bone to have stuck in your craw?
I READ ONLY ONE MORE book worth talking about. I saved it for last since it has the single wisest sentence to be found in all the pages of all the paperbacks I read. It's strange that that sentence should appear in a book that's otherwise so bad. Death Trap, the first number in the Murder Master series whose hero is black agent Louis Luther King (patterned after the Executioner), begins with the worst first sentence I've ever been privileged to read: "Leaving Chicago's O'Hare Airport, one drives southeast on Kennedy Expressway to get to the Holiday Inn."
The book's humor is sophomoric; bras are called "over the shoulder boulder holders." Minor characters are given to the most peculiar idle musings: "Miss Wildersen was wondering if she could talk her future husband into a vasectomy." The hero is an unlikeable smart ass who uses words like "Pygmalionist" and "pedophile" to show his erudition (the author apparently opened the dictionary to the letter P). But out of nowhere as I was reading along, numbed to the bone by hours of reading, hours of lying on my back, hours of junk food and junk sweets and junk liquor, this sentence came to put everything into place: "He faithfully followed the dictum that half the work in this world is to make things appear as they are not."
Of course there's no speculation about why that should be. This is popular fiction, entertainment, not great literature. Take it for what it's worth. Remember that all the paperbacks in all the grocerettes and bus terminals and newsstands in America are testimony to that statement's truth. Imagine the elaborate organization of human energy those books represent—writer, editor, printer, binder, distributor, grocery store owner. And only one out of a hundred of those books has anything to do with anything real. None of the ones I read did. Someone might look at all the sex books and say that we are consumed with sex or look at the violent books and say we are infatuated with violence. Some of the books themselves will say sex is the most powerful force in man's psychology; others that violence is. They are both wrong. It's dreaming, it's fantasy, it's imagining other lives and other places, it's Murder Masters and Happy Hookers and Crazy Ladies and Private Eyes and Strange Events and Clashing Swords and Chariots, even Chariots from Outer Space.
Pages: 1 2
My Library
