Book Report: Firestorm U.S.A. by Jack Hild (1987)

Book coverThis book is the 16th in the series; I read the 5th of the series, Gulag War, in 2009. Strangely enough, I bought this book, too, for a quarter, although I see it’s not as quite in demand as the earlier books when I search the Internet. I told the kid at Castle Books, a used book store here in Springfield that I’d never heard of (!), that I was excited to get it. He tried to riposte, but could not. I hate it when repartee dysfunction happens to me, too. I’ll keep my eye out for others in this particular series when I’m there. I’ll just have to look in the back cheap books closet again.

Speaking of used book stores, this volume has made the rounds: It has three different used book store stamps from the Kansas City area within it. I guess it was held onto by some serious pulp readers who bought it, read it, and turned it in for store credit elsewhere. Unlike me, who is a serious pulp accumulator.

So this story shares some broad strokes in common with the Chuck Norris film Invasion U.S.A.: A group of terrorists infiltrates Florida and starts wreaking havoc until the Soldiers of Barrabas can stop them by firing their submachineguns from the hip.

The strokes they share are only broad, though. It’s not the Russians behind this, but some group that has a plan to introduce a dictator into the United States as a reaction to the terror. Ah, the olden days, before 1995, when you could posit that a coordinated terrorist attack could topple the government. Before 2011. Before we did actually have terrorists and enemies of our way of life popping up every so often to shoot or otherwise wound innocents. I dunno, the drama loses some relevance since it’s no longer unthinkable, and the stakes are somewhat diminished since what’s at stake is a little more ripped-from-the-headlines-where-the-government-warns-us-not-to-assume-terrorism.

At any rate, a quickly paced read that is more like a text movie than a book, and if you can forgive that and forgive some actually laugh-out-loud funny cinematic moments (no, really, one of the SOBs does bring her MAC-10 up to firing position, her hip, and shoot a terrorist in a crowd three times in the chest, or when two SOBs chasing a bad guy toward his car bomb wait for him to pull his gun before bringing their MAC-10s up to their hips, or any of the points where a soldier with a rifle even with open sights could have ended a dramatic moment really quick), you can enjoy the book.

Books mentioned in this review:


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