Like Rated R, I saw this new book mentioned on the Internet–in this case Glorious Trash, and I ordered it based on the PWoC and the promise of a modern men’s adventure paperback.
Boy howdy, this is even more lurid than Rated R or even a The Gunsmith book. It starts out in the present, where the titular (that means from the title, gentle reader) character has spent four years training to seek revenge on those who raped her and a friend, prostitutes in a high-end Manhattan cat house, and killed the friend–and would have killed her, too, if a protector had not emerged to save her. In this present day, she finds one of the men, a pimp who has moved up in the world, and has graphic sex with him before dispatching him.
Then we get a flashback of her life before, including how good of a prostitute she was because she’s beautiful and really, really likes sex (the author continues to point out). The rape scene is pretty graphic, too, but after that we settle down for the most part and cover how the man who saved her takes her under his wing, and he’s a Vietnam veteran with a set of special skills which he passes on to her. Then she gets down to the business of tracking down the other five men who killed her madame and her friend and ended her idyllic life. We get flashbacks of her training over the last four years, and then we find out the reasons the protector found her that night, and then we get a friendly cop, explicit sex with the friendly cop with the intensity and frequency which is probably physically impossible outside feverish books, and then the Black Angel and the friendly cop uncover a plot involving dirty cops, politicians, and a rising crime figure. All of whom are dispatched, and finis!
The front has a copyright date of 1975 and 2025, but I think it’s really a new book that’s trying to catch the blaxploitation and men’s adventure vibes of the era. My suspicion is triggered by three things:
- The book is 292 pages long, which is long by the standards of the era.
- The book really, really likes to throw around racial epithets in a fashion that I’ve not seen in books of the era, either. You get a couple to indicate that a character is bad, but in this book, well, all the bad guys use them all the time. Maybe I’ve only read the highest quality, most pure paperback pulp of the era. But it seems a little much, as though someone is being a little naughty under the cover of “it’s from the 1970s.”
- The book seems to have some confusion as to the difference between the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) and the Viet Cong (VC) in places where it talks about the protector and the friendly cop, who knew each other in a prison camp.
So I think this book, and the other books by the imprint, are probably new books set to have the feel of the most excessive of the 1970s men’s adventure books.
At any rate, it’s a decent enough plot and story hidden amongst the florid coupling.
But I’m not likely to order others in the line.
