A book at bedtime : Roadblaster #1 - hell ride

Ok, I admit to buying this book. I was trying to injure postmen, and that's my excuse.

Not fooling anyone am I?

One of my weaknesses is the post apocalyptic trash novel. Popular for a brief period in the eighties when it looked like Ronnie Raygun was likely to accidentally use the wrong colour phone to order a pizza and wipe out the planet by accident.


If you've never read one it works like this. The "hero" is a 'Nam vet etc. Who happens to be taking a weekend out of civilisation, living off the land in the wilderness when the button gets pushed and nukes go off everywhere. Lucky him, he doesn't die. But he now has a quest, to cross the US of A to "find his family". In the way are corrupt government killers, biker gangs, radioactive zombies etc. Our hero spends the rest of the book protecting the weak, shooting lots, and coming out with worse one liners than any Arnold movie.

So simple mindless fun for an evening's reading.

Except... this book is wrong. Very wrong. It looks right. Double checks the list:

tag line, check! :
After the war the dead outnumbered the living and gasoline was more precious than blood
Silly title, check!
Author with unpronounceable name, check!
Nuke scorched cover art, check!

Problem's are:

Boom.. there go the nukes. So he goes for a drive to see what the bang was. Now at this point there should be radiation mutated zombies, biker gangs etc. There isn't. Instead there be friendly townsfolk who feed him and give him fuel before waving him off on his quest.

He goes to the big city, and starts helping people. Still no zombies etc. This is all wrong. In fact I'm at page 100, and nobody has died yet... There's no descriptions of burger joints where the only things char broiled where the customers.. No bullets tearing thru skulls, brains flying like strawberry thick shake.

It is, to be blunt, an epic fail. I don't think I can read more. It's mad max - the disney channel cut. The last time I was this disappointed with a book was "rendezvous with rama". (Oh look an alien spacecraft, oh yes, it's alien alright, right that'll do, then end.)

The only thing that truly amazes me is he found somebody stupid enough to publish two more followup books, imaginatively called "death ride" and "blood ride".

More books coming soon...