Author Preview #2: William W. Johnstone, or Why, God, Why?

I, personally, am a lover of pulp novels. You know, those trashy little paperbacks you can pick up at Wal-Mart for a couple bucks. They usually include dashing heroes saving helpless damsels, lots of gun-porn, and are almost always written, in my experience, by right-wingers. And I don't mean right-wingers like that Republican uncle we all have who insists Obama is going to destroy America...I mean the kind of right-winger who fantasizes about overthrowing the government, booting everyone more liberal from them from the country, and forcing Christianity on every man, woman, and child.

Not that they'll admit it, mind.

I may be stereotyping here, but in my years of reading this trash, I've found one series that is actually decent (which we will be returning to in a later review :D), and it is certainly nothing to do with William W. Johnstone, who is our target this time.

Johnstone is most famous for his Westerns, which I actually enjoy quite a lot. In fact, he may just be one of my favorites. My personal favorite of all his series would be his The Last Gunfighter series, about a man called Frank Morgan, an old gunslick who wants nothing more than to settle down, only to have his reputation as the best gunfighter left in the West come calling every time he tries. It's an enjoyable series, if you don't mind the author occasionally trying to make a point through his characters.

On an almost equal footing is his Mountain Man series, about a man called Smoke Jenson, who is of course a mountain man, and a gunfighter with skills that rival Morgan's own (yes, these series do take place in the same world, and ever reference each other occasionally). Smoke has much the same problem as Morgan, and when done well, the Mountain Man books are actually quite good reads.

However, nothing good can last, and Johnstone just couldn't keep writing good Westerns. Oh no; he had to get into military fiction.

And not just military fiction, but apocalypse fiction, a staple in the diet of all pulp lovers. For some reason, nothing quite captures these guys' imaginations like the end of the world as we know it. When done well (say in my personal favorite pulp series The Survivalist, which is thankfully NOT written by the above-mentioned right-winger), it can be actually enjoyable. When there are developed characters, three-dimensional and threatening villains, and a genuine sense that the world's been nearly destroyed, I love nothing more than a good apocalypse novel.

Sadly, Johnstone's Ashes series has none of that. At all.

Ashes tells the story of Ben Raines, a Mary Sue, Author Avatar/Wish Fulfillment and all around wannabe-badass as he goes through the process of rebuilding the shattered world after WW3 nearly kills it. Along the way, he fights every staple of apocalypse fiction every to be introduced: cannibals, criminal gangs, Soviets, Nazis, Middle-Eastern terrorist, insane liberals, and a few others I can't quite recall.

Might I also point out, just as a preliminary complaint, the narrator's love of describing, in graphic detail, every rape and death that happens to...anyone? In a world where there is apparently not one woman who has not been raped, and where death comes swiftly to anyone who is not a main character? And the fact that, despite being in, I believe, his 50's by the midpoint of the series, Raines is still a supersoldier and chick magnet of the highest caliber? Or the fact that, despite apparently having the love of women worldwide and supposedly meeting the perfect girl for him every two or three books, he replaces them roughly every two or three books? And how his army, the Rebels, lose roughly two major engagements over the course of 40 books, despite going up against impossible odds on a regular basis? And how, despite estimates that winning just about any engagement will take months to years, the Rebels always seem to wrap it up with time enough to deal with the next in their long list of crises?

I'm getting ahead of myself, but suffice it to say that this entire series is, essentially, Johnstone creating his own personal hell and showing how good Republican militants can get out of it. And it is, as I think I said above, awful...but I just can't look away.

The first book in the series, Out of the Ashes, is available as an abridged audiobook, and THAT is what I'll be basing this review off of. If I have to read the whole book over again, I may have to hurt something. So, I present to you, as soon as I can force myself to double-click the file, the horror that is William W. Johnstone's Out of the Ashes.