Phoenix #1: Dark Messiah
David Alexander
Leisure, 1987
ISBN: 0-8439-2462-4
The civilization was over in the 80s. What was left was a wasteland of killers, cool vehicles, mutants, big ‘ol guns, and tough heroes. I mean that’s how I remember it. The Post-Nuke Pulp movement introduced a ton of new paper heroes and series, obviously the whole thing was a reaction basically just to the Mad Max movies. They had titles like Swampmaster, Storm Rider, Road Blaster, The Survivalist, Warlord etc. etc. There’s a lot more and some of them like Deathlands well into the 2000s which is pretty impressive. I guess it was the allure of a new west where the thrilling tales of a lawless land and the lone man who tries to tame it must hit somewhere deep in our unconscious. Or people like to read about mutants getting killed.
David Alexander is no stranger to paperback action. He created or worked on several series in the 80s and 90s, like the Post-Nuke series C.A.D.S, and straight action series like Z-Comm and Coltray. He’s still writing today, making him one of the last men standing from the classic era of Men’s Adventure paperbacks. Curiously during the pandemic the Phoenix books were updated as ebooks with the phrase “Predicted Coronavirus” on the cover. Yikes. Outside of Men’s Adventure he’s written tons of stand-alone action and thriller books. He did a lot of work for the classic-trash publishers Leisure and Zebra, both of which put out a lot of solid genre content, but were not considered “classy” places to write for. Still Alexander pretty much always gave it his all with a book. And nowadays the books he’s most known for is the five-book odyssey of a man named MAGNUS TRENCH!
The Phoenix series has quietly become something of a cult object. They are a nearly perfect cocktail of what every young person into action/horror/sci-fi loves. They are a gruesome, thrill ride that actually delivers what the crazy cover promises. You pretty much have to deliver on the goods if you name your hero MAGNUS TRENCH (it's a name that screams for all-caps) and set it in a world of street gangs, way to technical-gun fights, karate-fights and the titular Dark Messiah.
So, it’s 1987 and MAGNUS TRENCH is hanging out in the woods outside San Francisco, across the country from his family to relieve the stress of being a businessman. But man, he knows his business because he was a Green Beret in ‘Nam. It was ‘Nam where he got his “Phoenix” nickname, which was fortunate for the allusions cast after he emerged from the woods after surviving a thermonuclear blast. He’s in the ashes of society, ya know?
See, a crazy preacher named Luthor Enoch has a nickname too, Dark Messiah. He’s a real nut-bag who sets off the chain of events that cause the nuking by assassinating the president and firing America’s nukes at Russia. He thinks the world needs cleansing and only his people should take over after he wipes the slant clean. After the blast it takes all of fifteen minutes for San Francisco to become home to leather-clad street gangs, mutants and every other cliche. MANGUS wants to cross the country to try and find out if his wife and kid are still alive and he’s off to the running.
And I mean running. Outside of some “retraining” sequences where MAGNUS brush up on the art of being a badass, Dark Messiah moves at a super-fast pace and is pretty much all action. That and self-aggrandising speeches from MAGNUS and the bad guy Luthor Enoch, who’s the big bad of the series, sending his underlings out into the world. They both like themselves a lot. It’s also chock-full of far-too-technical specs about firearms, which pretty much always grinds any book to a halt. But Alexander has enough stuff happening that the slow parts seem incredibly minor and you’re just left with the memories of the wild action scenes. It reads like an arcade game, where you're mowing down bad guys with a red or blue laser gun on a stick and breathlessly trying to cram quarters to keep up with it.
This is an over-the-top book and I’m pretty sure that Alexander had his tongue-in-his-cheek at least a bit, either way it seems like he had a good time writing it. The insanity might not work for every reader, but there’s enough gruesome stuff for gore-hounds and enough action to keep the blood pumping. Just don’t expect much characterization. But who wants that in a book with mutants?
Roy Nugen is an award-winning writer, producer, property master, plus actor. He comes from a family of musicians, engineers, wildcatters, cops, lion tamers, and carpet salesmen. Evil Dead II changed his life and he once partied with Lloyd Kaufman.
He has written 15 short films including Bag Full of Trouble, Potboiler, Handle With Care, Death in Lavender, Hole in the Ground, and the feature film Arrive Alive, many of which have played across the country. He has been the property master on 17 short films and 2 feature films.
Roy is also a prolific book reviewer and collector of vintage pulp paperback books. You can read his reviews on his blog Bloody, Spicy Books and multiple magazines including Paperback Fanatic, Hot Lead and Sleazy Reader. He has also written afterwards for novels and for various websites. He lives in the only city that once arrested L. Ron Hubbard with his wife and cats.