Radioactive mutants vs. Nazi Communists

[MinDonner]

So he needs to prepare himself by taking a bowel movement, a high colonic enema, and some time in a sweat lodge.

Pretty close, actually - this "DOING BATTLE FOR KIM'S SOUL!" looks like it's going to be more new-agey hippy bullshit rather than an actual battle.

Anyway, Chapter Twenty Four begins with the Glowers all standing around a naked (and perfect-breasted) Kim, "their organs pumping rapidly outside their bodies". Yeah, I bet they are. But what has Rock been up to?

Rock walked back through the door, naked himself from his purification ceremony. He had sat for the full two hours in the direct sun, without water or shade, without clothes. He reached out to the sun, to the earth, for strength - for ultimate courage, and sank into a deep meditation.

This is, presumably, the same sun which a few pages earlier had been burning everything it touched and raising the ground temperature to a hundred twenty five degrees. Hardcore!

THE TURQUOISE SPECTRUM tells Rock to LIE DOWN BESIDE KIM AND REACH OUT WITH HIS THOUGHTS - he has to go deep into her consciousness and retrieve her soul! What this actually involves is him drinking a green mescaline porridge and then having two pages of lame stoner consciousness-expansion. It's all kind of like this:

He was drifting energy. He was a breeze, a motion of swimming atoms. He was all places at once, within each of the Glowers, seeing what they were seeing, hearing what sounds they perceived. The images gathered into a giant spinning ball, with lines of reality shooting off everywhere. And he could see it all as one. Could perceive a million different planes of existence at once. And they were a new whole. It was as if his mind had been expanded to perceive on a macro-scale, lifted to a new level of evolutionary consciousness.

Yes, two pages of this, half of which is in CAPS LOCK. Then in a paragraph and a half he spots Kim's auric rainbow body ("a vibrationlike essence"), and grabs it and takes it back to her real life body. Fuck yeah!

[Seventh Pup]

Fuck Yeah for AMERICAN Auras.

[beniowa]

So... It's the telepathic hippie version of group sex. But without the physical act and no orgasms.

[lacuna]

This chapter is clearly the start of a new era in the literary works of the Stacy conglomerate, and I, for one, am worried. Switching fistfights, gunfights, any kind of REAL AMERICAN FREEFIGHTER fighting with some hand holding trippy drug trance holistic aromatherapy crap... That's not the Rock I know! Far from it!

Dear Min, please tell me that Stacy ate some out of date ham or something, and that this paradigm shift is temporary. I will not abide further besmirching of Rockson. I will not! :leaving:

(Ok, at least it had boobs in it. Which I will deem proof of viability for further installments. And we need a 'storms off in a huff'-emoticon.)

[Lummel]

This chapter is clearly the start of a new era in the literary works of the Stacy conglomerate, and I, for one, am worried. Switching fistfights, gunfights, any kind of REAL AMERICAN FREEFIGHTER fighting with some hand holding trippy drug trance holistic aromatherapy crap... That's not the Rock I know! Far from it!

Dear Min, please tell me that Stacy ate some out of date ham or something, and that this paradigm shift is temporary. I will not abide further besmirching of Rockson. I will not! :leaving:

(Ok, at least it had boobs in it. Which I will deem proof of viability for further installments. And we need a 'storms off in a huff'-emoticon.)

But what colour were the nipples? Were they white? No. I share your fears sir!

[Rakka]

If they're lavender, then I'll be afraid.

[MinDonner]

Chapter Twenty five sees the sun rising like a pearl of brilliant, purest red (?), in a mother-of-pearl sky under a Day-Glow aurora (yes). The Glowers have managed to heal Kim completely overnight, even restoring her hair to its lovely blonde colour and get rid of those ugly disfiguring blisters. They had literally pulled the radiation out of her body! So now she can resume her proper function.

She turned to him and said as soft as flower petals waving in the wind "I want you, Rock." She leaned toward him and kissed his neck.

"Are you strong enough to - I mean -"

"A woman knows when she's ready," she said mysteriously. "I ache for you. You touched my mind - now touch my body. They go together, Rock. I'm burning, feel me." She placed his strong hand over her full breasts, which seemed to swell at his touch.

Sadly(?) we are spared the details of nether universe poles and deepest tunnels, as this bout is conducted in leftover hippy nonsense about falling forever into the colorless purity of their hearts, experiencing thoughts through their eyes, etc etc.

Then, back to see Langford, who has used his convalescence to devise "a whole plan of military co-ordination". Awesome! Then Rock gets another trippy trip with the Glowers, and has a good look over the entire planet, including Killov's stock of nukes. YOU MUST STOP THEM, ROCK! say the Glowers. And so they give him the ability to make everyone else telepathic too! At least I think that's what's going on. All this CAPS LOCK makes my brain hurt. And then Rock, Kim, Mt Ed and President Langford all head off into the sunset.

And that, ladies and gents, is the end of the book. :smoking:

[Maithanet]

And that, ladies and gents, is the end of the book. :smoking:

Even in a bad series of books, if you read books 2,3 and 5, and the main characters in 2 and 3 are not present in five, you would assume that something happens to them in book 4. Hence, all of us have been predicting Kim's gristly death, and probable trip to the freezer.

However, I am starting to wonder if she and Langford were left out of book five for no reason at all, or simply because Stacy forgot about them and their :rolleyes: "plotline".

Min, since you read book 5 first, was there any mention of Langford or Kim that simply didn't seem important enough to mention? I mean, he is the president, I would think it would make top notch window dressing.

[MinDonner]

Onto Book 4, then? Cos I don't know about you, but I am desperate to know why Kim had become so irrelevant by book 6 as to barely merit a mention.

(I don't have the book handy, as I lent it to a mate, so can't check, but I'm pretty sure Rock spent zero time thinking about her, it was Rona all the way).

Anyway, before I begin, here's the cover. Yes, the title is Bloody America, so you have to imagine me saying this in a disparaging British accent every time. :D And take a wild guess as to what might happen in this one!

[Lord O' Bones]

(I don't have the book handy, as I lent it to a mate,

If this mate is a boarder, I'm expecting an appearance in SP's revenge thread any minute.

[MinDonner]

But, as ever, it takes a while for the main story to get going, and chapter 1 is pretty short, so I'll make a start anyway.

Now, doesn't this sound rather like the CNN coverage of a certain recent event?

Something shifted. Deep within the earth, a rumbling and grinding of massive grids of rock hundreds of miles long, pushed against one another, cracking. Something bubbled and boiled like a thing alive. It was the poison of a hundred years, the black rotting radioactive liquids that had seeped into the soil through a million cracks and collected hundreds of miles down in a dark sea of death. It was an underground ocean of stench and decay and rot, of glowing molecules with names like strontium 90, titanium 140 and krypton 85 - all of them as virulent as the day they had been created in the fires of the H-Bombs going off everywhere like the fourth of July a century before. It was a sea of slime and putrescence that writhed in a radioactive frenzy spitting forth clouds of toxic gas, reaching out with pseudopods, of the purest blackness.

It's almost as if he thought "radioactive decay" was something like rotting vegetables, and hadn't even heard of the half-life!

Anyway, the earth surrounding the "living lake of death" can apparently no longer stand all this radioactivity, so it spews it up in a massive slime volcano, which sends a SEA OF RADIOACTIVE SLIME pouring across the prairie in every direction. The last paragraph of the chapter gives this a number of monickers, including THE BLACK SEA and THE OCEAN OF DEATH and the RIVER OF DARKNESS. All the animals run for their lives as the wave approaches!

[Lord O' Bones]

The main thing I take away from this is that there in fact animals here. Just Ted Rockson apparently can't ever see them. They must be illegal immigrant animals to thwart his massive American Detection powers.

[Maithanet]

The main thing I take away from this is that there in fact animals here. Just Ted Rockson apparently can't ever see them. They must be illegal immigrant animals to thwart his massive American Detection powers.

The novel really goes back and forth on the issue of "is America inhabitable"? First the sun is so deadly it wilts plants instantly, but...this is a hundred years later, so the fact that there are plants all means...something. The animals are running away from the radioactive sludge, but surely regular, nonmutant animals couldn't survive against superpredators such as megapedes. Could they?

No.

The truth is that not even Rockson can accept that the America he is fighting so hard for just isn't worth saving. All the real Mericans should probably want to investigate Australia. Or, if that is full, Panama.

[Lord O' Bones]

All the real Mericans should probably want to investigate Australia.

Good lord. I'd think we'd've grown out of investigating fucking Australia by then, radioactive slime or no. Some things just aren't worth it.

[Lord of Starfall]

Is there a literary equivalent to drinking out of a brown paper bag?

[MinDonner]

For the record, no, I don't read these books in public places* - all this, dear readers, is for your edification alone, so reserved for when I'm at home with a laptop handy for snarking purposes. Where's the fun in just reading them by myself?

*though I would, if I had to, cos I'm just that badass

[Antonius Pius]

Oh good, a fourth installment.

What o what will happen to The Rockson now?

For the record, no, I don't read these books in public places - all this, dear readers, is for your edification alone

For which we are duely grateful.

[Jon AS]

Is there a literary equivalent to drinking out of a brown paper bag?

Sure there is. Taking the dust jacket of another book to wrap it in. Or hiding it inside another book or newspaper (in this case, even a tabloid would probably less embarassing).

[Jon AS]

I like these ideas, but how does one respond should they be asked the dreaded question: "So, what are you reading?"

Obviously you need to have a vague idea what the book the dust jacket originally belonged to is about. The tabloid paper would be the easy way out: you can just claim you bought it for the pictures of topless women (though at least in German ones these tend to be on the front page, so if you're going to go with that explanation make sure they aren't visible to other people, lest they suspect you're actually reading the articles).

[Darzin]

I like these ideas, but how does one respond should they be asked the dreaded question: "So, what are you reading?"

An epic of American greatness, its like the Odessey but with more boobs and commies.