"No!
A man gave his life to bring us the
news! And we've got to get across the
continent as fast as possible now, or it
won't matter! Storm or no storm, the car
leaves now! Your feelings on the matter
don't mean a good goddamn in the face of
this! All I want out of you, Hell, is
one word: Which on will it be?"
"'I'd
like something to eat. I
haven't..."
"There's
food in the car. What's your
answer?"
He
stared at the dark window.
"Okay,'
he said. 'I'll run Damnation Alley for
you."
Hell
Tanner is the last hardcore One-Percenter
left on the planet. After a worldwide
nuclear holocaust, he and the rest of his
Hell's Angels brethren ran illegal
contraband from one pocket of civilization
to the other, raping, looting and
pillaging as they went. But as time passed
and humanity reasserted itself, the new
Nation of California cracked down on these
hooliganistic activities, wiping most of
them out, and now Tanner faces hard prison
time for several crimes -- including
murder.
However,
word comes that the Nation of Boston is
about to be wiped out by some mysterious
plague. Answering the call for medical
assistance, California has
arranged to send a vaccine via a caravan
of three specialized cars -- more like
armored half-tracks -- armed with
missiles, flamethrowers and machine guns.
And whoever pilots them is gonna need all
that fire-power if they hope to survive
the perils of Damnation Alley --
the nickname for the wasteland that was
once America's heartland.
Reputed
to have traversed this suicide run as far
east as the Mississippi River, and survived to
tell the tale, Tanner is offered a full
pardon if he'll drive the lead rig
carrying the precious Haffikine
anti-serum. Seeing it as his only option,
with the possibilities of escaping along
the way lingering in his mind, Tanner
agrees. With the clock ticking, the expedition embarks,
heading
out into a vicious storm, but Tanner knows
that he has a lot more to worry about than
just the weather when crossing Damnation
Alley...
Author
Roger Zelazny was one of the founding
members of the so-called New Wave
of science-fiction writers who, with the
likes of Philip
K. Dick, Harlan Ellison and Harry
Harrison, were a little less grounded in
science and opened up a whole, wild-assed
can of fiction and fantasy, evolving the
genre past its space-faring, whiz-bang
preconceptions. Probably more famous for
his series of Amber books that
blurred the lines between science and
magic rather deftly, Zelazny also had a
couple nifty novels dealing with life on
Earth after the nuclear apocalypse. In The
Immortal,
a slightly irradiated and mutant plagued
Earth is now under the management of the
Vegans: an alien race who treat Terra
Firma as a planet wide tourist attraction,
and while Conrad Nomikos, our protagonist
and tour guide, shows a certain Vegan
what's left of his world, he becomes
embroiled in an assassination plot. With
some latent precognitive abilities, Conrad
knows he must keep the alien alive -- but
he has no clue as to why.
As
good as The
Immortal
is, I like Zelazny's vision and version of
a post-apocalyptic future in Damnation
Alley
a lot better. The Alley is a
wasteland, littered with active volcanoes
and lingering hot-spots of radiation
around the still smoldering craters left
by the hydrogen bombs. Outside these few
pockets of civilization, the flora and
fauna have mutated to gigantic
proportions. Monstrous creatures lurk
everywhere. On the ground, the caravan has
to stop several times to allow train-sized
snakes to pass -- shooting at them will
only piss them off. They also keep their
eyes peeled for the truck-sized Gila
monsters. And I found myself giggling a
little at this old B-movie scenario came
to life, and then one of the creatures
pounces, destroying one of the vehicles
and I found myself cheering. Tanner
manages to kill it, but one of the drivers
was crushed and killed. Now paired with a
guy named Greg, the surviving co-pilot
from the destroyed vehicle, they roll on.
Then, more danger comes from the sky in
the form of giant bats.
"The
flame shot forth, orange and cream
blossoms of combustion. When they
folded, Tanner sighted in the screen and
squeezed the trigger. He swing the gun,
and they fell. Their charred bodies lay
all about him, and he added new ones to
the smoldering heaps.
"'Roll
it!' he cried, and the car moved
forward, swaying, bat bodies crunching
beneath its tires.
"Tanner
laced the heavens with gunfire, and when
they swooped again, he strafed them and
fired a flare.
"In
the sudden magnesium glow from overhead,
it seemed millions of vampire-faced
forms were circling, spiraling down
toward them."
Even
with all this stuff trying to eat them,
the real danger isn't what's on the
ground, or the bats, but what's lurking up
in the atmosphere -- and this is what
really sets Zelazny's novel apart. Seems
that all those nuclear detonations chucked
a lot of stuff into the sky that never
came down. The blasts also triggered some bizarre
and deadly weather patterns with
jet-streams of high velocity winds whose
erratic courses lead them to sheer off
mountains or suck up oceans. The sky above
is criss-crossed with these separate
streams of debris, and whenever these
streamers of refuse collide, gravity kicks
in and whatever they sucked up -- rocks,
water, trees, anything and everything -- crashes back down to earth
at terminal velocity, leading to several
deadly barrages. Before they can reach
refuge in Salt Lake City, the caravan
loses another vehicle in one of these
violent storms.
Down
to one vehicle, the surviving crew presses
on and manages to make it as far as St.
Louis before Greg starts to crack-up under
the pressure. With a mutiny on his hands
inside, giant mutant spiders lurking
outside, low on ammo, and a long way yet
to go, Tanner puts the pedal to the metal
-- hell bent to see this thing through to
the bitter end.
Does
he make it? Who am I to spoil the ending,
and I encourage you to find out for yourselves;
it's well worth the read. Coming in at a a
quick 190 pages, the novel threatens to
unravel near the end with several stream
of consciousness chapters from the delirious
and nearly dead Tanner. Zelazny also
hijacks the novel in a few spots for some
social commentary that probably could have
been left out. And as he gets closer and
closer to Boston, the action shifts more
and more from King
Dinosaur into Road Warrior
territory as roving bands of bikers lurk,
ready to pounce on anything that moves,
and an obligatory love interest that comes
from completely out of nowhere. Still, the
author manages to hold it together until
the very end.
One
of Zelazny's greatest strengths is that he
can really get into the nuts and bolts on
how something works -- like the
catastrophic weather patterns, and paints
a beautiful picture that's easy to
"see" and understand. And he's
no slouch with an action sequence, either.
The main crux of the novel is the
transformation of Hell Tanner from
self-absorbed misanthrope to hard-working savior
of the people. As he travels across the
scarred landscape, he's slowly stripped of
everything and emerges on the other side,
transformed into something far
greater.
Obviously,
by what I've told you so far, if you've
only seen the
movie that's based on this book you
can see they
are as different as night and day.
Allegedly, Zelazny was so disgusted by the
film adaptation that he asked for his name
to be removed from the credits. The studio
refused. Having seen the film and
liberties taken, yeah, I can see why he
was a little upset. Personally, I
encountered the film first, and after
finally reading the novel several years
later all I could think about was, damn,
if they hadn't screwed it up so royally,
that would have made a great movie, which
leaves us with the source: a damn fine
novel.
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