Two more
Weird War Tales issues and a long novel.
Weird War Tales 22.
Wings of Death. WW2. A French Baron has his chateaux bombed by Germans and seeks revenge. He’s an expert in bats so devizes the bat bomb. This is a real thing from history but the details are changed. Someone else invented the bat bomb and it was used against Japan, not Germany. The story is mostly the Baron going up the chain of command fighting for his idea then seeing it come to fruition. The twist is he’s a vampire therefore he knows about bats. This is revealed in the last panel on the last page so has no effect on the story whatsoever.
Bat bomb - Wikipedia
The Day After Doomsday. Far future. A soldier thinks he’s the last man on Earth and is searching a ruined city for food and other survivors. He spots someone and is overjoyed…until he realizes it’s an enemy soldier. They fight and kill each other. The actual last man on Earth steps out from the shadows, loots their bodies, and walks off. This is a weird one in that it’s only a page and a half long. Most are 6-7 pages.
Last Rites for the Living. WW2. A reckless American sergeant in search of promotion and medals comes across German soldiers firing on a group of Romani. He orders his men to attack despite being outnumbered. They barely win the day and the Romani elder gives the man a gift. A medallion that reveals when he will die (1994) and, as long as he wears it, protects him from death until that time. The soldier uses and abuses the power of the medallion taking ever increasingly suicidal risks with himself and his men. The twist is the medallion keeps him alive, not unharmed. He’s caught in a bombing raid where he loses his limbs and persists in a vegetative state until he dies of natural causes. In 1994.
Weird War Tales 23.
The Bird of Death. WW2. An American soldier can see a spectral bird in the sky when someone’s going to die. He repeatedly tries to use this to save his friends, but they think he’s nuts. When he’s captured by the Germans he uses this power to maneuver the Germans into a landmine, killing himself and the Germans.
Day After Doomsday. Far future. The last man on Earth wanders the wasteland looking for food. He spots a vending machine in the rubble and tries to open it. When he’s beaten it into submission it spills out all the change. Another 2-page story. Same story name and possibly the same last man on Earth. This their first serial story?
Corporal Kelly’s Private War. WW2 and an alternate dimension…maybe. Kelly is the lone man stationed at a listening post on an island. He’s bored out of his mind and hunger for action. He’s whisked away to an alternate dimension where there’s a war on. The aliens are susceptible to loud noises, which Kelly uses to his advantage to win the war for one side. He’s thanked and sent back to his reality. He wakes up to an angry officer standing over him. He was asleep at his post. The island was in the pacific. Kelly slept through the Japanese fleet moving to attack Pearl Harbor.
One Last Gasp. WW2. Long, long, long ass novel. This was about 151,000 words long. It really needed an editor to trim that down to something like 80,000 words. I’m glad I read it as the story was good. But it barely kept my interest in places. It almost felt like three novels smashed together with the same characters throughout.
The first 1/3 is the story of Harry, a sergeant, who’s almost always referred to as Sarge. Sarge and his company are fighting in Belgium during WW2. They’re faced off against a particularly nasty German SS commander. This section is almost pure war story with hints of something more, something supernatural happening. The SS can somehow see in the dark and are taking prisoners to use as rations…because these SS are cannibals. They’re led by a particularly nightmarish man named Kleg who has a skull for a face and fangs. This section was almost pure action without pause. Almost always in as close to real time as the author could do over the course of a few days of a kind of running battle between the Sarge and his company and Kleg’s SS. As interesting as the section was, it was also kind of exhausting to have nothing but pure, incessant action for roughly 50,000 words.
The second 1/3 is the story of the Sarge and his company encountering a haunted house, Dom Caern. This is where the horror kicks in…and is fairly quickly explained away. You see the haunted house used to be an insane asylum
and because of that the barrier between realities wore thin, so of course a bunch of German scientists showed up to intentionally punch a hole through the thin spot to see what was on the other side. I don’t mind lf the horror is explained up front, like Stranger Things. This is all happening because of these scientists in the lab over there doing crazy scary stuff. But it really bugs me when it’s a bait-and-switch.
No, really, it’s a haunted house…just kidding, you see there are these scientists. Ugh. Really disappointing part of the book. The build up of the horror was great, but the reveal was like letting all the air out of the balloon. Simply drained any and all tension away.
The third 1/3 is the story of the Sarge and his company having to fight Kleg’s SS in and around the haunted house. We get lots of typical horror tropes, animated dead, lots of wartime gore, and breathless action.
It was a decent book. I’m glad it’s over. More in a “damn, that was exhausting” way that overjoyed with the resolution of the story. I’m almost the exact right reader for this kinda thing, and I’m in the exact right mood for this kinda thing, but the book was so absurdly long it was more a slog than anything.
If you like really long WW2 action & sci-fi horror novels, this book will probably knock your socks off. For me, it was just way, way too long.
