Yes, it's very good. Not the best ever, but still very good. And it turns Dean into a worthwhile and more mature character, instead of the annoying kid he used to be.

Congratulations to Deathlands on there 100th book! May there be many more!!!!

Posted By Ron Miles on 17 Sep 2011 07:26 AM
Yes, it's very good. Not the best ever, but still very good. And it turns Dean into a worthwhile and more mature character, instead of the annoying kid he used to be.

Book finally turned up today!
On chapter 4 already, seems good so far! Ill let you know the final verdict.

Just finished it this morning, my my it was worth the wait!!!!!!

SPOILER ALERT £$$%%^^&&***

Well young master Dean has returned and gone but i think we may see him in the future. Im kind of glad he didnt automatically join back up with the gang, although i knew it was gonna happen i was kinda P***** when they killed off his love interest i thought she kinda showed potential.
  I was quite excited when the Trans-mats all stopped working and Ryan et al where planning to become traders, i thought this would have been a nice little break from the aimlessly wandering.
  The "Stony Angels" where quite a cool little bunch and made nice cannon fodder.
Was it a howler at the end that ate Natters???
  Anyhoo i have really enjoyed the last three books and hope the next one can keep up the pace

Posted By silentalbino on 21 Sep 2011 02:49 AM

Just finished it this morning, my my it was worth the wait!!!!!!

SPOILER ALERT £$$%%^^&&***

Well young master Dean has returned and gone but i think we may see him in the future. Im kind of glad he didnt automatically join back up with the gang, although i knew it was gonna happen i was kinda P***** when they killed off his love interest i thought she kinda showed potential.
  I was quite excited when the Trans-mats all stopped working and Ryan et al where planning to become traders, i thought this would have been a nice little break from the aimlessly wandering.
  The "Stony Angels" where quite a cool little bunch and made nice cannon fodder.
Was it a howler at the end that ate Natters???
  Anyhoo i have really enjoyed the last three books and hope the next one can keep up the pace

Sadly, knowing GE.. They won't make mention of the Mat Trans (Trans mat?) stopped working until the author who wrote this book writers again.

As for the next book.. well different author, so possibly be ready for another let down that is until Chuck Rodgers next book 'Hell Road Truckers'.. Which A) Is going to Kick some whitie produced ass B) Takes Place in Canada C) Is going to kick some major whitie produced ass..

Yes I know that A & C are technically the same, but I thought that they were so important that they needed to be repeated!

SPOILER ALERTS




i have about 30 pages to go ni this and think it was ok to read. i read a lot of mistakes in it and realy thougt the part in the power station was very stupid. why would so many animals and mutes all come into the one place without attacking each other in the tunel on the way in. it was just to stupid.
also they did not have a lot of bullets for the guns but used them a lot without any worry about how many they had.
will doc keep his new gun, i think he had another onre like this in the book in the disney like place but lost it.

@ jodes- Whats a "whitie". is that slang for canucks?

That ending annoyed and depressed me. Maybe Dean didn't have to hook up with the companions, but he's seperated from his family, such as it is for 3 years, has to do some cruddy stuff, including wounding Ryan, and then his first real love gets killed, by his own father.....WTF wrote this, Joss Whedon?

I *finally* got my hands on a copy. Not sure why it was delayed; B&N had the new OL on the shelves two weeks ago. It'll be another week or so before I finish reading my current book and get into that one, though.

Edit: Pollotta? Pollotta wrote this?? Agh. It only takes him five pages to screw something up, too - Dean's weapon is 9mm, not a .38.

I think it's funny, BTW, that the teaser on the first page is from the first page of the book. Way to go, GE.

Finished it earlier today. Wow, Pollotta pulled out all the stops - he managed to cram in just about every trope from his previous books that I've seen so far: huge war wags (two of them), bioweapons (howlers), droids, flare guns, a Webley, weirdo muties (flapjacks - which seem to be as ubiquitous as stingwings - and feeders), and a climactic end battle between multiple factions. He even mentioned Delphi and robot tanks. I was half-expecting a kraken to make an appearance.

And what Pollotta novel would be complete without factual errors? To be fair, though, this one's far better than others I've read.

Regarding the M16: it's called a "charging handle", not an "arming bolt", and you can lock the bolt back, so there's no reason why Krysty would nearly lose a finger when it snapped forward.

Oh, and you can't mount an M-40 grenade launcher onto an AK-47.

Once again, the LeMat's shotgun barrel is not a 12-gauge. The reproduction Doc picked up is a 20-gauge.

He uses the companions' code (Alpha, Bravo, Charlie) correctly early on, then inexplicably gets it wrong later when Dean meets up with Jak.

The companions end up in Kentucky, then walk "several weeks" away to "the next redoubt". Hmm... there's one in Kentucky, one in Ohio, two in Indiana, and two in Tennessee, all of which are closer than wherever they went (and some of which even appeared in his other books). And that's just the ones I know of.

In the "rofl file": The companions are attacked by mastiffs three times normal size, with sabretooth fangs. No problem so far... but then Mildred cuts one open, examines the organs, and proclaims that it's not a mutie. Suuuure.

An aircraft carrier gets blown into the air high enough to fly about a hundred miles inland. Uh-huh. (Note that this one appeared in a previous book, too... I believe it was Gemini Rising, except that one was simply sitting on the ground, not buried in it.)

Honestly, I can't figure out why the Alton people joined up with the coldhearts. Ralhoun has a vision, then she goes totally crazy and has to go kill Ryan. WTF? Did I miss something? It doesn't make any sense, but maybe I'll see it when I do the summary.

A whitie is just that.. a white guy.


"Whitie Produced" is from a comedy "skit" about a Native American (or Canadian) radio station, called Brocket 99. Some consider it racism, and others don't (it was made by white people).

Its kind of hard to go into here, but one of the skits has a guy trying to start his car from a used car lot and he basically says "this whitie produced car better f'n start.. I need to get to the rodeo".

It may sound confusing, but once you've listened to the tape you might have a better feel for it.

 

 

 

I have read and finished this book and find it like all other of NP's work a little lack lustre and filled with his own interpretation of the DEathlands and not established canon.

He makes way, way too much use of bio weapon animals and his own ad hock knowledge of the world, weapons and most importantly the main characters.

To me this book was nothing more than another pay cheque to him and something he churned out with scant regard to it being book 100 and as such a book that all long time readers have been waitting on.

I would give this book 2.5 / 10

Posted By )3az )3aziah on 08 Oct 2011 07:33 AM
I have read and finished this book and find it like all other of NP's work a little lack lustre and filled with his own interpretation of the DEathlands and not established canon.

He makes way, way too much use of bio weapon animals and his own ad hock knowledge of the world, weapons and most importantly the main characters.

To me this book was nothing more than another pay cheque to him and something he churned out with scant regard to it being book 100 and as such a book that all long time readers have been waitting on.

I would give this book 2.5 / 10

I was thinking much the same thing. There are plot holes large enough to drive a truck through. I thought about it a bit and decided to write it all down. Feel free to discuss.  

Plot Hole #1

The situation: The companions ride up to Alton ville and offer a trade - their vehicle for horses and maybe some supplies. Ralhoun, the baron/chief, is interested at first, then suddenly clams up when Ryan mentions using the wag as a war wag. She then gives them directions to a camping site which is obviously an ambush point. Sure enough, the companions are ambushed that night, but since they see it coming, the Alton men are killed instead.

The problem: Why did Ralhoun suddenly turn on them? I can see her getting a little nervous about having a war wag, but she could easily rip it apart. It certainly doesn't justify sending a party out to kill them in their sleep. It even says that "Ryan knew why the deal had gone flat", but apparently he can't be bothered to explain it to the reader.

What I think: It makes some sort of sense if you assume that Ralhoun has heard rumors of the Stone Angels raiding villes. Some people have surely survived and fled, carrying news of Dean acting as an advance scout (of course, if that were the case, the Angels wouldn't have been as successful as they were...). Ryan mentioning a war wag might have tweaked Ralhoun onto hearing the description of the scout, who looks just like a smaller version of (you guessed it) Ryan himself. This doesn't explain, however, how Ryan knew what was going on - they hadn't met the Angels at this point.

And it also doesn't explain...

Plot Hole #2

The situation: Ralhoun and her men have been chasing the companions for several days now; apparently they think Ryan's a member of the Stone Angels (more on this later). One night, Ralhoun (who's a doomie's daughter) has a dream. In it, she's trapped in a stone room lined with flayed human skins: one is her sec chief, who charged into the Angels' base and got them all killed/captured, and one is Ryan's (this becomes important later). She herself is tied down and is being raped by Camarillo, the Angels' leader.

After waking from the dream, she takes her sergeant out of sight of the camp and shoots him. In cold blood. Just because she thought it would avert the fate that she saw in her dream, even though she knows (it was explained to us) that her dreams are seldom accurate. A couple days later, she and her men raid the Angels' base, seeking to wipe out the Angels and the hated Ryan Cawdor (who, of course, isn't there). In the middle of the fight, two men from either side are broken out of their mortal combat by none other than Camarillo and Ralhoun, riding side-by-side. Ralhoun explains that they've "been tricked" and that Ryan's not an Angel. Camarillo suspects that Ryan and Dean are running a scam on them, setting the two groups against each other so the companions can clean up after the smoke clears. They then make a truce and set off after the companions.

The problem: Oh, where do I start... Pollotta has painted himself into a corner - he took half the book to detail the companions being chased by a howler instead of setting up a coherent plot, so by this point (about 90% of the way through the book) it's a total mess. Instead of rewriting it, he just shoehorns everything in and either expects the reader to ignore the gaping flaws, or he simply doesn't care.

Remember that dream Ralhoun had? The one that made her shoot her sergeant? Yeah, she apparently forgot all about that: she's joining forces with the guy who killed most of her men and raped her. I guess she figured killing the sergeant was good enough...

And then we have the fact that the Angels are raiders. You know, the "rape and pillage" kind of raiders, who have done this to over a dozen other villes? Again, Ralhoun completely ignores this little detail, despite running a ville of her own, because... she's blinded with hatred, or something. I don't know. There's not even an internal monologue about her planning to turn around and kill them after the battle, to prevent them from coming after her ville (because they're, you know, raiders and all).

And speaking of sec men... where did all these people come from? The way I figure it, the caravan would've been wiped out between the initial contact with the Angels, the battle in the power plant, and the final battle - there were only 11 wagons, and most of them were destroyed. Likewise, there seem to be hundreds of bandits and sec men each - Ralhoun apparently took every able-bodied man and woman she had, leaving her ville completely defenseless.

How did Ralhoun find the Angels' base? She was supposedly following the companions, but they never went anywhere near that place.

How exactly did Ralhoun find out that Ryan wasn't an Angel? Did she just walk up to Camarillo and say "Hey, I want Ryan Cawdor, and then we'll leave peacefully"? More to the point, why did she think he was one in the first place? If Ralhoun had heard rumors of the Angels, she would've instantly recognized Ryan and given him the old heave-ho immediately, instead of playing nice and then changing her mind. Though why she doesn't want them to go east is a total mystery; there's nothing there but that old aircraft carrier, and that's a hotspot (despite, you may note, the material in the reactor having broken down years ago).

On the same note, why did Camarillo believe her? He's the leader of a band of raiders, which breeds a good degree of paranoia. If someone attacked my ville with no warning, I'd assume it was either another raider band or a ville out for revenge; I certainly wouldn't believe the other leader if she told me she was after a single person.

The whole "they're out to play both sides against the middle" conspiracy theory isn't actually that bad... if it had been set up properly. The problem is, you're talking about a band of raiders and a ville (which is run by a non-paranoid baron). If I were Ralhoun, I'd start worrying that someone would take advantage of the ville's weakened defense (see above) and hurry back to Alton after I figured out that Ryan wasn't actually a bad guy (see below).

Ralhoun has no reason to go after Ryan - the companions killed her men out of self-defense, AND they left the war wag behind like they promised they would. Sounds like a fair deal to me - once I had someone check the wag out thoroughly for boobie traps (and finding none), I'd say "oopsie" and let the whole thing go, because Ryan was obviously not the person I thought he was. If she were an extreme paranoid, she could justify it; I would say she's not (given that her people love her and she runs a tight ville), but her actions seem to speak otherwise. Maybe she's got multiple personalities?

This wasn't the worst book of the series; but pretty close.

The mistakes in equipment people carried were numerous.  Sometimes the sequence of events just didn't make sense.  Makes you scratch your head, 'why'd they do that?'. 

Doc throwing his LeMat away for a modern Lemat that takes cartridges?  Ahhh, not a chance.  1) His LeMat IS a modern version taken from a Kansas baron. 2) The modern version does not take cartridges.  Just check Cabellas.  3) He's a believer in black powder.

It was so wrong on so many levels that I wonder why there is no editor to catch all the mistakes?

Posted By Grantbo on 13 Oct 2011 07:00 PM

... I wonder why there is no editor to catch all the mistakes?

There is an editor, but only a line editor whose function it is to correct spelling and grammatical errors (as apposed to fact or continuity checking).

Posted By Ron Miles on 13 Oct 2011 07:06 PM
There is an editor, but only a line editor whose function it is to correct spelling and grammatical errors (as apposed to fact or continuity checking).

Um...riiiight.

I have to agree with Mark on this one. The line editor's responsibility goes a lot further than that.
@Grantbo, there is a dealer on the Web who sells LeMat replicas that fire .44 cartridges.

I am man enough to admit when I am wrong. This is me, being wrong.

Graphic Audio books 99 and 100 are coming out soon, I cant wait to see what the latest in DL is happening, both books are listen as coming soon on GA's site

I have a long commute and listen to many of the DL books on Graphic Audio, however I wanted to actually read Prodigal's Return, even though GA does a superlative job adapting the stories.  I pre-ordered the book and read it several weeks ago. It started off well, but , for me anyway, it just fell flat. It's not terrible and I like Dean's character development, but the ending left me cold and there wasn't enough interaction between Dean and the companions. I think I outsmarted myself. I should have waited for the Graphic Audio adaptation.  My rating is 7/10.