Adam

Firstly, I do love a lot of 80's slop and I love discovering lost forgotten tales. This kind of sits in the realms of both. However, some 80's slop can be really good and well written, the rest is just not good to painfully mediocre. Sadly, I'd probably rate this in the realms of not good overall. I can really find no info on the author, it might be a pseudonym, or this Tankwar series might be a one and done for this author.

I found a few of these books at a library sale and they looked so ridiculous I had to give them a try. Bonus points because they were short and hopefully a quick read. Unfortunately, the story wound up being somewhat boring at times that I could not tear through the writing as fast as I would have liked. I also had to switch on and off with another book just to read something a little bit better. However, this entire series being lost to time, might mean I read the whole thing so someone out there has a full review of the books!

The story is primarily about the outbreak of World War III and the tank crew of an experimental tank called "No Slack" suddenly caught behind enemy lines. For whatever reason the experimental tank was in Germany and when World War III broke out as the Russians moved into the region, our intrepid tank crew found themselves needing to escape the region immediately. The book starts off with these kinds of tank action sequences and it was pretty good at first. I was somewhat hoping it would be similar to that movie Fury, which was a really fun movie. I will say, at first glance this book felt a bit like that, but rather quickly deviated.

The main character is the commander of the tank crew Sergeant Max Tag. As with a lot of military novels, the rest of the crew has plucky nicknames, which makes it annoying to read when there are too many to keep track of. Luckily this book doesn't get that bad for the reader. As they make their escape Max and his crew run into an old German buddy Holz. Who is heading up a small German unit with his sister Giesla.

...And this is where the ultra bad writing begins. Reading this in 2026 is probably very different from reading this in 1989, and I don't know if I ever would have thought about it back then, but I've seen enough lists of bad writing tropes of women to know that this pretty much checks off all the boxes. First off, she's basically the only woman in the entire novel. Like, we seriously don't encounter any others at all anywhere in this universe. Maybe this will change in future novels? I'll keep you posted. First off, I assure you this woman is very hot. Because the only woman around a warzone better be? She also has a traumatic past, to "give her character depth," I assume? Guess what happened to her? She was kidnapped and sexually assaulted multiple times. The assaulters also killed her husband and made her watch. Was this during a war? No, no it wasn't, it was during a car race... At this point we've very much lost the plot... but it gets worse.

We have a couple chapters of war action, which weren't terrible, but then we move into a 20 something page chapter about Max's past. About how awesome he was in high school, of all times. This isn't even much of a spoiler, because it has literally nothing to do with the book. It feels like it exists just to show off how awesomely cool Max must be? Anyway, this is where another woman shows up in the book, she has pretty no lines, while Max rattles on about things. You see, instead of going to prom with someone he really liked, he took pity on the homely girl and asked her to go with him to show off how great of a guy he is, I guess. It's just dumb and very bad writing all around. But low and behold she gets dressed up and now she's hot! They stop for gas and these bikers start to harass her about going with them. Now Max needs to show off how cool he is and stand up to the bikers at the gas station. He, naturally, embarasses them, but now they lie in wait after the prom and they bring the whole gang! Max challenges them to a race and wins... which solves the problem? The sheriff gets involved and forces the bikers to back down, but then Max goes and has a talk with his dad. His dad proceeds to tell him stories about Vietnam and now we have this whole Vietnam sequence in the middle of this book... what in the hell am I reading at this point? Now the plot has really been destroyed and I'm, frankly, bored out of my mind.

I'm really hoping the rest of the tank crew doesn't get these weird twenty page monologues, because then there would be almost nothing left of World War III to talk about... and while that, thankfully, doesn't happen, their backgrounds are minute blurbs. To be honest, they feel more like one sentence author notes that just got put in here and weren't fleshed out at all. So, now we know the backgrounds of everyone on the team, now we can get back to the war. The action rather drops off for quite a while as most of the time is spent running and hiding. They end up meeting up with some other Americans and with the German Jagd unit they make a break for safety. I don't know if, being American, I just don't know much about the German area, but I was getting pretty lost in their descriptions of where they were trying to go. They pretty much escaped into farm country and I imagine the areas and lands are just as nondescript as driving through those regions of the U.S.

The writing often feels a bit clunky, where the author tries to be funny or witty with his characters. Sometimes it works, but maybe I just don't know 80's military slang, because everything feels like slang at a certain point. It's also weird to have all the American soldiers throwing their slang at the Germans as if the Germans would understand what is going on... They eventually get to a farmhouse and regroup and this is where the obligatory sex scene has to occur? This was just awkward to say the least. Giesla basically trauma dumps on Max, telling him all the horrible things that were done to her and her husband when they were kidnapped. And here we find out that she was taken by a group of black men... that were in cahoots with the Russians? Does our intrepid author explain the connection, certainly not. Just throwing around things people fear at the time... but it's not a racist book, one of Max's tank crew is a black man. So it's all good right? So, after she trauma dumps, it is now time to have sex. We are, thankfully, assured that Max is very big down there, I know all of us reading it wanted to know.

Okay, now that we got that out of the way, it's time to get back to the war. I will say the actually parts where there is tank action are good. The battle sequences and final escape were good. I actually tore through the last thirty or so pages wanting to see where things would go from there. At this point, I do wonder if the following novels get better. If this is really the authors first try ever at a novel, it would explain a lot of the bad writing. Most authors first book is not well written and they have to grow into their style a lot more. I think of Clive Cussler as a staple comparison, where even he knew the first Dirk Pitt novel was not that great. Comparing the first writings to his like tenth book are night and day... maybe that will happen with Steelbaugh as the series progresses.

Outside of the action sequences this book is bogged down by all the bad writing tropes people would later identify and complain about constantly in the mid-2000's. There is none of the wackiness of the 80's I was hoping find. This is labeled as sci-fi, but it really isn't. The experimental tank isn't even all that experimental. It has some new armor coating to make it more defensive and then more powerful guns, but like... it's not run by anything super different than regular tanks. The only other major factor is that it's fast... but like, fast for a tank. This book ends up reading a lot more like a Vietnam war story, but instead of a squad making their way in the jungle, it's a tank crew. Personally, I'd give it a pass, I'm gonna read these so you don't have to! I need a break from this though... we'll see when I get around to book two.

The Old World setting has really returned to the original ways of Warhammer Fantasy Battle, sort of... In the original creation the setting was broken up around the rule book then the forces of "good" and the forces of "evil". In the new edition they've used the same split, but now it's just the "Forces of Fantasy".

This book gives you a little bit of lore to get you started with your army. Right now none of the massive events from Warhammer Fantasy Battle have happened, and this setting feels a lot more of a pre-game of what's to come. I fully expect to see the forces of Chaos rise in the near future when we get back onto the regular timeline of the original release decades ago.

"Forces of Fantasy" gives you rules for the various armies and gives you instructions to help create a muster list. From here you will need to get a hold of your army's respective Arcane Journal to flesh out all the details of running your army. I'm sort of surprised they went this route instead of creating the old 128 page army books that gave you all the information you needed. I do wonder if they eventually march into the next edition they will eventually do that. There are just some minor details that I sort of wish they would get into and flesh out, but that's what makes this feel a lot more like a "getting started" sort of design. The rules are fully fleshed out, but I mean more in the sense of the lore at this point.

I did enjoy reading all the basic lore of all the armies though, so, in that regard I did enjoy the book. Maybe they're trying to entice people to start more than one army... which I can very much see Games Workshop doing. In any event, to play this game as any of the armies in this list, this book one really be enough. You need three books to fully play your army of choice in this edition of Warhammer.

As someone who is not a massive fan of the zombie genre, I've wound up consuming a fair few things in the genre over the years. I picked this entire book series up a while ago and I've finally sat down to read it. It took me a little while, not because it was bad, but because all books that are the first in a much larger series always have the first half of the book paced pretty slowly. So, sometimes I have trouble cranking through the first book, while the following novels go much faster for me. I mean, everyone should know, it's a necessary slog because the author wants you to care about the characters and one of the best vehicles to do that is to flat out introduce them, often in relatively mundane ways to make them seem relatable/realistic. Smith did an awesome job of this, but very few people could ever make such things feel extremely fast paced. Other than to do that time line jump around stuff where one chapter is in the thick of the action and the next is back in time to build the characters etc. I kinda prefer the slow slog than time jump if I'm being honest.

<i>Extinction Horizon</i> features two fairly main characters Reed Beckham and Kate Lovato. We are introduced to them quite separately as they go about their day jobs and Smith jumps between the two at the beginning. Naturally there are side characters in this, such as Reed's team, but early on I'm expecting these two to be a bit of a "Mary-Sue" and this is about their survival and just about everyone else is expendable (as is the usual case for Post Apocalypse scenarios).

(The following is not much of a spoiler, because it honestly all pretty much happens in the first couple of chapters.)

Beckham is an extremely highly trained covert operative in charge of a special forces unit called Ghost that is sent in when the US government needs to leave no trace that a team was sent in... for reasons. Beckham's team is kind of thrown into the action quite early on where the government has lost contact with a research facility on an island in Building 8. Beckham's mission is to extract a sample of what they were working on and get out. On the plane ride it is revealed that during the Vietnam War our government's desire to create super soldiers never really waned after World War II and we find out they tested out a new drug called VX99. However, the test subject went berserk and killed everyone around them then went into the jungle hunting. It's pretty wild stuff and a really cool concept. Fast forward to the modern era and our government is at it again, but this time messing with Ebola to create a more intense contagion, under the guise of "trying to cure Ebola". A member of Kate's team, Ellis, is with Bekham as an advisor on this mission and he will be transporting the sample back to CDC where Kate works. We are then introduced to Kate and the rest of her team.

Needless to say things go very awry at the lab and Bekham and his team are lucky to get out alive. However, by the time they make it back to relative "safety" it's already too late. The virus is out and spreading rapidly. One of the things I really like about the novel is that the zombies aren't really like the traditional style of zombies. Instead they are a true threat, which I think is a bit inspired by 28 Days Later and the concept of the Rage Virus from that franchise. The victims are often faster and stronger, so it's really terrifying trying to defeat these things. Smith also gives us a dash of Resident Evil and introduces strange body horror level mutations into the victims. Their hands transform into claws so they can rapidly climb walls like a spider and their mouths transform into these weird sucker shapes, ostensibly to bite victims and spread the virus faster I assume.

It's kind of surprising how fast the world falls, as I thought Smith would milk it a bit over a couple of novels, just to give us readers a bit of false hope that maybe the virus could be contained... but nope, the world just falls in about a week. There are pockets of resistance and at this point I'm assuming the next novels are going to sort of be about trying to coordinate with those that are left or trying to maybe rescue who survived while looking for a cure or vaccine of some kind. A vaccine would be an interesting thing to include because it would take away the threat of infection, but it doesn't stop the zombies from being an insane threat given how strong they are.

Another aspect that I really liked about this was that it's a third person story and it's military based. I feel like the majority of the zombie genre books and movies are often told from the perspective of some random person who survived or a random group of regular people who made it. Maybe that's why Smith's zombies are a real serious threat due to their speed and strength, so coupled with the horde mechanic zombies always feature fighting trained operatives can feel like a truly desperate event. Do you have enough ammo to survive a swarm? Can you reload fast enough? etc. That dynamic really makes the battles intense to read and Smith does a superb job of making those action sequences feel like a desperate fight. Whereas the usual slow zombies a la <i>Day of the Dead</i> or <i>The Walking Dead</i> would be little threat to a team like Ghost. They would just kill all of them and establish a perimeter for extraction fast enough to get a helicopter in. With Smith's zombies you don't have time for that.

The one thing Smith gives his people a chance with is that you can just shoot the zombies in the chest and kill them like a normal human. If you do enough damage to the zombie it dies. The threat of things like <i>The Walking Dead</i> is that you do need to shoot them in the head in order to stop them.

The book clearly ends with the intent to write a second installment. I'm actually going to be quite interested in reading the next book to see where things go. A lot of stuff happened in this first book and things I thought he would bleed out over the series just all happened in this first novel. I quite like his characters Bekham and Kate, even if to a certain degree they feel a little bit one dimensional at this point. But gosh, a lot has certainly happened so having super deep characters in an action packed book like this right away is not very realistic. Just run with the 80's/90's action flick feel and enjoy the ride.