Mass Movement Magazine

Death Got No Mercy (The Afterblight Chronicles) - Al Ewing (Abaddon Books)
Cade - just Cade - is like some sort of post-apocalypse Conan The Barbarian, a man of few words, who lets his actions do all his talking. He’s built like a brick shithouse and is basically an unstoppable son of a bitch. Armed with only a few chains and a knife, he ventures into a desolate San Francisco in search of insulin for The Duchess, one of his very few friends in the whole sorry world; there he meets religious fanatics who crucify him to the black-top with railroad nails, a gang of subterannean cannibals out to taste his giblets, and a crazed hippy cult who survive on a cocktail of free love, narcotics and sado-masochism. It’s a storyline straight out of a comic book, of course, one man wandering through the wreckage of civilisation, dealing out his own unique brand of street justice along the way, but Al Ewing’s dead-pan sardonic delivery hooks you from the off, and you can’t help but smile at some of the outrageous ultra-violence Cade metes out, usually towards those that deserve a painful death - but not always! Ewing almost loses his way mid-book though, with a strange, and totally misguided, Scooby Doo pastiche (it’s brief, but so jarringly off-the-mark, it throws the whole vibe for a good few chapters), and he really milks it (to the point of distraction) with his metaphors to describe The Pastor’s sinister laugh, but these quibbles aside, he’s penned a satisfyingly amoral tale of triumph in the face of adversity that is a real page-turner into the bargain.
IAN GLASPER