Tag Archives: kioga

THE SOUTHERN BOOK CLUB’S GUIDE TO SLAYING VAMPIRES by Grady Hedrix is set in the 1990s as a group of upper-middle class South Carolina housewives (wine moms, although the phrase didn’t exist back then) become friends after they form a true-crime book club. Protagonist Patricia, however, tests everyone’s friendship when she becomes convinced the new man in their social circle is a vampire preying on the local black community. He’s gotten away with it because nobody in authority cares if a few black kids go missing — but now he’s moving upscale.

This was Hendrix’ tribute to his mom and the moms of his social circle, and how much unpaid labor they were doing that he never noticed. While I enjoyed it (as I did his Final Girls Support Group), some reader reviews found the sexism of the milieu (a world of stay at home moms with husbands in charge) and the casual racism (almost nobody outside the black community cares about the dead black kids) off-putting.

It’s a valid complaint, as is the vampire slaying being a minor part of the book. I liked it though. Hendrix nails the “bros before ho’s” attitude of the men folk (they’d sooner believe Patricia is a nutter than turn on a guy they hang out and do business with) and I enjoy the old school approach to the vampire — a solitary, cruel serial killer rather than a subculture (as in Vampire: The Masquerade) or the crime family of so much urban fantasy.

KIOGA OF THE UKNOWN LAND by William L. Chester is the spectacular finish to the adventures of Kioga, the man raised by indigenous tribes in the lost Arctic continent of Nato’wa, the ancestral homeland of Native Americans. In this book, a relief ship has finally arrived to rescue Kioga, true love Beth and the rest of the cast. It turns out, however, that Kioga and some of his comrades have stumbled into M’Andra, a lost land within a lost land. The culture of M’Andra is built around the mammoth, which they’ve domesticated — its fur makes clothes and ropes, its tusk ivory makes ornaments, and mammoths are both beasts of burden and war animals. Like so many lost lands, there’s a power struggle going on and Kioga and Co. are thrust into the middle of it.

It’s a really cool setting, though it annoys me that while M’Andra’s implied to get a happy ending — a just noble will abolish slavery — the Shoni tribes of the rest of Nato’wa are apparently collapsing into bloodshed as our heroes depart. Overall, though, Chester remains one of the best of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ imitators.

After years sharing space in the Tales of Suspense anthology series, Iron Man got his own series late in the 1960s. IRON MAN: The Man Who Killed Tony Stark collects the first 24 issues (except the first, which was in the previous volume), written by Archie Goodwin and illustrated by either Johnny Craig or George Tuska (the cover above, for instance), neither of whom suit my taste as much as predecessor Gene Colan.

As I’ve written before, Goodwin was one of the best writers to take over from Stan Lee as he largely stepped back into editing. In this run we get new villains — the Controller and the second Crimson Dynamo — a new romance, with Janice Cord (spoiler: don’t get too attached) — and in what was a game-changer at the time, Tony getting an artificial heart to replace his damaged organ. Plus generally solid storytelling. I think Goodwin was the high point of the book until the David Michelinie/Bob Layton run of the late 1970s.

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FAMILY BRITAIN: The Certainties of Place is third in David Kynaston’s series looking at Britain from 1945 and the end of the war through Margaret Thatcher becoming prime minister in 1979 (I read the fifth installment a while back). Like the other volume I read, it’s composed of diaries, interviews, newspaper articles and the like to give a feel of life as it was experienced; that works, though it also leaves me with questions (as with his Open the Box I can’t make hide nor hare of the disputes over education issues).

This look at Britain from 1951-1953 shows my friend Ross’s point that any year in the 20th century can claim to be The Year That Changed Everything. We have the death of King George and the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, a new book called Casino Royale, a train-worker strike that Thatcher would later cite as the moment unions got drunk with power, big sports events (Jean-Luc Goddard described Hungary crushing the British soccer as the last great triumph of socialism), Indian restaurants becoming a thing (they’d been around before but people were starting to notice), the failure of Britain’s supposed cutting-edge jet plane, the Comet, and a debate over whether the BBC’s new TV service should have commercial competitors (I was charmed to notice that Watch With Mother, which I watched as a kid a decade later, was born in this period). Plus Britain still struggling with rationing, efforts at slum clearance (and debates over where the government should clear slum-dwellers to), cinema and the Palais dance halls (you may recognize them from the Kinks’ “Come Dancing”) and an astonishing amount of smoking and drinking. I’ll get to the second part of Family Britain soon.

Several decades back, comics artist Barry Windsor-Smith pitched Marvel on a Hulk graphic novel that would share Bruce Banner’s rage as the Hulk sprang from childhood abuse; as Windsor-Smith was working on the story, it turned up as a plot point in the Bill Mantlo run on the book. Whether Mantlo or someone else ripped Windsor-Smith off or there’s a more innocent explanation, Smith’s concept surfaced in radically altered form as MONSTERS.

In this massive graphic novel, a teenage abuse victim volunteers for the military in 1964. Realizing he’s a guy nobody will miss, the military subjects him to a super-soldier type experiment, transforming him into a Hulk-like brute, though with more compassion.

I suspect this would have worked better as a Hulk tale, which might have been more focused. Here it wanders into endless long conversations and domestic scenes and flashbacks that make me think Windsor-Smith is shooting for something serious and literary. Instead it’s meandering and slow and didn’t really hold me (concentrating on the Hulk stand-in would have worked better). The art is stunning, though.

William L. Chester’s sequel to Hawk of the Wilderness, KIOGA OF THE WILDERNESS, is a much better book. Unlike the first one it held my attention all the way through, even though it’s quite meandering (for example having Kioga wander off and become chieftain of one of the Nato’wah tribes). The plot has the white forest god Kioga lead a tribe of Native Americans to their ancestral homeland so they can live free as their ancestors did before the white man took their land; once there, Kioga gets involved in tribal struggles while the white cast of the first book arrives to claim the lost land for the United States (the racial/colonialist politics remain dodgy). If good Tarzan knockoffs are your kind of thing, well worth a look.

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