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Title: Walpurgis III
Series: ———-
Author: Mike Resnick
Rating: 3.5 of 5 Stars
Genre: SF
Pages: 173
Words: 59K
While I enjoyed this little standalone in Resnick’s universe, it just goes to show that inverting something doesn’t always work out well. In this book, everything takes place on Walpurgis III (hence the title), a planet that was settled by all the satan worshippers from Old Earth who felt oppressed that society wouldn’t let them do their thing in peace (like human sacrifice, rape, etc). So they settled their own planet and kept everybody else out.
Which sounds great in theory. But as Resnick shows in his writing here, it simply can’t work out that way. We have a world where woman are ritually raped on altars, “voluntarily” of course, where people just sit there and watch as someone else gets gutted by a knife and at the same time we’re supposed to think that the main cop guy is a moral guy who wants to track down the assassin (Jericho, who is here to kill Conrad Bland, the biggest mass murder in the history of humanity) because he killed 5 random people. I’m sorry, but those two things simply don’t co-exist. Evil doesn’t get compartmentalized like that. That juxtaposition of compartmentalized evil really distracted me. It was like a world of meat eaters decided to kill a vegetarian because he ate some fish and that was just too horrible for them to contemplate. Yeahhhhhhhh.
Other than ALL OF THAT, I enjoyed this. Jericho is a master of disguise and this story was all about him making his way to Conrad Bland’s stronghold so he could kill him. Each town he made it to held its own little adventure. In that regards, this was more like a serialized story but Resnick does pretty good at telling that kind of story, so it worked out well.
The fact that I still enjoyed the story despite the premise means this was a complete success, especially since I have such wishy washy luck with Resnick (I was not a fan of his Dead Enders or Starship series). Every time I read a story by him that I enjoy, it gives me a shot of encouragement to dive into something else by him. Right now, I have a choice of either going for his John Justin Mallory trilogy or his Weird West series. I read a sequel about JJM and I didn’t really enjoy it, so I’m leaning towards the Weird West stuff. I don’t know if it will be Steampunk or Cthulhu’ic or something else entirely.
I chose this cover (which while hard to see, depicts a ritual sacrifice of a woman by one of the death cults) because the current cover is just a grinning skull on a red background. It was the most boring, uninformative cover ever. Reminded of something Amazon would do when they release those free classics but still charge 99cents. So instead I’m showing the cover that is the coolest. You are welcome.
★★★✬☆
From the Publisher
Conrad Bland has slaughtered tens of millions, a butcher vastly worse than Hitler. He has never considered not killing anyone who stood in his way.
He takes refuge on Walpurgis III, a planet settled by various cults of devil worshippers. He is the manifestation of the evil they revere, but now that they have come face-to-face with their beliefs, the cults desperately want Bland to be removed from their lives, their world, and entirely from existence.
So Walpurgis III contacts Jericho, the greatest assassin in the galaxy, to rid them of Conrad Bland. But once the assassin arrives and begins to make his bloody way toward Bland’s headquarters, the people—especially John Sable, the top policeman on the planet—must face an excruciating choice.
Who is more dangerous, the man who kills from compulsion? Or the man who kills from calculation?
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