Road Movie

If you are given to extremes, as I sometimes am, you are likely to enjoy this deliriously overwritten pulp novella. I have carefully chosen delirious as opposed to laborious. Farren is a natural at turning out outrageous events and pop culture references. He never has to strive for his effects.

This is the most recent Farren publication. He made something of a name for himself with the DNA Cowboys Trilogy published in the UK in 1976. But before turning to SF, he was a musician with the proto-punk band The Deviants and went on to be a music journalist He relocated to the States where he continued to write science fiction as well as a book on the history of amphetamines, a memoir, and a study of Gene Vincent. A collection of his music writing, Elvis Died for Somebody's Sins but not Mine, will published in May 2013, but almost all of his fiction is OP. He recently returned to London stating that he did not want to die in Los Angeles.

That is all information I picked up because I happened to pick upRoad Movie. There is a kind of plot running through these ninety-two pages of sex, drugs, alcohol, and assassinations. Doc meets up with Huxley Hahn -- possibly not her real name. She wears a t-shirt from the Golgotha Corporation, drives a 1969 yellow Jaguar XK-E, and carries a purse filled with pharmaceuticals, whiskey, and a .45 caliber Colt 1911. He likes everything about her. But she works for Golgotha, and that makes her one of the slaygirls, assassins whose missions serve no conceivable purpose but are carried out with ruthless thoroughness. Their victims include a kid name Johnny Yuma, a Roman Catholic cardinal, his mistress, and a party filled with L.A. trash just waiting to be taken out. Last on the list is their own boss.

There is also something known as The Humiliation which must be protected at all costs. And a presence called The Fulfillment. And The Apex, an alien force touring the galaxies that is about to determine whether the bipedal life forms on the insignificant planet they have detected should be left alone or sanitized.

Perhaps none of this adds up to much, but it is fun while it lasts.