| Title | : | Pilgrimage to Hell (Deathlands, #1) |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 1599500000 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9781599500003 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Audio CD |
| Number of Pages | : | 8 |
| Publication | : | First published June 1, 1986 |
Pilgrimage to Hell (Deathlands, #1) Reviews
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This is the first book in a long running series called Deathlands. The series is written by several authors writing under the pen name James Axler. This is the one that started it all, and I've waited a long time to be able to read it. I enjoy a good literary art piece as much as the next book nerd, but sometimes the old gray matter needs a break...well here it is. I've been looking for a good action Mad Max esque post-apocalyptic book for quite some time. A literary masterpiece this most certainly isn't. It is exactly as one would expect it to be. Life as we know it was obliterated in a nuclear apocalypse in 2001. Pilgrimage is several generations after the nuke. Ryan Cowdar and Krysty Wroth are the main protagonists with an array of supporting characters. Ryan is a mysterious bad ass with an eye patch, Krysty is a tall big boobed combat trained red headed beauty. Together with their team of warrior merchants they take on the ruthless baron of a "Plague Pit" town. There is lots of bloody action, over the top characters, with a bawdy and macabre humor tossed in. If there were a template to be made for "Books for Dudes" this would be the mold to start with. The men are manly, the women are beautiful. Sex is brief and very "Dude-centric". It was the first time I'd seen the word "pumping" used to describe the act of intercourse. Mutants (Muties) and Cannibals (Cannies) are the common foe in the Deathlands. This book is awesome for the very same reasons Chuck Norris, Rambo, and demolition derby's are awesome.
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Deathlands 1: Pilgrimage to Hell / 0373625014
I'm a fan of the Deathlands series, although I can't quite put my finger on why. They're pretty much gun-'n'-torture fantasies that take place in an apocalyptic America where might makes right and men are real men and women are real women and death is always lying just around the corner. Not the sort of thing I usually eat up, but the setup is so fascinating that I can't quite look away -- each book is a very careful variation on the same themes and it's delightful to see what the bevy of authors who write these books will come up with next. (I've heard them described as popcorn -- no nutritional value whatsoever, but you can't stop eating! Er, reading!)
I recently decided to re-read my Deathlands novels, so I've been going through in order. "Pilgrimage to Hell" is the first book in the series, and... it could be better. The first 30 novels of the series are credited to Laurence James as the author, except for this one who is co-credited with Jack Adrian, and I think Adrian's writing style differs strongly from the clean sharp prose that characterizes James' novels in the series. "Pilgrimage to Hell" seems to be written with a very limited budget for periods; every sentence seems to stretch on for miles until you arrive gasping at the end, trying to suss out what the author is trying to convey. The prologue is especially guilty of this: I'm sure the intricate details of how the Cold War ruined the entire planet was very fascinating at one time, but whew, it comes across as a bit of overkill now.
Unfortunately, if you're going to get the world-building setup and character backstories, you'll have to read "Pilgrimage to Hell" before moving on to the better-paced novels in the series, so I do recommend it for new fans, but with the understanding that the series definitely picks up after this first book. So let's talk about the content.
"Pilgrimage to Hell" is a rather good series starter, plot-wise. We're introduced to the concept of Deathlands (an apocalyptic America) and the main characters who will define the series as a whole: the Trader, an older man who has made a name for himself as a traveling merchant; Ryan Cawdor, a one-eyed security officer who leads the Trader's convoys; J.B. Dix, an unassuming man with an intense love for guns and laconic wit; Krysty Wroth, a red-haired mutant with supernatural strength; and Doc Tanner, an old-fashioned gentleman who belongs to a time before the apocalypse. A series of well-timed coincidences and betrayals throw the group together and they leave the safety of the convoy in order to explore the entirety of Deathlands, searching for a place of peace where they can live happily and safe all their days.
If Deathlands books had movie ratings, they would all be rated R or higher, and "Pilgrimage to Hell" is no exception. This book contains discussions of rape, sexual sadism, bestiality, violence, slavery, torture, and lots and lots of guns and death. Pretty much every possible Trigger Warning is contained in this book alone, and while normally I would find all this darkness overwhelming in a book, there's still somehow a lightness of tone over everything that makes it easier to read -- maybe because we know that nothing will ever truly phase the main characters.
If you're interested in reading the Deathlands series, I almost recommend starting with Book 2 in the series, "Red Holocaust", and working back to this one if you like that one enough to keep going. If you don't like "Red Holocaust", you won't like "Pilgrimage to Hell", but if you *do* like "Red Holocaust", you'll want to come back and pick up the pieces you missed.
~ Ana Mardoll -
This has been recommended to me several times, but I didn't think it was my cup of tea. I happened to stumble on this abridged audio version at my library, so I thought I'd give it a try.
I think I read this or one of the books years ago, but I'm not sure. I get it confused with
Jerry Ahern's Survivalist series (
Total War) & possibly some others from the 70s. These are guy action porn that seemed to litter the landscape, so were handy to read when nothing else was at hand. I never cared for them much, though.
Like the
Executioner series (Mac Bolan) they rely on a strong, driven protagonist who kills all the bad guys with lots of different weapons. One of the most irritating habits of the writing is to describe just the gun in great detail (.45 caliber Heckler & Koch HK45 with a blah blah blah & a this that & the other thing plus a so & so scope with x, y, & z) almost every time it is mentioned & then use the damn thing like a club. They also seem to have an endless supply of good-guy bullets plus plenty of other lethal devices until they should walk bowlegged.
Anyway, this book was pretty good as an abridged audio. I got the gist of the story without being too turned off. The plot was fairly stupid & showed up more since it wasn't hidden by the detail, but it was kind of fun & had some interesting points. For instance, the women are strong & well done. There were a lot of cool toys, nasty bad guys, & heroic good guys/girls. Some even died. While traditional races were equal, all muties were bad... well, almost. There is a slightly interesting twist there that will be exploited in later books I assume. It was also pretty gritty, which I like.
I can't recommend this series. I prefer
the Destroyer series which made fun of the Executioner, James Bond, Doc Savage, & other such books plus the politics of the day. The
Horse Clan series is set in a post apocalyptic world created by nuclear war like this series & far more interesting to me. -
I listen to a lot of audiobooks whilst at work to pass the time and i come across the Deathlands series by chance. I have read 88 of these buggers now via the Graphic Audio versions. Unlike your usual audiobooks Graphic Audio are fully casted with sound effects etc.
Being a fan of Apocalyptic novels i picked up Deathlands without realizing there are almost 100 of the buggers. Since there are so many of them i don't see the point in writing reviews for them all.
Deathlands set almost 100 years after nuclear apocalypse you are introduced to a set general anticipated scenarios from post apocalypse situations - Traders, Survivors, Cannibals, Mutations, Cold hearts and general bad guys with insane lusts for power. Groups come together to form "Ville's" the only form of civilization and these villes are controlled for most part by ruthless insane barons, who always have 'sec men' to protect the ville. Some villes are welcoming but most usually end up with the group of survivors blasting their way out. Some of the books can be really cheesy, but because the characters grown on my right at the start i am happy to overlook the cheese factor of some of the later novels. But then some of the later novels are as good as the first few.
What i like about these deathlands books the most is the technology that is hidden away for 100 years untouched by only a select number of characters. The group of survivors having rescued an old man that appears to know much about the past with his help come across a "Redoubt" In this redoubt they find a matter trans gateway that transfers matter across the country to various other underground redoubts. Sometimes these redoubts are built into the side of mountains, or in the desert. Often these redoubts house a selection of weaponry, ammunition, food supplies and sometimes dark technology that hints at the dark past of what was the cause of the nuclear apocalypse. Outlanders - A sequel to the Deathlands series focuses deeper into the technology and the cause of the end of the world, a series that is also worth checking out -
One of the reasons I rate this book so highly is because I was expecting so little from it, and it is very rare that I have been so completely surprised.
On one level, it contained all of the elements I would expect from a post-nuclear-holocost-survivalist-novel, lots of focus on gun models (which mean nothing to me), scaly flesh-eating mutants, slowly awakening psionic powers in the more "acceptable" mutants, bands of killers roaming the badlands, baronies run by cruel, insane gang leaders, all the tropes of the genre. This is pretty much what I expected.
What I didn't expect was a well crafted, tightly plotted action adventure taking place in a fully realised post apocalyptic world. I didn't expect the author to be able to portray such a believable set of characters, who somehow retain a glimmer of nobility underneath the vicious, dog-eat-dog attitude they have had to learn simply to survive.
What I most of all didn't expect was to finish this book, which ends on a cliff-hanger with the main driver for the next hundred books already in place, immediately thinking - pass me the next one, that was incredible!
This book is, in my opinion, a shining example of why pulp should never be written off as pap. -
This book will definitely fluctuate between a 1 and a 3.5 throughout the reading.
TW: This book series is designed to be brutal, it has rape, torture, and other things you'd expect from the fall of man.
Okay everyone, buckle up... I have spent about the past hour reading about the history behind this book series and it's just fascinating. It's a book history I, personally, have never encountered before, so let's try to dive in. Deathlands is a series of books spanning well over a hundred installments at this point. The whole project was supposed to be a joint effort between Christopher Lowder (aka Jack Adrian) and Laurence James (aka James Axler), however, the first installment of this world Pilgrimage to Hell did not seem to go as expected. As has become clear to me now there is a rather massive shift in the format of this book towards the end, well it turns out that despite this being a joint project idea, Lowder wrote the first 3/4's of the book, but then he became ill and Laurence James stepped in and finished off the story. I will say, despite this happening James did a good job of keeping a feeling of continuity as he took over. I actually didn't really notice except for one detail in the formatting. So, that's the story of the authors behind the series.
This book series was published by Gold Eagle Books. I've looked at some of the advertisements in the backs of the other Deathlands books and it conjures up a memory from my younger years. There was this television station in the U.S. called TBS and they would sometimes run a sequence of films all day and they would advertise it as "movies for guys who like movies" and they would run films like Mad Max, Aliens, Predator, Lethal Weapon, Die Hard, etc. Lots of franchise-y action packed films filled with Mary Sue styled characters (obviously the male variation Gary Stu etc.) that are invincible and kill all the bad guys. Gold Eagle seems to primarily want to publish books of this ilk. Many of them feel like a b-series movie starring Chuck Norris. Deathlands isn't really all that different, and while these things are not considered "good" in any shape or form, they are fun if done right. Despite how campy some of those b-movies of the 80's were, man, some of them are awesomely bad, which makes them great fun and worth watching. Sometimes the overall story is well written, it just suffers from campy execution, but a good story even told in this medium is still pretty good and can be enjoyable.
Now, enter Deathlands. First off, remember the first major portions of this book were written by Christopher Lowder, and he was a British author, so when it came to world building this America of the future it's not being told from the same political lens you would think of here. The whole first fifty or so pages are devoted to a background info-dump that lead to where humans wound up in the book series. The love of Reagan as president is interesting from that point of view as I sort of started reading this like it was some apocalypse preppers wet dream of a novel, but it's not really like that at all once we get deeper in. It was amusing to see the setup talk about Reagan so favorably and the democrats so negatively, but then say none of that even mattered because terrorists set off nuclear bombs in 2001 triggering a U.S. vs. U.S.S.R. mutually assured destruction response on part of both nations, when the terrorists had nothing to do with either nation. Interestingly this all occurred in 2001 mind you and for those who are confused about the Soviet threat... that's our next history dump.
For any modern people diving into this series, you have to read this with a little bit of context of the times to understand things. This book was originally written in 1986, the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union was still going quite strong. Yes, I remember when the wall fell in Berlin, I'm that old. So, I remember growing up in a time when we feared nuclear response in the arms race, this is why so many movies have that theme in the 80's still, think Terminator, and it's not just some holdover from the 70's and further back. You see the Cold War had been going on for so long that it just felt like it's how things were always going to be from then on. So, it's not outlandish to even project fifteen years into the future and suppose that's when the real nuclear war would finally break out.
So, what is Deathlands really about? If you've played the video games in the Fallout series, then you kind of already know the gist of Deathlands, only Deathlands is pre-Fallout. Anyway, the initial nuclear war occurred in 2001 and the Deathlands series picks up a hundred years after that. The old world has been absolutely ravaged by nuclear fallout, entire portions of the world are unlivable. Most places are a desert wasteland and what is left of humanity struggles to survive. If you're saying, "...but isn't this the Mad Max movie Road Warrior," the answer is yes, yes it is. Road Warrior is one of my favorite movies of all time, so when I had heard Deathlands was kind of like that... naturally I'm reading it. Since there are no novels written in the Mad Max universe, but in retrospect, I rather wish there were now.
Some context: At the time a lot of these things were written we didn't really understand what would happen in the aftermath of massive nuclear weapons. We knew about the aftermaths of the bombings of Japan, but compared to the weapons that existed by the 1980's those were small time weapons. The hydrogen bombs that we have today weren't even around in World War II, so as the theory went, at the time, those types of weapons would turn the world into a total wasteland where nothing could grow, hence the deserts of Mad Max. The disaster at the Chernobyl power plant hadn't happened yet either, and in the 80's it probably would have only confirmed what people thought would happen. However, after long term studying of the Chernobyl disaster, we don't really think the world will be thrust into a nuclear wasteland for thousands of years. Sure, fallout will be a problem, there is still radioactive materials in the vegetation of Bikini Atoll, but we no longer believe it will be as lethal as once imagined at the height of the Cold War.
However, when imagining the world of the Deathlands, the authors basically wanted to create a landscape that was desolate, but also an environment where anything goes. In the world of Deathlands there are mutants, muties, humans who have been changed by radiation and possibly other rogue scientific experimentation. Our intrepid heroes fight these "monsters" off in the first engagement of the book. These muties range from ugly deformed creatures, to regular looking people, but with special psychic powers. The theory that the radiation contamination over the years has forced mankind to evolve in radically different ways. Once we get to the first mutant engagement we have finally started the story proper. Lowder's info dump was exhausting, I can sort of see why he did it, but I much prefer being thrown into the action and having a fifty page info dump sifted throughout the actual story. However, if you're going to try and tackle the entirety of the Deathlands series, then you might need to tackle this for the sake of context.
The main story starts by introducing us to a well established figure in the Deathlands known as The Trader. Yeah, everyone actually just calls him Trader. Despite the nuclear war happening, there were facilities around like NORAD which were huge stock piles of old world technology and weapons. The Trader and an associate of his found one and from that stock pile of arms he managed to generate a thriving business, becoming a sort of arms dealer of the wastelands and trading with what was left of civilization. They tell of him travelling all over North America looking for these lost treasures of the old world, since old tech is much better than new. (Interestingly this is the same concept in the BattleTech universe, which pre-dates Deathlands in release, only the BattleTech series is set in space.)
Our major story is not really about The Trader, instead the star of the show is his second in command, Ryan Crowder and his team. Lowder was obviously being very original in his naming conventions here. An interesting part of this original pressing is that there is a poster styled insert in the middle of book and it actually has a drawing of the main characters. Anyway, Ryan Crowder is basically Snake Plisskin from the movie Escape from New York. (If you're a guy that likes movies for guys that like movies, I highly recommend.) He's basically your standard fair male action hero. Short of dialogue and feelings, long on weapons training and killing bad guys. Then we have J.B. Dix, his best friend I assume, the weapons master, who's like this genius super tech. I actually really liked Dix. He's only a side character, but he's almost more interesting than the main character in some ways.
Rounding out The Trader's crew is a few hundred people. But we really get to know more of the people in Ryan's smaller group. I was really surprised that this book seemed to take more of Mad Max feel when it comes to representation. The other top people in the group include a mix of male and female characters. Some of which I found really surprising. One of my favorites was Hunakar, she's blood thirsty and extremely good in battle. Ryan often takes her as his second into battle, because of her skills. She has green hair, and wait for it... she's bi-sexual. I was kind of shocked to see this show up in this book. Even though they say this, she is introduced as having a girlfriend and only seems interested in women throughout the book. Color me shocked, for a 1980's novel like this to have representation of any kind blew me away. I mean, they acknowledge the existence of other people! And they're not villains! In any event, she was one of my favorite characters and they didn't kill her off or anything either and I look forward to seeing her in future installments. Next we have a black woman named Samantha who is pretty much as equally badass as Hunakar, unfortunately she wasn't written about as much other than her helping out the team. Maybe there will be more featuring her in the future installments. Finally we have Koll, a tall imposing blonde fellow, who made me think of some Scandinavian dude. We didn't get to know him as well either, which was sad, because like Samantha he seemed pretty interesting too. It sort of makes sense given the length of the book that we mainly got to know Ryan, the Trader, Dix, and Hunaker.
Okay, moving onto the story proper. The story starts off with the Trader and his crew bringing a delivery to a town called Mocsin. To illustrate how dangerous the Deathlands are, we are immediately thrust into action (finally, after all the info dumps) and the Trader's group is beset upon by mutants! These mutants think they have stock piled enough armaments to take on the Trader, but now we'll get to see how good the Trader and his team really are. Essentially, they make short work of the mutants and the Trader sends Ryan and his team to go and take out any stragglers. Ryan and his team follow them back to an abandoned building where they notice the mutants have a captive. This is none other than the future love interest Krysty Wroth. (Yes, that's Krysty, with a two y's...) Upon escaping the devastating loss at the hands of the Trader the head mutant decides it is finally time to rape Krysty... this is where the book started to hit that 1 to 2-star average. It was literally setup that she was a damsel in distress and Ryan needed to save her. The rape scene is absolutely baffling and includes, for our benefit, a dude trying to explain Krysty's defensive response by suddenly menstruating... yes, that happened. It was terrible and definitely the worst part of the entire book, bringing us to zero star territory very briefly. I decided to soldier on and see what would happen, interestingly Krysty proved a capable warrior and ended up helping Ryan fight the mutants off. It wasn't as simple as Ryan steps in shoots all the bad guys and the girl falls madly in love. No, Krysty is combat trained and ends up saving Ryan in the end, an interesting twist I wasn't really expecting, but it was Ryan's disruption of the scene that gave her the advantage. Now, Krysty is by far a Mary Sue styled character as well. She is perfectly beautiful, perfectly intelligent, combat ready, somehow clean and I'm sure has no unsightly body hair... in the wastelands of the future... right? Right. Despite her battle competence Lowder's installment of this book seems to use her more as a foil for Ryan to fight off bad guys and Krysty often winds up nude or partially nude at the hands of her torturers. It's just bad writing at that point, because it happens more than once. Luckily when Laurence James takes over, I feel like that narrative fell away... but we'll see what happens in book two.
So, now we have the proper full cast! Once the mutants are vanquished we resume our trek to the town of Mocsin. Mocsin is not much of a thriving town, it's probably a bit inspired by Barter Town in Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, but more like what happens in the aftermath after Max and his group take away it's energy. I think some of the aspects of this remind me a lot of Fallout: New Vegas as well. There were themes in that game that made me think the writers had read the Deathlands series. Mocsin is where the brutality envelope gets pushed quite a bit. The leaders of the town, Jordan Teague and his security man (sec man) Strasser are the main villains. Strasser's character was very obviously inspired by the heroes/villains of the Marquis des Sade. Strasser rapes, kills, and tortures indiscriminately. There is a bit of a power tug of war between Teague and Strasser, unfortunately, the Trader and his crew have just stumbled into Strasser's power play and that's what the story mainly goes with. Ryan and his team are sent into Mocsin as an advance team to see if the deal is still in place, and that's when all hell breaks loose. Now it's up to them to try and escape and get back to the Trader!
That's the main adventure of the story, but it's interesting because this isn't really where it ended. Along the way they pick up a mysterious character called Doc and he confirms stories of this area called the Darks. Earlier we were introduced to a legend Krysty grew up with about the Darks. So, after one conflict is finished we move on with Ryan and his team entering an area of the Deathlands called the Darks and looking for an old stockpile. It's nothing like they expect it to be and I feel like this should have just been it's own book... but they manage to get into this special area and Doc shows them a matter transporter in the facility which will teleport them to various areas round the U.S. The book ends with Ryan waking up in some new location and I assume the next novel takes off from there? It was just such a bizarre ending, because they actually had them teleport to a few other areas... whatever. The book was almost 400 pages and needed to be ended, so I'll deal with it.
Also, be forewarned, there are a lot of info dumps about guns. I can't figure out if this was written by gun nuts for gun nuts, or the author bought a bunch of random Guns and Ammo magazines and just wrote about whatever he came across. However, many readers might be annoyed by the constant specific modelling and ammo type being used every single time a character pulls a weapon. It just sort of creates this unnecessary bloat in the writing. This reminded me of
Highschool of the Dead, Vol. 1 with it's info-dumps about weapons.
In the end, I think this book was better than I expected it to be. Rest assured, there are some terrible moments in this book. Some of which are super cringy, such as fighting Native Americans, that seem to only have bows and arrows, with machine guns at one point... but the Native Americans were stronger by numbers, so it was sort of a Custer's last stand feel. I don't know, it was bad and weird really. I'm really hoping the series starts to settle into it's own solidified form since Laurence James takes over the series going forward under the moniker James Axler, calling this the "Axlerverse". One distinction that is much more welcoming is James' reasonably written chapter lengths. Lowder wrote chapters that were 25 to 45 pages long... then when James took over suddenly they stayed to within 10 to 15 pages, a real boon by the end of the book! So, I look forward to reading the next one. I consider this a bit of a preliminary read to get the world building out of the way and whatever terrible writing nonsense it had... so, till next time. -
This was my first audio book with sound affects to accompany the narrative, and I wasn't sure what to make of it at first. The violent PA setting is ideal for this sort of treatment, with gunshots, explosions, shouting, screaming and the rest. However, I was pleased to be on the motorway and out of earshot when I hit a sex scene... The "Graphic Audio" treatment means that Pilgrimage to Hell comes across as more of a play than a narration, and overall I liked it.
As other reviewers have mentioned, the style is pretty cheesy, with square jawed men (and women, to be fair) toting their impressive weapons as the descendants of the apocalypse survivors battle it out for supremacy 100 years after the earth changing events. Like an old B movie with a low budget and dodgy acting, it's difficult not to enjoy this slice of cheddar.
Of course, there are a few gripes otherwise Pilgrimage to Hell wouldn't be trudging off with only a 3 star rating. When there are no relevant sound effects to blast out, sometimes terrible music is played instead. This almost drowns out the narrative and is unnecessary and annoying. I realise that there are around a 100 sequels, but the ending sucked. And I know it comes with the territory, but the endless supply of Get Out of Jail Free cards is a bit too convenient at times. With all this in mind, Pilgrimage to Hell earns its 3 stars and I'm sure I'll be trying a few of the sequels. -
Even for 1986 this is not a good book. It’s got a whole lot of crazy ideas about the world 100 years after a nuclear war that would eventually make their way into video games (and still used to this day), from monstrous mutations to living fog, but the execution is just severely lacking. Even back then I would’ve thought it was silly and sexist, and I’m the exact target audience for this stuff. I mean, I was into books like
Systemic Shock by Dean Ing and movies like Escape from New York. It’s not offensive or anything, just really clunky.
I got this on Hoopla as an audiobook with a full cast recording and sound effects, made by GraphicAudio, and I have no issues with the production. They did the best they could given the material. It’s the underlying story that doesn’t work for me. -
In 2001 the bombs went off and destroyed the world as we know it. What was once America is now the Deathlands, a hellish landscape populated by mutated humans and beasts, pockets of surviving humans trying to cling to life, and roving marauders looking to take advantage of the weak. Now a small group of warriors have banded together to seek the secrets of prewar science experiments that could be the key to their survival in the Deathlands.
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I have to say that I am torn about this book, because while enjoyed the story and the idea, I would be lying if I tried to say it wasn't cheesy as hell. But I like post-apocalyptic novels, and if I'm being honest, I'll likely read at least a few of the others in the series simply because of my love for said subject matter. However, if it were about anything else (and I read books from all genres) I would never have finished it. If you don't like action or post-apocalyptic stories, you may have a hard time with it. Sort of a B movie of books, and my fourth star is there to reflect my interest in the subject matter, not the quality of the writing. Basically, if you like the subject matter or action with a ton of gun fighting and plenty of carnage, you just might get a kick out of this, but if your looking for good writing or depth of any kind, this is definitely not for you.
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I bought this book when it originally came out, and sold it some time later along with the other volumes I had up to then. Now, I regret selling them, as this was an interesting take on a post-apocalyptic world.
A friend recently gave me a whole load of ebooks, and much to my surprise, these books are in there, so I look forward to re-reading them at my leisure, and seeing what happened after I stopped buying them. Someone told me the series lasted for over 30 volumes, with a spinoff series as well.
The hero is an ex-soldier in a post apocalyptic world who stumbles upon a secret base of some kind. He and his companions explore and they step through a "gate" and discover they have travelled 100s of kilometres from where they were.
Now they set out to try and discover the secret of the "gates" and how to control them. -
Pilgrimage to Hell is the first book in the long running Deathlands series. There are 100 volumes of Deathlands, written by 12 different authors under the house name James Axler. Pilgrimage to Hell was started by Christopher Lowder under the pen name Jack Adrian, but Lowder became ill and Laurence James stepped in to finish it under the penname James Axler. Pilgrimage to Hell is the one that started it all, and I've waited a long time to be able to read it.
Life as we know it was obliterated in a nuclear apocalypse in 2001. Pilgrimage to Hell takes place several generations after the nukes destroyed civilization. Ryan Cowdar and Krysty Wroth are the protagonists, though there is an array of supporting characters... Read More:
http://www.fantasyliterature.com/revi... -
This is far from perfect, but there's a lot to like about it and I have to say it exceeded my expectations. It's the first of a long series of novels set in a post apocalyptic America and started in the 1980s. That sentence probably tells you a lot of what you need to know and the book delivers the extreme violence and despair you'd expect, but there's an inventiveness and playfulness to the storytelling that lifts it enough to make it a fun and satisfying read.
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Very similar story to the previous book (Encounter), so much so that it was easy to feel like parts were recycled.
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My brother Scott bought a few Deathlands novels that I remember while growing up. By the time I was a teenager only one, "Ice and Fire" was still around. I read it and liked it, and a lot of the characters and concepts stuck with me over the years, but it was only recently I decided to try and get into the "trucker series" (these books and audiotapes seem to always be for sale at truck stops).
SUMMARY
One hundred years after a devastating nuclear war, what is left of the United States is known as the "Deathlands". Scattered human populations (usually called "baronies") struggle to survive amidst mutant humans and animals, cannibals, renegades, and a lethal environment.
Ryan Cawdor is the second-in-command to Trader, a powerful nomad who has prospered (and brought a degree of stability) by discovering ancient caches of weapons, ammunition, fuel, and vehicles. On a fateful delivery trip to a petty dictatorship called Mocsin (somewhere in what was Montana), Ryan meets a beautiful woman named Krysty Wroth and learns that a great secret, one that will change the course of his life, is to be found in a forbidden zone known only as "the Darks".
OVERALL: 3 out of 5
I was surprised at how much I enjoyed this book. I recently tried to read an old Mack Bolan book (usually sold alongside torrid romances on supermarket racks around the country) and I had to put it down. "Deathlands" succeeds by introducing interesting characters in an interesting environment. That's enough to keep things going even when the story is disjointed.
Ryan Cawdor is also an interesting protagonist. He has some qualities of the anti-hero, but he is also brave, capable, gallant, and willing to sacrifice himself for those he cares for (even though he talks and thinks a good talk about being a self-preserving survivor). In this first book the reader gets to see nearly every side of him, including a particularly harrowing scene in which he is held down to watch the brutal torture of a person he has only recently met. Ryan does not handle it stoically, but is reduced to screaming through a gag to indicate his willingness to cooperate. This is not cowardice or weakness, but a true nobility of spirit that makes Ryan stand out against most of the so-called "heroes" in many action novels.
RATINGS BY CATEGORY
CHARACTERS: 4 out of 5
All of the characters stand out in their ways. Ryan Cawdor is at once both gallant and a survivor, a man with a mysterious past and yet making no real attempt to conceal it among friends. Trader is a grizzled veteran of the Deathlands, intelligent and experienced yet uneducated, and with plenty of baggage after a long and danger-filled life.
If the heroes are established, the villains take a backseat. A pleasant mythos is built up around the warlord of Mocsin, Jordan Teague, but the real villain is his security chief, Cort Strasser. Unfortunately, any other villains are just mindless thugs (and are generally described as such).
PACE: 3 out of 5
This book moves at a good speed, but the problem is that the story is somewhat disjointed.
STORY: 3 out of 5
I like the story in this book, but it is quite disjointed. Many questions are provided to which there are no answers (those come in later books). The "climax" seems to occur about 3/4 of the way in, the ending feels meandering, and the scope of the final discovery feels stunted.
Survival and death in a post-apocalyptic environment is nearly always fun though, and these books (starting with this one) really continues and builds upon the concepts that began with the "Mad Max" movies and later evolved into the "Fallout" video games.
DIALOGUE: 2 out of 5
Most of the dialogue is well enough and clear, but the various post-apocalyptic curses are laughable. Characters growl out things like "Burn it down" or "I couldn't give a nuke"; everything is oriented to the world-changing event of a hundred years ago. I think better and more natural profanities could be invented though.
As much as I like Ryan Cawdor, he switches between a casual lingo with incomplete words and sentences to a proper English gentleman who never uses contractions.
STYLE/TECHNICAL: 3 out of 5
I think this book was well written, but the disjointed factors are almost as apparent in the technical execution as they are in the story. It's not obvious at first that "Jack Adrian" is two different writers, but I can see where their writing styles differed and each pursued plots and characters they preferred. -
My dad is a fan of this classic 80s pulp science fiction series about life after worldwide nuclear apocalypse (think if Matthew Broderick did not succeed in preventing global thermonuclear war at the end of War Games) and he gave me the first two books to read. It's a lot of fun if you go into with the right expectations, and by that I mean, no expectations of quality writing but lots of gore and explosions and weaponry and devastated landscapes and mutated creatures and a series of hard-bitten testosterone-fueled men who are either outright villains or antiheroes just trying to survive. They could all be played by Arnold Schwarzenegger as Dutch and Sly Stallone as Rambo. Oh, and one hot outrageously sexualized chick who can hold her own with the menfolk but still, of course, is repeatedly threatened with sexual violence throughout the course of the book. I won't even get started on the role of women in this story.
OK, let's be honest: these are not good novels. Even in the 80s, they were not good novels. Still, there was something nostalgic about reading this for me, because it reminded me of all the time I spent in the 80s and early 90s reading RPG-related novels and all the other serialized novels, like the Thieves World stories and another shared-world series (that I can't remember the title of) that involved magical races returning in this technology-heavy future, so there were elves who could hack computers with chips in their brains and so on. (If any of you reading this know what I'm talking about, tell me!) And there are some really cool, creative details to the world-building and mutations that no amount of bad, melodramatic purple prose can mask, and despite myself there were a couple of times where I really wanted to know what was going to happen, especially since it ended in exactly the right place. I would never seek out and read the 100+ novels in this series (many hard to find these days), but I'll skim through the start of the second just to see what happens to Ryan and Krysty (yes, I know, I know). -
Overall, a mediocre plus read. Slow starting to me. Opening scene and characters felt cliched, probably because it's been so many years since the book was written. Unfortunately, I knew what was going to happen the whole time, it was just a matter of getting there. The bit of mystery that stayed unresolved and kept being hinted at, was the only thing that kept me interested. I was surprised by the ending though. It made the possibilities for the continued story seem more worthy of my time to find out about. I will probably read the next one to see how the series evolves. I like a good series, and there are tons of books in this one, so I'm not ready to write it off just yet.
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This was a pretty good story. I would give it 3.5-4 stars. The narration was really good. One thing I didn't like was some of the voice acting sound fake and cartoonish.
This is the first story in the deathlands series originally published in the 80s and still being written until the end of 2015. The story is about the survivors after a nuclear war that wipes out civilization. I don't think these books are still available in book format however they have been transferred to an audiobook format that includes voice actors, sound effects and background music. The target audience is now long haul truck drivers. -
I had a problem with a big portion of this book because I read "Encounter" (Deathlands #45.5) beforehand. Encounter takes place many years earlier and shows the legendary hero Trader in all his glory. Years later here we are and in the beginning of the book you come to find out that Trader is dying and this Legend of a man is now a shadow of himself. Don't get me wrong he's still a tough SOB but I wanted more of him and took me a while to shift gears. The end of the book was really enjoyable for me. I liked where they went with the story and how it ended.
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This was my first Audio Book from Graphic Audio.
Honestly, I was very distracted by the ... well ... graphics. Blood and guts and squishy sounds and every time they mentioned a weapon they had to mention the ENTIRE weapon's name. Which got a little grating.
Otherwise I liked it. Though I did find that it lost my attention every now and then. -
Effectively, a novelization of the Fallout universe, before Fallout even existed.
It's got everything you want in the post-apocalypse: long distance travel, sex, violence, mutants, super science. I could go on. -
Why did I read this? Pulp action that appeals to teenage boys. I should have higher standards.
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I listened to the audio version; quite entertaining.
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Anyone who has ever played one of the popular Fallout games will recognise the world presented in Deathlands: Pilgrimage to Hell (written by Christopher Lowder and Laurence James under the name Jack Adrian). I’d go as far as to say they’d feel quite at home there.
A hundred years after a global nuclear war the world has settled into a place without borders, where land is separated into places you can live and places where the acid rains would sear your flesh from your bones.
In the continent that was once called North America no trace of government remains. There are no cities to speak of and what infrastructure remains is maintained by a series of feudal lords that called themselves “Barons”. These violent and disturbed men carve up the land between them and lord over them with iron fists, guarding their land jealously.
Across this land travels The Trader, a Baron in his own right, but a baron of a mobile city that moved from village to village trading goods and skills with the survivors.
The Trader is no hero, this was no longer a land for heroes, but he was a man with a code, and all those who worked with him shared his code. One such man was Ryan, a battered man running from some undisclosed pursuer, who served as The Traders lead war council.
After many years trading and travelling across the desolate wasteland Ryan happens upon a young flame-haired woman who insists on there being a hidden land of plenty hidden in the Badlands. Ryan had heard these tales before, but later – when he hears a very similar story from an aged actor – he becomes intrigued and begins looking deeper.
Deathlands: Pilgrimage to Hell could easily be dismissed as just another Mad Max clone, and this would not be entirely unfair, but there is more to the book. It is undoubtedly a direct response to the movie Mad Max 2 (known as The Road Warrior in the US), but as the story unfolds and we finally find the “promised land” in the shape of The Redoubt.
Here we discover something that Hollywood would later repurpose into the main plot element of the film Stargate (some ten years later) as well as containing underground complexes that gamers would recognise from Fallout (which was some six years later).
There’s not a lot of plot to Pilgrimage to Hell, but then there rarely is to stories set in a post-apocalyptic world. These tend to be stories of survival and conflict set against extreme violence and deprivation.
But it’s best not to confuse plot and story with such novels. The plots may all follow a very similar pattern but the stories, they can be as diverse as any novel.
Can be, not that they are always of course.
With the addition of The Redoubt, a system of instant teleportation across the continental US, the topography of the Deathlands becomes a whole new interesting place. It promises stories set across extremely diverse cultures derived from hundreds of years of evolution from the cultures of today.
As a “set up” for future books (of which there are many, but more on that a little later) Pilgrimage to Hell works extremely well, but does it as a stand-alone novel?
This is a difficult thing to ascertain. This kind of book is rather niche. Its unapologetically “masculine” in its approach, burly men carrying a dizzying array of firearms – many of them meticulously described – while dispatching foes in undeniably gruesome ways, but it also has some moments of human interaction that come as a bit of a surprise.
When Ryan meets the flame haired woman – who we learn is called Krysty (that’s not a typo) – a romance blossoms, and the reader not only has to steel themselves to some steamy scenes but some surprising tenderness from our anti-hero.
This all comes after a few hundred pages of ultra-violence, tolchokery and devotchka chasing, so don’t expect the tenderness to come without a price.
(And if those words meant nothing to you, well…)
If you like the Mad Max movies, or you eagerly await the next Fallout then you should probably seek out a copy of Deathlands: Pilgrimage to Hell. They’re available easily enough online, but none of the books ever got a release in the UK. I particularly enjoyed the audio release, presented by a company called Graphic Audio. It was a full cast dramatization that stuck very closely to the written word, making it a full nine-hour long audio play.
I have the next three books on my shelf to read, but – to be perfectly honest – I’ll probably forego reading them if I can find the Graphic Audio presentations instead.
Deathlands is a long running series that consists of a staggering 125 books (and a further sixteen audio-only episodes), and a spin-off series called The Outlanders.
I don’t know how far I’m going to get through these 125 books, but as I’m already halfway through the second book (Deathlands: Red Holocaust) I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a fair few of them on my shelf by the end of the year.
Be warned though, Deathlands books are pretty extreme in their depictions of violence so if you’re a “trigger warning” kind of person just assumed they have every trigger warning you can think of printed in fluorescent red on their covers. -
I'd give this a 2.5 but I'm rounding down to accommodate for goodreads not having half stars. I'm opting to round down and not up based on gut feeling.
This is post-apocalyptic pulp fiction. Those giving this one star reviews and acting shocked by the content baffle me. Did you see the cover? I assume you had to do some digging when you found these. Were you not tipped off by any review you ran into when you started reading? Ah well. This book provided exactly what I was looking for. I've been in the mood for some trashy/fun books to read to take my mind off some of the heavier stuff I read earlier in the year. This book delivered. Villains are black and white morally, the action scenes are gratuitous, and the world is fun to read about.
I say read but I listened to the Graphic Audio edition of this book. If I had to rate the production alone this would get a 4/5. The production is likely what kept me engaged the most. The atmospheric soundtrack, sound effects, and decent voice acting elevated what would otherwise be a throw away pulp fiction novel
My major complaint is how women exist in these books. Even among the "good guys" with their moral code they looks are what's discussed first and foremost. I write it off as a product of it's time, but I still winced whenever the book got sexist. -
Packed full of violence, sex, explosions, bloodshed, mutants, cliched antagonists and protagonists, car chases, warlords, desperation, destruction, cheesy dialogue, nuclear wastelands, and just about every other known trope in the post apocalyptic genre, Pilgrimage to Hell may be the perfect example of just how right all those things can actually be.
I loved pretty much every moment of this novel. It’s action packed and surprisingly well written for a cheap, pulp-esque testosterone fueled and testosterone minded audience. There’s nothing even remotely deep or mind changing, but it’s a ton of fun to read. Such a pitty that James Axler (Jack Adrian) never got to experience a true level of recognition he rightfully deserved.
My one complaint? The last 20% of the book dragged a bit. Nothing wrong with it, just felt a little slow in comparison with the first 80%.
Still though, I don’t know where this series has been my whole life. Just glad I found the Deathlands and something new to sink my teeth into.
