In the future — at least that imagined by the appropriately named David Gunn in DEATH’S HEAD — our soldiers still face horrors in war. Take Sven, for instance. He’s got a prosthetic arm, his originally being bitten off by creatures known as ferox. They’ve been keeping him captive in the desert when he’s rescued by the elite military group from which this book takes its title.
Rumored to be inhuman, Sven — “a man who can order a whore or a drink in fifteen different languages” — is a killing machine ordered to assassinate a senator and his daughter Aptitude, but instead, he decides to protect the latter after he offs the former. Then he suits up for an all-out war on the planet Ilseville, armed with laser knifes, pulse rifles and a talking gun set on “‘fuck off’ mode.”
I don’t need to tell you DEATH’S HEAD is insane. Military sci-fi isn’t my bag, but this one had me jazzed, probably because it seems like a lost segment from the HEAVY METAL movie and also because Sven is the kind of role Arnold Schwarzenegger would be perfect for, if he didn’t have a gubernatorial job and a pig heart.
It has everything: animal sex and cannibalism, sodomy and torture, puking and other bodily fluids, malt liquor and strip clubs, genocide and general insubordinance, spider robots and alligators, the old ultraviolent and one really nifty coin trick. It also has an elongated battle too long for its own good, but it’s still worth enlisting. —Rod Lott
Related posts:
- Dead Head
- Death Head Crossing
- Head Game
- Are My Blinkers Showing?: Adventures in Filmmaking in the New Russia
- Ghost
{ 1 trackback }
{ 0 comments… add one now }