Definitely not to be confused with the Patrick Swayze movie, GHOST is sci-fi writer John Ringo’s attempt at writing something outside the genre. In doing so, he may have created his own genre: the pornographic technothriller.

The title is the code name for its completely unlikable protagonist, a former Navy SEAL named Mike Harmon. In his 50s and newly divorced, Harmon has re-enrolled in college in Georgia and is busy stalking co-eds on campus when he witnesses a young woman being kidnapped. He jumps on the van all stealth-like, which takes him to an airport, where he jumps on the plane all stealth-like. Before we know it, he’s in the Middle East, taking on an entire Al Qaeda cell, which has 50 – 50! – American girls held hostage, all of whom they plan to rape, torture and kill, in that order.

That setup is so over-the-top and bizarre that it’s kind of fun, even with all the indecipherable military speak bandied about. When Harmon equips three of the girls – all naked, mind you – with grenades, teaches them how to turn tampons and condoms into tools of war, and renames them Babe, Bambi and Thumper, we’ve fully entered cartoon territory, with the square-jawed Harmon being played by McBain, the Schwarzenegger clone of THE SIMPSONS.

For this stretch, I enjoyed how unseriously GHOST dared to take itself. Like having one of the freed hostages immediately find a computer, sign up on AOL Instant Messenger as “HostageGirl” and find help via a chat room. Most conveniently, it just so happens there’s one called “InsideTheHostageRescue.”

But that fun is short-lived as this section of the book comes to a close on page 161. Apparently, GHOST isn’t a novel, but a trilogy of stand-alone novellas. The second story is little more than a 100+ page S&M sex scene, as Harmon talks two college girls into taking a boat trip with him to the Bahamas, during which they do little more than screw, as Mr. Ghost teaches them proper blowjob techniques and introduces them to the wonderful world of butt plugs. Then, for a few pages, he takes on some pirates.

If there’s still any doubt, the third novella is where GHOST truly crosses the line. Now in Eastern Europe, Harmon visits a brothel and brutally rapes a hooker for several agonizing pages, all because he’s stressed and hasn’t killed anybody lately. He makes up for that by killing even more terrorists. The end.

Harmon himself tells several characters that he’s a bad guy, so the reader is more or less warned. But a rapist is another can of worms altogether, and one wonders why Ringo decided to devote a book to him, not to mention the threat of a series. What starts off as a guilty pleasure becomes sordid and needlessly ugly – the very definition of gratuitous, and I’m far from prudish. If Tom Clancy is your box-office blockbuster, then GHOST is your straight-to-video offering starring Michael Dudikoff. With too many tits and not enough ’splosions – something I thought not possible.