Hell & Damnation: Looking at Zelazny’s out-of-print novel Damnation Alley (and the movie and what that should have been, somewhat)

craters coming at me now
ashes coming at me
radiation wasteland
i've got my anti radiation machine
oh thank you doctor strangelove
for giving me ashes and post-atomic dust
and the sky is raining fishes
it's a mutation zoo
i'm going down damnation alley
well good luck to you......
--from “Damnation Alley” by Hawkwind (written by Dave Brock, Robert Calvert and Simon House)


So many of the books I like are out of print, I feel the need to write them up, like I did recently with Donald E. Westlake’s Humans. (This essay originally appeared in a slightly different form on an upstart scf-fi website in 2002.)



A slim, rough-and-tumble volume, Roger Zelazny’s feisty SF thriller Damnation Alley (Berkley; 1969; out-of-print) would’ve made a great premise for B-movie maven Roger Corman: a skuzzy and violent biker named Hell Tanner is picked to drive from Los Angeles to Boston across the post-nuclear holocaust America to deliver the serum to stop a deadly plague there.


Flying is impossible in this world: the world’s skies are terrifying tornadoes that dump tons of earth and mud (and whatever) randomly.

Giant mutant rats, bats and Gila monsters roam the land, and most cities are either glowing radioactive craters or plains of fused glass.

And let’s not forget the marauding bands of savages, shall we?





Originally attracted by its weird, almost surreal cover (above) which actually has nothing to do with the book, but looks really frickin’cool—Damnation Alley was the first Roger Zelazny (May 13, 1937 – June 14, 1995) book I ever picked up, sometime in the mid-1970s.

It sat on the bookshelf in my room for a while, until I read Zelazny’s amazing Creatures of Light and Darkness (also 1969—he was quite prolific at this time). Impressed, I then proceeded to read Damnation Alley.

(I believe the cover above was painted by infamous proto-surrealist Richard M. Powers, truly one of the greatest painters of paperbacks in the 1950s and 1960s. Check out more of his work HERE; I think it’s fantastic.)


While I’m not a fan of all of Zelazny’s books, there is a handful that I return to again and again.

In high school, I devoured the first five books in his “Amber” series, and I’ve re-read his Creatures of Light and Darkness, Jack of Shadows (1971), Roadmarks (1979) and Damnation Alley at least a couple of times each. Zelazny died in 1995, but never seemed to slow his pace, although his later works were just too sword & sorcery for my tastes.


Damnation Alley is hardly “hard” SF: by 1969, it was common knowledge that the massive doses of radiation released by an atomic war would not cause spiders and bats to grow 500 times their normal size.

However, around the time that Zelazny wrote it, bikers and motorcycle gangs were everywhere: in the news, in films (dozens of biker flicks were released between 1966 and 1974), and in popular books (Hunter S. Thompson’s book on the Hells Angels was published in 1966), and gangs like the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club were attaining mythic stature. I think Zelazny was trying to meld a then-contemporary phenomenon with a SF plot in a very commercial premise. As a piece of pulp fiction, then, Damnation Alley is wildly successful.


Forty years later, the book is still very much a page-turner, an exciting action story that effectively crosses genre boundaries. In fact, the “blood & guts” crowd may appreciate this book more than many hard-SF fans will. The book may be episodic, but Zelazny takes a cheeseball premise, treats it seriously and runs with it at a ferocious pace.

You can argue that as a grand master of the SF genre (the man won six Hugo awards in his career! some might say) the author should have transposed the biker theme into a more “serious” SF concept other than the giant-mutant-critters storyline that filled so many B-movies in the 1950s.


But I think it’s perfect: two great B-movie tastes that taste great together—bikers and mutants! (Perhaps there was something in the air in 1969, but that year also saw the release of Ray Harryhausen’s underrated film The Valley of the Gwangi, which featured cowboys versus dinosaurs).

Because despite the inherent trashiness of both of these respective genres (bikers, atomic mutants), there have been excellent films made about each of them, including Roger Corman’s The Wild Angels (1966) and Them! (1954).

And it just seems so perfect: of course a biker is going to be the one man to cross the atomic wasteland U.S. of A.

In the hands of a good writer, no premise is stupid, and Damnation Alley lucked out by being written by an inkslinging wiz like Zelazny. I think the furious pace is a result of the author having fun writing it—making it up—as he goes along.



The book starts with a motorcycle vs. police car chase under a mutated tornado sky, slowing down only to drop a bit of exposition a few times, then roars off into the wilds of the nuclear nightmare.

Tanner’s given a car fit for such a hostile environment: an uber-SUV, equipped with machine guns, flamethrowers and other deadly amenities. Zelazny’s anti-hero is the Last of the Hells Angels, in jail for murder, being offered a full pardon if he takes the job.
(Kinda like Escape From New York or The Dirty Dozen.)


A real vile bastard, who “once gouged out a man’s eyes, just for fun,” Hell Tanner is a mean son-of-a-bitch, but the best driver around: the only man who’s made the mail-run to Alberqueque, he also claims to have been as far as the “Missus Hip.” (And “Hell” is not a nickname—in a great bit of tossed off dialog, Tanner explains that when the nurse asked his father for a name for his seventh child, the old man said “Hell!” and split, never to be seen again.)

Originally published as a novella in the October 1967 issue of Galaxy Magazine, Damnation Alley was expanded by the author adding interstitial quasi-Gothic scenes of Boston descending into death and madness from the plague. Church bells are always ringing, the skies are dark and the houses are filled with dead bodies. Zelazny has remarked that he really doesn’t like these scenes, that he just added them to pad out the novella.

And while they might slow down the out-of-control action occasionally, I feel these scenes add weight and a sense of urgency to Hell Tanner’s mission. No longer an abstract “Man Against Nature Fight for Survival,” the story becomes the greater mission of “Saving The World.”

Meanwhile, during his drive through the Alley, Tanner finds himself thinking more and more about Brady, the man who brought the message about the Boston’s plague (and the plea for the serum) to Los Angeles. The first man to cross Damnation Alley (what the survivors call the wasteland between the coasts), Brady died from his injuries soon after arriving, and only left scattered, fevered descriptions of the horrors on the road.


When Tanner is finally alone (the other drivers having been killed, injured or disappearing into mega-cyclones), the reminiscences grow spooky, with the biker almost feeling challenged by Brady’s ghost. When this is intercut with the scenes of desperation in Boston, there’s an even deeper resonance to the endeavor, an indication that the vicious biker might be doing something to save his soul.

Zelazny gives a heavily camouflaged hint that Tanner might be more than just a beast early on: Rather than let his kid brother (who is also a naturally gifted driver; it must run in the family) pilot one of the cars to Boston—a trip Tanner has no illusions about certainly being fatal—a “Himmelfahrtskommando”—he beats up his brother and kicks his ribs in, sending the kid to the ICU.

It’s brutal and horrible, but it’s the only way Tanner knows of how to save his little brother’s life. A pulp novel doesn’t have to be all style and no substance.

Like Harlan Ellison’s novella A Boy and His Dog, Damnation Alley takes place enough in the post-nuclear war period that our protagonist is truly of a unique post-war generation: kids who grew up never knowing a pre-nuked civilization, but with enough of that civilization’s detritus and trappings for them to scrap up an inkling of what they’ve been cheated out of terribly.

Unlike A Boy and His Dog, when Damnation Alley was made into a movie, the filmmakers strayed far from the source material—and screwed things up royally.

When director L.Q. Jones made his incredible (and highly recommended) film of A Boy and His Dog in 1975, he was smart enough to know that there was no way to top Ellison’s crackling dialog, and hardly changed a word.

(But I do think that Jones actually improves on Ellison in the depiction of underground city of Topeka. While I understand the parody of Squaresville that Ellison’s trying to present, but I just don’t feel it. Visually and thematically, I connected more with Jones’ Richard-Nixon-Reads-Samuel-Beckett-on-LSD presentation of Topeka.)
I used to think that Damnation Alley was made by 20th Century Fox to cash in on the popularity of sci-fi movies brought on by the monstro-success of Star Wars. But according to IMDB, the movie was finished and then shelved until after Star Wars came out. It seems that its release had already been delayed by the lengthy post-production process where the cheesy laser effects were matted onto the sky.

The first few shots of the laser skies are okay, but it’s shocking how inept the rest of the effects are. The flick’s not on DVD, but it is on YouTube, so you can decide for yourself. It’s actually more tolerable on YTube, the bad transfer making the movie of Damnation Alley look more interesting than it is.

But to me, it seems the whole film was sloppily put together by people with little understanding for the action-movie genre at least, let alone genuine science fiction.

The flick is poorly paced, the dialog is atrocious, the movie is not even fun in that “it’s so bad it’s good” way. You watch actor Paul Winfield get devoured by 10-inch long cockroaches and you yawn.

Zelazny’s plot, except for driving a big weird truck cross-country, is completely jettisoned, and the main character has been changed from biker trash Hell Tanner to clean-cut Air Force Captain Tanner, stiffly played by a bland Jan-Michael Vincent.

And the movie’s Tanner is one of the guys who launched the missiles in the first place! The protagonist has been changed from the new breed of existential/nihilist human that grew up in the aftermath of the Day of Fire to the guy who pushed the button! It’s a thematic change that’s insulting.





And worst of all, he rides a motherfuckin’ riceburner, man!

Zelazny is reported to have hated the movie, and tried to get his name off the film, but 20th Century Fox wouldn’t let him (probably correctly assuming that his die-hard fans might be the only ones willing to pay money to see it).

But something good comes out of Damnation Alley the movie, I guess.

The big tank/truck they drive, called the “Landmaster” in the film, went on to have an extended cameo in an episode of Chris Eliott’s late, great, lamented sitcom Get A Life. The vehicle “played” Paperboy 2000, the automated paper-delivery machine that threatened Chris’ job and eventually went haywire.

Interestingly, the Landmaster’s costar from the Damnation Alley movie, Jackie Earl Haley, also appeared on Get A Life, although in a different episode. Haley made a great guest-starring appearance playing the infamous Cousin Donald (with that incredibly greasy hair).

FYI: Aside from influencing Chris Eliott’s cult comedy (albeit in a roundabout way), Zelazny’s book likewise inspired an awesome 9 minutes and 8 seconds song by proto-metal/psychedelic band Hawkind, also called “Damnation Alley.” It’s off the album Quarks, Strangeness and Charm (which is itself also a good song).

You can give the song "Damnation Alley" a listen to at this YouTube location.


I used to hope that there still might have been a chance to make a faithful movie of Damnation Alley, but after those Rollerball and Death Race remakes? Forget it.

In the best of all possible alternative universes, the movie of Damnation Alley would’ve been made in 1974 starring William Smith as Hell Tanner, and either Warren Oates or Bruce Dern as Brody: they both could play “square and tough, but crazy” well.

I could see a capable journeyman with a taste for weirdness or action in the director’s chair, like Ted Post or Larry Cohen or Jonathan Kaplan. Maybe Charles B. Griffith or Dan Haller.

And if you didn’t know, William Smith is probably one of the most awesome screen presences ever. A guy so tough, John Milius cast him as Conan’s father. THE biker in the biker flick.

William Smith is so awesome, pop-cult-new wave-bubblegum band The Jickets even wrote a song about him.

I’d want this sci-fi biker movie of the mind to be a slightly-higher end Corman or AIP production: stock footage of lizards with plastic fins would be bought and matted in by someone like Howard A. Anderson, with matte paintings farmed out to a freelancing Albert Whitlock over footage shot around Joshua Tree. (Oh yeah, I’m a special effects nerd.)

Once you get all of these elements together, just adapt the novel faithfully, and you’ll have a freat (fricking great) movie of Damnation Alley.

Just not in this universe. Oh well.

Human see, human do: An appreciation of Donald Westlake’s out-of-print Humans

(Westlake photo by David Jennings)

RIP
DONALD WESTLAKE
THE BEST WRITER IN THE WORLD
1933-2008

Hearing that Donald E. Westlake, the best writer in the world, had died while on vacation in Mexico on NEW YEAR’S EVE, all I could think was, “Is this the beginning of one of his novels?”

Unfortunately, it’s not. Sigh…


I’m just going to concentrate on one of Westlake’s novels in this post, as the start of what will be an ongoing look at out-of-print books that should be searched out.

But for further Westlake:
The Bad Plus’ blog “Do the Math” has an in-depth look at all of Westlake’s books as well as a good reminiscence of the author as a friend, and a concise compendium of his traits as a writer HERE.

Meanwhile, there’s a mindbogglingly exhaustive collection Westlake tributes and recollections HERE.

A nice tribute to Richard Stark, Westlake’s alter-ego HERE.

Phil Nugent at Nerve’s The Screengrab gives good obit and provides a nice focus on the Westlake books that have been made into films.

And speaking of the Hell of Hollywood, The Los Angeles Times had a good article titled, “Hollywood rarely did Donald Westlake justice.”


And as much as I liked the man’s work, I’m ashamed to admit that it was only upon reading all these obituaries that I found out that Westlake was the co-creator of the mega-flop TV show Supertrain—which actually I used to watch regularly—for the model work; us sci-fi nerds were starved for special effects back then and had to take what we could get. (see below)



I honestly can’t remember which Donald Westlake novel I read first. But I’ve enjoyed them all (of the ones that I’ve read—including the very weird, but appealing to me as an ex-pornographer, Adios Scheherazade (Thanks Colin!)), some more than others of course, but Westlake is a writer whose work I return to regularly: The Ax, Two Much, Jimmy the Kid…

And Westlake’s books are the ones I always find when I check out a used bookstore in some out-of-the-way locale, or if I’m on a business trip to a medium-sized burg in the middle of nowhere. I’m really lucky that way and in all honesty, it’s how I’ve scored most of my books by Westlake.

This review of Humans was originally written for a sci-fi website back in the late-1990s—but I’ve updated it and tweaked it a bit since then.


Who do you root for when God wants to destroy the earth and Satan wants to save it? A look back at Donald E. Westlake’s Humans.


The scenario Donald E. Westlake sets up in his fantasy/satire Humans (published in 1992 by Mysterious Press/Time Warner; now out-of-print), one of his rare forays out of the crime/mystery genre, is delicious.

It seems that God is fed up with humanity and He’s going to do something about it. Remember Agent Smith’s wonderfully creepy speech in The Matrix, where Smith compares humanity to a virus? Well, that’s how God feels. But He just can’t snap His fingers and make us disappear.


The magnificent paradox of God’s omnipotence and Man’s Free Will gets in the way. “Thus it is that God has always nudged men, has engaged in confidence tricks and little scams, has played at times with a stacked deck, has thrown up illusions and toyed with mirrors, all to get humankind to want to do what God has in mind,” explains the novel’s lead character, the angel Ananayel (italics are Westlake’s).


Westlake is best known as an author of mysteries and crime thrillers (both serious, like the relentless socio-economic shocker The Ax, and comic, like his Dortmunder series), and it is somehow fitting that with his mentions of “stacked decks,” and “confidence tricks and little scams,” he essentially presents God as perhaps the greatest con man ever, someone not to be trusted.

The Lord sends Ananayel to Earth “to arrange things, to set the stage, to coach the unwitting actors in their parts.” Using heavenly subterfuge and various disguises, the angel (who admits he hasn’t had much experience with humanity—which may prove to be his undoing) assembles a ragtag crew of eccentric nihilists to put the wheels of apocalypse in motion.


It’s with the humans that Westlake really shines. He’s the grand master of sharp dialog and he gives all his characters unique voices, making them all the more real. He gives us Frank, the ex-con looking for that one last big score (this is a Westlake book after all); Grigor, the Russian fireman poisoned by the radiation of Chernobyl who moonlights as a joke writer for Moscow’s version of David Letterman; Kwan, the Tiananmen Square activist with sex on the brain; and several others.

These people might all be disillusioned enough to eventually at some specific point want to see the world end (which is what Ananayel is trying to accomplish after all), but none is unsympathetic in the extreme—even Pami, the almost-feral, AIDS-stricken prostitute from Kenya who keeps willfully infecting her customers.

But as subtle as his machinations are, the angel’s activities finally attract the attention of someone else. God may be fed up with us, but Lucifer certainly isn’t. “We love this world!” howls the unnamed demon chosen to thwart Ananayel and God’s plan. “Don’t be afraid, you wretched vermin,” the fiend vows, “We will save you.”


(So why is it that Ananayel and the unnamed demon are going toe-to-toe and not God and the Devil themselves? The angel explains that “Like the limited wars on other people’s territories that the so-called Great Powers have indulged themselves in over the last half-century of Earth’s little history, it is only through proxies that my Master and His Opponent can contend.” Ananayel further explains that while Lucifer will surely try and cheat, that the Prince of Darkness wouldn’t dare to try to overwhelm the angel, because “that would bring into play a truly Great Power”—more of Westlakes’s droll humor.)



And so the race is on, with Westlake throwing another monkey-wrench into the mix: Just who the hell are we supposed to root for? I guess I sort of answered myself there, but you get the point. Ananayel is a nice guy and his growing love for the beauties and wonders of the Earth is inspiring.

The humans, despite their flaws and foibles, all have legitimate gripes. The demon is absolutely despicable. But out of these three groups, only one is actively trying to stop total planetary destruction. Westlake has lots of wry and sardonic fun toying with his audience’s emotions at this point, and the book becomes the quintessential page-turner with plenty of twists and turns.

The novel lags only towards the end, and then only slightly. This is a gripe I only noticed upon re-reading Humans—and please take this with a grain of salt—but at the conclusion, when the group than Ananayel has brought together take over an experimental nuclear research lab, I was not sure if the story was taking place over the course of days or weeks (when it’s the end of the world, these things are important).

Earlier in the novel, Westlake has months passing between chapters, but towards the end, the novelist doesn’t create enough of a sense of immediate urgency to keep me as riveted the second time I read his book. (I’m willing to concede that perhaps knowing how the novel concludes could possibly be influencing my assessment.)

However, Westlake wisely leaves the ending quasi-ambiguous. The author is more concerned with the characters—he’s neither on God’s nor Lucifer’s side (well, maybe just a little on Lucifer’s—but solely for pragmatic reasons); Westlake is thoroughly on the side of humankind.


Humans is recommended especially for those who are fans of the quasi-theological sub-genre of fantasy.

I’m loath to call these books fantasies, but I guess they are. It’s just that when you’re dealing with fiction of a theological nature, using a term like “fantasy” seems demeaning, if not downright sacrilegious.

It just doesn’t seem right to lump books that question the motives of God with books about gnomes and unicorns and sword & sorcery. But maybe that’s the latent Catholic in me talking…


With its concentration on the humans rather than the angels/demons, Humans is closer in tone to Jeremy Leven’s recommended Satan: His Psychotherapy and Cure by the Unfortunate Dr. Kassler, J.S.P.S. (originally published in 1982), than the more “goofy” angel/demon-centric antics in the Monty Python-esque (but also recommended) Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett (1990; Ace), which is a book a lot of people love. (I just like it a lot.)




Other recommended sacrilegious/theological fantasies include the excellent To Reign in Hell by Steven Brust (1984; Orb Books), which is reminiscent of Roger Zelazny’s Hugo-winning Lord of Light in its treatment of the expulsion of Satan (who in Brust’s novel is not the same entity as Lucifer, Beelzebub or Mephistopheles); and John Collier’s Milton’s Paradise Lost: A Screenplay for the Cinema of the Mind (1973; Knopf/Random House), which brilliantly translates the literary classic into screenplay format.



Humans is a fine fantasy novel, one that goes beyond the boundaries of “mere” genre, and it deserves to be back on the shelves.

Because Westlake is best known as a mystery/thriller author (he also writes the ultra-violent “Parker” series under the name Richard Stark), I think Humans unfortunately got lost in the shuffle of his more commercial work. It would be simply divine (snicker…) if a SF/fantasy publisher somewhere went and acquired the rights to this wonderful book and put it back into circulation.

But with Westlake’s death, who knows? He might get one of those posthumous blasts of republishing that can happen when one of the Mighties kicks the bucket; we can only hope.