Customer Reviews

The Bronze Axe : Blade No. 1

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Like the previous reviewer, I bought the complete set and am starting from Book 1. The material is formulaic at best. While reading you can see that Blade will in the following adventures meet x number of beautiful women and engage in sex with every one of them. The books are great timewasters for a late evening or early weekend morning.

First, let me say that I went overboard and bought every one of these (all 37) from my local used bookseller. The odd thing is I'd only sort of remembered them from my high school days. And only because of the cover art.

I'd been too nervous back then to actually buy anything with a naked man on the cover.

While I am only about a forth into this, Volume 1, I have looked a bit at the others and this is my take:

You either can put on your politically correct hat and bristle at the patriarchy, the misogyny, the homophobia, or-

You can laugh you ass off at this naked James Bond in fantasyland. Every woman wants him. They are, to a one, unable to resist his buff bod and masculine swagger.

I don't know if Mr. Lord knew he was writing a character that was so imminently outdated. The macho white guy who lords over every one and everything, secure in his right to do so.

Heck, even the setup is classic crap. Mad scientist strips down and greases up our man Blade. (Please, no snickering folks.) Hooks him up with electrodes over his entire body and instead of creating a super genius (as Britain needs more of those to regain world domination) he throws Blade into the prickly, but welcoming arms of a Princess!

Silly, silly stuff. Inadvertently funny. Sort of like that moment in Soylent Green where Charleston Heston's character gets in bed with the "furniture" (actually the lovely Leigh Taylor-Young) as they discuss the murder of her former "owner" with such casualness that a modern audience went: EWWW! Then they laughed at this presumption.

Imagine 37 volumes of this.

I have guaranteed laughs for the rest of my life.

Plus, I have all those lovely naked men on the cover.

I recently ran across 36 of the 37 volumes (missing #37) in this series in a bookstore and decided to buy them all. Not because this is great art, but because it's a glimpse into a time when books like this were really common. I had read a few of these as a kid and generally liked them. Jeffrey Lord is actually a house pseudonym for many writers: Lyle Kenyon Engel, Roland J Green, Ray Nelson, and Manning Lee Stokes.

These novels are pretty consistent in content and quality. If you like one of them, you'll probably like the rest.