Customer Reviews

The Cursed (Casca, No. 18)

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4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(0)

 

 

Casca gets involved in the Boxer rebellion in China in 1899-1900 and fights on the Chinese side against the imperialist British oppressors. Well, that's the condensed version, but I found it by far the most hilarious of the Casca stories (the parade ground scene with the corpse on the flagpole and the bandit raid on the Chinese village being two scenes which had me in stitches) and if you can ignore the blatant anti-British bias that screams out at you this is an enjoyable yarn of Casca acting as a British undercover spy and ending up fighting against them. The Chinese water torture scene is very well done, too.

The story had some good parts, but the one thing that makes me want to puke is the friggin cover. Fabio? With not one scar? Man, this is just plain misleading. Casca is not some pretty boy, and even in #1 when he had very few scars...he still had scars. I have no idea whom the target audience was when this cover was done. Jeeez!

I remember this one to be one of the most boring and unbalanced novel of poor 'ol Barry Sadler's. Was he writing them just to collect a paycheck here in this time frame...? Running out of story ideas? We'll never know.

I was hoping for something along the lines, and up to par to his past Asian adventure, Book #4: Casca the warlord. Samurai's and ninja's is what Casca should have been fighting with in these novels. But it wasn't meant to be...