Customer Reviews

Ghost (Paladin of Shadows Book 1)

5 star:		(37)
4 star:		(18)
3 star:		(15)
2 star:		(15)
1 star:		(58)

 

 

I found myself voting "helpful" for reviews with one star and reviews with five stars. I'm definitely conflicted over this book.

As the author says in his own review on this site, the book reads well. The stories are pretty carefully plotted, although the third one kind of skips around a little too much.

And how many nukes does one guy just happen to stumble across? In that respect it reminds me of the murder mystery genre, where amatuer sleuths just happen to trip over bodies every time they go on vacation. Suspension of disbelief is integral to the idea. These are "tall tales", not psuedo-realism.

And yes, there is lots of sex. Very dark sex, too. And it gets darker from story to story.

And yes, there is lots of violence. Very dark violence, too. It also gets darker from story to story.

Not only is the book not "politically correct", but it is an over-the-top right wing fairy tale. The hero is always right, the Bush-like president is noble and wise, all liberals and the French are weak and stupid, and all the positively portrayed characters make comments about how they are now going to vote Republican for life. The book is also relentless about showing the bad side of Islam: the villians in all three stories are Muslim terrorists. There is not a single sympathetic portrayal of a Muslim in any of the stories.

But ... well that's what this book is about. It is not about plot realism, political moderation, or cultural understanding. It is about darkness: rage, sexual dominance, the seductive joy of killing your enemies, and most of all it is about the relationship of the wolves to the sheep.

It is well executed, but very disturbing. I'm not surprised the author had to be talked into publishing it. It reads more like a private exorcism of personal demons than something intended for public consumption.

This book is not about a conflicted protagonist who wrestles with his dark side. It is (at best) pulp fiction a la Don Pendleton's "The Executioner" -- but without the romance. At worst the publisher deliberately avoided mention on the back cover of the book that it is porn rather than a "techno-thriller."

To summarize, Ringo's "hero" defeats three groups of stereotyped terrorist plots while stopping along the way to school two young college freshmen co-eds in the ways of three-way bondage and to beat, rape and sodomize a teen girl, then buy her (as in, purchase her from another person for cash), and offer an offhand, half-hearted apology for his behavior.

Fortunately our hero advises the co-eds to call their mothers before they let themselves get tied up and the young teen is a foreign slave girl with the worldly wisdom to realize that a tip of 300 American dollars for services rendered really takes the edge off of any pain (either physical or psychological) that rape, sodomy, and a good knocking about might bring on.

The previous paragraph is not a joke. Or, if it is, the punch line is that Ringo actually wrote this book and Baen chose to publish it.

I am a 12-year U.S. Marine with a BS in Psych, an MS in Organizational Management, and working toward a doctorate in the field of leadership. I am neither a prude nor an idiot -- and I advise the following with confidence: If you find yourself sympathizing with Ringo's "Ghost" or you think that rape is an understandable way to relieve stress, then you should seek counseling immediately.

Seriously. And ESPECIALLY if you are a member of the U.S. armed forces.

Sometimes good people do bad things and sometimes the good guys have to muddle through some pretty murky gray area when it comes to right and wrong. Unfortunately, Ringo does not explore these issues.

He could have.

He is a tremendously talented writer.

But this time, he chose to write some really bad porn.

Which is fine -- as long as it is labeled that way and we remember to be worried any time we are tempted by an author to think, "Oh, well, I guess he had some pretty good reasons for raping that teen aged girl."

Let me start by saying that I'm a big fan of John Ringo. I've read everything he's published, except for the rest of this series. Unfortunately, his skills in scifi don't seem to transfer to other genres. This seems like a throwback to bad, old military fiction from before Tom Clancy and others popularized the use of characters, plot, political intrigue, and facts. Save your money and, more importantly, your time.

The main problem is the total lack of realism in just about every area. The main character, Mike "Ghost" Harmon, is repeatedly drawn into adventures because he happens to stumble upon them. Once makes a story -- three times is just lazy, contrived writing. If Ringo had stopped at the first novella, I'd have given a rating of 3 or 4 (a quick, empty, mostly entertaining read). The actual tactics are laughable. Another reviewers' comparisons to Rambo were spot on. Mike typically takes out at least a dozen enemies by himself, and he makes a stand against hundreds with almost no help. He repeatedly fights to his last, spends time in the hospital, and goes back to absurdity. The politics, while expectedly conservative, are simplistic and ham-handed.

Others have complained about the sex, and I will too. There's no mention of it in the blurbs and liner notes, but it takes up 1/3 to 1/2 of the book. It adds nothing to the plot and seems to just be filler. The only small addition it makes is to try and show that Mike is a bad man doing dangerous things that allow good people to live in peace. It's spelled out simplistically in the first novella, and there's no need to a hundred pages of elaboration. It's heavily BDSM, but if you're looking for titillation, you're better off picking something at random from alt.sex.stories or some website.

Ringo does each element much better in other books. "Road to Damascus" is very political and conservative, but it is integrated into the story. "Against the Tide" is darkly sexual (harems, rape, etc), but it works within the plot. The superhero warrior taking on overwhelming odds is logical when wrapped in the ACS of the Polseen series. For special ops stories, I'd recommend Clancy's Rainbow Six or Marcinko's Rogue Warrior series.

I feel betrayed by the author and publisher. I enjoy John Ringo. But there was no warning that this book was going to describe in great detail the hero practicing domination sex and rape AND the women liking it and thanking him for it. Anybody who says they enjoyed this book "for the articles" is vainly trying to look sophesticated. Its just male fantasy about doing anything to a woman's body without relationship or consequence.

First of all, this is NOT an SF book. Although Ringo writes pretty good SF and I picked this book up in the SF section - it's some kind of bizarro cross between a poor-man's Clancy and a BDSM porn book. Actually, it's three short stories, none of them particularly memorable. The first is a throwback to those old pulp Destroyer type books of the seventies, with a brooding hero who wipes out everything in his path. Problem is the hero is too good, so there really isn't any tension. Ringo has also let his politics get in the way here, so you get distracted by dumb conservative cliche'd thinking (I'm a conservative but not dumb). He also uses George W Bush as president and Donald Rumsfeld as Defence Secretary, though he changes their names. But President "Cliff" refers to his father's error in failing to turf out Sadaam in 91 so... The first story is also laughably unbelievable as it involves Osama Bin laden and the President of Syria conspiring to kidnap American Co-ed hotties, and then rape and torture them on the internet (!!) Nowhere does it say how they expect to profit from this except perhaps to upset those softy yanks. And frankly, if Bin Laden could get a dozen terrorists with their own airplane to America I think he'd find better things to do with them. This first story reads like it was written by a teenage boy with too many hormones, especially since the girls are naked the entire story. And several times, as they are rescued, their rescuers beg them not to hate all men and become, like, lesbos or something because of what the A-rabs did to them. (sheesh!)

The second story is even stranger. It features our hero, now rich since he got the reward for his earlier hero work, doing the beachbum boater thing in the Caribbean with a million dollar yacht. Our hero is into bondage, and quickly finds a pair of just out of high school girls who think he's the neatest thing since sliced bread. Now the bondage and sex is a little too detailed for a thriller and not nearly detailed or graphic enough for erotica or porn (or even romances these days). And our hero's seduction of these teenagers reads like a classroom lecturer explaining the theory behind bdsm fetishism. He also makes sure they call someone to protect themselves before going off on his boat, warns them about taking drugs and drinks from strangers - and insists they call their moms, who, btw, are fine with their teen daughters getting into a bondage/slavery relationship in the Caribbean with a guy ten or fifteen years older than them they've never met (!!). Just so they're home by midnight, I guess. Towards the end of the story he dumps the girls to go kill a bunch more A-rabs.

The third story has him chasing a nuke through European cliches. The Russians are noble but corrupt. The French are largely stupid and arrogant. For no reason I can figure out the people who stole the bomb use a bus commonly used to transport slave girls to old Yugoslavia, which lets him go there to explore slavery, which he both loves and despises. He also gets to rather nastily beat and rape a teen prostitute identified as perhaps 15/17yo, which goes totally against his altruistic sexual restraint in the second story. Ringo seems to be trying to portray him as a tortured soul on the edge of being an evil character like those he hates, but he turns it on and off without any explanation or background and so it's completely unbelievable.

Ringo does pretty good SF, as I said earlier. I'm not sure what this is, but it's uhm, not so good. He's also falling into too many cliches. His characters, for example, duck-walk, crab-walk, leapord-walk... Did Ringo browbeat his editors into letting this out? God knows Clancy's last few books have sucked big time, but I hadn't thought Ringo was succesful enough yet to bully his editors into letting dreck through. <shrug> If you want a techno-thriller, there are plenty who are doing it better. If you want a soft porn bondage story there's lots on the internet. This is supposed to be book 1 of "Kildar" but I have no idea what Kildar might be. It's certainly not identified here and there are no issues to resolve I saw.

I kind of enjoyed the first third of this book. The hero was likeable and the humor was biting. Being ex-military in a pretty liberal city, I fully empathized with some of the sentiments expressed. The denouement of part 1 was fun, even though total B.S. Imagine fighting a defensive action against overwhelming odds from an underground fortress accompanied by 48 beautiful naked co-eds! Part 1 would have gotten 3.5 stars from me.

That's where the story should have stopped. The rest of the book lacks in humor and properly belongs in the pages of the Penthouse forum. Ringo expounds more than I ever wanted to know about S&M in part 2 in a storyline with no plot whatsoever. Part 3 is not much better -- again little to no plot. Our hero is always right by virtue of his "spidey sense", and includes an entirely unnecessary graphic rape scene on the part of the hero.

This is trash. Ringo can do better. Now he has to prove it.

Ugh. I received the paperback of this book as a holiday stocking-stuffer. Fortunately, I didn't have to purchase it myself.

I was somewhat looking forward to the book, as I have previously read "Watch on the Rhine" and enjoyed it considerably. I was ready for the "controversial" nature of the book, since in "Watch..." the protagonists are dubiously reformed (and restored) members of the Waffen SS. If one can convincingly make them look sympathetic-well, I guess I was intrigued to see how the anti-hero sexual predator could be portrayed.
Wow, holy disappointment.

Plot-wise, the earlier reviews are pretty much dead-on. The ex-SEAL Mike Harmon is able to score a practical "one shot-one kill" hit rate with a variety of NATO and Warsaw Pact small arms on dozens of incredibly one-dimensional "Middle Eastern jihadist" types in combat scenes that read like their out of "The Turner Diaries," while avoiding critical injury himself. (In the first novella, when Mike is hit, he is able to survive by jamming feminine hygiene products into the wounds, no Curlex, no forceps, just-girlie stuff.)

The more bothersome part of the book, as mentioned earlier, is the BDSM "rough sex" subplot, which occupies half of the second two stories. For me, the problem with the graphic depictions of BDSM and rape within the book stems from the fact that they are entirely without any sort of "ethos." For those who have read John Norman's Gor series, the Nietzchean/evolutionary psychology subtext of the stories give the Gorean culture a raison d'etre-morally offensive or not. Mike has "demons" that have no real basis in anything, other than pure "masculinity" or the product of PTS, which makes him want to "act out" his aggression. Great... if the character is nine, not-so-great if the character is in his thirties. In one scene Mike explains to his sex slave that he raped her because "there was no one to kill." C'mon, is this guy free-basing Y-chromosome extract?

Despite the rating I've given, masochistic me is actually considering at least leafing through "Kildar" the sequel on my next library trip. The Amazon reviews for it are generally higher and, after all, it just doesn't get much worse than this.

Ghost is a book that is difficult to classify. But before I get to any of other details of the novel, I must point out that this book contains pages upon pages of EXPLICIT PORNOGRAPHY. Bondage, SM, etc. in graphic, graphic detail. And I am in no way being prudish.

The middle novella tells the tale of our intrepid hero sailing on his boat two more than willing college girls who engage in violent, submissive sex for almost 200 pages. Nothing, and I repeat, NOTHING is left to the imagination. This may offend some readers. And the book is DEFINITELY NOT FOR KIDS!

That said, there are many other aspects of the book that some might find offensive. Excessive violence. Intense right-wing politics. These didn't bother me. In fact I give a tip of the hat to the author and publisher for having the guts to publish the book.

The first novella is about as fast moving and entertaining, over the top, action yarn as you'll have the pleasure of reading. The second novella is just graphic sex. The third blends the two more along the lines of the first one and is all the more palatable. The whole, unfortunately doesn't quite make the journey worthwhile.

But, again, for the record, this book contains material that many may find objectionable. And I think Baen has been irresponsible in presenting this material without any disclaimer as to the graphic sexual content. This book is adults only. No question about it.

I like Ringo. I've read all of his other work. He writes good adventure science fiction, and his stories are probable, within the framework of the world/setting in which they are placed. His characters are well presented, and his writing skills are very good.

But this book is different, in one very important way. In part of this book, Ringo sets the scene for the joys of kinky sex - specifically, bondage and dominance/submission, including whips. The first such episode involves two college girls - 18 and 19 - one with a mother who advises her on the joys of this kind of sex and checks with the hero to make sure he won't leave any permanent scars on her dear daughter.

I can live with a kindly, wise, plain-spoken president whose father made the mistake of not finishing the job in Iraq when he had the chance - a president who makes all the right decisions and gives our hero a free hand. A lot of this genre is fairly right-wing in background, and I can either agree or ignore the politics of the setting. The shoot-em-up battles which have our hero winding up winning though severely wounded and ending up in the hospital each time are reasonably typical of this kind of story. And the book is, as is usual with Ringo, well written. But the detailings of bondage, and our hero explaining why this kind of sex is not only OK, but better than run of the mill sex - but oh, he's a good guy and rape is wrong, but bondage is more than OK - that's not what I bargained for when I bought this Ringo book. Nothing on the jacket or jacket flaps gives any hint. So I was surprised, unpleasantly.

Maybe Mr. Ringo was exorcising some demons. I don't care. I would have preferred to have had some hint before I spent my money. It appears that Mr. Ringo has written a sequel, which will probably have more of the same because this is part of the hero he has developed. But I won't buy it, and I probably won't buy any more books by Mr. Ringo. I am sorely disappointed, and more than a bit annoyed. I wouldn't give it even one star if that weren't necessary to post this review. This book should have an "R" rating.

Being a retired Army officer, I understand that, for some soldiers, the violence that it is necessity to apply to be an effective soldier can cross the boundaries into one's private life. That given, it is never acceptable or condoned. To have a hero of a novel denigrate the young women he rescues as ignorant, mindless liberals unworthy of his sacrifice, spend a second episode of the book in gratuitous S&M, and then have a violent rape of a prostitute by the HERO in the third episode begs the question as to Mr. Ringo's motives and/or attitude toward women. I loved his marine SF series, but I'm deeply disappointed in his latest offerings. Very disturbing stuff from John Ringo. If he's trying to make a point, I took it to be that he has issues.