Customer Reviews

The Long Man (Sci Fi Essential Books)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

An enjoyable adventure story from also comic book writer Steve Englehart. It's got fights, chases, zombis (old school Haitian style, not Romero flesh eaters), and a well-developed implementation of both magic and technology. Actually, as I read it, John Twelve Hawks' The Traveler kept coming to mind, insofar as both books deal with secret societies, technology, and magic. The difference is that Steve Englehart doesn't ask you to leave your brain at the door like Twelve Hawks does. The characters and magic system are much better developed, and the technology is used in a realistic fashion. You can tell this is a writer who cares about realistic science. Recommended for fans of fantastical adventure fiction, James Bond, or for anyone who found the later books in the Fourth Realm trilogy disappointing.

Max August would like to return to his simpler life as a DJ during the Reagan Era, but ever since he became the timeless Point Man mage sandwiched between the war of chaos and order, he knows he can never go back. Two plus decades later, still looking in his thirties and not his fifties, his friend Fern calls him on his iPhone; a voice he had not heard in six years. She needs his help.

Someone using powerful magick has assaulted researcher Dr. Pamela Blackwell. Her work on curing the zombie plague is looking promising. An unknown super cabal the Free Range Coalition has plans for global control and Blackwell's work could br a major interference to their plans. When Max intervenes, the FRC sends hordes of killing zombies after the Timeless mortal.

Over the top of Nob Hill in San Francisco, Juliana in Suriname and Mount Hillaby in the Barbados, the Long Man is an engaging thriller that is fun to read; just ignore credibility especially of the throwback comic book villains. Fast-paced as Max and Pam elude the enemy while also killing some along the way, readers will enjoy the return of the Point Man.

Harriet Klausner

Mr. Englehart, one of my favorite comic book writers, created "Shang Chi, Master of Kung Fu". Shang Chi is a Chinese phrase meaning "Rising and Advancing of the Spirit". This is exemplary of Englehart's entire ouvre. All of his story arcs center on growth and change, of the spirit and capabilities of his characters.
"The Point Man" and "The Long Man" are very much in this tradition. They are, first and foremost, ripping good yarns. They are popular entertainments that are political and philosophical at their cores. They draw one in under the guise of giving one a thrill ride, but teach and provoke reflection. They make me want to do magic!

In the early 1980's, Vietnam vet and DJ, Max August became involved with the magician Cornelius Agrippa, discovered his own magical talents and was able to make himself "timeless", so that he no longer ages. However, Agrippa and Max's girlfriend Valerie were killed by the demon Aleksandra. In the present day, Max stays on the move to avoid Aleksandra while trying to find a way to bring Valerie back. He becomes involved with a doctor, Pam Blackwell who has been poisoned by a magical dart, which soon turns out to be one move in a much bigger conspiracy.

This book was OK, but definitely nothing special. Most of it just didn't work for me. The magic system just felt like a random collection of things from various mythologies that gets explained in a lot of long infodumps. The entire plot of the story hinges on the attempt to kill Pam with a slow-acting magical dart, instead of just having her killed with a more conventional and immediate method. The action was never compelling enough to interest me. I won't be looking for the other books in this series.

Few comic book writers successfully make the transition to novels. Conversely, few authors successfully make the transition to comic books. Like Mickey Spillaine, Englehart is a master of both mediums. (yes, it is true that Spillaine wrote for Marvel in the 1950's!)

The Long Man follows his initial offering, the Point Man. Tor has released both books in sequence and thusly establishing the adventures of Max August firmly. While Point Man was a good read, the Long Man puts Max into a conspiracy to control the world through neurotoxins at Hallowe'en. August and Dr Blackwell travel to the Barbados and with wit and magick, they encounter an evil that only the ultimate sacrifice may be only solution.

This is one super read (again). I love the fast paced, comic book cinematic touches that Englehart imbues his text with. This is no one series wonder and 10 years from now we will be reading Englehart with 12 August novels behind him...

WHile at Marvel Comics, Steve wrote Dr Strange, and August resonates with the same energy and synergy. Is a comic book series far behind?

Long live Max August!

I enjoyed The Long Man even more than I did The Point Man. A constant page turner that I was sad to finish. I look forward to the Plain Man and more adventures of Max August.

I never read Steve Englehart's first book, The Point Man, which was published in 1981. I would have been 9 years old. And I'm not Timeless. The Long Man is a follow-up to that book, and follows the continuing adventures of Max August, but just as 25 years have passed in our world, 25 years have passed in his. Because I wasn't familiar with the back story of the characters of Max, Agrippa, or the superstar singer Val, it did take some figuring out what was going on in the books first few pages. I wasn't sure if this was the sort of book that would keep my interest going or not, as Englehart kept changing the time from the current time and going back to 1985 as he filled in some of the gaps of what has happened to our main character in the intervening years between his first book and this one. His mentor has been killed by Aleksandra. Val has been to, though this doesn't stop him from spending the years in between trying to find her and bring her back on each October 31.

So, when in 2007, he feels a pull back to San Francisco, where he had his popular radio show back in the day, he thinks that it's his desire to reach Val that is bringing him back. That, however, is not what fate has in store for him when he receives a phone call from an old friend that results in a new adventure taking him from San Francisco to Barbados and to Suriname (that's in South America if you slept through your geography class) as he faces off against black magic, zombies, chupacabra, and the FRC. In tow is Dr. Pam Blackwell, a doctor who has come up with an antidote for puffer fish poison--an antidote that earns her some powerful enemies that don't want to see that antidote known about in their scheme for world domination. The Long Man is nonstop action from start to finish, presented in a fun and irrelevent manner, while at the same time putting it all into context of the way the world was in 2007 and the changes our world went through as a result of 9/11 and the need for change and hope in the 2008 Presidential election.

It's interesting that the FRC is chosen as the initials of the evil cartel that he comes up against, and how those same initials are used by these high-ranking and powerful individuals who run the world behind the scenes. One of the several examples of this presented by the author is the Federal Reserve Chair. Of course, FRC has a variety of different meanings, in all fields--politics, manufacturing, financial institutions, some of which you can find by searching Wikipedia and/or Google.

This is Steve Englehart's second book. He is more known for his work on writing for comic book series, "The Avengers," "Captain America," "The Fantastic Four," "Batman," and "Justice League of America."

I thoroughly enjoyed reading The Long Man. Will you? I would have you do what Max August says. Explore but verify.

To my mind Steve Englehart was the most interesting and exciting comic book writer of the 1970's. When I found out that he had stopped writing comic books to do a novel, I was a little disappointed. But when that novel, The Point Man, came out and I read it, I was pleased to find that he was an even better novelist than he had been a comic book writer. The Point Man was not, in any sense, a "comic book novel"; it was just a really good novel. That was in 1981.

But then he never wrote another actual adult novel until 2010's The Long Man.

Unfortunately, that book, which fares poorly when judged on its own merits, simply pales when compared to its predecessor.

Whereas The Point Man presented magic in a subtle and interesting way, which made one think that this is how magic might be if it actually existed in the real world, The Long Man is, well, Dr. Strange: bolts of energy shooting from people's hands, zombies (or, to use Englehart's somewhat affected spelling, "zombis"), and the like. Actually that's an unfair comparison. Englehart used to write Dr. Strange and it was much, much better written and more interesting than The Long Man is.

Now some might suspect that my love and appreciation for the previous book biased me against seeing the merits in this one. Not to mention the fact that I'm not 14 anymore! But I don't think so. With regard to the first point, due to my respect for Englehart and his work I tried ceaselessly to like this book, to find any redeeming qualities I could, but with very little success. And as to my age difference, all I can say is that I can dip into The Point Man today and it seems every bit as good to me now as it did way back in the early Reagan years.

I would hesitate to refer to the characters in The Long Man as being made of cardboard as cardboard has far too much three-dimensionality. Tissue paper might be a more accurate term. Rather than create actual personalities and convincing motives for the characters he instead gives them gimmicks. And Max August, the protagonist, becomes an absurd -- and insulting -- caricature of who he was in the first novel.

In that book Max was the student, striving to come to grips with a new world far beyond anything he had ever imagined. In this one he is the master, which makes for much less interesting reading, as for every challenge he has some implausible magical solution. And he doesn't let you forget that he is the master, using every break in the action to harangue his unfortunate new protégé Pamela Blackwell with yet another long-winded and tedious lecture on the magical arts and true nature of reality. Driving in a car? Lecture. Flying in a plane? Lecture. Riding in a boat? Lecture. I wouldn't mind all of the lectures if they were interesting -- I mean I like Atlas Shrugged! -- but they are not.

I quickly grew tired of Englehart's contrived and unconvincing "evil villains" and, for that matter, of Max's contrived and unconvincing allies, and of the silly games Englehart plays with the initials of the shadowy, villainous organization for which the villains work: Does "FRC" stand for "Free Range Coalition", "Federal Reserve Chairman", "Fraternitas Rosae Crucis", and do we really care?). There is a heavy-handed attempt at political commentary in a sub-plot about Guantanamo Bay and another subplot about Max's girlfriend Valerie Drake from The Point Man being reincarnated as the anagrammatical Eva Delia Kerr.

The farfetched main plot of the book revolves around the FRC's attempt to take over Suriname, the smallest country in South America, via a completely implausible and roundabout scheme involving sarin gas (a toxic nerve agent developed under the Nazi regime) and, of course, the ubiquitous zombies.

Interestingly, according to his website, in 1999 Englehart, under the "house name" of Cliff Garnett, wrote Hellstorm, in the TALON Force series of military action adventure books. The plot of that book involved a planned attack upon the West Coast using planes loaded with... sarin gas. Apparently he decided to recycle the research done for that book for use in The Long Man.

He also admits to having done other "behind-the-scene jobs," but "the deal is, I don't cop to having done them." (He only admits to Hellstorm because someone figured out he was the author.)

I wonder if some or all of those other books were in the same genre, because The Long Man reads exactly like a lowbrow military thriller, albeit with a heavy dose of magic very awkwardly thrown in.

It was a long time between the publication of The Point Man in 1981 and that of The Long Man in 2010. While Max August, having used his magic to conquer aging, may not have changed much during that period, Steve Englehart clearly has and, as far as his writing is concerned, not for the better.

It is unfortunate that Englehart decided to abandon writing his second novel in the early 80's to go and work on video games for Atari. I suspect that that would have been a novel well worth reading. This one, unfortunately, is not.