Customer Reviews

Warrior Wolf Women of the Wasteland

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Carlton Mellick III's longest novel in about ten years, The Warrior Wolf Women of the Wasteland is also one of Mellick's best. It features a diverse cast of characters, my favorites being Mayor McCheese, a samurai Hamburglar, Daniel Togg (the four-armed protagonist), and a complex society of wolf women who live by their own warrior code in the wasteland beyond the Blessed McDonaldland City. There are even forty-five illustrations of the characters interspersed throughout the book.

Despite all the crazy action, it's actually the characters and their relationships that made the book so compelling and fun to read. Daniel Togg is one of Mellick's most fully realized protagonists. Whether he's caught in an awkward social situation with his brother Guy (a Fry Guy, McDonaldland's equivalent of policemen) and Guy's spiteful half-wolf wife, giving instructions on making alcohol out of various McDonald's products, or caught in a power play of love between two wolf women, the reader feels right there with Daniel Togg. He's the perfect guide through this strange and unforgettable world.

Highly recommended for fans of bizarro fiction and also those just reading Mellick for the first time.

mellick is an adept voice for the new counterculture. i'm becoming a fan! i was a bit hesitant with this book...i'm usually not big on post-apocalyptic fiction because it's reaching the 'been-there-done-that' stage in fiction. but mellick treats the subject with just the right sense of humor. he tells a good 'alternative werewolf' tale with a certain serious, respectable story, but still injects humor about the world in which we live. it's filled with war, violence, carnage, biker wolf babes, sex and love...all the things that make life worth living. it's about the only book i can name that is written in the first person by a character who spends an entire chapter inside a wolf's stomach (after being eaten), that is still an easy book to digest. mellick can tell a serious tale...yet he has a good sense of humor about our so-called civilization. mellick is intelligent, at times irreverent...sometimes pleasant...sometimes sick and gruesome. i wasn't sure how i was going to like this book, but i was really impressed. i like sick and gross as long as it is well-written, and mellick can deliver the goods. i'm becoming a mellick fan. if you like stories that are filled with war, violence, women who turn into wolves, carnage, sex and love...(and did i mention women who turn into wolves?)...then wolf this baby down. you'll be glad you did.

Carlton Mellick has made his writing career as one of the pillars of the bizarro community. To some, he's already a legend. But with his newest book, it's easy to see that Mellick is still evolving as a storyteller. It seems he's no longer content to put on a weird spectacle, so he's pushing himself into new territories. Warrior Wolf Women is one of his longest books, and strangely enough, it's not very genre-heavy. The post-apocalyptic "Road Warrior" theme isn't so prevalent in Warrior Wolf Women. This isn't a simple adventure of barbarism in a blighted future. In fact, almost half of the story takes place in McDonaldland, a mega-city walled off from the wastelands (similar to the world of Judge Dredd). The landscape of McDonaldland could've been its own book, but Mellick has different intentions for this story.

The main character, Daniel Togg, is exiled from the city to (presumably) die in the apocalyptic wild. Like I said earlier, what unfolds isn't your typical post-apocalyptic story. Warrior Wolf Women becomes a tale of a fierce battle of the sexes. In this world, women slowly evolve into gigantic wolves while the men tend to sprout extra limbs. Both are considered freaks in civilized society, and are thrown out of the city and into the wild. In the wastelands, the Wolf Women enslave the men, and the men have rallied to defend themselves. The two factions are at war with one another, and Mellick uses this setting to tell a romance between Daniel Togg and his childhood friend, November. The two are separated by the weird gender roles society has thrust upon them. They are trapped in a cycle, as the women kill the men to survive, and vice versa.

Some characters manage to break out of the prescribed roles of this world. The characters of Krall and Slayer seem to have some sort of loving relationship, founded on the fact that they aren't your typical man or woman. They're society's exceptions to the rules, the ones who fall through the cracks. Because of this, they manage to create a real relationship when everyone else seems totally trapped by society's gender roles. And as Mellick peels back the layers of this social structure, we see just how weird and depraved this gender separation can be. When Daniel discovers the secret schemes of the war between male and female, it's absolutely stomach-churning.

Warrior Wolf Women of the Wasteland is a pretty good tale, and it might go down as one of Mellick's most thoughtful bizarro books. It was exciting, strange, violent, and sexual, but don't expect a simple action story in the vein of "Mad Max." There are plenty of crazy battles, but these scenes only serve a greater theme in the story. Despite the grittiness, this story has a lot of heart. Besides the theme of abusive gender roles, I thought Warrior Wolf Women was similar to "The Island of Dr. Moreau," a meditation on the animalism of humanity and the sort of atrocities we commit against one another. There's a lot going on for this book, and strangely enough, I haven't really spoiled anything for you. Make sure you read this one.

Warrior Wolf Women of the Wasteland

Carlton Mellick

Just looking at the title of this book makes me want to read it, then when you add in the fantastic cover art it makes you very curious about how Carlton is going to pull this off with his usual style and vulgar hyper-violence. Well after reading this book you will have no doubts about his ability to do so.

This is one of those books where you look at it and you think all right I already know what is going to happen just looking at it.

You are wrong.

This book was in fact about a post-apoc world where McDonalds has taken over and everyone in the huge city of McDonaldLand works for them. That was odd enough right off the bat for you to seriously wonder how this was going to tie into the Warrior Wolf Women in question... trust me it does.

Very much so.

Daniel Togg, has a problem he works at McDonalds like everyone else but he has mutated, which is frowned upon to say the least. He is the main character of our story and he is truly well intentioned and honestly does what he believes, not what he believes others want him to do. Which if you are honest with yourself not alot of people can brag about at all.

Daniel has an older brother, Guy... Guy is a Fry Guy, the police of McDonaldland, he is also a complete dick. Well at first anyhow. He grows a bit as the story goes along and he realizes that his utterly black and white world is truly filled with the grey mists of obscurity and after a while he turns it around a tiny bit and almost redeems himself. At first however you truly wonder how long Carlton is going to let him live and you make bets with yourself as the book moves along about when he is going to die.

I liked this character very much, every book needs someone who you at first feel strongly opposed to but whom after a bit you grow to understand a bit better and realize he is honestly just a victim of his environment and of his own ego and isnt what he seemed at all.

Krall however is almost exactly what he seems, he is an agent for the research dept of McDonaldland and he has stumbled across the embarrassing truths that McDonalds doesnt want people to know about. So when his mutations are discovered he is booted out into the wasteland. This guy is a very cool character and his arc is odd to say the least. I did not expect a guy like this after alot of the other things that had happened leading up to this part but this just once more proves the old fact that you can try to guess where a story is going to go but with Carlton Mellick, you will be wrong.

I was wrong.

This character ended up so much different than I thought at first and I am very glad that he was in there because he explained a few things that I was wondering about as we went along as well.

Ah, Pippi...

One of the most selfish, vain, stupid, bigoted, awful people you will likely ever read about. Honestly from about ten seconds after we first meet this girl I wondered when she was going to die. I hoped she would die soon. But... she kept on living... I wanted her to die eventually so much that I got mad at her continued survival. In my mind you see she was clearly painted with the too-over-the-top-to-live brush... and yet she persistently kept on not dying. Also once more in the end you begin to understand that she isn't as over the top as you thought and you begin to understand that you were simply not thinking big enough, she is so much worse than you ever thought and yet finally at the very end you find out that without her this book would never ever have worked. Seriously I really liked this character, well at first I loved to hate her but right at the end she pulls off something that I would never have accepted until then that made me like her just enough for me to not be eternally pissed that she didnt die any of the 175,000 times I wished her dead throughout this book.

Then there is Nova. Nova is very misunderstood right from the beginning and you truly hope a few things will work out with her but Carlton sticks to his guns on this one and you eventually realize that he was right she has to be this way for this story to work. She is at first the love interest that Daniel has been pining for since he was a young man. However like most things in life it doesn't work out quite the way our hero thinks or even hopes it will. In the end I am sure that like me you will appreciate where he takes this character but there is a little bit in there where you wonder how this woman can be so cruel and distant yet have obvious regrets about it herself.

This book was an adventure and a very well wrought story it truly makes me want to sit down and write a huge story based on this world that popped into my head while reading it but sadly I don't know Carlton well enough to ever get the balls up to ask him. However someday I do hope to meet him so I can simply shake his hand and thank him for his many wonderful books and most especially this one.

Thank you Carlton, I loved it.

T. Patrick Rooney, Author of Bakemono...

[...]

Carlton Mellick III has a talent for making the unbelievable seem real; throughout each of his novels/novellas, I really feel as if I'm a part in the story, that the story is completely plausible no matter how ridiculous it is. When I get to reading one of his books, it's as if everything that I know can't happen is thrown out the window, and my reality is replaced with a different one; a crazier one, but infinitely more interesting than the one I currently have. After each book of his I read, I sit down for an hour or so to let some of its nonsensical parts sink in, and then daydream about what life would really be like if we were put in the kind of situations that Carlton Mellick III puts us in. And then, for a while, the stuff doesn't really seem that farfetched. He's got a talent for writing that I wish I could emulate.

Onto the actual book though, I have to say I was pleasantly surprised. I'm used to reading CM3 titles that are around 90 - 100 pages long, and I didn't know what a long Mellick book would read like. I really like his novellas because I can sit down and read them within the course of an hour or so, without losing any of the material by trying to skim over stuff or read too fast. It's almost like watching a movie, and I can appreciate a book like that. They appeal to the rush of today's age. But, after sitting down and picking up Warrior Wolf Women of the Wasteland, I can honestly say that I couldn't put the book down after starting into it. I read through the entire time in four or five hours, and it was intense. It seemed to have just the right mix of plot and shock for me; it had three or four sex scenes, a good amount of gore, a good theme and plot, a storyline that kept me guessing, and the Hamburgler. What more can I ask for?

As far as making a comparison to his other books, I'd say that Warrior Wolf Women of the Wasteland reminds me most of The Kobold Wizard's D--do of Enlightenment +2, the first CM3 book I read. It has a comparable gore/sex quotient, and has a lesson to teach if you read hard enough. That's what I like about Bizarro books - they always manage to slip in some intricacy of life, some truth that's applicable to your life, but they don't spend four hundred pages yammering about boring crap like Ayn Rand or some other novelists I can think of. They really prove that you don't have to be boring to spread your message.

I really can't wait for Barbarian Beast B--ches of the Badlands to come out; Mellick seems to do good with the post apocalyptic werewolf idea, and I think it'll be just as good as the original.

Warrior Wolf Women of the Wasteland is a slight departure from Mellicks other works and is more reminiscent of his early novels Satan Burger and Punkland. The book is much longer then his other recent novel. This allows for Mellick to create a world, explore life in this world and tell a story that only be described as an epic. He states in the forward how he was completely immersed in the post apocalyptic wasteland and it comes through full heart fully. The world is place where the readers will want to be, with characters they want to meet, and trials they want to experience. This is one of Mellick's best works.

I've only read three other books by Carlton Mellick III, but I've found WARRIOR WOLF WOMEN OF THE WASTELAND to be by far the best.

What's so good about it?

I love, Loved, LOVED the world-building! Mellick just about always excels at painting weird worlds, but I don't think I've ever found one as convincingly weird as his parody of a post-apocalypic, fortress-like McDonaldland. There's room for LOTS of social commentary,and I think I enjoyed this aspect of this book, too.

I also found the characters engaging. Expelled mutant Daniel Togg and his former girlfriend (now Wolf Woman) Nova are ideal (if star-crossed) lovers. Their interactions make up the emotional core of this book. This book is the antidote for anyone who thinks Bizarro is merely "weird for weird's sake"...there's a lot of emotional ups and downs in this one.

The only problem I found with the book were some lengthy action sequences that just weren't "my thing". But, for the most part, they were necessary for the action of the book, as McDonaldland and its surrounding Wasteland are violent environs, not for the faint of heart.

So -- to sum it up -- this book is HIGHLY RECOMMENDED. It will save your soul.

Daniel Togg led a fairly placid life within McDonaldland, working for The Blessed McDonald's Corporation like everyone else that's left in this post-post apocalyptic world. Togg's doing okay, working his mindless gig, making illegal fire-water out of ketchup packets, until he discovers he is one of the many men-folk who seems to be mutating extra limbs. The females of McDonaldland are gradually turning into wolves, becoming more wolf-like as the women become sexually active. Unfortunately for both groups, the mutations of the men and the sexuality of the women are seen as a threat to the stability and purity of McDonaldland. So, out into the harsh and unforgiving environs of the Wasteland, they go.

Besides trying to avoid all of the apartment building sized alpha wolves, the mutated men (outlanders) and the hyper-violent women (wolf warriors) spend their time trying to survive by hitting the McDonald's supply runs and fighting amongst themselves. Until the day comes when all three groups come together for a Wasteland armegeddon and all the wonderfully written bloody visceral violence. Warrior Wolf Women of the Wasteland is CM3's longest book since Satan Burger and arguably one of his best. I enjoyed the hell out of it!

CM3 is one of the founding members and current stalwart of the Bizarro genre uprising (uprising sounds much cooler than movement, don't ya think?). CM3 is a very prolific writer with 26 books under his belt in less than a decade, and holds great relevence to the Bizarro genre and scene as a whole. And he is a very gracious, nice guy. Meeting his Royal Chop-ness in person can be quite intimidating. He's a big dude. CM3 seems as if he could and would crush your skull with one of his huge mitts with no more effort than it would be for him to squash an aluminum pop can. He's quiet, too. I don't know how someone that displaces so much air can ninja his way so quietly, but he does. Coupled with his darkly garbed uniform, CM3 would make a more than passable James Bond-type villian. But he's not. CM3 is just a writer. One of the best on the planet.

Thank Gods.

After having read four of his novels (and ordered three more), I am a CM3 fan. And this book contains many of the characteristics that make me a CM3 fan. This novel takes familiar aspects of contemporary culture -- Christian conservatism, Islamic fundamentalism, radical feminism, fast-food culture, corporatist libertarianism -- and places them in an unfamiliar setting that encourages us readers to reevaluate our beliefs. Great.

However, this novel is not up to par with the other CM3 works I've read. More than even Sausagey Santa, this story gets bogged down in clumsy, confusing, and even anti-climactic depictions of action. Bear in mind, I enjoy good action sequences. Yet with this novel, I often found myself reduced to watching movement for movement's sake. I frequently struggled to remember which characters were whom and why I should care that they died.

If you're a CM3 fan and don't care that this book drags a lot, go for it. If you're new to CM3, try a different work. I'm starting to believe that CM3 works best in the shorter literary forms than in full-length novels.

Warrior Wolf Women of the Wasteland is a fantastic novel from bizarro author Carlton Mellick III. In a world decimated by bombs put off by religious activists, comes a time when McDonalds is the supreme superpower of the once United States. Everyone works for them, eats their food, and lives off property that they own. But when their food starts causing deformities in the men that live within the walled city, they banish them to the outside where wolf women have been banished to. The walled city does not allow anyone to have sexual forays, but when some women do, they start having wolf characteristics appear, and they are banished as well. Outside the walls, groups are made, the Wolf Women take the banished men as 'Meat' to eat and treat as slaves, and also there are a group of male warriors as well, all wanting to fight back against McDonaldland for what they have done. So much more is covered in the book, but this description hits the surface just a little bit. A great novel, and if you like this, don't forget to pick up the followup of three shortish stories, called Barbarian Beast Bitches of the Badlands.