17. The Black Roads by J.L. Hensley
… when you get to queue up some Mad Max memes for a review.
Today we’re gonna be taking a look at Blackrooms.
Sorry, The Back Roads.
Argh! Sorry. Look, it’s been a phonetically-challenging week. I just watched Backrooms with my girlfriend L. and now my tongue is in knots.
Get your minds outta the gutters, you filthy animals.
Would You Like to Know More?
What a breath of fresh air this film was!
As YouTubers break into the motion picture business, we’ve begun to see an energy, passion, and skill level absent from Hollywood films for over a decade. The phenomenon, started with Markiplier‘s Iron Lung, and now reaching a fever pitch with Backrooms and Obsession, is finally showing Hollywood that the revitalization of the stagnant cinema industry lies not with tired old directors succumbing to their own egos, but with wide-eyed youth belonging to the internet generation.
Don’t believe me? Then look at the numbers. All these films, made on what Hollywood would consider a shoestring budget, made back twelve to three-hundred-and-eighty-two times their budget:
Backrooms
Budget: $10 million
Box Office: $262 million (at time of writing)
Obsession
Budget: $750,000
Box Office: $287 million (at time of writing)
Let’s try this again.
This week on the Laser Books, we’re going to be taking a look at The Black Roads by J.L. Hensley.
Joe Hensley is quite an interesting character. According to his Goodreads bio:
Joseph Louis “Joe L.” Hensley (March 19, 1926 – August 27, 2007) was a lawyer, prosecuting attorney, member of the Indiana General Assembly, circuit court judge, science fiction fan, and writer of science fiction and mysteries. He was a long-time resident of Madison, Indiana and died there of complications of leukemia.
Upon further investigation, it turns out Hensley actually spent most of his life in legal circles, primarily as a judge in various courts. This is a fascinating background for an author of fantasy and science fiction to have. Crime and punishment is such a specific–and revealing–lens through which to view society, because codes of conduct and methods of justice tell you what a society holds sacred.
So, I’m eager to see what Joe’s take on a dystopian America in The Black Roads is.
But first… the court recognizes the Hon. Kelly Freas.
Cover
Gyatt damn, Kelly! This might be a contender for my favourite cover thus far. The colour and composition… wow!
Okay, let’s break it down.
Right away, the big fireball in the centre is where the eye goes first. If I had to guess, this is from one of the early scenes in the book where Jackman (the man in the portrait) sends a youth in an elecar spinning out into a fiery wreck. Kelly has drawn this thing like a meteorite streaking to earth, and the way he’s sculpted those… towers? antennae? pylons? … around the trailing flames is such an imaginative stroke.
Jackman is drawn with some incredible detail as well. The subtle sheen on the gold trim of his hat, the manic light in his eyes, the sneer. You know right away this guy ain’t the hero of the story.
By far the best aspect of this cover is the use of colour. Aside from Jackman’s portrait and the title, there’s no primaries; every shade is a drab, muted version of its base colour. Reds become maroon, greens and blues become teal. It makes my brain draw comparisons to mould sprouting on food, or flesh inflamed with blood poisoning.
This is a world that’s well past its Sell-By date.
Once again, Kelly is doing the heavy lifting, but lets see what Marketing Guy has going on.
Blurb
Sam Church is a trained killer, a member of the infamous Red Roadmen organization. In the bizarre world of this future America, the Roadmen’s word is law; to incur their displeasure is death. But Sam Church refuses to kill and is imprisoned and tortured by his peers for his nonconformity. He escapes and, in a terrifying race across the continent, clashes with the Roadmen in a running duel that can only end in death – his own or that of the system of tyranny that reigns on The Black Roads.
You know what? I’m on board. This is pretty slick copy from a guy who normally couldn’t sell a two-cent pencil topper. It’s simple, to-the-point, and teases the thrills to come.
I can’t even make fun of it! The dude actually did his job well! I’d be intrigued, even tempted to buy it.
Detour En-Route
Pump the breaks, everybody… my brain is wrinkling.
Something’s been bugging me for the last hour. Little neurons are firing, connections are being made.
Road warriors…
Duels on the highway…
Hensley…
There’s something… something there… but what? What doth my cognition reacheth for…?
Oh! I’ve got it! This is like the plot of Harlan Ellison‘s short story, “Along the Scenic Route”, from the collection The Beast that Shouted Love at the Heart of the World!
For those who haven’t read it, this story is a laugh-out-loud tale of futuristic road rage with a single, scathing message: those who live by the sword, die by the sword. It tells the tale of George and his wife, Jessica, a couple in a distant future of superfast armed cars trying to take a trip across the blacktop of America. They run afoul of a road-duelist who clips their car, and rather than let it go, George engages in battle with the bastard, despite his wife’s imprecations to just keep driving.
By sheer dumb luck, George pastes the twerp, which marks him as the deadliest road warrior in America–a fact which is instantly made public and broadcast across the country, putting a target on George’s back for every other road warrior out there. He realizes he’s gonna have to fight them all, and never stop fighting. He got lucky once; can he get lucky a thousand more times?
I first read the story in this collection. If you want a wide sample of Harlan’s work, pick up one of his Edgeworks series, published by White Wolf. Originally, there were supposed to be 30 volumes containing every piece of writing Harlan ever put out, but only four were released. Of those four, I recommend the first and the third. They combine some of his best fiction and non-fiction.
These books are hard to find: I’ve only seen one in the wild, and that’s the one above. It was on sale at The Scribe Bookstore on the Danforth in Toronto. My copies of the Edgeworks were purchased through Thriftbooks.
And I think somebody made a mistake because the copy of the above title that I eventually received… is signed.
I shit you not, that is Harlan Ellison’s signature. I checked.
I bought this for $26 CAD, plus $20 shipping. There was no note on the listing, no indication that this was a special, signed copy. I just bought a copy of the book, and it sat on my shelf for four months before I opened it.
And when I did, Harlan’s signature was staring at me.
Signed copies of the Edgeworks sell for anywhere from $250 to $400. This is as unlikely as picking up and cashing in a winning lottery ticket. Whoever made this mistake and sent me this book… thanks!
And now I gotta bring this digression full circle.
There’s another book in the Edgeworks, the Spider Kiss/Stalking the Nightmare combo. The latter of those two is a collection of short stories.
And in that collection is a story called “Visionary”.
And the by-line of that story: “written with Joe L. Hensley”.
Mind. Blown.
This–this!–is the joy of reading. You discover connections you didn’t even know existed. The world is tied together in the subtlest ways, and feeling part of that web is the whole reason I love books.
I’ve hijacked this post-apocalyptic armada long enough. Let’s get to the story of The Black Roads.
Story
“MEDIOCRE!”
— Immortan Joe, Mad Max: Fury Road
Would You Like to Know More?
Let’s have a moment of silence for the loss of Hugh Keays-Byrne, a truly underrated actor.
While most audiences will know him as the massive and terrifying Immortan Joe in Fury Road, or Toecutter in the original Mad Max, my personal favourite role of his is a brief guest spot on Farscape as the greedy, greasy, gluttonous Grunchlk (pronounced “grun-shlick”).
His appearance on the show was brief, but so memorable and popular that his character was brought back from the dead to appear in Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars.
Immortal indeed.
We’ve had a few let-downs over the course of the Laser Books, but this one really stings. I can so clearly see what this book was trying to be, and even hamstrung by the length of the Laser Books, I think it could’ve worked! It just needed to be bolder.
The story is told without chapter breaks, much like Stephen King‘s Cujo. Reading it feels like taking a drive down one long stretch of barren highway. It kicks off remarkably strong: a Mad Max-style chronology of events talks about the outbreak of WWIII and the collapse of modern America, and how the new government created the Red Roadmen to patrol the highways. This is followed by Sam and Doc evading patrols as they break free of prison.
We’ve seen such lawbringers before, in incarnations like Judge Dredd and the Spectres of Mass Effect: men who are judge, jury, and executioner rolled into one. There’s an almost ritual air to the Red Roadmen: they don red felt caps when they prepare to kill, and observe certain customs around obtaining the right to kill their targets.
These kinds of characters are fascinating to read about because, while they are the justice-bringers of a nation, that justice is shaped by the particular sensibilities of the one wearing the mantle: some prefer a more rigid code, others will find any excuse to skin their smoke wagons and waste some fools.
Jackman is of the latter variety.
A Tale of Two Roadmen
The setup for this story is a classic: two men–partners on “the force”–suddenly find themselves at cross-purposes when one of them has a break with “the code” and decides to challenge the reigning authority. This rankles his partner, who sets out on a mission of vengeance.
When these stories are told well, you have such classic rivalries as Benjamin Sisko and Michael Eddington.
Or Professor X and Magneto.
But in order for the story to work, these rivals have to clash regularly and often. Their worldviews have to slam together with the power of tectonic plates, and we have to see where each man is right, and more importantly, wrong.
Sam and Jackman are perfect mirrors of each other.
- Sam is young; Jackman is old
- Sam has forsworn killing; Jackman revels in it
- Sam has abandoned the System; Jackman clings to it
- Sam voluntarily betrays his codes of belief; Jackman is forced to do it
Jackman in particular is a fun character. He’s an old man in a profession where men do not grow old; that immediately marks him as dangerous. He’s very near retirement age, and he dreads it. He’s so accustomed to holding the power of life and death that, rather than surrender it, he turns upon the very system that made him, killing his own kind, making himself an enemy and choosing the life of a fugitive simply so he has the chance to drive free down the roadways until the clock runs out.
Jackman is the most entertaining kind of villain: the one who loves his work.
So it’s a disappointment, then, when he’s only in the book for about four or five scenes–and he spends only one of those with Sam.
This really pisses me off. Joe Hensley had the makings of a fantastic dual character study, and he squanders it on the same tame bullshit the bulk of the Laser Books is known for. You’d think with his background in law, Joe would take advantage of the opportunity to dissect the concepts of crime and punishment in a seemingly lawless world.
Other discomforts:
- There’s some kind of weird telepathic oracle
- There’s a lack of description of the kinds of communities that exist in the wasteland
- Sam spends an uncomfortable amount of time alone in a cabin shooting “black cannibal tribefolk” who come too close to his hideaway
Conclusions and Recommendations
To make this book truly historic, only a few changes are needed:
- Sam and Jackman need to clash. Repeatedly
- We need an equal share of screen time between Sam and Jackman
- We need these characters to have their morality tested over and over, particularly Sam’s–his vow of non-violence in a world lost to violence is a compelling story beat
- We need more than one roadrage battle scene; Hensley set up this thrilling concept of armed and armoured cars racing down killer highways, and the characters spend 70% of the book walking. There’s only one battle by road in the book.
- We need a proper climax; as it stands, there isn’t one
My Goodreads Review
Don’t bother firing up the Gigahorse and pounding on the Doofwagon for this road chase. What could have been a proto-Mad Max instead feels kind of flat and lifeless. There’s the spark of greatness in this novel, and the promise of a great character clash, but overall the story falls prey to the same tired issues the other mediocre Laser Books do: tired tropes and prescribed writing formulae.
As Harlan Ellison said, you can learn more from a bad film than a good one. The same is true for books. The Black Roads helped me to articulate some storytelling lessons that I can take with me into my own work, which I’m quite excited for. So, I’m glad I read this, but hopefully the next book truly does grab the sun and ride into Valhalla, shiny and chrome.
Who’s Next?
Ooh! Pretty! Blurb me, baby.
Blurb
Sam Williams is a fighter, but fate has dealt him a bad hand. Marooned on the bleak world of Arthe because of a computer error, he joins the local police force… and is soon fighting for his life. The enemy? The drug that drives men mad, the dreaded Tonocaine! In a harrowing, action-packed adventure, Williams whirls across the strange, forbidding planet as he trails a madman who is using the drug to satisfy his own lust for power. But the madman is chasing him, too!
Two protagonists, one after the other, both named Sam. Do I need to start keeping a tally? I’ll see you guys for the next review…
… huh…
… I feel like I’m forgetting something…
Ah! Yes.
