Damnation Alley

Hell Tanner, the last of the Hells Angels, gets a pardon from the Nation of California - if he takes plague vaccine from Los Angeles to Boston. To make it, though, he has to go through Damnation Alley -- what's left of America after a nuclear war. It's a land of giant critters, volcanoes, biker

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gangs, and storms that drop boulders out of the sky. Along the way, murdering, pimping, thieving Tanner decides he may just like to have a go at being a hero ...

This is a fast-paced, very enjoyable adventure story told in prose colorful in every sense of the word. Zelazny himself preferred the shorter novella version. He was right. The added bits about life in plague-ridden Boston don't add much and a poetic, impressionistic section on the source and circulation of the winds that plague the world breaks up the pacing and tone. And, needless to say, there's little in the way of plausible science. Still, those are minor blemishes, and the story is worth reading in either version.

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Damnation Alley contains some darn good writing much to my surprise. I've never read Mr. Zelazny before, he's one of those early science fiction writers who really cranked 'em out back in the day, but he never caught my interest until now. Turns out he can write a good piece of tough guy noir. Take

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this more-or-less random sample for example. Be warned, this passage contains a brilliant, but graphic sexual metaphor.

He was moving along a clean, hard, wide road, and just then he wanted to travel it forever--to Florida, of the swamps and Spanish moss and citrus groves and fine beaches and the Gulf; and up to the cold, rocky Cape, where everything is gray and brown and the waves break below the lighthouses and the salt burns in your nose and there are graveyards where bones have lain for centuries and you can still read the names they bore, chiseled there into the stones above them; down through the nation where they say the grass is blue; then follow the mighty Missus Hip to the place where she spreads and comes and there's the Gulf again, full of little islands where the old boosters stashed their loot; and through the shag-topped mountains he'd heard about: the Smokies, Ozarks, Poconos, Catskills; drive through the forest of Shenandoah; park, and take a boat out over Chesapeake Bay; see the big lakes and the place where the water falls, Niagara. To drive forever along the big road, to see everything, to eat the world.

I know the feeling. And this is not the writing I expected to find in a story like this one.

Mr. Zelazny's hero is a former biker, a devoted Hell's Angel, called Hell Tanner. He is pardoned from a life-term by the nation of California on the condition that he take the needed serum cross country to from L.A. to Boston in time to save the city from a plague outbreak. The country in between, ravaged by nuclear war, is now a wasteland full of deadly tornado like winds, mutant predatorary animals and small bands of humans just as dangerous and predatory as the animals are.

It's all very dime-store novel, think Road Warrior, but the book rises above its material much like The Wages of Fear, Henri-Georges Clouzot's movie about four down-on-their-luck drifters who take the job of hauling two truckloads of nitroglycerin through the mountains of Venezuela to help put out an oil well fire. It's a great movie that rises above it's premise and I think a very apt comparison to Damnation Alley.

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How can you not love a book about the last Hells' Angel forced into making a mission of mercy by making an extended road trip across a scarred and irradiated post-nuclear America?

It's brutal and a little dated at times, but if you're a sucker for the post-apocalyptic fiction genre you won't put it

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down.

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I consider myself a Zelazny fan, but this strikes me as one of his weaker efforts. I suppose it may have been groundbreaking in its day, but this is a story which has been told much more effectively since. The protagonist is unconvincing; the post-apocalyptic world is neither plausible nor

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particularly scary; the plotting is trite (most especially the Cornelia storyline). This feels like a made-to-order cheesy b-movie concept--try something else by Zelazny instead.

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After an apocalyptic war, one of the worst men does one of the best things for all the wrong reasons - mostly. Hell Tanner, the hero, is not a good man. He's strong, cunning & has just the right talents for the mission, but he's also a thief, murderer, rapist & convict. Only desperate circumstances

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force society give him a second chance & he leverages that for all its worth. Zelazny gives this anti-hero a heroic mission to perform. The book is action packed from start to finish, occasionally surprising, in a weird, ravaged version of our modern society. It's not my favorite work of his, but it is entertaining & much better than the movie based on the book. The movie starred Jan Michael Vincent & George Peppard back in the early 70's. It too was entertaining, but definitely grade B.

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Surprisingly good and action-packed. Complete with hi-tech cars, giant bugs, crazy biologists and more.

A somewhat ridiculous post apocalyptic science fiction story regarding main character Hell Tanner as he drives a vehicle across mutated former US to deliver medicine to a plague ridden Boston. The dialog is chock full of 60's slang, despite the plot taking place somewhere in the post nuclear war

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future. Lot's of "Don't be a square" and "Hey Baby, let's make it!" or "What's the scene?". Hell Tanner is the last member of a famous Hell's Angel gang. Memories of Kurt Russell in Escape from New York pop in my head. In fact, that series is probably heavily inspired by this book. Giant gila monsters, snakes, tornadoes, radiation, mutated butterflies, flocks of giant bats; all play threatening obstacles Hell must overcome. If only the Alaskan Iditarod was so exciting. Anyway, there is a film based on the book which is so so so bad. It's one ironic saving grace is that it features an early Vincent Van Michael (later to become the star of the TV show Airwolf) and the actor who played Hannibal on the 80's A-Team. Uncanny hilarity ensues. The only reason I gave this book two stars instead of three was its sheer entertainment value as an apocalyptic fiction fan. It's so bad it's good. Yes, I know, Zelazny went on to win a Hugo and a Nebula but this is just a silly book with such unrealistic post-apocalyptical "rules". For instance, very limited trade between settlements, yet everyone has fuel (even Mad Max world got that right). Ammo is spent like nobody's business. Where do bullets get made? Driving a car with inflated rubber tires over 3000 miles of no roads without getting a flat till the last 20 miles?! Please! Knit-picky you say? Perhaps, but I prefer verisimilitude over clichés.

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Good, solid, imaginative post apocalypse adventure novel, dealing with a trek in a souped up battle car across a apocalyptic landscape. There was a movie starring George Peppard which changed up many of the details, but kept the mass tornado scene and the killer roaches. But it's good, solid

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Zelanzy and served as one of the literary inspirations for Steven Jackson Games "Car Wars".

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Not to be confused with the horrifyingly bad Hollywood movie that was (barely) derived from Zelazny's novella, Damnation Alley is a wonderful, action-filled-yet-highly literate read.

This post-apocalyptic thriller begins with an America physically split in two by a dead zone of uncatalogued

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horrors, and the lead character - a convict with few redeeming qualities - attempts to drive the alley, bringing badly medicine to the east coast.

Zelazny's wonderfully spare style shines, and he whips up some interesting obstacles for our (anti) hero.

Another example of Zelazny's taut prose, and well worth the read.

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Bad-ass biker must cross a post-apocalyptic US in a heavy armored truck. Promising start... but disappointing result. A flat story with no remarkable features. The trip itself is schematic, talking about "big creatures" and "a destroyed city" but barely giving more. Not even insinuating it. The

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protagonist is cool at the beginning (in the style of Snake from the "Escape from New York" movie) but he hits the same note during the whole book.

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I've been a Zelazny fan for more than 45 years now, and Damnation Alley was one of the first ones I read, back in around 1970. This was my first revisit to it for about 25 years, and I wish I'd done it sooner, for it's far, far, more than just a post apocalyptic tale of a biker's attempt to drive

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an armored truck across America.

There's moments of revelation for Hell, our anti-hero, there's poetic, majestic, sweeps in the grand Zelazny style, there's the Zelazny trademark musings on the dichotomy of the dark and the light, and on top of all that, there's action aplenty, all packed tight into a small neat package that starts fast and never slows.

I love it all over again. And yes, I'm pretty sure Hell was a prototype for Snake Plissen, in style, attitude and swagger.

One of the great post apocalyptic novels, and highly recommended.

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This short SF novel from 1969 is set in a world ravaged by nuclear war, in which most of the United States has become a hellish wasteland ravaged by giant monsters and winds so high they can rip the tops off of mountains and drop them on your head. Boston, or what remains of it, is now also

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afflicted by a plague, so they sent a messenger to California, since it survived a a similar plague and is in possession of a treatment. He died on arrival, though. Now California is sending Hell Tanner, the lone survivor of the exterminated California biker gangs and an unrepentantly awful person, on the drive through Damnation Alley to deliver to cure.

All of which sounds incredibly pulpy, but it's elevated by Zelazny's writing, which, indeed, actually gets a little too overwroughly poetic in places. It's an engaging enough read, in any case. Definitely of its time, though: the dialog is very 1969, and the only significant female character is pretty terrible. Even so, it maybe still holds up better than some of its contemporaries.

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Story here is pretty straight-forward. Our protagonist needs to transport life saving drug from US West Coast to East Coast. He needs to be hard as nails and capable in order to cross the distance in shortest possible time using a heavily armored and armed vehicle. Reason for such a vehicle, you

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ask? Well time is (maybe unfortunately not so far) future, world after the thermonuclear war where almost everything is destroyed and glowing in the dark due to the weapons unleashed.

So, when you look at the premise, it does not sound much different than say Snake Plissken or Mad Max stories - it is story of a lone cowboy moving around and helping people in need. And you would be right if it weren't for the fact that our protagonist, Hell Tanner, is everything but a nice guy. Last gang banger, apparently from Hells Angels, lone survivor of the great Raid during which Angels were eliminated he is given an option - help East Coast by transporting the ever needed drug to them or end up and die in jail.

Of course, Hell accepts the mission, tries to evade the actual engagement (start of the novel is something that was copied in the Escape from New York) but eventually accepts the mission and starts the voyage.

Hell is very nasty piece of business, involved with biker gangs from early age and doing some very disturbing things - from murder to smuggling to human trafficking and exploitation. You name it he definitely did it. Clad in leather clothes and missing his biker equipment (much of it neo-Nazi WW2 SS equipment) he is something that would terrify today's PCs. He smokes, he drinks, he is ready to get into fight more on the instinctive level - to make sure everyone around him recognizes him as a killer.

His instinct and knowledge of the road and dangers ahead will greatly help him. But what will change him is the voyage itself.

And this is the thing - this is not just story of the voyage but how voyage changes the man, even someone as dangerous and criminally oriented as Hell. And for me this was unexpected and interesting part of the story. Hell, initially treating everyone else as tool, people he owns nothing to as he likes to say, starts to change as he comes across various people that try to save their humanity and what remains of their society. People ready to help, especially those they see as people able to link these now remote societies with each other and thus enable them to trade, cooperate and try to find the way out of the disaster they found themselves in. This voyage across the Damnation Alley (route through the central US) will change Hell to a degree he did not expect himself. And Hell's internal change follows the actual changes in the environment as he approaches the destination, where he will encounter the greatest challenge on the road, huge nomad biker gangs.

While ending is what one might expect from rough rider, although he attempts to downplay his role, Hell is definitely not the same person from the beginning of the story.

Very interesting, fast paced story. Release I read has no chapters story is split across paragraphs following Hell and those showing devastation caused by plague on the US East Coast. Even without chapter structure story was pretty well paced and kept my attention to the end (I have to admit I thought it would be more disconcerting considering that there are no logical divisions of the story - I was wrong, it worked like a charm here).

Highly recommended to fans of action and adventure, especially fans of SF dystopia like Mad Max and adventures of Snake Plissken, with bigger than life armored vehicles and bikes that pack quite a few surprises.

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