It has been a long 2 (and some change) weeks. Illness, new meds, social upheaval, plans… I would go into more detail but I understand that you don’t really care. My reader base consists of 12 people and a disinterested goat breaking up the monotony of it’s day by mastering the technology of the psychotics apes around it. All you care about is what I think about whatever I am reading and by that I mean you don’t care about my thoughts so much as the entertainment that my pain and rage can bring you. Fair enough. Schadenfreude is a concept I can get behind.
So what Sword of Damocles has been hanging over my head waiting for me to return from my unintended vacation? John Fucking Ringo. The third novella of Ghost – On the Dark Side. Fuck me fucking sideways. A third excursion into the adventures of the star spangled all American Rapist Rambo. If you want know the basis of the series see Fuck You, John Ringo! Parts 1 & 2.
And some of you may wonder why I just spend so much time cussing, insulting, and venting spleen here rather than giving intellectual dissection of the material. The answer is simple. These works are anti-thought. They react violently with any form of intelligence or decency. It is a mix of stereotypes, misogyny, and the fantasies NRA members have when they huff paint thinner. The best it deserves is mockery. Reviewing this is the Catholicism of reviewing. Just joylessness and guilt for having bought this with the vain hope of someday being rewarded for my suffering.
Sigh. Fuck it. Let’s do this. As per last time this will be a live chapter by chapter reaction. Uncensored and unfiltered. I want you to choke on my rage.
Chapter 1 – Return of Rapist Rambo
Nothing like starting a book with the main character buying the services of an underage hooker! Fuck me fucking sideways. Can’t I at least get a couple chapter warm up of the ins and outs of boating? Maybe some implausible and probably racist action against Arabs?
Oh and apparently all Eastern European women are gorgeous! Sincerely the weirdly backhanded racist stereotypes are a curveball. Do people actually believe this shit?
Whores acting as salespeople for nuclear weapons in Russia? Seems legit. And why our whoremongering frustrated Rapist Rambo? Because he’s moves like a panther and everyone can tell. That’s how I always picked my customers when they were in sales. By what kind of animal they moved like. I’ve suffered delusions that are more realistic than this.
Oh and the nuke? The guys selling it just found it and – despite knowing it was a real nuke – got conned into selling it for basically nothing.
It seems the US military can just operate freely in Russia as long as they inform Putin. Even with his hand up the President’s ass like the world’s most ignorant puppet that shit ain’t happening. Russia doesn’t need the crack team of 6 active soldiers and one retired bdsm enthusiast with a rape fetish to handle someone stealing from them.
Apparently Russia – the fucking dictatorship known for killing journalists and political dissidents – is very forgiving of their soldiers stealing and selling nukes. Huh. Wouldn’t have guessed that but I only say that because I’m not a fucking idiot.
Chapter 2 – Implausibly Inane Plot Set Up
Let’s keep track of the bullshit in this port-a-potty of a chapter.
- Mike throws his wealth around *wank*.
- The army has an impossible amount of information about a terrorist that’s never been caught. Seriously how do they know his sexual preferences and why does the reader need to know this? I have a terrible premonition about Harmon using a prostitute to get at the guy. I hope I’m wrong.
- Oh a sex slave market will figure prominently? Of course it will. John Ringo’s mind is a cesspool.
- Ooo… a detailed account of Mike Harmon’s luggage. What a fucking thrill ride this is.
- Englishmen only talk in outdated British because of course they fucking do. Ringo has never met a nationality he can’t stereotype into absurdity.
- American soldiers are providing security for the slavers selling the girls but it’s not a strike against them. They don’t like it. Fucking hell. I have never hated an author as much as I hate John Ringo. You can feel this misogynistic filth oozing from the page. I would feel less dirty working my way through college by performing in donkey shows in Tiajuana.
Chapter 3 – I’m Not Dunk Enough For This Shit
Nothing says action thriller quite like a detailed description of a hotel room. Rollercoaster of action and suspense here.
Oh gross accounting of how their inside man on the sex trade gives sex trade tours to senators and how they nearly came in their pants. That’s pleasant. I would rather slam my dick in a sliding glass door than read another fucking word of this.
Pointless history lesson about the drug trade in America that has fuck all to do with the plot. Al;so not correct. Pretty sure Ringo has not a fucking clue what he is talking about here.
Did I mention that they are literally walking around the town hoping to find the van with the nuke in it without even knowing (though of course it will be because fuck logic and probability) that the nuke is in the town?
More posturing about Mike being a “big dog” that even murderous Chechen slavers are afraid of by his very bearing. So much macho posturing bullshit. Compensation in literary form. This book is Ringo’s long way of telling the world about his micro-penis.
More of Harmon’s never ending set of skills. He is an expert lockpick! So let’s see about his list of skills so far. Quiet as a mouse fart in a hurricane, able to shoot with superhuman accuracy, in better shape than active military men despite leaving the military on disability, knows everything about every foreign group America could conceivably come up against, can shrug off bullet fire like it’s a mosquito bite, can survive a nuclear fuck explosion across open water without suffering bone cancer, can pick locks with the best of cat burglars, is an amazing fuck, can talk any woman into bed despite being described as looking like hammered shit, has magical regenerative powers as his “disabilities” are mentioned less and less with every passing story, and is stupid lucky on top of all that. Oh and he has an encyclopedic knowledge of the world as told exclusively through stereotypes. The level of wish fulfillment on display here is mind numbing. The fact that his agent didn’t beat him unconscious with the congealed dog shit that is this book amazes me in all the most depressing and angering of ways.
Random jump to a foreigner (almost certainly a terrorist) point of view for reasons that I can only imagine will serve to showcase how “badass” Mike Harmon is – as if the entire rest of the fucking books haven’t been everyone and their fucking mothers (literally) gushing (also disgustingly literally) about how star spangled fucking awesome he is!
Oh look a 9/11 reference complete with the terrorist talking about how fucking happy it makes him and how much he loves to watch the videos of the towers falling. Pandering to the lowest common denominator here. Why not just have the terrorist set a tie a flag to a puppy, set both of them on fire, and then piss the fire out? It would be just as subtle.
I was incorrect. This terrorist POV was simply to get you all riled up at how evil the terrorists are and how much the hate the Great Satan. The second terrorist POV is to show to how star spangled badass Mike is.
Did a professional author really right this? This isn’t just the deluded fanfic of a right wing nutjob locked in a trailer high on meth who hasn’t slept in 3 days while beating off over military recruitment ads?
Backstory on random terrorist B who will no doubt be dead in 6 seconds because none of the terrorists are competent and one silenced pistol is better than 5 AKs. Remember that these books are praised for military realism. Let that shit sink in.
Backstory on random terrorist C! Is there a point to this? I mean… other than interrupting the flow of a firefight for pointless infodumps?
Random terrorist c is dead so it’s time for the backstory of RT D! 4 year olds with GI Joes make better fight scenes than this bullshit.
RT D is dead so it must be time for the backstory of Random Terrorist E!
And all dead! Pages and pages of backstory for no reason other than to raise my blood pressure 20 points while Ringo flaunts every rule of writing action and common sense.
Chapter 4 – The Humor is Gone
Just so we don’t forget how much of a piece of shit Mike Harmon is all he can think of after killing the terrorists is getting laid. Not search them for clues as to where the fucking nuke is. Nope! Leave all of that boring investigative plot related stuff to off screen people while he finds a fucking brothel. If there is a hell this series will be the only thing there to read.
Hmm… a chapter that is gearing up to be nothing but rough sex and misogyny from Captain Rapist? This book is punishment for crimes I committed in past lives.
Oh and the rough sex is going to be with a fifteen year old girl who had been sold into sexual slavery? Yay. I have no words for how much I hate John Ringo. This character is nothing but a stand in cock for all the fucking degenerate bullshit floating around Ringo’s syphilis ridden skull. I am actually physically ill reading the detailed, unrepentant – almost gloating – rape of a 15 year old girl. Ringo lovingly writes about how the girls tears and fear turns him on as if that isn’t fucking disgusting. He goes on and on about hurting her and enjoying it. There are no words for just how far over the line of obscenity this goes.
The entire fucking chapter is just him beating and raping a 15 year old girl over and over again. I don’t have a funny joke for this. There is no laughter. This is despicable. I will not trust anyone who says they truly enjoy this series. Not because I don’t believe them but because that is admitting that you are a rapist cheerleader.
I need a fucking cigarette.
Chapter – You know what? Fuck this. There is nowhere to go from that. There is no way I can go from an entire chapter of a man beating and raping a 15 year old girl over and over back to funny. I can’t fucking do it. This is utter fucking horseshit. John Ringo does not deserve to be called an author. I am not entirely sure he even qualifies as a fucking human being. From the beginning this series has been wish fulfillment for him and the fact that he wrote that chapter…
I am not a prude by any means. I am not in the fucking ballpark on politically correct. I certainly don’t blunt my words to spare others feelings but there is a difference between having dark sexual content in a book and glorifying it – and that is what this book does. It glorifies the rape. It doesn’t paint it as horrible. It’s all about the pleasure he gets from hurting her. Rape here is not an element of man’s darkness or the evil that men do. It’s treated no differently than if he was masturbating. He was just scratching an itch.
I wish I could end with a joke or mockery but I’m not smiling right now because I have a damn near photographic memory of what I read. That chapter is burned into my brain forever. If I am lucky the details of it may soften in 15 years. So allow me to say for all the people who have been raped and all the ones who have know people who have known someone who has been raped – Fuck you, John Ringo.
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