Damnation Alley
Roger Zelazny
157 pages
published in 1969

For some reason, books by Roger Zelazny other than the ubiquitous Amber series are hard to find here, either new or secondhand. And when something is available, it isn't available for long. So when I found a cache of Zelazny novels, including Damnation Alley, This Immortal and To Die in Italbar, in my local secondhand bookstore I didn't hesitate and bought them all.

Damnation Alley is short and to the point. Not only is it just 157 pages long, it also reads very fast. It cost me less then two hours reading time and even with the way I read (in short chunks), less than a day in total to finish this. It makes a nice change from the kind of monstrously big books I've been reading lately.

The plot of Damnation Alley is fairly simple. Hell Tanner is the last remaining Hell's Angel in post-nuclear war California, an ass-kicker and troublemaker first class. When the Plague breaks out in the only other remaining civilised part of North-America (the world), Boston, he is "volunteered" to lead the expedition through the desert inbetween California and Boston to deliver the serum needed to stop the epidemic. Air travel is right out thanks to the jetstream basically having moved *down* to normal flying height; any plane would be ripped to pieces shortly. The journey won't be very nice; there are of course monsters and mutants aplenty to deal with in the wasteland that lies between California and Boston, but that's why they got Hell Tanner...

A pulpy, but very enjoyable plot then and I certainly liked it when I first encountered it, sometime in the eighties, in the pages of 2000AD, when Judge Dredd had to bring the much needed antidote to an otherwise incurable disease from Mega City One to Mega City Two --if you got to steal, steal from the best, the writer of that particular sequence must have thought. It's not the best novel Zelazny ever wrote nor is it typical of his work but it is enjoyable, if a bit oldfashioned.