Damnation Alley by Roger Zelazny

1. This novella steps out of the normal mode of Zelazny, or at least the mode of the last three books of his that I read—Creatures of Light and Darkness, This Immortal, and Lord of Light. Creatures tells a story with many characters and few explanations, This Immortal mixes dreams and reality but explains much, Lord of Light starts halfway through the story and then backtracks—while Damnation Alley tells a straight adventure, start to finish. Hell Tanner, yes his first name is Hell, drives from LA to Boston, carrying the cure for the plague eviscerating Boston. But this is a post-apocalyptic America, twenty-five years after an atomic war. He faces radiation, rough terrain, giant gila monsters, big bats, evil humans, storms that drop boulders and fish from the sky, and himself. It’s paced well and reads quickly. In other words, this is pulp fiction, and that’s unusual for Zelazny.

2. But it’s not entirely pulp fiction. Hell contemplates his own actions and place in the world, questioning his past life and wondering what comes next. This isn’t moralizing because Hell doesn’t go in for that, but it is turning a new leaf. He begins resisting changes, yet throughout the novel he changes, or realizes things about himself that he’s hidden from himself. The road, I’m sure, the solitude, his time in prison, the adrenaline and boredom—Hell finds out all about Hell. Hell actually feels bad a couple of times, for others, and this is a big change from the Hell the novel opens with. And I think that’s the theme here: at the end of the day, we still have to live with ourselves. It seems perhaps a little obvious in a post-apocalyptic tale, but I see this theme in Hell throughout as well, so to me it is the most apparent theme. However, it doesn't take up much space within the book. Of course, the theme of anti-nuclear war also pervades: this isn’t a glorification of the post-apocalypse, it tends towards a dark existence.

3. The writing doesn’t disappoint, but it also doesn’t thrill as much as in Lord of Light or Creatures. Here it’s refreshingly simple—Raymond Chandler-esque, rather than his typical poetic sentence structures and word choices. It moves the reader, but along such familiar, well-tread paths of adventure that the writing is not good for being groundbreaking, it’s good for perfecting the pulp voice—like Chandler. I just opened to a random page and started this next quotation anywhere to give you an idea of the writing; it occurs as Hell is driving past a hot crater:

He hurried. And he wondered as he sped, the gauge rising before him: What had it been like on that day, Whenever? That day when a tiny sun had lain upon this spot and fought with, and for a time beaten, the brightness of the other in the sky, before it sank slowly into its sudden burrow? He tried to imagine it, succeeded, then tried to put it out of his mind and couldn’t. How do you put out the fires that burn forever? He wished that he knew. There’d been so many different places to go then, and he liked to move around.

What had it been like in the old days, when a man could just jump on his bike and cut out for a new town whenever he wanted? And nobody emptying buckets of crap on you from out of the sky? He felt cheated, which was not a new feeling for him, but it made him curse even longer than usual.

He lit a cigarette when he’d finally rounded the crater, and he smiled for the first time in months as the radiation gauge began to fall once more. Before many miles, he saw tall grasses swaying about him, and not too long after that he began to see trees.

This is great efficient writing. This efficiency doesn’t lack for beauty, where somebody like Asimov misses beauty consistently in his striving for efficiency. I really enjoy this book as a straight, efficient story that doesn’t disallow beauty.

4. The character of Hell is fairly standard Zelazny, according to the other three books of his that I have read. They all feature superhuman male characters as the lead, and so does this one. But this one is less superhuman, and he’s constantly questioning himself, which leads to him being more sympathetic to the reader. Aside from this, Hell is also an iconoclastic character, a badass who relies on violence and surprise to stay alive in a dangerous world. Yet he’s also a criminal turning more square. This creates an interesting tension that assists the straight plot in driving the story forward.

5. In all, I love this book. It reads quickly and beautifully. It tells the story and doesn’t worry about too many implications to distract or bore the reader through lengthy interior monologues, but has just enough introspection to keep the reader’s mind engaged. It is really good pulp fiction, not terribly complex, but paced well and with an interesting main character. This is the type of book that non-Zelazny fans would probably like—I think it has a much wider appeal than Creatures or This Immortal. Think Alfred Bester and Raymond Chandler—and what a combination that is here! This book was nominated for the Novella Hugo in 1968, but lost out to two books. If those are better than this, I’ll have to read them soon. [This ebook is currently available free until 1 March 2016.]