Ghost (Paladin of Shadows, Book 1)

I found myself voting "helpful" for reviews with one star and reviews with five stars. I'm definitely conflicted over this book.

As the author says in his own review on this site, the book reads well. The stories are pretty carefully plotted, although the third one kind of skips around a little too much.

And how many nukes does one guy just happen to stumble across? In that respect it reminds me of the murder mystery genre, where amatuer sleuths just happen to trip over bodies every time they go on vacation. Suspension of disbelief is integral to the idea. These are "tall tales", not psuedo-realism.

And yes, there is lots of sex. Very dark sex, too. And it gets darker from story to story.

And yes, there is lots of violence. Very dark violence, too. It also gets darker from story to story.

Not only is the book not "politically correct", but it is an over-the-top right wing fairy tale. The hero is always right, the Bush-like president is noble and wise, all liberals and the French are weak and stupid, and all the positively portrayed characters make comments about how they are now going to vote Republican for life. The book is also relentless about showing the bad side of Islam: the villians in all three stories are Muslim terrorists. There is not a single sympathetic portrayal of a Muslim in any of the stories.

But ... well that's what this book is about. It is not about plot realism, political moderation, or cultural understanding. It is about darkness: rage, sexual dominance, the seductive joy of killing your enemies, and most of all it is about the relationship of the wolves to the sheep.

It is well executed, but very disturbing. I'm not surprised the author had to be talked into publishing it. It reads more like a private exorcism of personal demons than something intended for public consumption.

Author John Ringo has shown, as he did with his op ed pieces in the New York Daily News a few years ago, that he can do more things than write military SF. His fiction has ranged from hard SF to sci-fantasy, and now he branches out into contemporary thrillers.

Ghost is NOT science fiction, or fantasy. Ghostis a contemporary action thriller, more in line with Michael Z. Williamson's Target of Opportunity and the early Dale Brown or Don Pendleton than anything Ringo has written before. And there is SEX...lots of it in this book...so be warned!

Also, Ghost is not for juveniles. Ringo explores some of the darker sides of the human experience, and his hero, codenamed Ghost, has some serious dark issues. He also has a hypertrophied sense of duty and honor, and uses them to re-direct and stifle his violent and ugly urges.

This isn't really deep and introspective fiction, though, and the action and the sex are designed to give the reader a whacking good time. The good guy(s) win (barely) and the bad guys lose badly. The good guy (if that is what he is) gets the girls, and a good time was had by all.

Well, all except the bad guys. And that's okay by me.

Walt Boyes

The Bananaslug. at Baen's Bar

First of all, this is NOT an SF book. Although Ringo writes pretty good SF and I picked this book up in the SF section - it's some kind of bizarro cross between a poor-man's Clancy and a BDSM porn book. Actually, it's three short stories, none of them particularly memorable. The first is a throwback to those old pulp Destroyer type books of the seventies, with a brooding hero who wipes out everything in his path. Problem is the hero is too good, so there really isn't any tension. Ringo has also let his politics get in the way here, so you get distracted by dumb conservative cliche'd thinking (I'm a conservative but not dumb). He also uses George W Bush as president and Donald Rumsfeld as Defence Secretary, though he changes their names. But President "Cliff" refers to his father's error in failing to turf out Sadaam in 91 so... The first story is also laughably unbelievable as it involves Osama Bin laden and the President of Syria conspiring to kidnap American Co-ed hotties, and then rape and torture them on the internet (!!) Nowhere does it say how they expect to profit from this except perhaps to upset those softy yanks. And frankly, if Bin Laden could get a dozen terrorists with their own airplane to America I think he'd find better things to do with them. This first story reads like it was written by a teenage boy with too many hormones, especially since the girls are naked the entire story. And several times, as they are rescued, their rescuers beg them not to hate all men and become, like, lesbos or something because of what the A-rabs did to them. (sheesh!)

The second story is even stranger. It features our hero, now rich since he got the reward for his earlier hero work, doing the beachbum boater thing in the Caribbean with a million dollar yacht. Our hero is into bondage, and quickly finds a pair of just out of high school girls who think he's the neatest thing since sliced bread. Now the bondage and sex is a little too detailed for a thriller and not nearly detailed or graphic enough for erotica or porn (or even romances these days). And our hero's seduction of these teenagers reads like a classroom lecturer explaining the theory behind bdsm fetishism. He also makes sure they call someone to protect themselves before going off on his boat, warns them about taking drugs and drinks from strangers - and insists they call their moms, who, btw, are fine with their teen daughters getting into a bondage/slavery relationship in the Caribbean with a guy ten or fifteen years older than them they've never met (!!). Just so they're home by midnight, I guess. Towards the end of the story he dumps the girls to go kill a bunch more A-rabs.

The third story has him chasing a nuke through European cliches. The Russians are noble but corrupt. The French are largely stupid and arrogant. For no reason I can figure out the people who stole the bomb use a bus commonly used to transport slave girls to old Yugoslavia, which lets him go there to explore slavery, which he both loves and despises. He also gets to rather nastily beat and rape a teen prostitute identified as perhaps 15/17yo, which goes totally against his altruistic sexual restraint in the second story. Ringo seems to be trying to portray him as a tortured soul on the edge of being an evil character like those he hates, but he turns it on and off without any explanation or background and so it's completely unbelievable.

Ringo does pretty good SF, as I said earlier. I'm not sure what this is, but it's uhm, not so good. He's also falling into too many cliches. His characters, for example, duck-walk, crab-walk, leapord-walk... Did Ringo browbeat his editors into letting this out? God knows Clancy's last few books have sucked big time, but I hadn't thought Ringo was succesful enough yet to bully his editors into letting dreck through. If you want a techno-thriller, there are plenty who are doing it better. If you want a soft porn bondage story there's lots on the internet. This is supposed to be book 1 of "Kildar" but I have no idea what Kildar might be. It's certainly not identified here and there are no issues to resolve I saw.

First, I'm a writer and I've coauthored a book with John, and am working on another one with him. As you can see, I'm a fan of "full disclosure." :-)

This is a great book--for the kind of book it is.

John has actively warned his readers, at any chance he's gotten, about the explicit kinky sex and violence in this book, that it is in no way realistic, that it is an over-the-top, Mack Bolan type, male testosterone fantasy.

His first words talking about this book at Cons are always, "Do not read this book." :-) Well, then he goes on to explain that he knows most of his existing fan base won't like it, that he wrote it to get it out of his head so he could write other things, and that he published it because there were a lot of fans that did want to read it, and Jim Baen wanted to publish it.

He's made every effort, and I'm continuing with those efforts in this review, to make sure that potential readers know *exactly* what they're buying and don't buy it unless they really want it.

Hence the five star review.

The people who know what the book is and want to buy it because it sounds fun will have a great time with this book.

The people who know what the book is and *don't* want to buy it are absolutely right that they, personally, should stay far, far away from it.

It's a great book, but please don't buy an over-the-top, just-for-fun, kinky and violent testosterone fantasy and expect to get another Legacy of the Aldenata or March book.

If you don't like that sort of thing, John Ringo and Jim Baen would absolutely prefer that you save your money to buy a different Baen book that you will be *happy* with. I recommend John's _Princess of Wands_ or, if you want straight military SF and lots of dead Posleen, John's book with Tom Kratman _Watch on the Rhine_. I also recommend _Cally's War_, but nah, I'm not biased. :-) :-) :-)

Let me start by saying that I'm a big fan of John Ringo. I've read everything he's published, except for the rest of this series. Unfortunately, his skills in scifi don't seem to transfer to other genres. This seems like a throwback to bad, old military fiction from before Tom Clancy and others popularized the use of characters, plot, political intrigue, and facts. Save your money and, more importantly, your time.

The main problem is the total lack of realism in just about every area. The main character, Mike "Ghost" Harmon, is repeatedly drawn into adventures because he happens to stumble upon them. Once makes a story -- three times is just lazy, contrived writing. If Ringo had stopped at the first novella, I'd have given a rating of 3 or 4 (a quick, empty, mostly entertaining read). The actual tactics are laughable. Another reviewers' comparisons to Rambo were spot on. Mike typically takes out at least a dozen enemies by himself, and he makes a stand against hundreds with almost no help. He repeatedly fights to his last, spends time in the hospital, and goes back to absurdity. The politics, while expectedly conservative, are simplistic and ham-handed.

Others have complained about the sex, and I will too. There's no mention of it in the blurbs and liner notes, but it takes up 1/3 to 1/2 of the book. It adds nothing to the plot and seems to just be filler. The only small addition it makes is to try and show that Mike is a bad man doing dangerous things that allow good people to live in peace. It's spelled out simplistically in the first novella, and there's no need to a hundred pages of elaboration. It's heavily BDSM, but if you're looking for titillation, you're better off picking something at random from alt.sex.stories or some website.

Ringo does each element much better in other books. "Road to Damascus" is very political and conservative, but it is integrated into the story. "Against the Tide" is darkly sexual (harems, rape, etc), but it works within the plot. The superhero warrior taking on overwhelming odds is logical when wrapped in the ACS of the Polseen series. For special ops stories, I'd recommend Clancy's Rainbow Six or Marcinko's Rogue Warrior series.

This may be the most difficult book review I've ever had to write, so it may not turn out well. Sorry; I'm not a writer, I'm a reader.

John Ringo is one of the most new fascinating SF writers we've seen in the past decade, and I've been buying his books as fast as he can write them.

I was very much disappointed in "Cally's War", because he seemed to lose track of his core audience and because I just didn't like the way Cally's life turned out. But she's Ringo's character, and he can do anything with his characters he wants. (I thought the book was going to be the culmination of the Posleen Wars series, and I was disappointed that he didn't answer all of the questions which had arisen during the series.) That was a darkly negative book, but I figured the disjointed plotting was due to a combination of Ringo's choice to co-author the book and an attempt to find a new emphasis.

Now I've read Ghost, and I realize that Mr. Ringo is going in a new direction which takes me where I really don't want to go. He's the author, he can write anything he likes; but I'm not obliged to buy the books or read them.

To be perfectly clear, I'm not in the habit of buying and reading sado-masochistic literature. At the risk of sounding like a prude, I find it disturbing to the point of being offensive. The sexual overtones could be accepted if they advanced what I though would be the main plot, but it turns out that the bondage and S&M IS the main plot.

This not what I look for in this genre, and I felt that I had been sold a bill of goods when I read the book.

(Dammit, I'm the only person I know who has read the Prince Roger series twice!)

It's probably unfair of me to so dislike the book only because it didn't meet my expectations. But doesn't an author live or die by establishing a readership, and then writing for them? It worked for Twain, Burroughs, Heinlein ...

I'm not persuaded to change my tastes because the author says "well, I liked it and if you don't like it you probably don't understand it" which is the message I get from Ringo's online comments re "Cally's War". But I should have realized that this was the direction he was going.

In the future, I'll be careful to NOT buy any more Ringo books as soon as they show up on the shelf of my local bookstore; I can't trust him to meet the standards he had set by his earliest offerings. I'll wait until other people have bought them, and be guided by a more cautious approach as suggested by their reviews.

Probably the biggest disappointment was that I was so enthusiastic about the first couple of chapters, I was tempted to write a personal note to the author expressing my appreciation.

I'm glad that I waited until I read the whole book. It saved me some personal embarassment. This is the first time I thought a Ringo book was too long. He should have quit after the second chapter.

And I should learn not to be so gullible.

I like John Ringo's earlier works. It is for that reason alone that I picked up "Ghost" because I was expecting some good military SF, or at least, a good military yarn. I did not even look at the book description - I picked it up on author name recognition alone.

What a disapointment. I will not be purchasing other books in this series. I was shocked at the amount of sex in this book. I did not expect over 1/3rd of the book to be dedicated to dark sex scenes and outright pornography, to include a violent, graphic rape scene.

The other disapointment was the main character. I recently retired from the military after 24 years of service, and I have worked with some of the professionals that John Ringo writes about -- SEALs, SOCOM, Special Forces, etc. The main character in this book is nothing like the people I have worked with in the past. He does not epitomize the special operations warrior mindset, and in fact, the traits that the main character displays are a disservice to these men who do work in the shadows in the global war on terror. In my opinion, the main character should not be out saving the world -- he needs to be castrated and locked up. The whole focus on sex as a motivating factor is very unrealistic...in fact, in the military, if you display these tendencies and get caught, you get kicked out, and you can forget about holding a security clearance. The scene where two mothers turn their daughters over to him (over the phone???!!!!) for an extended lesson in bondage sex was strange, surreal, and quite frankly, unbelievable.

And that leads me to the plot. How on earth does a sex maniac stumble across so many plots to destroy the United States? From the very first encounter with terrorists as a pretend sexual predator/stalker exercise, to the "coincidence" that he is the closest operative to a particular event while on a sexual bondage cruise, to stumbling across a plot to obtain nuclear weapons while pursuing prostitutes in eastern Europe. The fact is that the main character, in every instance, is pursuing his lusts first and foremost, rather than behaving in a professional manner. Toward the end of the book, the main charactor seems to undergo a transition that I did not particularily like. He loses all politeness and respect for his fellow professionals, and becomes a very unlikeable person. I did not bother reading the last few pages of the book, other than to skip ahead and see that the woman/girl that he raped (repeatedly) basically abandoned him in Paris with no strings attached. Quite frankly...she needed to sue him into oblivion, and get him locked up just to protect society.

One thing that really bothered me about this piece of fiction is this -- that the plot of the book assumes that such people are necessary for freedom and democracy. My take on that is that if it takes this kind of person, with these character flaws, to allow our institution to exist, then that indicates that there is a fundamental flaw within our own society that is, quite frankly, evil. I do not believe this to be true, and so this added to the unrealism of this book's plot.

I cannot recommend this book to anybody who follows military SF, and I will be far more wary of future works by Mr. Ringo. I also will not be purchasing the follow-on book in this series.

I like Ringo. I've read all of his other work. He writes good adventure science fiction, and his stories are probable, within the framework of the world/setting in which they are placed. His characters are well presented, and his writing skills are very good.

But this book is different, in one very important way. In part of this book, Ringo sets the scene for the joys of kinky sex - specifically, bondage and dominance/submission, including whips. The first such episode involves two college girls - 18 and 19 - one with a mother who advises her on the joys of this kind of sex and checks with the hero to make sure he won't leave any permanent scars on her dear daughter.

I can live with a kindly, wise, plain-spoken president whose father made the mistake of not finishing the job in Iraq when he had the chance - a president who makes all the right decisions and gives our hero a free hand. A lot of this genre is fairly right-wing in background, and I can either agree or ignore the politics of the setting. The shoot-em-up battles which have our hero winding up winning though severely wounded and ending up in the hospital each time are reasonably typical of this kind of story. And the book is, as is usual with Ringo, well written. But the detailings of bondage, and our hero explaining why this kind of sex is not only OK, but better than run of the mill sex - but oh, he's a good guy and rape is wrong, but bondage is more than OK - that's not what I bargained for when I bought this Ringo book. Nothing on the jacket or jacket flaps gives any hint. So I was surprised, unpleasantly.

Maybe Mr. Ringo was exorcising some demons. I don't care. I would have preferred to have had some hint before I spent my money. It appears that Mr. Ringo has written a sequel, which will probably have more of the same because this is part of the hero he has developed. But I won't buy it, and I probably won't buy any more books by Mr. Ringo. I am sorely disappointed, and more than a bit annoyed. I wouldn't give it even one star if that weren't necessary to post this review. This book should have an "R" rating.

This right-winger's wet dream has the hero blasting liberals, slaying Arabs and playing sicko domination sex games with barely-of-age college coeds. He takes a break from that to rape a prostitute and put down the French. If this thing represents the author's personal fantasy world the man needs to get himself to the therapist right away.

John Ringo normally writes military SF and most of his offerings in that genre are extremely good. This one is more of a freelance war on terror book, and he seems to be in grave danger of crossing the line between challenging the reader and going out of your way to see how many people you can offend. That goes even for his existing fans among military SF readers, who are probably neither the most prudish or left/liberal of audiences.

Two thirds of the book reads like a manifesto for the hardline neo-con wing of the Republican party, complete with a defence secretary who appears to be meant as a sympathetic portrait of Donald Rumsfeld, explicit insults aimed at Democrats in general and a thinly veiled one aimed at Hilary Clinton in particular.

For those people who don't have a problem with that, the middle third of the book reads like a top-shelf SM sex book, so that may offend a good chunk of the religious right part of George W's supporters who are not put off by the politics.

The "hero" spends much of the book telling people that he's not a good guy, he's a bad guy who happens to be on the right side: towards the end of the book he proves big time that this is absolutely true. Ringo isn't quite the only author to cast a rapist as the anti-hero (remember Thomas Covenant?) but "Ghost" probably wins the prize for the least sympathetic central character I've read for a long time - even over the same author's "Watch on the Rhine" in which the heroes were reformed Waffen SS men.

The action scenes in the book are mostly very exiting, if occasionally a bit "with one bound Jack was free." There is a lot of humour, much of it outrageous or sick, but the book often had me laughing, sometimes against my will.

I rather admire the courage of the publishers for releasing this, but they probably should have put a "The publishers recommend that this book should be sold only to adults" warning on it. As a broad litmus test, if you were against the Iraq war or are even a little bit prudish, do your blood pressure a favour and leave this one alone.

I see that Ringo has written several sequels. I will probably read them, but in the spirit of the proverbial fitness report on an indifferent officer, that his men would follow him anywhere but only out of a sense of morbid curiosity. And I'll wait for the paperbacks.

POSTSCRIPT - APRIL 2008

I did eventually get round to reading the second book in the series, "Kildar" and was pleasantly surprised. Although I picked it up out of the sense of morbid curiosity referred to above, I found the second in the series, while still a little "off the wall" is much less outrageous and a vastly better book than the first one.

So I do now plan to read the whole series which as at April 2008 consists of -

Ghost
Kildar
Choosers of the slain
Unto the Breach
A Deeper Blue

Ironically the most entertaining part of the book Kildar comes before the body of the novel itself: it's the disclaimer facing the title page which clearly demonstrates that John Ringo has a sense of humour about the controversy which was stirred up by 'Ghost'. That disclaimer deserves to be the last word on 'Ghost' and reads as follows

"This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. This book and series has no connection to reality. Any attempt by the reader to replicate any scene in this series is to be taken at the reader's own risk. For that matter, most of the actions of the main character are illegal under US and international law as well as most of the stricter religions in the world.

"There is no Valley of the Keldara. Heck, there is no Kildar. And the idea of some Scots and Vikings getting together to raid the Byzantine Empire is beyond ludicrous.

"The islands described in a previous book do not exist. Entire regions described in these books do not exist. Any attempt to learn anything from these books is disrecommended by the author, the publisher and the author's mother who wishes to state that he was a very nice boy and she doesn't know what went wrong."