Warrior Wolf Women of the Wasteland [Paperback]

Carlton Mellick III's longest novel in about ten years, The Warrior Wolf Women of the Wasteland is also one of Mellick's best. It features a diverse cast of characters, my favorites being Mayor McCheese, a samurai Hamburglar, Daniel Togg (the four-armed protagonist), and a complex society of wolf women who live by their own warrior code in the wasteland beyond the Blessed McDonaldland City. There are even forty-five illustrations of the characters interspersed throughout the book.

Despite all the crazy action, it's actually the characters and their relationships that made the book so compelling and fun to read. Daniel Togg is one of Mellick's most fully realized protagonists. Whether he's caught in an awkward social situation with his brother Guy (a Fry Guy, McDonaldland's equivalent of policemen) and Guy's spiteful half-wolf wife, giving instructions on making alcohol out of various McDonald's products, or caught in a power play of love between two wolf women, the reader feels right there with Daniel Togg. He's the perfect guide through this strange and unforgettable world.

Highly recommended for fans of bizarro fiction and also those just reading Mellick for the first time.

mellick is an adept voice for the new counterculture. i'm becoming a fan! i was a bit hesitant with this book...i'm usually not big on post-apocalyptic fiction because it's reaching the 'been-there-done-that' stage in fiction. but mellick treats the subject with just the right sense of humor. he tells a good 'alternative werewolf' tale with a certain serious, respectable story, but still injects humor about the world in which we live. it's filled with war, violence, carnage, biker wolf babes, sex and love...all the things that make life worth living. it's about the only book i can name that is written in the first person by a character who spends an entire chapter inside a wolf's stomach (after being eaten), that is still an easy book to digest. mellick can tell a serious tale...yet he has a good sense of humor about our so-called civilization. mellick is intelligent, at times irreverent...sometimes pleasant...sometimes sick and gruesome. i wasn't sure how i was going to like this book, but i was really impressed. i like sick and gross as long as it is well-written, and mellick can deliver the goods. i'm becoming a mellick fan. if you like stories that are filled with war, violence, women who turn into wolves, carnage, sex and love...(and did i mention women who turn into wolves?)...then wolf this baby down. you'll be glad you did.

Carlton Mellick has made his writing career as one of the pillars of the bizarro community. To some, he's already a legend. But with his newest book, it's easy to see that Mellick is still evolving as a storyteller. It seems he's no longer content to put on a weird spectacle, so he's pushing himself into new territories. Warrior Wolf Women is one of his longest books, and strangely enough, it's not very genre-heavy. The post-apocalyptic "Road Warrior" theme isn't so prevalent in Warrior Wolf Women. This isn't a simple adventure of barbarism in a blighted future. In fact, almost half of the story takes place in McDonaldland, a mega-city walled off from the wastelands (similar to the world of Judge Dredd). The landscape of McDonaldland could've been its own book, but Mellick has different intentions for this story.

The main character, Daniel Togg, is exiled from the city to (presumably) die in the apocalyptic wild. Like I said earlier, what unfolds isn't your typical post-apocalyptic story. Warrior Wolf Women becomes a tale of a fierce battle of the sexes. In this world, women slowly evolve into gigantic wolves while the men tend to sprout extra limbs. Both are considered freaks in civilized society, and are thrown out of the city and into the wild. In the wastelands, the Wolf Women enslave the men, and the men have rallied to defend themselves. The two factions are at war with one another, and Mellick uses this setting to tell a romance between Daniel Togg and his childhood friend, November. The two are separated by the weird gender roles society has thrust upon them. They are trapped in a cycle, as the women kill the men to survive, and vice versa.

Some characters manage to break out of the prescribed roles of this world. The characters of Krall and Slayer seem to have some sort of loving relationship, founded on the fact that they aren't your typical man or woman. They're society's exceptions to the rules, the ones who fall through the cracks. Because of this, they manage to create a real relationship when everyone else seems totally trapped by society's gender roles. And as Mellick peels back the layers of this social structure, we see just how weird and depraved this gender separation can be. When Daniel discovers the secret schemes of the war between male and female, it's absolutely stomach-churning.

Warrior Wolf Women of the Wasteland is a pretty good tale, and it might go down as one of Mellick's most thoughtful bizarro books. It was exciting, strange, violent, and sexual, but don't expect a simple action story in the vein of "Mad Max." There are plenty of crazy battles, but these scenes only serve a greater theme in the story. Despite the grittiness, this story has a lot of heart. Besides the theme of abusive gender roles, I thought Warrior Wolf Women was similar to "The Island of Dr. Moreau," a meditation on the animalism of humanity and the sort of atrocities we commit against one another. There's a lot going on for this book, and strangely enough, I haven't really spoiled anything for you. Make sure you read this one.

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