Nerding Day: Mutant Chronicles Book 2: Frenzy (Patreon)

Mutant Chronicles was a tabletop gaming universe / glued-together Warhammer knock-off for weird children. It dared to pose the question “What if the Power Rangers were Blade Runner?” to kids who were too poisoned by undersink chemicals to answer correctly. I was obsessed with it in middle school, mainly because Warhammer seemed too adult for me, which in retrospect might be the funniest thought anyone has had about Warhammer. Mutant Chronicles was the more accessible choice for a permanent right fielder who was afraid of everyone in the game store. And if ever there were a series of techno-fantasy books written for 12-year-olds who get bullied by hobby clerks, it was the Mutant Chronicles: Apostle of Insanity trilogy. Published in a 12-month wind sprint between the twin Decembers of 1993 and 1994, the Mutant Chronicles novels were paperback science fiction books that only exist in the past tense. Judging by the multiple ads included in each novel, these books were meant to hook new fans into the Mutant Chronicles universe, but they were written by boring geeks, so they probably drove people away like a high-pressure nozzle on a gorilla’s rectum.

Last time, I covered Book 1: In Lunacy by William F. Wu. This time, which next time will be last time, we’re covering Book 2: Frenzy by John-Allen Price.

I was in fifth grade when I last read Frenzy, and then I never opened the book again for thirty-two years. Until now. This isn't my original copy; I had to get a new one from eBay pirates. You can’t even download crimed PDFs of these books because not one lost soul over the ages has thought to digitize a single page. History left that task to me, and in many ways I always knew that it would. In case you missed the previous installment, Book 1 followed a group of heroes led by Yojimbo the appliance repair ronin as they battled a secret enclave of Dark Legion monsters in Luna City, which is a settlement on the moon. The Dark Legion are defeated but their commander Ragathol escapes, with the author all but writing, “You know, like Darth Vader at the end of Star Wars.” Before I start reading Book 2, Frenzy, let’s have a mutant lark and see what I remember about it:

There are pictures in it.

I have opened the book and confirmed there are indeed pictures in it. We’re off to a great start! Let’s see how many of our favorite characters from the previous novel have returned:

Ragathol.

Damn. Not even our dear appliance samurai Yojimbo made the cut, which is ironic, because he carries multiple swords. Book 1 was only a story in the sense that it was the jumbled-together notes of a dungeon master desperately trying to turn his Mutant Chronicles campaign into a coherent manuscript by next Wednesday. Frenzy is an embarrassing collection of Aliens tropes written by a person who doesn’t understand cyberpunk or the military but has already spent his advance on Vietnam memorabilia. That’s a fun way of saying I believe he is very racist towards Asian people. Read on, I’ll explain!

Frenzy picks up right at the end of Book 1, with Ragathol the magic alien fleeing the moon and escaping to an evil Martian Citadel run by his fellow space monster Azurwraith, because I guess we’re roleplaying on a Final Fantasy message board. Then the novel shifts focus to Mitch Hunter, one of the most important characters in the Mutant Chronicles universe. Hunter is every action military hero cop stereotype rolled into a single man. He is a child’s imaginary friend version of Mel Gibson, meaning he’s closer to Santa Claus than Martin Riggs but he still carries a gun. Like if Ray Liotta was your fun stepdad. Mitch Hunter appeared in every game and comic book this property produced in the '90s, because the creators of Mutant Chronicles figured they needed a character like Mitch so he could be played by a Mel Gibson-type in the event of a major motion picture. Nerds are always self-inserting, but self-inserting our favorite movie stars from fan-casting threads on the world wide web. If Mutant Chronicles had been released in 2023, every drawing of Mitch Hunter would’ve looked exactly like Antony Starr. Who is just Mel Gibson if Lethal Weapon had been released in 2016. Which it was. And Mel Gibson was this guy:

The point is, any of these stumps could’ve played Mitch Hunter, because he was created to be the boring lead of an action movie. He is the most commonly featured character in Mutant Chronicles next to Max Steiner, who is just the European version of Mitch Hunter, because the game’s designers are Swedish (see “self-inserting,” throughout). The names Mitch Hunter and Max Steiner are even basically the same. Here they are whipping ass together on the Super Nintendo:

It’s very telling that the greatest aspiration for this entire universe was to smash it into cannon fodder for a glib patch of beard stubble. Anyway, the Mel Gibson they wound up getting for the Mutant Chronicles movie was Thomas Jane. His casting was appropriate, because in many ways Thomas Jane is the Mutant Chronicles of movie stars.

I guess it would’ve been too much to have both Mitch Hunter and Yojimbo the dishwasher repair assassin occupying the same pages in the same story. That’s a coolness overload. That’s a critical mass of raditude. That’s two kids playing cops and robbers only they’re both cops wearing robber-proof armor. I didn’t initially remember that Mitch Hunter was in this one, which says something about the quality of the book, because as I’ve just explained, Hunter is the Tom Brady of Mutant Chronicles. Were the game released today, there’s a nonzero chance he would look like Tom Brady. He already kind of does, because brown-haired action guys all come from the same factory.

The book starts with Ragathol, who is an extradimensional demon bent on the gene-splicing enslavement of the human race, taking a moment to admire the beauty of a Venusian morning. Those humans sure can terraform!

The Dark Legion are a blight almost by definition. Their soldiers are the reanimated dead, commingling with monsters torn from a realm beyond the reach of nature. Ragathol is an elite general of Hell personified, and his first thought of the novel is, “Maybe Hell could have some trees?” I love him, he’s my favorite character. He could definitely be played by Mel Gibson.

Then we’re introduced to Mitch Hunter in a sequence that sucks as much as it is poorly written. Hunter and his team are pinned down in a firefight with Cybertronic (an enemy corporation) and they need EVAC, stat! But his crusty bookworm of a military advisor Dirk Bamble won’t stop counting beans and pushing pencils to feel combat like a real soldier!

Every great writer knows the best way to introduce your core cast of characters is to have them casually threaten to murder each other over pretty grievances in the first three paragraphs. Don’t worry - nobody ever gets any more likeable than they are in this excerpt. Bamble demands to follow protocol by sending a report to command, so Hunter knocks him out cold … several minutes later. I’d forgotten they were arguing.

This is the novel’s central conflict - the push-and-pull between the rank-and-file grunts who do all the dyin’, and the suit-and-tie bureaucrats who issue commands without knowin’ diddly about what it’s like on the front lines. It’s the most basic conflict of any military action story. Let’s pick one at random - Aliens. That’s a good movie! You’ve seen Aliens. So has John-Allen Price!

That last one was Predator, but let’s talk about Aliens for a sec. John-Allen Price has seen Aliens. That’s not even a question, those are the rules. If you wrote paperback science fiction in the '80s and '90s, you basically just rewrote Aliens a bunch of times. The problem is, weaving together all the tropes in Aliens was more of a threaded needle than John-Allen Price realized. Aliens takes place in a cyberpunk dystopia where nations still exist, albeit in a diminished capacity. The Colonial Marines are still United States Marines; they represent a government of the people, not the Weyland-Yutani Corporation. The premise of Aliens is that they’re being deployed on a rescue mission to bail a corporation out of trouble, so it’s mired in dystopic corruption, but the Marines are identifiably a military unit, following military protocol. That’s part of the reason they resent Ripley so much at the beginning! To them, Ripley and Burke are initially no different. Down here in the Mutant Chronicles universe, nations are history. Only the megacorporations remain, and Captain Mitch Hunter fights for the Capitol corp. Each corporation operates as its own nation-state, with extensive armies fighting territorial wars against other corporations across the core planets of the solar system. Unlike the Marines in Aliens, Mitch Hunter and his squad are just a bunch of Blackwater goons killing people to protect shareholder interest. Soldiers don’t fight for populations in this universe, they’re the private armies of Amazon and Alibaba. John-Allen Price never comes close to understanding this distinction. Transplanting all the same conflicts from Aliens doesn’t work when your main character is a make-believe captain in a private military force that only exists to defend Google’s profit margins.

This book was written by a man who boldly misunderstood every part of Aliens that wasn’t cool space marine stuff. Consequently, Hunter just rages against the very notion of using the radio in every scene, regardless of whether it makes sense for their mission.

For example, back in that introductory excerpt where everyone threatened to kill each other, Bamble was trying to send an update that Hunter and his team had accomplished their mission. That’s an essential transmission in any situation, because if you and your dumbfuck squad of Aliens references get murked before you can deliver your report in person, no one is ever going to know whether you succeeded, making the entire effort a waste. This is basic stuff, Mitch! In fact, his violent refusal to use the radio is the source of all the tension during the book’s climactic assault on the Dark Legion’s Citadel. He almost gets his squad bombed by friendly fire because he never lets anyone know where he is or what he’s doing:

The uncertainty in this scene is due entirely to the fact that Hunter is not communicating with anyone. The bombers spotted his squad BY CHANCE and aborted their mission, a narrow miss that could have been avoided HAD HE STAYED IN CONTACT. These are the fundamentals of accomplishing team-based objectives! You can’t even play Call of Duty effectively without at least using some emotes. The entire book is just Mitch Hunter being an exhausting lunatic so the author can feed himself Western propaganda:

Mitch and his squad slip into Enlightened Redditor Speech when the author wants them to sound intelligent or reasonable. So not only does everyone sound like a fuggin’ dweeb, but they all sound like the same fuggin’ dweeb:

Like the hero he is, Hunter remains king of the dweebs:

CALM DOWN, MITCH! Prior to the final assault on the Citadel, Mitch and his pilot Alvarez pointedly don’t believe the Dark Legion is real. But when the assault begins, suddenly they’re so read up on the Dark Legion they know to switch off their ship’s radar instruments so they can’t be tracked.

There’s no reason for them to know this. Nothing has happened to them in the story to suggest this. They’ve just suddenly “read enough reports,” somewhere offscreen. Real embarrassing stuff. Anyway, Hunter continues his protocol tantrum by hurling Bamble out of the ship for suggesting they tell command about the radar trick. That seems like pretty vital information to pass along, but using the radio is PROTOCOL, and Mitch Hunter wants to FUCK PROTOCOL TO DEATH IN THE STREET:

Not to side with Sutter, the other pencil-pushing bean counter, but a fall of over 12 feet is like shoving someone off a house. You don’t … that’s not a thing you brush off, man. Meanwhile, back at command, they have to guess whether Hunter’s team made it:

Mitch Hunter might be the single dumbest hero of any science fiction paperback I’ve ever read. He’s a bunch of conservative Facebook memes brought to life by a six-year-old emperor’s birthday wish. He’s Homelander with a gun. Hunter is so pathologically opposed to protocol that he hates Rogers the communications officer just for being so buddy-buddy with the stinkin’ radio:

Mitch despises Radio Rogers so much that he feels nothing when Rogers is eaten alive by demons. It doesn’t immediately occur to him that the sight of Rogers’ bloody remains might be upsetting his squad:

Hunter makes sure to smash Rogers’ radio once and for all, then dispassionately collects his dog tags like Showtime’s Dexter while saying, “Thank America this didn’t happen to someone I liked. Anyway, where are we at with the motion sensors?”

“I’ve never gotten used to this … uh, not that this happens a lot! My dudes almost never get killed, ha ha! So, movement?" This is what I meant about the author not understanding military tropes. Rogers is a member of Hunter’s squad, not a corporate liaison or an outside advisor. He’s a field radio operator who just died in combat, horribly. This is the stuff Hunter is supposed to care about, and yet he’s disrespecting the man’s remains and barely batting an eye at the loss of a teammate. His hatred of Bamble, Rogers, and communication in general is supposed to read like Hunter is a guy who doesn’t ask for permission, he just follows his instincts and gets results. But when he’s irrationally refusing to stay in contact with command and threatening to execute anyone who uses the radio, Hunter just comes off like a maniac oozing with contempt for officers and protocol, because John-Allen Price still doesn’t understand the difference between Burke and Lt. Gorman after watching Aliens sixty-one times. He misunderstands it so much that Hunter has a witty & cool benefactor in the Capitol boardroom named Mr. Wood, who operates like the police captain in Lethal Weapon, keeping City Hall off Hunter’s back. Mr. Wood slaps those pencilneck goofballs with harsh truth bombs like “Mitch Hunter ghosting us during an important mission is TACTICAL and COOL, dammit!”

Later on, Mr. Wood vetoes the other people in command using his senior stockholder status, and the book wants us to cheer for this. It wants us to cheer for the shareholder taking control of a military operation.

Frenzy is what happens when you hire a person who can technically write but has no imagination. The author is so divorced from tropes and their meaning that he doesn’t seem to understand how people get nicknames:

Shacker, you guys nicknamed him Bungle because he’s a klutz. He didn’t somehow become a klutz afterwards. Also, was his nickname nearly Shoe-Chewer? Something about him suggested he might eat shoes and you went with “Bungle” instead? Was that a long meeting?

Earlier, one of Hunter’s men calls him “Bob Watts,” and you’d be forgiven for dismissing it as a harmless sex game between squadmates. But that would be a mistake, because Big Bob Watts is actually another major Mutant Chronicles character! He is Black in the tabletop games, but in this novel he is both caucasian and extremely racist. He is worshipped by the other characters for reasons that are never explained. Hunter gets Big Bob’s name wrong the first time he mentions it, because this book was barely edited:

Hunter and his team randomly whisper Big Bob’s name in awestruck wonder throughout the novel:

Big Bob finally appears at the end of the story to club us with his own catchphrase like he’s sweating through a cocaine hangover on The Joe Rogan Experience. He is instantly the lamest dork in celestial history. It’s fascinating.

Also, like I mentioned, he’s super racist! Don’t get him started!

Big Bob isn’t the only racist in Hunter’s orbit. Shacker the demolitions expert hates the Mishima corporation with the passion and intensity of a science fiction writer looking for an excuse to use his favorite slur (see “Vietnam memorabilia,” above):

In another scene, Hunter dreams about bouncing titties. It’s the most relatable thing he does:

It’s a good thing Hunter is such a Special Forces badass, because he is dumber than a sack of moon hammers:

He and his team are such badasses that half of them get into a staring contest with a statue:

They’re such badasses, in fact, that Hunter almost dies of fright when he sees a Dark Legion monster for the first time:

They never back down from a threat, not these heroes:

Just a bunch of stone-cold badasses, yessir:

While Hunter wastes hundreds of pages eating radios and shitting protocol, Ragathol does some stygian hot yoga to recuperate. Then he announces the Dark Legion are going to re-kidnap Lorraine Kovan, the woman they brainwashed in Book 1, only this time they’re gonna snatch her from the Martian city of Roswell, because The X-Files is hot right now. In case you couldn’t tell by the greasy monster on the cover of this book, they call Lorraine a “receptacle.”

Look at those names. Echmeriaz! Hell yeah. The Dark Legion are edgelords, confirmed. We already knew this, but it's nice to have it be canon. And in case you couldn’t tell by the greasy monster on the cover of this book, the Receptacle is petite!

Anyway, Ragathol doesn’t have much luck in this story, either. His plan gets thwarted because his demon mechanic doesn’t have the right part to fix their spacecraft. He has to command his evil horde to go rob a scrapyard instead, and that’s not a joke even though it is exactly what I would have written as a joke.

Despite commanding an invading force of dark magic demons, Ragathol behaves more like a mid-level criminal, like somebody who would get outplayed in the first three turns of Risk. At one point he celebrates Hunter’s suspension like a drug dealer on Miami Vice:

Tragically, Ragathol gets canceled:

His buddy Azurwraith dies offscreen, and Ragathol finishes the novel crying hysterically:

Don’t cry, big guy. You’ll get ‘em next time.

Tom Reimann is the co-founder of the podcast and streaming network Gamefully Unemployed, where he is busy smashing every radio in sight. Check out their Supernatural watchalong Him-Boos, and their improv mockumentary BADICAL, about the raddest fighting game (n)ever made.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Doug Redmond who was too busy kickflipping cigarettes in middle school to care about Mutant Chronicles. Haha, just kidding, they wrote a 14-page Dark Legion fanfic and won third place in the library story contest.

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