Dark Messiah

Phoenix #1

by David Alexander

After the nuclear holocaust was over, the real killing began. Phoenix was a survivor, an expert with any weapon, a master at hand-to-hand combat. He forged his way across what was left of the U.S., driven by hatred and thirsting for revenge against the supreme ruler of an almost extinct world--Dark Messiah.

Genres: Post Apocalyptic, Science Fiction, Pulp, Fiction, Horror, War, Action

224 pages, Mass Market Paperback

Published January 1, 1987

About the author

David Alexander began writing early in life and began writing uncoaxed and spontaneously. His fledgling appearance in print dates to a sonnet published in a New York City daily newspaper when David was in elementary school in Brooklyn. Between then and today, he has written and published in virtually every literary category, including novels, novelettes, short fiction, poetry, essays and film scripts. He received his early education via the New York City public school system. He later attended Columbia University in New York City and Sorbonne University in Paris, France.

In addition to fiction and creative nonfiction, Alexander has written technical papers as a defense analyst for some of the world's most prestigious international defense publications on high-technology combat systems and their strategic and tactical applications. He is as conversant with the global corporate and civilian defense sector as he is with the military side. Few can justly claim the scope and breadth of his knowledge of and familiarity with the international defense community, ranging from weapon systems to global strategic policy.

As an author, Alexander can justly claim to have pulled himself up by his own bootstraps. Never has he benefited from anybody's patronage. There have been no wealthy relatives with connections, no connections by marriage; no favors traded in secret, no hooked-up friends to fast-track his career. Nor has anybody but David Alexander penned the titles published over David Alexander's byline. Alexander is a resident of Brooklyn Heights, where he has lived and written for many years.

Reviews

[Grady Hendrix · Rating 5 out of 5]

This might be the greatest book ever written about a man named Magnus Trench fighting the sell-outs and scumbags who let the Commies nuke America. If you do not like your book, your American passport spontaneously combusts and your sofa turns into an ejector seat that shoots you through the roof of your house and all the way to Canada. I have written on this masterpiece at length, but even then I barely scratch the surface.

[Nate · Rating 5 out of 5]

Phoenix: Dark Messiah

I’m going to make this real simple for all the mutants, commies, contams and street trash (those of you in the habit of reading my book reviews in any case)
This is the best book I’ve ever read, in fact, it’s the best book ever written. PERIOD.

When America is nuked by the commies, Vietnam vet Magnus “Phoenix” Trench survives by virtue of pure manliness and patriotism. He marches into a post apocalyptic hellscape resplendent with mutant street gangs,hanging dong in assless leather chaps and unescorted, beautiful, young women who may be in real trouble without a super macho bad ass brandishing a great many guns.

I know what you’re going to ask: do they describe the make, model and type of ammunition in each and every gun in excruciating detail? Hell yeah, brother!

Can I give you a little taste? Hell yeah, brother!!!

MAC and MINIMI sang a blazing duet in the key of destruction as a figure eight frag burst turned Pagan Center into a human Swiss cheese.
The large intestine spilled from the jagged hole in the Pagan's side like a coil of pink sausages in a sauce of blood garnished with skeletal fragments.
The heart fell out of the ripped open chest cavity, pumping furiously as it hung from the blood-spurting coronary artery. The gun arm was blown completely off, as arterial tubes dangled from the ragged shoulder stump squirting death seltzer.
Gore and chunks of teeth, bone, muscle tissue, scalp and excrement spattered Center Pagan's terrified brackets who broke for cover, firing wildly as they ran from the Angel of Death.

It’s basically gun porn, gore porn, torture porn and porn porn.

Read this book, it changed my whole perspective on shit, man. I need to get some guns and start doomsday prepping, right now!
Read this book! It might just save your life. Plus there’s no mutants in assless chaps in moby dick or the grapes of wrath. Nuff said!

[Jordan Anderson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Take every single post apocalyptic cliche, drench them in straight testosterone, light it on fire, and then blend that with typical 80s attitudes about what a real man is, and you have a sort of idea of what Phoenix: Dark Messiah is.

Except, you’d be wrong, because this book is truly batshit insane. It’s over the top. It’s balls to the wall, take no prisoners, no hold barred ridiculousness. Leisure clearly knew what they were doing when they produced this absolutely bonkers story that someone manages to one-up everything that came before it.

How Alexander came up with this insanity, I have no idea, but if you want your “men’s adventure” stuff to contain countless descriptions of guns, violence, gore, explicit sex, and all around craziness, then here you go. Clearly, this book is far from “good” but it’s a hell of a lot of fun to read.

[Bob Mcqueen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Scene 1:
Phoenix sidestepped the swing as it's momentum jerked the Pagan around, and roundhouse kicked into the lower back area on the follow through, shattering the punk's spinal cord and shooting fragments of lumbar vertebrae through his kidneys like small bore bullets. His bladder exploded, spraying his lungs with hot urine. The Pagan vomited up chunks of his stomach and flipped over backward, kicking his legs in the air as he shit his pants and died.


Scene 2:
Trench finished off the mute duo by grabbing their heads and bashing them together with such force their skulls imploded. Cranial pressure popped the eyeballs and squirted brain matter out through the sockets.

What more do you need!! Magnus Trench aka Phoenix is the HERO we need!! He doesn't need our love, he's better than us!! But we'll love him anyways!!

[Craig · Rating 2 out of 5]

Dark Messiah is the first of five books in the men's adventure series published by Leisure in 1987 - '88. I picked up the first two at the newsstand because the covers looked to me like Doc Savage adventures. It's a post-apocalyptic series about guns and sex and violence, usually all three. Phoenix is a Vietnam vet whose real name is Magnus Trench, and his exploits make some of the crazy James Axler or William W. Johnstone stories look tame. He's a master at hand-to-hand combat and an expert with every kind of weapon. Leisure was trying to outdo Zebra maybe. It's a testosterone-fueled violence orgy with non-stop action, so the author did what he was supposed to, I guess. I read the first two but didn't continue with the series.

[Jesse · Rating 2 out of 5]

At its best, this is the literary equivalent of Kung Fury, except 100% sincere. At its worst, it's alternately dull and incredibly offensive and disgusting. Either way, it's supreme trash.

[Wayne · Rating 4 out of 5]

It didn't take long to turn this into a total raunch-fest. Eyeballs popping into glass with wet pops. Glistening engorged manhood entering unwilling flesh. Chemically ravished people killing and eating their fellow nuke victims. Mad doctors messing with sadistic experiments. And our Dark Messiah. The man who runs his cult of fanatics in the wasted landscape of America.

The story is simple and to the point. A man, known in his days in Vietnam as Phoenix, just made a big corporate merger. He decides to rough it in the woods around San Francisco, away from his wife and kid, who live in New York, for a week or so. A nuclear war breaks out and he survives. Wanting to know if his family made it through, he embarks on a cross country trek to find out. Before he even gets a few miles in, all hell breaks loose. One carnage assault to the next follows. Insane action all around.

[Oliver Clarke · Rating 3 out of 5]

Insane.

[Gavcrimson · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book with balls the size of Mount Rushmore, a major boner for all things weaponry and writing that is impossible to read without hearing the voice of Dirty Harry in your head.

A crazed televangelist called Luther Enoch triggers a nuclear war between America and Russia with the aim of lording over what little remains of society. Opposing him is Magnus Trench, a Vietnam veteran turned business big-wig, who was spared being nuked by virtue of being on a peaceful sabbatical in Golden Gate national park. On a mission to discover what became of his wife and son, the heavily armed Trench battles his way through a Mad Max style landscape populated by mohawk sporting punks, scum, baddies, hard cases and slime balls.

An absolutely berserk, sugar rush of a book that fully delivers in terms of action and gore, rarely coming up for breath. It channels the hard R-rated action movies of the era, but goes much, much harder. It's politics are an absolute minefield that is difficult to second guess. It seems pro capitalism -with Trench praised for making it in the corporate world- but it also seems pro hippie- with Trench briefly taking up with a bunch of survivors who fashion themselves along the lines of a 1960s commune. It loves its guns and regards the US government as weak and untrustworthy, but is at pains to not paint Trench as a survivalist. It's pro family, Trench's endgame being to be reunited with his wife and child, yet he thinks nothing of emptying his balls into most of the women he encounters in post apocalyptic America. It's full of extreme violence and with sex described at a level of hardcore porn, but has it's hero complain about rock music and violent television being a corrupting influence on the young. It sidesteps the easier route for the 1980s of making the Russians and the PLO the villains (even though the opportunity to do both presents itself) and instead goes after Christian fundamentalists. So there more food for thought here than you'd expect, amidst scenes of brains flowing out of eye sockets, a man's bladder being destroyed, causing his lungs to fill up with urine (the sicko in me enjoyed that bit) and lots of limbs being lost to heavy gunfire. I thought Shaun Hutson had a thing for guns, but his interest in firepower seems quite casual compared to the author of his book. The meticulous attention to detail, always listing the make of guns, the type of ammo, the rpm, etc etc, can seem a bit techy if you're not into guns as much as the author of this book...and I'm beginning to suspect that no one is into guns as much as the author of this book, but it is certainly a distinct characteristic. The book was brought to my attention in unusual circumstances. John Mozzer, who used to act in porn under the name Alan 'Spike' Adrian, posted about the book on social media, speculating that the dedication in it referred to his now deceased friend Lisa Baumgardner 'For Lisa, here's looking at you kid'. Baumgardner was the publisher of the NYC zine 'Bikini Girl', an underground filmmaker and a prolific bondage model. Which, if Mozzer is correct about that dedication, might also explain the strong S&M scene in the book "the spreadeagled woman lay naked on a stainless steel table to which she was secured by metal clamps". Whatever the case, I can't stress how much fun I had with this book, it's unironic, industrial strength men's adventure material, and I didn't want it to end...so it's just as well that there's four more books in the series. Phoenix: Dark Messiah is an entertaining work of fiction that will hopefully stay that way, but given how things are going it may one day soon also double as a handy survival guide. Perhaps the question we all need to be asking ourselves right now is...are you man enough to live in a Magnus Trench world?

[Paperbackbooks86 · Rating 4 out of 5]

As someone who LOVES the 80's post apocalyptical genre, I was extremely excited to read Phoenix: Dark Messiah. All the reviews I read on the Phoenix series claimed this was the be all end all of this genre, with sex, drugs, violence's and more! I scooped this one up for $5 and dove in ready for some high testosterones action!

After finishing book one in the series, I think I will wait to get into the book 2. So what happened? Dark Messiah is VERY similar to the Guardians: Trial by Fire. The end of the world comes, and a religious nut job is out to take control of the world, but what REALLY brings this book down, is the same problem the Guardians suffers, the author just drones on at times. In the Phoenix case, the author goes on and on about EVERY weapon mentioned. Side character is holding an UZI? You are going to get a total rundown of the gun and its ammo, and heaven forbid the weapon has an accessories attached to it.

With the book clocking in at 221, I would say 20-25 pages are just weapon descriptions. In fact, there a chapters just dedicated to weapon details. After awhile, it starts to become a chore, and I would find myself skipping ahead, to bypass all the weapons explanation.

The action is pretty good, but often short. A battle or fire fight will start, and quickly be over in a page or two. Unlike other books in this genre, the action is NOT non stop. Instead, this tends to be the pattern. Hero discusses plan. Hero goes over the weaponry. Hero gets to action. Hero fights. Hero goes back to base. Rinse and repeat. This wasn't a book where I had to keep reading to see what happened next.

As for the violence, reviews rave about it's gruesome tendencies. To be honest, you will find more gore and over the top violence in books like The Traveler, The Outrider and the Rat Bastards. In terms of "adult content" this has been the most over the top I have read.

Overall it wasn't terrible, but it was hardly the over the top book I was promised. If you are looking for over the top violence and bloodshed, end of the world stuff, go for the Traveler and the Outrider series. The Phoenix is a quick fun read, but there are better in this genre.

[rndgmoat · Rating 3 out of 5]

An insane work of pulp art, this novel centers on our hero, Magnus Trench, a stereotypically 80s action hero/masculine fantasy. He's an almost superhumanly gifted killer, capable of shattering bones with a single kick and also shooting a missile out of the sky with a handheld machinegun. The novel begins with Trench taking some time off from his day job as a corporate exec by going survival mode in the wilderness. It is from this vantage point that he witnesses WWIII, a nuclear exchange between the USA and the USSR. Trench is magically unharmed, of course, and then begins moving through a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Along the way, we learn that this nuclear holocaust has been manufactured by a psychotic Billy Graham type--the "Dark Messiah"--who has somehow infiltrated the highest reaches of the government and is now utilizing his Nazi-worshipping shock troopers to take over the desolate wasteland that remains.

As Grady Hendrix points out in his entertaining review (which I would not attempt to top), the novel quickly descends into cartoonish levels of ultraviolence and destruction. Plague-infested zombies have their skulls stomped, mercenary troops are disintegrated by high-velocity gunfire, there are lots of explosions, including two (2!) follow-up nuclear blasts. There is also a lot of ridiculous over-the-top sex and sexual torture.

The book speeds through a variety of classic 80s action and post-apocalyptic set pieces, culminating in a gloriously violent finale that leaves open the door for the inevitable sequel.

Overall, this book is a brutal and ridiculous piece of 80s pulp fiction that has to be read to be believed.

[Neal Cooper · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was published in 1987, it's stated clearly in the publishing and copyright details but really it's in every line of text within the book.
And on the cover too, the cover is soooooo very 1987  - like a rejected Lååz Rockit LP cover.

Phoenix: Dark Messiah is also fucking hardcore. So much so that by the end of the first chapter I'd grown a secondary pair of testicles, more muscular, ruthless and with more martial training than my initial pair.

By the end of the second chapter I'd torn off my auxiliary clackers and flung them, brutally, at a passing hardass who was wearing a safety pin through his nose. The force of the blow smashed straight through his orbital socket, mushing his brain into a raspberry mousse and walloping out the back of his skull - right into the sputtering mouth of some other candyass in a cut off leather jacket. There they exploded, sending scrotal shrapnel, shards of skull and internal organs over a 20 metre radius. Then they both shat their pants, keeled over and died.
That's how hardcore this book is.

You'll definitely get your money's worth; a lot of ink went into Dark Messiah.
Not that it's particularly long, just that there are a LOT of CAPITAL LETTERS. Mostly for various military and paramilitary groups, weaponry manufacturers, their subsidiary distributors, model and serial number of the weapon and the part numbers used to customise the weapons and, of course, the International Workshop Agreement guidelines being worked towards during the customisation.
There's also a lot of capitals just for the ruddy sake of it.
I'm pretty sure Chapter 8 was just 5 pages of GGGGGRRRRRRRRRRRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!
Marvelous.

Helpfully, the book prevents you from making any cultural slip ups when recalling the racial make-up of supporting characters by constantly referring to them throughout - lesser writers would have made do with actual names or occupations and such.

Erm, not sure if I should mention the sexy sex scenes or not. They're not sexy for a start or even convincingly written by somebody who knows one end of a lady's whatsit from the other.

I rather enjoyed reading this book. I've bought copies for my friends and have made the missus listen as I read out great swathes of sinewy, bulging, violent, overly technical far fetched nonsense but I'm not sure I'm going to bother with the rest of the series though.
Best to leave it here.
On a high.

[David B · Rating 4 out of 5]

When nuclear Armageddon ravages the world, Vietnam vet Magnus Trench, AKA Phoenix, rises from the ashes of San Francisco and sets out to search for his wife and son on the East Coast. Along the way, he contends with mutated Contams, predatory bikers, and the forces of SCORF (Special Commando Retaliatory Force). These soldiers work for Luther Enoch, the dark messiah of the National Church of the Second Coming, who orchestrated the end of civilization while positioning himself to rule among the ruins. It doesn’t take long for the two to become archenemies. David Alexander’s gory action scenes sometimes read like the fever dreams of a frustrated cookbook writer. On the menu: “human Swiss cheese,” “bloody hamburger,” intestines “like a coil of pink sausages in a sauce of blood garnished with skeletal fragments,” and brains served in a variety of manners—“red cauliflower salad,” “steaming brain salad,” “strawberry thickshake,” and “yellow matter custard” (koo koo ka choo). Gross perhaps, but clearly the product of a man who loves his work. If you’re looking for something to fill the hole in your heart left by the disappearance of apocalyptic 80s action thrillers on VHS, this book is for you.

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[Jason Mussett · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've read this a few times. The story without giving too much away is like this. Our hero Magnus trench-I always liked the weird names Mr Alexander gave his characters, is enjoying a holiday in the hills above San Francisco when Soviet missiles blow the city and most of the U.S to kingdom come. After saving Federal agent Hamilton Rawlings from government troops Trench sets off in search of his wife and son armed to the teeth-naturally. Along the way he saves young Prostitute September Song -another name from a load of scummy bikers and makes an enemy out of mercenary John Tallon-not the kind of man who forgives easily.

So anyway there's questionable sex with September Song-agewise at least, gun porn, violence and gore-sounds like a Saturday night really. Quite exciting despite its faults, Alexander keeps the action moving at a fast pace. If there's nothing on the telly and its raining, trust me you could do a lot worse.

[DJMikeG · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ludicrously entertaining pulp action with strong sci fi and horror elements. This is one over the top, balls to the wall exercise in "Men's Adventure" from start to finish. Would most people consider this a "good" book? Probably not, but it entertained the hell out of me! If handled correctly, I think this book would make an awesome movie. The post apocalyptic genre is pretty worn out, but this book has lots of originality and serious cojones. I look forward to reading the other books in the series!

[Nick Horvath · Rating 5 out of 5]

Most fun I've had in a book in a long, long time. Violence porn. Gun porn. Porn porn. This book has it all. Splattered across every page in glorious technicolor gore. Instantly earned the title of my favorite men's adventure series ever.

[Brain Temple · Rating 4 out of 5]

cOntra, doom, and duke nukem 3D: the novel

[Ken Gooday · Rating 3 out of 5]

Meh. It was 80's action on steroids. Author had weird vibes. Would have been better as a B movie