Review: Doug Casey and John Hunt’s Drug Lord offers action thriller with libertarian hero

By William H. Stoddard

Drug Lord is the second volume in the authors’ High Ground series about international entrepreneur and libertarian idealist Charles Knight. I can’t fault it as a libertarian work; of course, libertarians disagree about a lot of specific issues, but any libertarian reader will recognize the basic point of view. And I didn’t bog down in reading it, or find it a struggle to turn the next page.

Nonetheless, I have to say I’m ultimately not satisfied with Drug Lord as a book.

To start with, the authors seem insensitive to prose. I was struck by one passage where a secondary character, an overtly gay man, makes a joke about being turned on by naked power—“Not so much the power, but definitely the naked part”—in what the authors describe as a prominent lisp. I’ll accept that as a deliberate mockery of the stereotype. But the sentence only contains one sibilant! How can anyone lisp words without sibilants? Casey and Hunt seem to have put words down on paper without thinking about what they sound like. There’s nothing else quite that striking, but the style throughout the book seems flat and unmemorable.

The presentation of libertarian ideas is handicapped by a tendency to present the authors’ evaluations to the reader, rather than showing people and events and letting readers reach their own conclusions. That may appeal to some libertarians (though it doesn’t to me personally), but it’s an obstacle to readers who don’t already share those ideas.

Beyond that, this reads to me like a conventional mass market bestseller. The characterization and motivation don’t seem very deep; I mostly don’t get a sense for why the different characters are doing what they’re doing. The protagonists succeed at most of their actions, even when their approaches look poorly thought out and could plausibly fail; on the other hand, when an action fails, it’s not because there was any deeper error—it reads as if the authors decided they needed a reversal of fortune there and put one in without showing why that specific plot twist would happen. I read through all the action scenes without getting into the heads of the characters, and without any sense of tension about the outcome . . . and that’s really not a good thing in an action novel, such as this sets out to be.

Perhaps the big issue is that I don’t have enough sense for what’s at stake in these novels. We see the libertarian ideas. But we don’t see Charles Knight starting a radical movement to defend liberty, or the antagonistic characters engaged in a sinister plot to annihilate it once and for all. The story goes through the motions of struggle and crisis, but the liberty that’s its nominal theme never really seems to be at stake. I think that above all is why I don’t feel strongly involved in this series.

Note: For more reviews of sf/fantasy books and Prometheus Award nominees, visit the Index page listing the reviews and articles in many past issues of the LFS’ Prometheus quarterly, which has links to dozens of reviews from 1983 to 2015.

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