I’ve always found it odd and a bit sad that the Death Dealer books give Frank Frazetta top billing at the expense of actual author James R. Silke. I mean, look at the cover at right; Silke’s name could not be pushed down any further without sliding off. It’s practically buried among the skeletal remains of Gath of Baal’s victims.

Sure, The Death Dealer is an iconic, near-transcendent image rendered by arguably the greatest fantasy illustrator of all time. Frazetta’s name sold scads of books back in the day, by the 1980s was a household name, and so should get play. But in the end Frazetta provided a single arresting cover image, hardly enough fuel for a single story, let alone a series of novels. And it’s up to an author to carry them.

Silke gives it his best go in the Death Dealer books, a series which eventually spanned four volumes (Rise of the Death Dealer, an omnibus edition containing the first two novels, was reprinted in 2005). I have not read them all but am making my way through this Vietnam of late ‘80s sword-and-sorcery, and recently tackled book 2, Lords of Destruction (1989, TOR). You can read a review of Book 1, Prisoner of the Horned Helmet, at The Silver Key.

Silke seems like an interesting cat. From what I’ve been able to gather he was born in 1931 and at age 91 is still kicking in Los Angeles. In addition to the five Death Dealer novels, he also wrote the screenplay for the immortal S&S film The Barbarians (1987), along with a handful of other screenplay credits. And it gets a lot more interesting from there: Silke was the executive art director at Capitol Records where he won a Grammy Award for the cover of Judy at Carnegie Hall. He created, edited, and designed the magazines Cinema and Movies International, was a glamour photographer, and author and artist of several graphic novels. And he continues working up to the present day with a successful 2021 Kickstarter for a 350-page, illustrated hardcover novel Mata Hari Escapes that exceeded its fundraising goals and shipped in June of this year.

More coolness on Silke can be found in the Juxtapoz Magazine article “Jim Silke’s Erotic Side.”

How a fine art and music background led Silke to S&S and barbarian fantasy is a curious one, but the genre did have a gravitational pull of its own in the ‘70s and ‘80s, sucking many a creative into its muscular vortex. It’s a tale I’d love to see told. It’s all a roundabout way of saying that Silke seems interesting enough to share a bit more cover real estate with Frazetta, IMO.

I have mixed feelings about these books. They contain zero irony or outward humor, but they are also to S&S what Manowar is to heavy metal: Unapologetically loud and proud, wildly brash and unrepentantly over the top. The books embrace the schlock entertainment aspect of S&S so hard that they really can’t be described as caricature, unless unintentionally so. I suppose it’s possible Silke and the Death Dealer series is taking the piss out of ‘80s barbarians on a level I can’t quite comprehend, but I don’t think so. It all feels too earnest.

More likely, I think he believed the way to win S&S readers’ hearts is to take what the likes of Lin Carter and John Jakes and Gardner Fox were doing in the ‘70s, and turn it up to 11 in the decade of decadence. Which has some merit, if handled skillfully. But that is (mostly) not the case here.

This novel unfortunately was not as entertaining as Prisoner of the Horned Helmet. The basic plot is not worth spending much time on, but in short…ah hell I’ll just give you the back cover copy:

In the mists of time, before Atlantis rose, Gath of Baal was imprisoned by the Horned Helmet, the Death Dealer. Only the innocent touch of the maiden Robin Lakehair could free him from its murderous power, even for a time.
Now Tivvy, Nymph Queen of Pyram, seeks the godlike powers that she can gain only from Robin Lakehair’s death. To save Robin’s life, Gath must don his helmet again and confront the demons Tivvy has summoned from the primordial depths—demons that emerge from mankind’s deepest fears.
For his own freedom and the life of his beloved, Gath of Baal, the Death Dealer, must face the LORDS OF DESTRUCTION

(Yes, LORDS OF DESTRUCTION is in all caps. As LORDS OF DESTRUCTION should be. Lest they destroy you.)

The depiction of women will be described by many as “problematic”: You have your evil cougar snake demon, Cobra, and your young pure virgin, Robin, both sexually objectified to the hilt. Silke clearly loves/worships the female form (I can’t find fault there) and lets it all hang out with his lengthy, loving descriptions of the demoness Cobra, the artificially youthful bloodsucking demigoddess Tivvy, and Robin, who in one scene has to get loose on the dance floor to convince folks that she’s a voluptuous and greasy gypsy, and not the innocent girl everyone is hot to kill. Robin has a crush on Gath (all the women do) but also on this younger and more normal fella Jakar, who is utterly unmemorable except that he wields a crossbow and breaks an arm at one point. Trust me, this love triangle is nothing to write home about.

But “problematic” too are Silke’s depictions of men, especially Gath of Baal, who through two books is still a grunting murder machine with an occasional flash of fractured humanity. His sidekicks are likewise flat, save maybe the middle aged and soft Brown John, perhaps a stand-in for us readers. None of us can feel masculine next to Gath, not even Conan. The dude just smashes his opponents, crushing skulls and tearing out throats with his bare hands when he’s not lopping off heads and limbs with a wicked axe. Meanwhile poor Brown John just fawns over the scheming Cobra who strings him along.

Everything in here is simultaneously four color and two dimensional. The characters are comic-booky and flat. As I noted in the review of Book 1 the world is more or less a series of generic capitalized place names like The Land of Smoking Skies, the Barrier Mountains, and a vast sea of sand dunes cunningly named the Emptiness. I suspect this would have all worked a lot better as one of Silke’s graphic novels. I love the fact that when Death Dealer was adapted to the comic medium in 1995, angsty, muscle-bound metal singer Glenn Danzig wrote the adaptation, with Frazetta providing the covers and a trio of artists splitting the illustration work. This to me seems a better fit. In 300-350 page novels, it makes for less than entertaining reading. In the end Lords of Destruction feels more a long and dreary quest-thing broken up by fights and chases rather than the rock concert it should be.

On the plus side, there are a lot of wild weird monsters, including giant worms, bat creatures, and voluptuous vampiric demonesses, that offer some nice mental scenery to chew on. My favorite is a shark man LORD OF DESTRUCTION, a seven-foot foil to Gath who walks around with a dorsal fin on his back and can transform into a great white shark when he hits the water. Awesome.

I think there are a few good short stories in here but artificially padded out to novel length. I find this is a problem with a lot of book length sword-and-sorcery, which I continue to believe is best practiced in the short form, i.e., short stories or novellas. S&S can and has been written successfully at book length (see Fritz Leiber’s The Swords of Lankhmar, Karl Edward Wagner’s Bloodstone, etc.) but the sweet spot is the short story. The Death Dealer series pushes the limits by stretching its arc over four moderately sized volumes, and after two books it feels like a lot of editing and condensing is in order.

To sum up my impressions of Death Dealer Book 2: Lords of Destruction: Heavy metal, but too one-note. Spinal Tap, absent the cleverness. Nevertheless I’m certain I’ll wade into part 3 at some point in the near future.

Brian Murphy is the author of Flame and Crimson: A History of Sword-and-Sorcery (Pulp Hero Press, 2020). Learn more about his life and work on his website, The Silver Key.