"Go-Go-Girls of the Apocalypse"

Victor Gischler is a former English professor and the author of Gun Monkeys, The Pistol Poets, Suicide Squeeze, and Shotgun Opera.

He applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse, and reported the following:

From page 69 of Go-Go-Girls of the Apocalypse:

They climbed up again, made their way forward to the end of the flatcar. He cocked the little machine gun, thumbed off the safety. One of the train guards hung limp and dead between the flatcar and the handcar, the back of his head wet and bloody from a large-caliber slug. They leapt over him and landed with a thud on the big handcar.

The stink of sweat slapped Mortimer in the face. The muscle guys pumped, hot, wet skin steaming in the freezing air. A shot caught one of them in the head, brain and skull and blood exploding red and gunky. He toppled over, hit the deck of the handcar with a meaty thump and rolled off.

The above selection is a pretty good indication of the sort of action found in my new novel Go-Go-Girls of the Apocalypse. Direct, visceral and cinematic. But the passage also hints at the satire. In Go-Go I’ve attempted to create a world that walks the tightrope between a legitimate action novel, and an over-the-top satire.

After the fall of civilization, our hero Mortimer Tate finds himself on The Muscle Express, a train not powered by a locomotive, but by a team of greased-up muscle men who have been given narcotic boosts so they can pump the handcar faster and longer.

Yeah. It’s that kind of book.

Mortimer and the train crew must repel an attack by bandits – which is where we find ourselves on page 69. Mortimer’s adventures become more dangerous and bizarre as the novel continues. A bawdy, irreverent, violent, strange novel.

Read an excerpt from Go-Go-Girls of the Apocalypse, and learn more about the book and author at Victor Gischler's Blogpocalypse.

Check out the complete list of books in the Page 69 Test Series.

--Marshal Zeringue