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Deathlands #23
Road Wars
THE FUTURE UNCERTAIN
Emerging out of the ashes of the nuclear apocalypse, no one has been more successful and determined than Ryan Cawdor and his band of warrior survivalists. But if the wasteland's endless miles come between them, the odds for getting back together again -- for their very survival -- are not in their favor.
DIVIDED WE FALL
A cryptic message regarding the long-missing Trader sends Ryan and the Armorer on an odyssey to the Pacific Northwest, away from their base, away from their band of warrior survivalists, away from Krysty Wroth. While Ryan battles the blood-hungry predators of the road, back in New Mexico, Krysty Wroth and the others fight off attacks against their weakened group in an all-out struggle for survival.
In the Deathlands, fate and chance are clashing with frightening force.
Emerging out of the ashes of the nuclear apocalypse, no one has been more successful and determined than Ryan Cawdor and his band of warrior survivalists. But if the wasteland's endless miles come between them, the odds for getting back together again -- for their very survival -- are not in their favor.
DIVIDED WE FALL
A cryptic message regarding the long-missing Trader sends Ryan and the Armorer on an odyssey to the Pacific Northwest, away from their base, away from their band of warrior survivalists, away from Krysty Wroth. While Ryan battles the blood-hungry predators of the road, back in New Mexico, Krysty Wroth and the others fight off attacks against their weakened group in an all-out struggle for survival.
In the Deathlands, fate and chance are clashing with frightening force.
348 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published January 1, 1994
6 people are currently reading
132 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
November 30, 2009
I'm a little dissapointed in Trader.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
May 28, 2025
Book Title: Road Wars
Author: James Axler
Genre: Scifi/Post- Apocalypse
Rating: 4/5
Quick opinion of book:
Pure Action Entertainment
Why I chose this book: Next book in Drathlands series.
Date started: Don't Recall
Date finished: 5/26/25
Summary: Ryan Cawdor and J.B. Dix travel out toward Seattle to meet and Abe and the Trader, who was thought dead. Meanwhile Krysty and the others stay at Jak's farm house waiting their return. Both have troubles they must face and survive, can they do it?
Favorite Quotes: N/A
Highlights: N/A
Author: James Axler
Genre: Scifi/Post- Apocalypse
Rating: 4/5
Quick opinion of book:
Pure Action Entertainment
Why I chose this book: Next book in Drathlands series.
Date started: Don't Recall
Date finished: 5/26/25
Summary: Ryan Cawdor and J.B. Dix travel out toward Seattle to meet and Abe and the Trader, who was thought dead. Meanwhile Krysty and the others stay at Jak's farm house waiting their return. Both have troubles they must face and survive, can they do it?
Favorite Quotes: N/A
Highlights: N/A
September 13, 2022
Bad spelling
Decent story, but the spelling and broken paragraphs really ruin it. Examples include smith amp; wesson and it always says that a person bolstered their weapon when the correct word is holstered. I hope the later books have corrected these mistakes.
Decent story, but the spelling and broken paragraphs really ruin it. Examples include smith amp; wesson and it always says that a person bolstered their weapon when the correct word is holstered. I hope the later books have corrected these mistakes.
June 20, 2023
Kind of a tableau of short scenes of different places along the road. Meanwhile the home group deals with flagellants. Felt like it was made up of ideas that couldn't be fleshed out into full books but the writers didn't want to lose them so they shoved them all in together.
November 2, 2025
Great entertainment without too much thinking! These books are great if you care into those 'after the bomb' scenarios! Although, like most series, they follow a pattern but the stories are just different enough not to matter!
October 23, 2019
It feels like the protagonists are getting stupider. A creepy Texas Chainsaw Massacre embalmist lets you stay the night in his house, what could go wrong?
March 29, 2013
Rating: 5.1 / 10
I had never heard of the Deathlands series until a friend mentioned it to me about a month ago and I became intrigued. I have always and will always have a soft spot for science fiction, and have a personal love of post-apocalyptic. And this series (at least what I've read of it) seems to be the double bacon and peameal bacon four cheese burger between two Boston cream doughnuts as a bun version of post-apocalyptic scifi – that is, super indulgent with little nutritional value.
First, the tidbits of the series. James Axler is not a real person. This pseudonym has evolved as a sort of corporate shell for the brand that is Deathlands. The first book was written by Christopher Lowder, mostly, yet he fell ill before he could finish it, and it was concluded by Laurence James, who stuck the name James Axler on it. As of the writing of this review, there are 108 books in the Deathlands series. All total, there have been 13 authors (not counting Lowder himself) to have used the mantle Axler and contribute to the series. This is important to note because – as we may see as I progress further with the series – different authors tend to have different voices, or even employ different styles, and the integrity of the story can only carry a book so far.
This book, the 23rd of the series (the first I'm reading) is still a Laurence James original. He wrote all the way up to the 33rd, as well as the 45th and co-wrote the 44th.
The Deathlands series takes place about a century after a nuclear holocaust in America they call Skydark, and follows Ryan Cawdor and a group of others along their adventures and misadventures across the Deathlands. Society looks like a neo-Dark Ages, with various barons controlling random territories, slavery, a Wild West-type gunslinger bravado, mutants and so on. This book, Road Wars, follows Ryan and his friend JB Dix as they travel by road from New Mexico to Seattle in search of an old companion of theirs, Trader.
The perfect word to describe this book is this: episodic. Never have I read anything that appeared more to be an episode, or, more accurately, a series of episodes that is itself an episode.
The book is short at about 350 pages. I listened to this as an audiobook, and the audiobook was itself abridged, coming in at about 3 hours – less than half the length of standard airport pulp. I wasn't bored with any of it, but it does become quite apparent that it's merely a string of unrelated misadventures and, had it gone on longer, it would have become tedious. As it stands, 108 books worth might be too long, but such short episodes can be consumed at my leisure and I think I'll be able to do the entire series without reaching the point of tedium. It's important to note that there is a lot of background detail very lightly skimmed over in this, the language is beautifully crafted and these short episodic snippits paint, collectively, a grandiose picture. If the series maintains the calibre of this, randomly chosen, 23rd book (and that's a big 'if'), it could become a beloved and treasured series.
I want to take a moment to discuss the prose and structure. One such Goodreads review of the first book (“Pilgrimage to Hell”) says this:
“Ryan Cowdar and Krysty Wroth are the main protagonists with an array of supporting characters. Ryan is a mysterious bad ass with an eye patch, Krysty is a tall big boobed combat trained red headed beauty. Together with their team of warrior merchants they take on the ruthless baron of a "Plague Pit" town. There is lots of bloody action, over the top characters, with a bawdy and macabre humor tossed in. If there were a template to be made for "Books for Dudes" this would be the mold to start with. The men are manly, the women are beautiful. Sex is brief and very "Dude-centric".”
I would almost completely agree. In “Road Wars”, Krysty's cup size isn't mentioned, but she and Ryan do have sex, within about the first ninety seconds (audiobook), and it's written both with vulgar realism, but without being pornographic. The grit and grime of post-apocalyptic America is written with the same dark realism, beautiful women being ogled but trucker types demanding a titty show, greedy heirs plotting an overthrow for a timely ascension to power, rape, dysentery, and a type of callousness towards human life that's to be expected. This is not a cheap cop-out of a post-apocalyptic book.
For me, a rating like 5.1 is rather low and generally signifies I don't like something, but I did like this. It probably has a lot to do with its abridged length and my soft spot for post-apocalyptic scifi. This is one of the rare instances where my rating system is somewhat flawed, because things like theme and character development – of which there's little of either – seriously drag down the score. Take that into account when contrasting a number like 5.1 with the general praise I've just detailed.
So to sum up, I enjoyed this utterly meaningless romp, I'm glad it was only three hours, and I will definitely be reading more of them.
I had never heard of the Deathlands series until a friend mentioned it to me about a month ago and I became intrigued. I have always and will always have a soft spot for science fiction, and have a personal love of post-apocalyptic. And this series (at least what I've read of it) seems to be the double bacon and peameal bacon four cheese burger between two Boston cream doughnuts as a bun version of post-apocalyptic scifi – that is, super indulgent with little nutritional value.
First, the tidbits of the series. James Axler is not a real person. This pseudonym has evolved as a sort of corporate shell for the brand that is Deathlands. The first book was written by Christopher Lowder, mostly, yet he fell ill before he could finish it, and it was concluded by Laurence James, who stuck the name James Axler on it. As of the writing of this review, there are 108 books in the Deathlands series. All total, there have been 13 authors (not counting Lowder himself) to have used the mantle Axler and contribute to the series. This is important to note because – as we may see as I progress further with the series – different authors tend to have different voices, or even employ different styles, and the integrity of the story can only carry a book so far.
This book, the 23rd of the series (the first I'm reading) is still a Laurence James original. He wrote all the way up to the 33rd, as well as the 45th and co-wrote the 44th.
The Deathlands series takes place about a century after a nuclear holocaust in America they call Skydark, and follows Ryan Cawdor and a group of others along their adventures and misadventures across the Deathlands. Society looks like a neo-Dark Ages, with various barons controlling random territories, slavery, a Wild West-type gunslinger bravado, mutants and so on. This book, Road Wars, follows Ryan and his friend JB Dix as they travel by road from New Mexico to Seattle in search of an old companion of theirs, Trader.
The perfect word to describe this book is this: episodic. Never have I read anything that appeared more to be an episode, or, more accurately, a series of episodes that is itself an episode.
The book is short at about 350 pages. I listened to this as an audiobook, and the audiobook was itself abridged, coming in at about 3 hours – less than half the length of standard airport pulp. I wasn't bored with any of it, but it does become quite apparent that it's merely a string of unrelated misadventures and, had it gone on longer, it would have become tedious. As it stands, 108 books worth might be too long, but such short episodes can be consumed at my leisure and I think I'll be able to do the entire series without reaching the point of tedium. It's important to note that there is a lot of background detail very lightly skimmed over in this, the language is beautifully crafted and these short episodic snippits paint, collectively, a grandiose picture. If the series maintains the calibre of this, randomly chosen, 23rd book (and that's a big 'if'), it could become a beloved and treasured series.
I want to take a moment to discuss the prose and structure. One such Goodreads review of the first book (“Pilgrimage to Hell”) says this:
“Ryan Cowdar and Krysty Wroth are the main protagonists with an array of supporting characters. Ryan is a mysterious bad ass with an eye patch, Krysty is a tall big boobed combat trained red headed beauty. Together with their team of warrior merchants they take on the ruthless baron of a "Plague Pit" town. There is lots of bloody action, over the top characters, with a bawdy and macabre humor tossed in. If there were a template to be made for "Books for Dudes" this would be the mold to start with. The men are manly, the women are beautiful. Sex is brief and very "Dude-centric".”
I would almost completely agree. In “Road Wars”, Krysty's cup size isn't mentioned, but she and Ryan do have sex, within about the first ninety seconds (audiobook), and it's written both with vulgar realism, but without being pornographic. The grit and grime of post-apocalyptic America is written with the same dark realism, beautiful women being ogled but trucker types demanding a titty show, greedy heirs plotting an overthrow for a timely ascension to power, rape, dysentery, and a type of callousness towards human life that's to be expected. This is not a cheap cop-out of a post-apocalyptic book.
For me, a rating like 5.1 is rather low and generally signifies I don't like something, but I did like this. It probably has a lot to do with its abridged length and my soft spot for post-apocalyptic scifi. This is one of the rare instances where my rating system is somewhat flawed, because things like theme and character development – of which there's little of either – seriously drag down the score. Take that into account when contrasting a number like 5.1 with the general praise I've just detailed.
So to sum up, I enjoyed this utterly meaningless romp, I'm glad it was only three hours, and I will definitely be reading more of them.
January 26, 2016
An average apocalyptic adventure story. This one takes a century after the last war and now there are mutants running around the earth. Recommended
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews