Sky Strike

The Zone #4

by James Rouch

Book by Rouch, J.

Genres: Fiction, War

221 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published February 1, 1986

Reviews

[Craig · Rating 2 out of 5]

The Zone was a series of ten books that appeared in the U.K. from 1980-'90. The earlier books were published as military/future warfare science fiction, though when political and technological developments made the WWIII premise obsolete the description was changed to alternate history, set in a world where the Berlin Wall didn't fall. Zebra reprinted the books in the U.S. with the genre "Men's Adventure" listed on the spine. In this fourth one, a NATO strike team is trapped in The Zone, an area that seems to be Germany that's been ravaged by nuclear and chemical and conventional warfare. They try to fight their way back to their own lines in a Soviet armored vehicle, encountering displaced and desperate civilians and hordes of Soviet troops, who aren't very intelligent or efficient. There's a lot of pointless sex and violence and cruelty, and it's hard to distinguish the good guys from the bad guys much of the time. It seemed like one of those older cartoonish video computer games where the players just endlessly shoot their way across the landscape. (It occurs to me that perhaps those games are what replaced the market for men's adventure series like this one.) Anyway, it's not great literature, but it tells the story it's supposed to tell.

[Paschalis]

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