Mick Norman (the pen name of Laurence James) wrote four Angels from Hell novels in the 1970s, and this 1994 collection from Creation rescues them from out-of-printness.

The rescue effort was worth it: they’re fast, brutal, addictive novels about biker gangs, set in a dystopian 1990s Britain. Petrocarbons are burned, laws are broken, women are deflowered. The novels are short and were clearly quickly written (why didn’t Creation fix the copy errors?), but they’re loaded with energy, heart, and humor, and the only parts that have dated are the parts that don’t matter. There are read-in-one-go books; this is practically a read-in-one-go series.

Disillusioned vet Gerald Vinson becomes a patched-in member of the Last Heroes chapter of the Hells Angels, where his intelligence, training, and leadership abilities soon see him in command of the charter. But when you ride a tiger you can’t ever get off, and Gerry is enmeshed in Forever Wars against rival chapters, switchblade-wielding football hooligans, crooked journalists, and a fascistic British government that seeks to destroy the Angels (given the hundreds of homicides the Angels are involved in over the course of the series, one sees their point).

The main character, of course, is almost the bikes themselves. They serve the same function as horses do in Westerns – both a method of transportation (you can go almost anywhere on a bike, and very quickly) and symbol of masculinity. One way to know shit’s about to go down in the books is that a biker has his “hog” sabotaged or destroyed.

The political incorrectness is high. Mick Norman doesn’t seem to like homosexuals: his villains are flamboyantly gay far more frequently than chance would predict. I also don’t believe there’s one female character who isn’t killed, raped, threatened with rape, beaten to a pulp, or some combination of the previous – aside from the old lady at the start of Guardian Angels, who merely has a severed head flung through her car’s front windshield. There’s one British-African character that I can recall. He provides help to Gerry, and he and his family get burned to death by Gerry’s enemies for their trouble.

If I had a complaint, the books get smaller in scope as they progress, instead of bigger. The first one (Angels from Hell) is Gerry vs the government. The second (Angel Challenge) is Gerry vs a rival chapter. The third (Guardian Angels) is Gerry vs a couple of hoodlums. The fourth (Angels on my Mind) is Gerry vs a single psychotic cop, who (in a scenario reminiscent of Stephen King’s Misery, which it precedes by fifteen years) has illegally detained him in a basement, where his even more batshit psychologist wife seeks to “study” him.

They’re fine tales, but the first has an exhilarating sense of “us against the world” that is never quite recaptured, replaced instead by weary Ballardian nihilism.

The bikers = cowboys metaphor I posited above breaks down quickly. Cowboys in the paperback Westerns always had pro-social goals – saving towns from bandits and cattle rustlers is a noble deed. But none of Gerry’s men and women are good people. Their world has no use for good people. Nice guys don’t just finish last, they finish in body bags. But they also don’t have any long-term goals; everyone seems to be staring into the same black pit. Their battles and rides lead to more battles and rides. What’s the point? But then, what’s the point of a biker gang in real life? To have brothers? A brother that’s going to squeal on you at the first scent of a plea bargain?

How do you write a novel about a bad person and persuade the reader to care? Typically, by making the other characters even worse – gangster films traditionally pit “good” criminals (honorable men, bound by loyalty and brotherhood) against “bad” criminals (unprincipled lunatics). It’s sort of like making your worst-smelling clothes smell good by rubbing your nose in shit. Norman’s approach is different: he makes the “straights” equally bad, just in a different way. One of the books ends with an open-ended question: who is to blame for the Angels? They didn’t fall out of the sky. Our society made them. Our society will make more of them.

The best book is Angel’s Challenge, which features an absurd premise that at least gives the story some anchoring: two biker gangs agree to a scavenger hunt across London, with the losers being forced to disband and burn their colors. But in the third book, an existential loneliness sets in. The fascistic government is out of power. There’s nothing left to do, and Gerry’s bikers end up working as roadies for rock bands (echoes of the legendary Altamont Free Concert in 1969, where a Hells Angels security detail ended up fracturing skulls and stabbing people). They are empty men inside. It’s a miracle that they don’t shatter like eggshells when they crash.

They have their freedom, at least. Freedom to do what?

1. The Beatles fandom is surprisingly forgiving toward its historic villains.

Yoko Ono was rehabilitated years ago. It’s difficult to believe that anyone ever resented Linda Eastman. Alexis Mardas is remembered as a lovable kook.

Allen Klein is a more difficult case: his current status is “slightly shady chap who nonetheless made lots of necessary decisions and helped save the Beatles from ruin.”

I wonder who will post the first unironic “You know, we’re really a bit hard on that Mark David Chapman bloke…”

2. Who broke up the Beatles?

The Beatles formed in 1960 and lasted until 1970, when they severed relations under a metaphorical cloud and possibly also a literal cloud (Paul was known to quote partake endquote). Any chance of a reunion ended in 1980 with John’s death.

But that’s only ten years of breakup. It pales into insignificance when you consider the years prior to 1970 in which the Beatles were broken up, because they hadn’t formed yet.

There’s a strong argument that they were more broken up in 1900 than in 1979. In 1979, they could’ve theoretically gotten in a room and played together. But in the year 1900 the Beatles were broken up so hard they hadn’t even been born. In 1700s their instruments didn’t exist. In 10,000 BC music didn’t exist.  1.4 x 10^10 years ago the carbon composing their bodies didn’t exist.

The further back you go, the more broken up the Beatles become. Ironically, the Beatles weren’t broken up at the beginning of the universe, when all matter was overlayed in a single point. The Beatles existed in that point, as did all of their music and all of their fans and the bullets killed one of them and the cancer that killed a second. But then the point released its energy, and the tragic Beatles-less aeons began.

To answer the question: God himself broke up the Beatles. He caused the fourteen billion years of creation and ensured that the Fab Four only existed in ten of them.

3. What’s the greatest Beatles album?

It’s unthinkable in 2021 to say Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Maybe you actually like that one the best, but it’d be like picking Ziggy Stardust as the best Bowie album or Dark Side of the Moon as the best Pink Floyd album. You’d look like an milquetoast, risk-averse idiot, following the herd. The point of these “what’s your fav?” questions is to display the sophistication of your tastes.

Abbey Road or Revolver or Rubber Soul? Those are still too popular and well-loved. The White Album? Let it Be? Then there’s the opposite problem: you’re obviously trolling, trying to get a reaction. One of the first five albums? And announce that you’re a lobotomy patient who only listens to pop songs and doesn’t appreciate psychedelic 9/8 sitar anthems about monkeys fucking etc?

So what’s left? We’re running out of albums. I’ve given this important matter several seconds of thought and reached a conclusion: the greatest Beatles album is The Rutles (1978) by The Rutles.

A 1993 platform game programmed for DOS by Apogee’s Jim Norwood, who went on to develop Shadow Warriors, Heroes of Might and Magic V, and that cherished classic Third Example Goes Here.  You control a porn-mustachio’d spec force operative named (I fear) Snake Logan, who has crash-landed in a mutant-infested city and must etc.

Platform games belong to either the “jump around and collect stars” Mario school or the “shoot guns and blow shit up” Contra school. Bio Menace is unapologetically the latter: it ranks as among the most violent Apogee titles, with monsters dying in explosions of pixelated blood and body parts. This clashes with their visual design, which is “Teletubby crossbred with Barney the Dinosaur”.

Bio Menace looks a lot older than it is. Slated for a 1991 release, it was delayed for two years due to engine modifications, and in 1993 it looked as dated as glam metal. The graphics are 16-color EGA, and the backgrounds don’t parallax-scroll. At least it ran smoothly. I recall being able to play it on Windows XP, although I don’t think it works on any 64-bit operating system.

The game was a competent blend of puzzle-solving (a laser forcefield blocks the way! Can you find the key to disable it?) and hallways filled with monsters to gun down. It had a nice sense of place – the first level in particular is a realistic urban environment littered with bodies and wrecked cars.

Bio Menace tries to create a believable world. Completing levels is just shorthand for “rescuing civilians”. Reaching high places means finding a ladder or riding an elevator, instead of jumping 30 feet. Health powerups and keys are usually found in places that make logical sense, like lockers and cabinets.

This part of Bio Menace hasn’t aged. In fact, it anticipates the future of gaming. The arcades were going away, and the industry was pupating into the next stage of its life: immersive experiences dependent on technology and sensory realism. Bio Menace, with its stupid monsters and EGA pixels, is far from immersive. But playing that first level, with its eerie post-apocalyptic vibe, you can see that the winds are starting to change. For better or worse, games would soon start trying to be movies.

There’s even an effort made at narrative. When you rescue a civilian, Snake Logan has a little tete-a-tete with them, with dialog as amazing as you’d expect (“I’m gonna dust that little dweeb! He can’t do this and escape!”)…hey, at least it’s only the second worst-written videogame about a spec forces operative called Snake, am I right ba-dum tisshhh hurr hurr.

It exemplifies Apogee’s approach: funnel out cheap (and cheaply made) games under a “shareware” business model. You got to play the first 30% of the game for free, and since that 30% typically contained 80% of the game’s actual worthwhile content, this was a pretty good deal. But it did lend itself to disposable experiences, and games that were  copy-pastes of some other popular title.

Bio Menace is a minor game, without the arthouse pretensions of Eric Chahi’s Out of this World or the rotoscoped professionalism of Jordan Mechner’s Prince of Persia. It probably made some money, and even if it didn’t, it surely wasn’t a big red stain on Apogee’s balance sheets. Bio Menace is like throwing ten cents down on a roulette spin. Is it worth playing now? No, unless you’re a fan of “ARE YOU A BAD ENOUGH DUDE TO RESCUE THE PRESIDENT?”-style shlock.