Book Review - Pat Kelleher - The Alleyman

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2011 Abaddon Books – spoiler alerts Book three of an ongoing pulp SF-Horror series featuring a squad of British soldiers snatched from the Somme to find themselves on a hostile alien jungle planet due to Satanic rituals performed by one of their officers. Volume two, The Ironclad Prophesy, ended with multiple cliff-hangers, as the tank, now heralded as a God by some of the insectoid aliens, plummeted into a deep jungle crater, with is crew on board. The main trench-camp was in trouble too with many men on the brink of mutiny, convinced that the war is over for them and adopting an every man for himself stance for survival. The third book quickly quashes the rebellion without killing them men, though some are cast into exile with consequences for later while the bulk of the story deals with a rescue mission to salvage the tank and its surviving crewman, with its captain having committed suicide and now turned into a zombie by the jungle’s plant-spores. The squaddies find unexpected allies among the aliens. Though the tank has lost a caterpillar track, it is now movable on actual giant caterpillars. The men find their gas-masks protect them from the deadly spores and poppy seeds from the Somme actually hold the encroaching jungle back from engulfing the camp. The crew’s airman, a pilot captured in the dimension shift that brought them to the alien World, is in for a surprise – the rival German pilot, The Alleyman of the title, has survived and also has his plane with him, but is he trying to attack, or just guide the pilot to something important that can only be seen from the air? This is a highly inventive yarn as the men find staying together as a unit and maintaining army protocols gets essential to their survival. Much of the story is taken up with resolving the complex problems set by the second book, but the finale is anti-climatic in that 1/. We have yet to re-encounter the main villain of the story, the Satanist who got them all transported n the first place. 2/. The finale now is just the discovery of a new dark sinister valley and the heroes entering it as if going into Dante’s inferno but with no mmediate sense of peril or tension. It feels like a mid-book chapter ending rather than a thrilling hook for volume four, but I look forward to reading that too. Arthur Chappell