Daddy's Little Girl by Daniel Ransom

Daddy's Little Girl
by Daniel Ransom (Ed Gorman)
1985, Zebra

A man travelling through a small town has his teenage daughter disappear. He fiddles around town with the local widowed journalist and they, despite the lack of any evidence, assume a conspiracy. We look in on the various townfolk and occasionally pop in on the captured teen to remind us this is supposed to be horror.

Spins it's wheels pretty much the whole length before exposing the baddies which we already know about. I saw a review that described this as a watered down Richard Laymon tribute, and that kind of tracks.

Tame and aimless. One of Gorman's first books, and presumably improved later in his career.

From Amazon

Phoenix 2: Ground Zero by David Alexander

Phoenix 2
Ground Zero
by David Alexander
1987, Leisure

With this second installment of Phoenix, David Alexander adds a vital component to post-apocalyptical men's adventure: hard core pornography.

Magnus Trench makes his way through Las Vegas, where he's forced by the town boss The Sheik to fight in the Murder Marathon and ends up with a hippie mutant sex cult in the desert.

Fights, car battles, exploding heads, gun porn, porn porn, a gladiatrix with a strap-on pistol. One of the most excessive novels of the 80s.

The whole series from Amazon

The Bartender 1: Highballs and High Kicks by R.J. Calder

The Bartender 1
Highballs and Highkicks
by R.J. Calder
2023, Point of Impact Publishing

Tough gal Brodie goes undercover as a bartender at a cover for an underground fight club to avenge a dead friend. Quick and brutal action, more good stuff from Point of Impact.

From Amazon

Black Brute 3: Slave's Revenge by Robert Tralins

Black Brute 3

Slave's Revenge
by Robert Tralins
1974, New English Library

Escaped slave Brutus is on the run, comes across bandits and bounty hunters, and meets up with an escaped slave community hiding in the swamp. He tries to build them into an army with a plan of marching to the coast, seizing a ship, and returning to Africa, but his plans are thwarted and he's captured.

His former slaver ties him down and tries to have a sexing contest, which Brutus of course wins. Not much subtlety with the inferiority complexes in this genre.

Included in Black Roots

WWX: European Title Hardman vs Robert Silverberg

 

Monsters beat mobsters, and Robert Silverberg claims the gold.

Monsters and Things by Robert Silverberg

Monsters and Things
by Robert Silverberg
2023, PS Publishing

Before turning to respectable science fiction, Robert Silberberg cut his teeth writing monsters and aliens for magazines like Monster Parade and Super-Science Fiction. Many had the feel of sub-EC horror comics of the 50s. Some highlights:

An undertaker who brings his products to the next town where he's a butcher.

A spaceship lands on a planet where a ship had crashed a decades ago. A leaky reactor produced a generation of cannibalistic mutants.

After repelling endless waves of unstoppable giant monsters who just wanted to lay their eggs, the human survivors break open the giant eggs and stop on the embryos.

Solipsistic horror as a returning vet finds that most people aren't real.

Fun stuff, probably more my style than his classier stuff.

From Amazon

Hardman 2: The Charleston Knife is Back in Town by Ralph Dennis

Hardman 2
The Charleston Knife is Back in Town
by Ralph Dennis
1974, Popular Library

Hardman and Hump (who should have gotten equal billing) are hired by the family of a kid who participated in a robbery at a mobbed up party, trying to find him before the mob assassin The Charleston Knife does. The characters and sleazy setting of 1970s Atlanta carry a lot of the weight, and for me it seems as time goes on it won't cover for the plotting as effectively.

Available from Amazon