FFB: Overload Book 10: Michigan Madness

FFB: Overload Book 10: Michigan Madness by Bob Ham

Bantam- Falcon Adventure. $3.50 in the USA

Published April 1991

Marc Lee and Carl Brown are a pair of former commandos who have returned to the civilian life and now drive big rigs coast to coast and along the way have adventures, as chronicled in the Overload series by Bob Ham about a dozen of which were published around the end of the 80s and starting of the 90s.

According to my notes I read this one back in April of 1991, at the time I was in my last semester of my senior year of high school. I was the one kid in my school who was reading what my creative writing teacher dismissed at the ‘books you find in line at the grocery store’. I loved that they were nothing more than escapist adventure tales, and the fact that this generally tended to piss off my classmates and keep me separate from them.

Men’s adventure books of the era we in a strange place. The pulp tales of the 30s, the WWII stories of the 40s had given away to a world where most of the globe had been vigorously explored, where colonial powers were watching their foreign holdings becoming independent. By the 80s we were a post Vietnam world, and the biggest influence on Adventure story telling had to be films like Rambo, Death wish and Die Hard.

Overload as a series dealt with the fears of the day, Satanists and Terrorists, as Nazi’s, Commies, and homegrown revolutionaries having faded as the big threats of the time. Notice that I am not getting into the in’s and out’s of the story of the book, as I honestly don’t recall them, and my recent attempt to re-read the book wasn’t so much a failure as my lack of interest gave way to my having picked up other titles that seemed to hold more promise as leisure reading worth my time, energy and interest. I am sure that we all have those books that we read once upon a time that we all now look back and wonder what we were thinking. I read the Overload Series, the Mutant’s Amok Series, the Freedom’s Rangers Series, and others that I have long forgotten and dismissed as a teen and early twenty something, and as I gave them my time, they are worth at least looking back at.