Chapter by Chapter features me reading one chapter of the selected book at the time and reviewing it as if I were a reviewing an episode of a TV show or an issue of a comic. There will be spoilers if you haven’t read to the point I have, and if you’ve read further I ask that you don’t spoil anything further into the book. Think of it as read-along book club.

Looking at the previous works for this stories’ author, he seems to work on fantasy and spy stories. His big works seem to be as one of the revolving authors of the Mack Bolan The Executioner series, created by Don Pendelton. One can make the case that the Phantom has skirted both genres and the end of story blurb says that he is a fan of the Phantom. So let’s see how he works the three together, if at all.

A Grim Certitude

by Nathan Meyer

Apparently drawing from his spy routes, this story is really one big action scene, and Meyer tells it well. This is also the first story in the book to feature the Singh Brotherhood, the pirate guild responsible for the Phantom in the first place all those generations ago. This particular group is part of a white slave trade and when the Phantom arrives is about to film a snuff film, with a poor nun as the “star”.

What follows is a beautifully described story of the Phantom kicking Singh backside, with great alliteration. For example:

The Phantom slipped smoothly in a choreographed ballet of violence. His hands came up and encircled the gangster’s neck, his arm locking around the man’s throat like an iron bar, shutting down the flow of blood to the thug’s brain, depriving it of oxygen. His grip slipped like a noose over the man’s head and held like a Boa constrictor.

The man gagged as his larynx was bruised. The blunt hammer of the Phantom’s knee connected hard with the man’s kidney and he folded like a lawn chair, dropping to his knees. As the man went down, the shadow that was the Ghost Who Walks, jerked sharply back on his hold until the man blacked out.

At one point, the nun is watching the Phantom take down her captors and there’s a moment where she looks at a table of instruments and remembers one of the filmmakers was tell her what they planned to do to her with each piece. There’s another where the story stops to talk about the history of technique used to tie her down. Neither really stops the story but I don’t think we would have missed them. Not that they were graphic, just that the story stops for a moment without being a breather between the next fight. Also, this story takes place in Africa in 1979. I wonder if this is still the same Phantom as the previous stories (as the strips have not used the “legacy” concept of the series very well, using the sliding timeline to keep the same characters in place) or a new one, as the previous stories have taken place a few decades earlier.

As a pure action piece it does a good job and is one of the better stories. So far this is a good book. Hopefully this continues in the next tale from our anthology.

Next Time: “The Sky Warriors” by Mark Justice

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