Conquer

Conquer by Edward M. Erdelac
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Conquer collects seven short stories featuring John Conquer plus a preview of the Conquer novel, Fear of a Black Cat.

I'm a huge fan of Edward Erdelac's Merkabah Rider series so when I saw on Facebook that he was writing stories featuring John Conquer, described as Shaft meets Brother Voodoo, it was a no-brainer to grab this collection once it was released.

Much like The Merkabah Rider, Conquer is right in my wheelhouse. Part Blaxploitation, part supernatural, this hits all the right buttons for me. Conquer is a bad ass brother, a private detective people come to when strange shit is going on during the 1970s. In this book, he encounters a lot of weirdness, like a dead pimp haunting his old ride and a dead man shrunken to tiny size, floating inside a lava lamp.

Also like the Merkabah Rider, you can tell Erdelac did his homework. I'll have to pick his brain over what resources he use for the various magic techniques and creatures. You can feel Ed's love for the subject matter coming through. I don't usually get excited when a book I like gets adapted but I'd love if this was a TV show shot to look like it was from the 1970s.

Conquer gets all the stars. Now the wait for Fear of a Black Cat begins.


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Sabu: Scars, Silence, & Superglue

Sabu: Scars, Silence, & Superglue by Terry Brunk
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Sabu: Scars, Silence, & Superglue is the biography of professional wrestler Sabu.

Even before I ever saw him wrestle on TV, I was a Sabu fan. The maniacal daredevil captured my imagination in articles in the Apter wrestling mags. Hell, one of my first wrestling shirts was a Sabu shirt that I eventually wore to death. I even contributed to his GoFundMe when he needed surgery a few years ago. Anyway, my wife bought this for me a while back and I wolfed it down in two evenings while waiting for my son to fall asleep.

It's cliche to say a wrestling book pulls no punches but Sabu lays it all out there from the very beginning, from getting shot in the face as a teenager while hanging with the wrong crowd, to wetting the bed until he was 13, to not getting laid until he was 20. After the shooting, Sabu starts training the old school way with his uncle, The Sheik!

Sabu talks about his uncle working him like a dog with manual labor to try to get him to quit before taking him on the road, a road that would take him to Japan, ECW, WCW, the WWE, TNA, and various points between. Sabu's tone is pretty humble but he also isn't afraid to call people out on shitty behavior, like Ric Flair, Jim Ross, and Test, to name a few. He also puts over the people who treated him good, like Bret Hart and Terry Funk.

Unlike a lot of wrestling books, this books has tons of great road stories in it, like getting pulled over in his Winnebago with a bunch of Japanese wrestlers on the way to a show or pissing off the yakuza in Japan. Sabu also goes into depth about the backstage stuff everywhere he worked and gut churning details about his various injuries. He's honest about mistakes he made and things he should have done differently. He also doesn't go out of the way to put himself over, even though he was one of the most influential wrestlers of the 1990s. People are still stealing his stuff today.

For my money, Sabu: Scars, Silence, & Superglue is the epitome of what a wrestling book should be. Five out of five scars.

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