Kung fu movies took the world by storm in 1973. The paperback market wasted no time unleashing their fastest hacks to cash in. Thus we see texts like The Year of the Tiger emerge on seemingly impossible timelines. Bruce Lee pandemonium began after the star’s untimely death in July and the release of his posthumous blockbuster Enter the Dragon in August. Then this book appears on September 20th. By reading the pop culture tea leaves, publishers had a purchasable product ready at exactly the right time. Literary quality hardly mattered.
Today, The Year of the Tiger receives mostly laughter for its non-existent plot and overall absurdity. However, many readers still have fond memories of devouring it in the early ’70s, or later as a used copy. Even the most scathing reviews are often so passionate they sound more like obsession.
Love, hate or laugh, enduring fascination remains when reading a novel probably churned out in one sitting, fueled by gallons of coffee and a psychedelic or two. Discarded are the traditional rules of characterization, rising action, climax and resolution. Instead, there’s only non-stop action.
To be fair, many martial arts movies follow the same tactic. Give the people what they want, and give it to them quick before they move on to another trend. These movies can be just as plotless with only the thinnest logic for explaining why a horde of gang bangers face off against a kung fu master, and lose miserably.
That, at least, describes the full scope of this book. Each chapter, Victor Mace fends off beefy bad guys who want to abuse his family and kill him especially. The bad guys deal drugs and use racial slurs to illustrate their badness. Meanwhile, Victor Mace is a good guy. He may kill approximately 200 dudes by the end of the book (rough estimate) but he wears a cloak of innocence thanks to the self-defense clause.
Come to think of it, that sounds exactly like the plot of John Wick movies. So laugh all you want, but this trite formula ain’t dead. Apparently it’s as lucrative as ever.
Lee Chang, pseudonym of paperback mega-writer Joseph Rosenberger, does an overall effective job at capturing the frenzied action of a kung fu movie in written form. He also makes some questionable decisions. Racial slurs, for example, are effective at making bad guys dislikable…but he beats that dead horse to the point of grating.
“Chink” is used, on average, once per sentence. We also see numerous phrases like “you chopstick stupido” and “you nutty noodle-eater” and “you chop-suey eater.” So, so many slurs referencing chop-suey. Since these slurs come from villains, and they are severely punished/killed by the kung fu master, there’s no glory in them. They might also be used to emphasize limited intelligence since, at one point, a bad guy is said to be “so damned bright that you think Sherlock Holmes is a housing development.”
Still, after much repetition, the “yellow balls” jokes start to feel racist at the authorial level at worst, or simply dull writing at best.
What isn’t dull is Rosenberger’s zany metaphors describing unfolding chaos. Mace delivers a terrific side-kick that caves in three ribs as easily as “a sledgehammer tearing through a straw wall.” He strikes one gangster squarely in the throat. The result? “His Adam’s apple turned to applesauce.”
Meanwhile, Mace’s enemies flee his sight “faster than a naked lover running from a jealous husband with a shotgun.”
Somewhere between 20 and 5,000 bad guys have their solar plexus kicked in, and at another key moment Victor Mace kills his attackers with a kung fu scream that ruptures eardrums like a high note shatters glass.
I’m not sure if Rosenberger was particularly religious, but there is a lot of religious imagery. Mace is feared “the way a fanatical Christian is terrified of sin.” Bad guys, according to the narrator, are sent to literal Hell after their death. Mace is also described as faster than the “time it takes for God to work a million miracles.”
In the end, the book is crazy and action-packed enough to be entertaining. Every chapter is essentially the same, so you’ll know quickly if it’s a style you can stomach. Personally, I couldn’t speed through it without a headache from all the déjà vu. But it was nice to pick it up every now and then to see how many gun-wielding, racist corpses Victor Mace would leave slaughtered at his feet. At the very least, the book is unlike anything I’ve read before. Bonus points for that.
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