Spooky 8

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

From the very beginning, King assumes a defensive position: "I expect a considerable effort will be made to discredit my past, challenge my veracity, or even attack my mental state to make sure few will take this story and what it represents seriously." What this book represents will surely disturb many readers--but not for the reasons King thinks it will. Though he wants us to be shocked by the fact that the U.S. government is willing to betray its covert operatives, what will trouble them is King's own attitude toward events. The book bears obvious similarities to Richard Marcinko's Rogue Warrior series, but readers know that Marcinko's team--in both his fiction and nonfiction--is under the command of the U.S. Navy and that its existence is therefore a matter of record. By contrast, King writes that his team, Spooky 8, which he joined in 1975, was a covert team designed to work the "dark, classified side of black operations" and that he never knew who was running the show. In an epithet-filled style thick with self-conscious bravado, King describes a Spooky 8 mission gone wrong. In 1992, the team was dispatched to Colombia to set up surveillance equipment to monitor the drug trade. It was ambushed and lost three members. The "final mission" of the subtitle refers to how King and his fellow survivors deduced who betrayed them, kidnapped the culprit and killed him, with King pulling the trigger ("BBLLLAAAMMM! `That's for Santana'"). One team member collected the spent shell casings to make a necklace. The prospect that King is telling the truth may distress readers more than the prospect that he is fabricating events. Those events are related with a modicum of suspense in adrenalized prose laced with sometimes laughable dialogue. But even if everything that King says happened actually did occur, his telling is so devoid of meaningful moral reflection that it will satisfy only those willing to entertain the most lurid and violent revenge fantasies. Photos not seen by PW. Film rights to Hughes Brothers' Underworld Productions. (July) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A passably intriguing and allegedly true yarn of US covert operations, government betrayal, and good-looking babes. King ("David Chance" in the story, but both are pseudonyms) is leader of a special operations team (hence "Spooky") that carries out the dirty work of assassination and sabotage the US government wants done but wants no one to know about. Chance and the Spooky 8 team he assembles spend much of the 1970s and '80s in Latin America killing people and blowing things up and generally having a good time. The team is a suitable ethnic mix, à la WWII flicks, and all its members are men's men: expert killers with "cast iron balls." All goes well until, on a mission into the Colombian jungle in 1992 supposedly to install some monitoring equipment, they are ambushed. Two members of the team are killed, and the rest desperately make their way back to the US. What happened? Was it just a mission gone bad, or were they targeted for death by their own government because they knew too much? To make a long story short, Chance•with the help of a series of women who apparently are attracted to thoroughly unlikable men•discovers the latter to be true and also that there is a mole, a traitor in their midst. The team regathers, captures the mole, and blows his head off. With enough top secret information in their hands, the team is also able to blackmail the shadowy government organizations for whom they work into rescinding their death sentence against the team. This is all decent enough pulp fiction; the writing is in a style that is sometimes unwittingly good: "I was so scared my sweat hurt." But is it all true? The author claims so, but nothing in the way of concreteevidence is ever presented. Will appeal to the conspiracy-minded and Rambo fans. As an exposé of dark secrets, however, this falls short.