Sauvage Sitdown - A Yellow Rose

Being a review of Watcher of the Damned Volume One: Transmutation Texas by R.H. Snow

Sparks, let’s have some music, Yellow Rose if you please.

Yellow Rose on the pipes, aye-aye cap’n!

Sparks, put yourself on report for being a smartass.

Aye sir!

In a World gone Viral, a Hero shall Arise - join the Revolution with WATCHER of the DAMNED!

The Happening wreaked havoc as Humanity got a hard reset from a deadly gender-cidal Virus - and for TransMutated Survivors like The Watcher, life in Post-Apocalyptic Texas just got a whole lot bloodier and a whole lot lonelier. In a cyberpunk Wild West gone awry, The Watcher was a Rebel without a clue under the System: a brutal, high-tech Social Construct engineered to serve the Enlightened and oppress the Damned. But that's all about to change, thanks to a cheeky chaos agent named Rose...

Now The Watcher must lead a Revolution to save Rose from the System He helped create, or Rose will die - and Humanity will die with her.

Fight the System - Join the Revolution - with WATCHER of the DAMNED!

So that’s the front copy fam, what about what’s inside?

Well to make a long story short, let me answer you with a meme.

Yep, it heppens.

Well not the old heppening we all prepped for in the 80s, not Gamma World or the Morrow Project or Twilight 2000. No, this is the other happening of the future, a post cyber, biopunk happening. That’s right, After the Bomb happens. Fallout happens. The Big Death. The Crash. The FEV. The Great Transmutation.

The Empire of Humanity did nothing wrong...

In the brief glimpses of memories of the Life Before given to us, the world appears to have achieved the Great Reset proposed by the World Economic Forum; there’s a world council and strict emissions controls, but AI driven electric vehicles and Ready Player One VR bread and circuses has distracted us from owning nothing and left us more or less numb if not happy. But this all comes crashing down due to the machinations of a faction of Extinction Rebellion type hardliners who figure that the WEF hasn’t gone far enough, that Man is a virus upon Gaia, and they need a virus to fight the virus. So yeah, Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six, only the Greens win.

Nine out of ten men, women, and children die from either the virgin field epidemic - melting into puddles like the Super Ebola in Rainbow Six - or from follow on effects of the mass death - starvation, chaos, anarchy, opportunistic infections, violence, collapse. But this isn’t the worst thing. The tithe of survivors have been changed, mutated, transmutated. Women are masculinised, sterilised, turned into scaly lizard-bull dykes. And the men, well what used to be men, call them ‘survivors’ now, well some of them are turned into monstrous white apes from Barsoon, some into he-men, and some into fembois, but all mutated and scaly, scabbed, and sub-human.

Admittedly the descriptions aren’t quite as wild as either Gamma World or After the Bomb, there’s no talking anthropomorphic adolescent animals, let alone plant-people. More like the super-mutants and ghouls from Fallout, roughly stable clades that are post-human, and effectively immortal. Oh yeah, they stopped aging after they Changed. The only thing that kills ‘em is violence and the first hundred years after the Event are plenty violent.

But that was then, now we have The System. The System is a network of camps and farms that are run as prisons and labor farms. Why? For whom? Those are the questions, and to find out, we’ll both have to read because in this first volume we only catch curious glimpses. Whoever is running this mix of 1984, Brave New World, THX 1138, and Boy and His Dog uses an eight pointed star of Lakshmi as their insignia and they really likes the Vedic scriptures, especially the Kama Sutra. They also like hooking their enslaved survivors on smack.

A new star over Texas

So that’s how it is. The world that was is gone, the war is over, we’re all just mutant survivors now, trusting Friend System and the System’s Bad-Bitch Judge over us. Because if we do what we’re told we get booze and smack and a chance to spin the wheel for a night with a sorta-kinda girl if you squint reeeeal hard, with beer goggles on. There’s one man, well, survivor, in this system that ain’t buckling down, wants no part of slavish obedience. I’m a little surprised none of the semi-independent LandLords of the system’s neo-feudal farms didn’t snap him up away from the bitchy Judge who ruined a perfectly good one man brute-squad. But then, we needed the plot to happen.

Our survivor, Our Watcher, has been chained to the gate of Reunion Camp, reduced to a guard-dog for the central administrative centre of The System, at least, the public centre. All for the love of tacos. OK, for Abuela’s Tacos. And Abuela. But bruh. Tacos. No, *Abuela’s Tacos.* Anyway, I get it. Abuela, not his actual Abuela, but Our Watcher has adopted her as his own, because tacos. It’s the end of the world as we know it and our billy bob bad ass Survivor, former bounty-hunter(?) (his life before is not clear, but from context he’s running investigations and chasing leads and bringing people in), comes across a mutated little old Abuela who can fry up a mean fajitas. I’d let myself be chained for that, if the choice was chains or Abuela’s tacos. No cap.

This unlikely pair wanderers across Reunion Camps and Watcher, rightfully wary, wants no part of the required disarming to go in, but Abuela begs him, she doesn’t want to play the wild rover no more, she wants a chance to build a life in the after-world. So they enter the gates. Abandon all hope ye who enter here. Decades later Our Watcher is doing his best guard dog impression, for so long it’s not clear he remembers his own name, between his burning anger, degenerated hyper aggressive mentality, shame, and the drugs.

He’s pulling his guard mount, chained to his post and he sees a child. And that’s our inciting incident. My theory is that the child hallucination is a Synesthesia of the fertile pheromones wafting from Rose. But I don’t know, maybe there’s psionics and they haven’t been explained yet. Who is Rose? Why Rose is a sultry, naughty minx of a girl, who is one of the very few real fertile women left in Texas, perhaps the world. She comes from an underground vault bunker - oh, hello there Fallout! - where she was bred? Cloned? Engineered? It’s not clear, but where Rose and her sisters, who call themselves Asura, are the property of the Deva, the so called ‘Church Fathers’. Yeah, they go there, but the chutzpah of calling themselves both heavenly beings and Apostolic patriarchs, that’s how we know we are dealing with the prideful, the wicked, and the worldly wise.

Anyway, all we get is glimpses and fragmentary memories from Rose’s perspective, but it seems that the Devas, or perhaps some inner circle of their cult, is behind the Happening. They have cleansed the Earth of the ‘wicked’ in a new flood, to make way for re-population by the righteous. Only they don’t seem to be in any great rush. It’s been something over a hundred years since the heppening, and they don’t seem to have made much progress. Maybe these Deva have edited their own genomes, made themselves into elvish ubermensch with immortal lifespans, so there’s no great hurry. Maybe the need the flower? But why send only suicide squads? We have questions and few answers, but that let’s Our Author string us along for more books, clever girl ;)

Anyway, Watcher can smell Rose and it messes with him something fierce. And you know what, it’s not mentioned much, but I’m pretty sure Rose can smell Watcher too, keep that thought, it will be important later. Why is one of the Deva’s Asura out of the bunker? Well, it seems she was sent out to die, after she tried to carry a baby to term against orders. After a forced abortion she’s sent on a suicide mission to retrieve a rare orchid from the area around Camp Reunion. The rest of her team doesn’t even make it much beyond visual range of the bunker door before they are beset by goat-suckers, chupacabra, one of the apex transmutated predators of the world after the happening. (Seems like a setup, like they were all supposed to die out there).

Oh yeah, did I mention our Author provides illustrations? Here’s a Chupacabra...

Right, so Rose is looking for a special flower around the camp, and Watcher know something is up but not yet what, only that his hallucinations are of children and glimpses of a real woman. An ‘afterling’ he calls her. You see the Suvivors have their own folk lore, their own legends, their own ghost stories, and everyone knows about the fairy women who live under ground. And everyone knows it ain’t so. But everyone’s wrong, dead wrong. Through a comedy of errors mutant-boy meets purpose-bred girl, and it’s love at first smell. They’re both fertile it seems, and their bodies realise it before their minds do. Only Watcher is a mute (his tongue didn’t make it, see?) and can’t really talk to the girl, much to his frustration, and even after he manages to break free of the system to go a roving with best girl, he can’t tell her what his plan is, that he’s smitten with her, that he knows the System is looking for Her. Looks like someone messed up when they sent her out to die.

And she can’t trust this giant looming mutant man whose solution to communication problems is to restrain her. Well… She starts to because, again, he smells right, but, then she finds a note that makes her question his motives. And so, like Delilah, she uses her wiles and charms to… well you got to read to find out. And yeah, in case it wasn’t clear I recommend you do. There’s a rich stew here. Martial arts. Guns. Knives. Psalms. Vedas. Right. Wrong. Man. Woman. Authority. Power.

Polarity. That’s the word. This is a meditation on polarity. Yin and Yang. Sun and Moon. Sword and Chalice. You get the idea. Does it get as raunchy as some of that implies? Well on a scale of One - to - Tarnsmen of Gor I’d give it a seven. It ain’t smut, but there’s a part that fades to black. So if you're the type of church lady that thinks the Song of Songs should be censored, this ain't for you, man. It’s a sensual story for grown ups. With grown up concerns. There’s drugs, booze, sex, rock’n’roll, abuse, violence, nihilism, and emotional damage.

All for the sweetest rose of color a cowboy ever knew. Who’s getting spanked when Our Watcher catches up to her. There, I said it. Criticism? I spotted some copy errors, missing articles and such. At spots the first volume might be too picaresque, one incident leading to another with little to thread it all together, but I trust that more will be revealed as we progress through the volumes. And I want to know what happens next, aside from the spanking I mean. Queue outro.

Hail and Read!

There's a yellow rose of Texas
I'm goin' there to see
No other feller knows her
Nobody, only me.
She cried so when I left her
It like to broke my heart
And if we ever meet again
We never more will part.

She's the sweetest rose of color
A cowboy ever knew
Her eyes are bright as diamonds
They sparkle like the dew.
You may talk about your dearest May
And sing of Rosa Lee
But the Yellow Rose of Texas
Beats the belles of Tennessee.

Where the Rio Grande is flowin'
And the stars are shinin' bright,
We walked along the river
On a bright summer night,
She said, "If you remember,
We parted long ago,
You promised to come back again,
And never let me go."

She's the sweetest rose of color
A cowboy ever knew
Her eyes are bright as diamonds
They sparkle like the dew.
You may talk about your dearest May
And sing of Rosa Lee
But the Yellow Rose of Texas
Beats the belles of Tennessee.