By coincidence when i received this book free as part of Goodreads First Read program, i was already reading some old Marvel Comics (The Defenders) Mr Englehart had written for. That and the blurb on the back made me excited to read 'The Long Man'. In the end i enjoyed it but it was a bit rough at points. Some days i just couldn't pick it up.
My first peeve was the vagueness of the mechanics behind the magical abilities of the hero. The hero, Max August, seems flat. All we have to identify with him is his yearning for his dead wife and his alchemical abilities. By the end of the book neither seem real.
Instead of depth to the plot and characters, Mr Englehart throws a large variety of information at us: exotic locales, spiritualism, the Mayan calender, astronomy and badly explained gnosticism. It wasn't till i started treating 'The Long Man' as a picture-free comic book, and not as an occult action novel, that i started to enjoy it and then the reading was smooth sailing through till the good guys triumphed.
I'm still debating on whether to hand this book to my fiance's 15-yo son. There is no overt passages describing sex acts, but sex and torture are definitely here. PG-13, not R, rating.
All in all, once i took 'The Long Man' for what it is, it was a good lazy weekend read. I will continue to enjoy Mr Englehart's writing for Marvel and might look for other works by him but i really can't say i will ever return to the 'Max August' series. ( )

The plot of this is well-constructed. The underlying ideas were obviously thought out in some depth, and do not feel at all half-assed as I've come to expect from novels with similar themes. The pacing is decent. The characters are sympathetic (when Englehart wants them to be sympathetic). It was a very easy read that kept pulling me along toward the conclusion.

The dialog is corny, and not in a good way. The character motivations can be a little hard to swallow. The descriptions are a touch too involved.

In the end, I felt like I would have been justified just ignoring it rather than picking up a copy to read -- and, if it hadn't been a gift as part of a yearly book exchange with my second family, I would have passed it by based on the back cover text. It wasn't hard to pick up and keep reading, but it wasn't hard to put down either. ( )

Steve Englehart’s “The Long Man” is a part two of a trilogy but you would not know it, as the author quickly gets the reader up to speed in the first few chapters.

Other reviewers have complained that the book moves slow as the characters begin to lecture to each other but I disagree that this is a necessary negative. I think it’s helpful that we know and understand why Max August is who he is – a Timeless alchemist, recent disciple of Agrippa, a man who is a few centuries old – both Agrippa and Max’s wife Val murdered by a female demon who wants to control the world. Pretty evil stuff.

Max sets a trap for an unknown organization that wants to take over the Western Hemisphere via a small country in South America. He uses Pam, a biologist who has accidentally discovered a cure for a poison that turns people into Zombies (or “Zombi” as Englehart likes to spell it). However, he fall s in love with her and it turns out he can’t survive without her.

She plays the foil where she has the same questions we have – why is Max immortal, what does he believe in, how does the universe work in his doubtful mythology? And why is he searching for his now dead wife Val every Halloween night?

The book has some political commentary – bought senators and ambassadors, women who use sex for their own political ends, and an organization, the “Necklace” whose only job in life is to subjugate the Earth for the demon Alexsandra, who is a former lover of Max August. Complex, perhaps too much so, but interesting.

Bottom Line: I met Steve Englehart when he autographed this book for me, but regardless I let the book stand on its own merits. If you know Dr. Strange from the Marvel Comics and James Bond films, then your young adult may enjoy a good read. The book always has some action and suspense, mystery and exploration of mysticism and cultures that maintains interest. Recommended.
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Steve Englehart’s “The Long Man” is a part two of a trilogy but you would not know it, as the author quickly gets the reader up to speed in the first few chapters.

Other reviewers have complained that the book moves slow as the characters begin to lecture to each other but I disagree that this is a necessary negative. I think it’s helpful that we know and understand why Max August is who he is – a Timeless alchemist, recent disciple of Agrippa, a man who is a few centuries old – both Agrippa and Max’s wife Val murdered by a female demon who wants to control the world. Pretty evil stuff.

Max sets a trap for an unknown organization that wants to take over the Western Hemisphere via a small country in South America. He uses Pam, a biologist who has accidentally discovered a cure for a poison that turns people into Zombies (or “Zombi” as Englehart likes to spell it). However, he fall s in love with her and it turns out he can’t survive without her.

She plays the foil where she has the same questions we have – why is Max immortal, what does he believe in, how does the universe work in his doubtful mythology? And why is he searching for his now dead wife Val every Halloween night?

The book has some political commentary – bought senators and ambassadors, women who use sex for their own political ends, and an organization, the “Necklace” whose only job in life is to subjugate the Earth for the demon Alexsandra, who is a former lover of Max August. Complex, perhaps too much so, but interesting.

Bottom Line: I met Steve Englehart when he autographed this book for me, but regardless I let the book stand on its own merits. If you know Dr. Strange from the Marvel Comics and James Bond films, then your young adult may enjoy a good read. The book always has some action and suspense, mystery and exploration of mysticism and cultures that maintains interest. Recommended.
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An interesting story about an immortal radio Disc Jockey from the 70s that has magic powers drawn from the energy of the universe. He lost the love of his life years ago and has been searching for her since, while trying to avoid being recognized. Along the way he's made enemies of other powerful magic users that want him either dead, or to join their cause.

This time out, Max August uncovers a conspiracy of powerful people who are trying to take over small country by turning the population into zombies, and then killing them all. Only Max has found a new friend, the very attractive doctor Pamela Blackwell, that has inadvertently discovered the antidote to the zombie potion.

As Max saves Pam's life and introduces her into the world of magic, together they seek out the evil people set on controlling this small country.

The Long Man is a sequel to a book I didn't read, but it make any difference. The Long Man was easy to get into and covered enough back story to bring me up to speed on the world and the characters.

The presentation of magic in this book had a very clear "new age" feel to it, as did much of Max's own belief system and everything he explained to Pam about how the world works. That turned me off a bit due to my own personal beliefs, but I still enjoyed the book. It had action and adventure, nice personal interaction, and a fun story.




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I can't believe this thing got published. Not only that it got published, but that it was published in hard cover no less. Did somebody at Tor lose a bet? Holy crap. I thought it was an interesting premise for a character but it was so poorly written that it failed on every level. ( )

I received this book, and both my husband and I were favorably impressed enough to go seeking other books in the series. Unfortunately, before we even started to look we were making preparations to move, and haven't been able to lay hands on the book ever since :-/ Mea Culpa.. I don't have an ereader and it's very hard for me to read ebooks on my pc or phone and even hard for me to review them. My fault, no excuse, to be sure. I *will* post a more comprehensive review at some point, HONEST!!

That Hubby read it at one sitting is enough for three and a half stars, for both of us to agree to seek out the other books in the series makes it worthy of four! ( )

I can't deal with reading books out of order, so I need to get the first one in this series before I can read this one. Was going to pick it up from Borders... and then Borders went out of business... so until I make the trek to B&N or somewhere else, I can't give a review with any justice! Looking forward to reading it though, it did sound interesting which is why I requested it in the first place.

This was an enjoyable read, and I would probably read the other books in the series from the library, but not buy them. I am a sucker for interesting systems for structuring magic in fantasy, and that of the main character (based on the relative positions of major asteroids) certainly fits the bill. ( )

A nice book and enjoyable read but while I would read the others in the series I wouldn't buy them. Character development, particularly concerning the female lead, isn't as well done as I would like to see. For example, Pam, the main female character, is a researcher. When she has to kill someone she is bothered by it but quickly gets over it, too quickly for it to 'feel' right for the character. It is occasional lapses like this that kept me from getting wrapped up in the story. ( )

In the early 1980's, Vietnam vet and DJ, Max August became involved with the magician Cornelius Agrippa, discovered his own magical talents and was able to make himself "timeless", so that he no longer ages. However, Agrippa and Max's girlfriend Valerie were killed by the demon Aleksandra. In the present day, Max stays on the move to avoid Aleksandra while trying to find a way to bring Valerie back. He becomes involved with a doctor, Pam Blackwell who has been poisoned by a magical dart, which soon turns out to be one move in a much bigger conspiracy.

This book was OK, but definitely nothing special. Most of it just didn't work for me. The magic system just felt like a random collection of things from various mythologies that gets explained in a lot of long infodumps. The entire plot of the story hinges on the attempt to kill Pam with a slow-acting magical dart, instead of just having her killed with a more conventional and immediate method. The action was never compelling enough to interest me. I won't be looking for the other books in this series. ( )

I hate to review a book I wasn't able to finish but after thinking about it I guess that fact really speaks for itself. At about the halfway point I was rapidly losing interest in the story, but I figured I would push on. By the 3/4 point I couldn't stand it anymore and wanted to read something else.

The writing style of this book is off. Sometimes there will be a few pages where the story skips from scene to scene within two or three paragraphs. Other times one conversation will drone on & on for 3 or 4 pages. The areas where Max tries to explain things to Pam never quite make sense and start feeling like the teacher from Charlie Brown.

A factor that really killed the book for me was that Pam & Max never felt real. To me good writing is where you can imagine what you're reading like a movie. I couldn't do that with this story. In the end, I think Englehart is not a very good writer and I would probably not read anything else of his. ( )

I really wanted to like this book. The story about a modern day wizard protecting a young sexy scientist was promising. The angle the author used to explain how magic worked in the world of Max August was fairly logical and kept the hero from being an all powerful bore. But what I found to be intolerably distracting was the way the author interjected his political views. The flow of the story comes to a sudden halt every time Englehart clumsily inserts what comes off as snide remarks about people on the political right. The other issue that kept me from fully getting into this book was the unending pop culture references that has this book becoming instantly dated. 'Timeless' it is not. ( )

I normally give a book 75-100 pages before I give up on it, but I quit reading this one at 57. I didn't know it was the second in a series until I got it in the mail, but I've read a lot of second books without having read the first and really enjoyed them, so I know that's not the problem. This sounds like the sort of book I should like -- a super hero fantasy with elements of alchemy and magic, and Egyptian and Mayan mythology, in which an immortal hero battles an evil corporate cabal -- but the writing is poor enough to detract from any enjoyment I might have about the cool premise. The pacing is terrible: slow and choppy. One of the earliest scenes in the book is a massive infodump of the "as you know, Bob" variety, with the characters standing on a rooftop explaining to each other their backstory (which I assume is the plot of the first book). The same thing happens when Max confronts the sorceress Aleksandra in the early pages while attempting to resurrect his dead wife -- they speechify at each other for a while about things they already know and then she goes away. In the first 55 pages, there is almost no real conflict and no real action -- just large, dense blocks of text in which Max explains how he became Timeless, how magic works (which I never understood), how he longs for the past now that he can live forever, and how his attempts to bring back his wife are going (those parts should be interesting, but they still too description-heavy, wordy, and slow). It's like reading a series of lectures with a little bit of story thrown in. I might have been able to read longer if I liked Max, the narrator, but he came off as kind of a pontificating douche rather than an action hero.

I think the main plot has started by page 57 -- Max rescues a doctor from a magical dart that would have killed her and they flee the hospital with bad guys on their tail -- but that's too late for me. Maybe it picks up and gets really exciting after that, but life is too short to read books you're not enjoying, so I'm putting this aside for now. ( )

It's taken me a while to review this book due to my mixed feelings about it. It is the second book in a series. The characters are sei-developed and very comicbook like. The author has written a variety of superhero comics and the main character is cut from similar cloth.

The premise of magic and science, and the idea of being 'timeless' (unaging) is an interesting one. Bringing in the Maya calendar structure is also interesting. I would have liked to see some of these ideas developed more.

The book is good, and a mostly satisfying read. At times the pace feels rushed and the potential for character development is glossed over. ( )

I had a very difficult time following along in this book. I loved the premise, and the main characters definitely kept my interest, but I had a hard time visualizing some of the jumps to the other characters and parts of the storyline. ( )

Disclosure: I received this book as part of the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program. Some people think this may bias a reviewer so I am making sure to put this information up front. I don't think it biasaes my reviews, but I'll let others be the judge of that.

Steve Englehart is most well-known as a comic book writer, most notable for having penned runs of Captain America, Dr. Strange, and Batman. It is appropriate, then, that Max August, the protagonist of The Long Man, is more or less an amalgamation of these characters. In many ways, August seems to be a throwback to the hyper competent lantern jawed pulp action heroes with special powers like Doc Savage or E.E. "Doc" Smith's Lensmen. The title of the book "The Long Man" is a reference to August's magically enhanced longevity - despite being old enough to be a Vietnam veteran in 2007, when the novel is set, Max is physically a thirty-five year old man. The book is ostensibly the sequel to The Point Man, which was out of print for a couple decades but it now being republished.

The plot of the book is fairly straightforward, despite the shadowy nature of Max August's foe, "The Necklace". An old friend asks Max to look into the illness of her doctor, and Max more or less stumbles on to a plot to take over the world, which leads him across the U.S., the Carribean, and into South America, with magical escapades along the way. Max battles his foes, has numerous scrapes with death, and wins the pretty girl. The only real problem with the action sequences is that there is rarely any real tension in them - Max simply doesn't seem to actually be in serious danger, even when confronting the final "more powerful" villain. To a certain extent, however, the book is a disappointment. The Long Man reveals that having a writing background in another style of media is not a guarantee that one will be able to translate their success into something like a novel. So long as the book sticks to over the top action, the story works. Unfortunately, Englehart seems to feel compelled to provide lots of added explanation for the magical world in which August lives, and that description simply falls flat.

First, I have to digress about spelling. I know it is a somewhat common affectation to use the word "magick" to differentiate between stage magic and "real" magic. And in the book August explains that is why he uses the "magick" with a "k" version. I find this affectation to be really silly and pretentious. At no point in the book does anyone mistake anything that August does for stage magic, nor is there any reason to expect that anyone would. Most books that involve people with real magical powers seem to have no trouble convincing the readers that the protagonist is not Doug Henning. From my perspective, resorting to the use of nonstandard words like "magick" when perfectly acceptable English words with the same meaning are available is a mark of an author unsure of his ability to convey his meaning through the context of the story. Although no one comments on it at length as they do with the "magick" spelling, the "zombis" that show up in the book, also unconventionally spelled, seem to omit the final "e" of the word for much the same reason - to prevent the reader from confusing the "real" zombis of the book with "fake" zombies from movies like Night of the Living Dead. This affectation is also pretentious and unnecessary.

These spelling foibles are fairly small, so one might wonder why I harp on them. I do so because they are indicative of a larger problem with the book. Whenever the action pauses, the author feels the need to have Max try to explain how "magick" works, and the explanations are long, dull, and don't make any sense at all. First, Max insist that he is not a sorcerer, he describes himself as an "alchemist", although in practical terms this appears to be a meaningless distinction. He also posits that he is not using magic, just highly advanced science, comparing his skills to taking a television back to the Sixteenth century. However, Max's skills don't seem to work even like he describes. Max asserts that magic only "influences" things, it doesn't "control" them, supposedly making magic not reliable like science. Then Max goes on to assert all kinds of reliable things about magic: how it can be studied and evaluated, how the Mayan calendar somehow matches up with the first two hundred and sixty asteroids, and how their gravity affects our daily lives and so on. In short, despite Max's constant assurances that magic is inherently unreliable (and thus different from "normal" science) the magic in the book is nothing but reliable.

And the ways used to describe how magic is different from science are just gobbledegook. In reality gravity "only" influences the position of objects, but this does not mean it is not subject to evaluation and scientific inquiry. Gravity does this in a predictable and regular manner. As an aside, I'll point out that astrology, which supposedly "really works" according to August, because of the "influence" of gravity, is, even on that basis, complete hokum. The person standing next to you exerts more gravitational influence on you than Mars, or any of the "two hundred and sixty" asteroids that supposedly link up with the Mayan calendar. I'll also say how very tired I am of the Mayan calendar and how "magical" it is. If August's magic works like gravity, it should be studiable, and more importantly reliable, despite all of his protests that it isn't. And apparently, you study magic by reading all the mythologies of the world and somehow "evaluating" them, despite this supposed unreliability. Because, of course, people working 500, 1,000, or 4,000 years ago were better able to understand how the universe works than we are now. In fact, if magic is inherently unreliable, then it would be inherently unstudiable, as one could not figure out how it works without some regularity. In effect, Englehart is trying to have things all ways: make magic a usable tool, and make it a mysterious and unpredictable force, and connect it with apparently every magical tradition in the world. And in trying to make these irreconcilable ideas work together, Max spends large chunks of the book pontificating nonsense, which makes for tedious reading.

Of course, magic use is also apparently pretty common in the Caribbean and Suriname (because, presumably, they haven't been contaminated with silly ideas like "science"), with magical casters popping out of the woodwork left and right, which makes one wonder why those regions are so desperately poor. This is one of the random inconsistencies that make the book so frustrating, like the author came up with some cool ideas, but didn't bother to think them through for even five minutes.

But the mixture of fun action plus tedious nonsense explanations adds up to merely a mediocre book. What drives the book into the "less than mediocre" category is the utter idiocy of the villains and their plan, and more importantly, a nasty undercurrent of misogyny that runs through the story. The evil villainous organization, called variously "the Necklace" and the "Free Range Coalition" is a sort of comic book archetype - the shadowy underworld operators who are secretly controlling everything. They apparently control large chunks of the U.S. government, several corporations, as well as most of the criminal enterprises in the country. They appear to be well-connected across the world as well. So what is their master plan? To use zombis to release sarin gas in Suriname allowing them to take over the country and get their U.N. vote. Yep, you read that right. An organization that is powerful and well-connected enough to get someone assigned to (and tortured at) Camp X-Ray on a whim has, as its master plan, the takeover of a tiny South American nation so as to control its U.N. vote. The real oddity here is that the necklace appears to pretty much control Suriname already, since when Max is flying his way there, they manage to get the Suriname air force to mobilize to shoot him down. And of course, this is even sillier when one considers the complicated nature of the plan, requiring them to train mindless zombis to first make sarin, and then engage in a complicated series of maneuvers so they can kill off much of the population of the nation they wish to control, that they pretty much already control. As Frederick Forsyth demonstrated in The Dogs of War, there are much easier ways to topple the government of a tiny third world country making the whole exercise seem so ludicrously stupid that I think Stan Lee would have told Englehart to go back to the drawing board if he had proposed this plot for any of Marvel's titles.

Making this even sillier is the repeated mantra of the book that "the Necklace never fails", when all they do in the book is fail time and again. Max foils every one of their plots, and disposes of every enemy they send against him. The ultimate villain, the evil Aleksandra, is little more than a wooden villain: she hates Max August because she's evil, and she's evil because she hates Max August. It is possible that her character was fleshed out more fully in The Point Man, but leaving her with as little character development as she has in this book is simply an unforgivable omission.

The ugliest thing about the book is the misogyny that runs through it. Most is more or less subtle and would have been just a foible. The ingénue of the piece, Dr. Pam Blackwell, is little more than sex candy for Max to resist for much of the book as he mourns his long dead wife (killed by Aleksandra years before). The whole story is kicked off by a magical attack on Pam, from which Max has to save her. Later, another female character becomes the only person on the "hero" side killed in the conflict that rages through the story. Aleksandra, the mastermind villainess, seems to be little more than a prop to serve as a foil for Max. A lesser villainess is portrayed as nothing more than a drug addled sex fiend (despite supposedly being one of the most successful drug traffickers in Miami). But all of these fade into the misogynistic background when the subplot (and I use that term loosely here) involving Nancy Reinking crops up.

Nancy is a minor villain working for the Necklace in the story. She sets Pam up to be killed early in the book, and was quickly found out by Max, who puts her into a magically induced sleep. She is later discovered by some other Necklace operatives and freed. They then fly her to Camp X-Ray and imprison and torture her to make sure she didn't tell Max anything about the Necklace or the FRC. There is almost no point to this storyline, as whether she told him something or not is of no consequence to the rest of the story. However, Englehart returns over and over to scenes of torturing Nancy in what can only be described as sexually sadistic ways: she is stripped naked to be water-boarded, she is left to lie in her own waste, she is raped by a zombie, and so on. All told in loving detail. And all completely pointless. It is as if Englehart felt like he had to pad the page count and couldn't come up with anything better than to include a bunch of scenes in which a woman is tortured for no real plot related reason. There is also the implication that late in the book, after Pam has been captured, she is subjected to (or merely threatened with) similar treatment. This is all completely gratuitous and pointless (Englehart attempts to make some political commentary here, but it is clumsy and forced, and completely extraneous to the actual story). Every page wasted on the Nancy Reinking subplot is basically garbage that should have been excised by a decent editor as a worthless digression that adds nothing to the book, and actually, makes it substantially worse.

The main problem appears to be that in the transition from comic book writing to novel writing, Englehart didn't shift emphasis. A lot of things that are necessary in the comic book genre - like broad stereotypes such as the drug addled sex fiend cocaine trafficker - simply don't work well in a novel, where one has more time and text to flesh out less clichéd characters. In a comic book, there likely would have been less effort to "explain" magic as well, which would have improved the story significantly. The transition seems to have also brought with it some problems with viewpoint, as the viewpoint seems to shift from third person limited to third person omniscient at the drop of a hat. The Long Man is 376 pages long. It would have been a much better book if it had been half that. Then the extended tedious explanations of magic and the pointless torture scenes could have been excised. If one could read only the pulpy adventure portions of this book, it would get a modest recommendation. As this is not possible, and despite the potential the book shows, it gets a frustrated thumbs down.

This has been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds. ( )

Ok I'm finally getting around to posting my review. How to classify this book. Its kinda like James Bond with magic. Yes it would be considered urban fantasy but there isn't too much fantasy in it. Very grounded in reality. Also I love the Mayan calendar aspect of it. Makes it more interesting that way. This is also the second book.

Ok Max August is an Alchemist and is "Timeless". He no longer ages past his 35 years though he was born in 1950 (?). Being an alchemist, he is able to use Magick. And this is all related to basically life. I do like how using magick is explained and how a voodoo priestess can also do what she does and they are both using the same force just different ways.

Max is trying to save a scientists life because she has discovered an accidental cure for something that doesn't exist. Zombies. The organization, FRC, run by the necklace is trying to kill her and Max. Max they just want dead so he can't ruin their plans again. The plot starts off in San Francisco, and continues on to Barbados, and a small South American country. As well as scenes around the U.S.

The book is paced good, though I had a hard time getting immersed into the plot for extended periods of time. I found my mind wondering during the explanations of magick, though the book does need them so the reader can understand how Max does what he does.

One bit of criticism is Max seems to powerful. He doesn't use his abilities a lot, and it just seems like either he should have been shown more tired after using them or used he powers in more situations if there are no draw backs.

All in all a good read. I did enjoy it. Also I do want to read the first book The Point Man, and there is a third coming out next year called The Plan Man. ( )

This was an interesting book - the premise was not quite like anything else I've read before. It fit in well with the paranormal genre that I typically read, but it still had a very distinctive style - one that I hadn't read before. Over all I liked it, though I think that if one were to really want to understand the book, the predecessor should be read first (THE POINT MAN), which I have been unable to do at this time. The story was something I could easily slip into, which is always a plus. ( )

I just finished reading this book and I have to say I have mixed feelings about it. I am predisposed to like this kind of book. I am very much into modern day paranormal/fantasy novels. My favorites including Butcher's Dresden Files, Green's Nightside, Chadbourn's Age of Misrule, etc. This book fit very well with this genre, but I felt that this book was dated and reminded me of books I read in the late 80s.

Overall it was a good read. solid. I liked it enough to find the prequel to this book on abebooks. ( )

Max August is a former soldier, ex-DJ, and modern-day alchemist who has learned the secret of immortality. He helps a female medical researcher and in the process runs afoul of a cabal of bad guys who want to take over the world by building an army of zombies and conquer Suriname. Yes, Suriname. Oh well, I guess we’ve all got to start somewhere. Comparisons with Jim Butcher's Harry Dresden books are inevitable, and I went into the book with high expectations. Sadly, they were not met, as I found THE LONG MAN to be generally pretty flat and boring. While the first half of the novel is fast-paced, the second slows down considerably. The protagonist has an interesting backstory, but he’s one of those “can do no wrong” characters who is intellectually, physically, magically, and morally superior to everyone else in the book.

There are some other negative aspects of the book I should mention. This is actually the second book in the series. The original is long out of print, but is being reissued by Tor in 2011. I only found this out by reading the author's bio in the back of the book. This explains a lot; I kept wondering why the protagonist was having to relay his elaborate backstory in huge chunks of exposition. I can only hope that the original novel is better than this sequel.

The author feels the need to inject lengthy occult mumbo-jumbo and physics-based explanations for all the magical stuff that the protagonist does. Boring, superfluous, and breaks the flow of the story. Eliminating much of this would have quickened the plot’s pacing considerably. Just as bad is when mystical stuff is referenced but not explained for very long periods. It's a weird mix. The author's created a pretty elaborate cosmology and magic system, but he chooses to either over-explain it or fail to explain it at all.

Too many named bad guys all plotting and engaged in various nefarious schemes that are only cryptically alluded to. It's not a lot of fun to read about some guy who you can't quite remember who he is doing something mysterious for unknown reasons -- for example, speaking in code on the telephone to some other guy you don't really know anything about. This happens a lot. While we're on the subject of bad guy names, the evil cabal plotting world domination is the "Free Range Coalition." That's a remarkably lame name. I keep thinking of them as chickens whenever I read that.

It's a minor annoyance compared with the above, but the protagonist is periodically used to give voice to some fairly paranoid fantasies about the erosion of civil liberties in the United States, and that gets pretty old after a while. Coupled with this are some interminable chapters where a minor villain is taken by her bosses to Guantanamo Bay and systematically tortured to find out what she told the protagonists while being magically mind-controlled. I wouldn’t have a problem with this if it were done “off-screen,” but a number of pages are devoted to this. She is tortured through various means, water-boarded, and then gang-raped by zombies. All the while, her captors keep telling her that this is legal under U.S. law. Yes, we get it, Steve Englehart, you don’t like the Bush administration.

I received a free copy of the novel, and to be honest, I’d have been disappointed with my purchase had I spent money on it. I don’t plan to pick up any other books in the series. I would really only recommend THE LONG MAN to readers who have an intense interest in modern alchemy and occult traditions, but even they would probably be annoyed how these various schools of thought are all lumped together. The premise has a great deal of potential, but sadly, it’s never realized. Not a great book.

Full disclosure: I received a complimentary copy of this book through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program in exchange for a review. This has not influenced my review in any way.

Review copyright 2010 J. Andrew Byers ( )

I noticed when I first started reading this book that is the second in a series. This did put me off a little bit because I can't hardly stand to read books out of order. However, I found The Long Man to be wonderfully stand-alone. It was quite easy to follow despite being the second in the series.

The characters of Max and Pam were detailed nicely, and I found Max's combination of ex-soldier/alchemist especially intriguing. The novel itself is fun and fast-paced with a good amount of action. It is written is such a way that it is very easy to visualize, and I agree with ljbryant in that is very like a graphic novel without the graphics. Considering Steve Englehart is a long time comic book writer this should not come as a surprise. The magical aspect of the story, and how the magic is explained, is something I found interesting and different from most other modern fantasy novels. It was refreshing to have Max offer explanations for his magic that transferred (semi)realistically into our non-magical world. Too often fantasy novels overlook how the magic in the stories work because "it's magic. It just does."

Overall it was a good read, and I plan to keep an eye out for any upcoming books in Max August's world. ( )

This book was good. Not great, not earth-shattering, but definitely worth the time it took to read it (which wasn't very long). The action is fast-paced, the plot is interesting, and the story holds your attention.

The few complaints that I have mostly deal with the deliberate misspelling of words and the odd decision to italicize certain words. This is explained in the book as being used to separate real magick (with a k) from parlor tricks and sleight of hand -- but this goes well beyond the spelling of magic. Several words related to the world of magic and voodoo get slight modifications to spelling, or get italicized. This seems to be a petty complaint, but the whole spelling thing just seems contrived, and does nothing for the book.

In addition, the story feels a lot like a graphics novel, less the graphics. This isn't necessarily a bad thing -- but keep this in mind if you don't enjoy the typical story arc of a graphics novel.

Overall, I would recommend this book for any fan of urban fantasy or modern magic. While it could definitely be improved, it was fun nonetheless. ( )

Review for "The Long Man" by Steve Englehart

Over all it is was a wonderful book. Max August is a philosopher/magician. As well as never aging, Max battles evil with quite a flair. After he gives Pam Blackwell a temporary reprieve from death; they hit the road trying to save her, keep from getting killed and stop the bad guys. Max is a great hero. He is an everyman but with a wonderful twist, an open mind. I can see him clearly in my head, to me that is a mark of good writing. Pam, the heroine, is equally clear. She is stubborn, curious, sensitive and bright. The story is fascinating with lots of unforeseen complications. My only gripe with the story is the endless tangents into how the world is connected in unseen ways. These tangents are interesting but disrupt the flow of the story. There are too many of them and are too narrative. ( )

I never read Steve Englehart's first book, The Point Man, which was published in 1981. I would have been 9 years old. And I'm not Timeless. The Long Man is a follow-up to that book, and follows the continuing adventures of Max August, but just as 25 years have passed in our world, 25 years have passed in his. Because I wasn't familiar with the back story of the characters of Max, Agrippa, or the superstar singer Val, it did take some figuring out what was going on in the books first few pages. I wasn't sure if this was the sort of book that would keep my interest going or not, as Englehart kept changing the time from the current time and going back to 1985 as he filled in some of the gaps of what has happened to our main character in the intervening years between his first book and this one. His mentor has been killed by Aleksandra. Val has been to, though this doesn't stop him from spending the years in between trying to find her and bring her back on each October 31.

So, when in 2007, he feels a pull back to San Francisco, where he had his popular radio show back in the day, he thinks that it's his desire to reach Val that is bringing him back. That, however, is not what fate has in store for him when he receives a phone call from an old friend that results in a new adventure taking him from San Francisco to Barbados and to Suriname (that's in South America if you slept through your geography class) as he faces off against black magic, zombies, chupacabra, and the FRC. In tow is Dr. Pam Blackwell, a doctor who has come up with an antidote for puffer fish poison--an antidote that earns her some powerful enemies that don't want to see that antidote known about in their scheme for world domination. The Long Man is nonstop action from start to finish, presented in a fun and irrelevent manner, while at the same time putting it all into context of the way the world was in 2007 and the changes our world went through as a result of 9/11 and the need for change and hope in the 2008 Presidential election.

It's interesting that the FRC is chosen as the initials of the evil cartel that he comes up against, and how those same initials are used by these high-ranking and powerful individuals who run the world behind the scenes. One of the several examples of this presented by the author is the Federal Reserve Chair. Of course, FRC has a variety of different meanings, in all fields--politics, manufacturing, financial institutions, some of which you can find by searching Wikipedia and/or Google.

This is Steve Englehart's second book. He is more known for his work on writing for comic book series, "The Avengers," "Captain America," "The Fantastic Four," "Batman," and "Justice League of America."

I thoroughly enjoyed reading The Long Man. Will you? I would have you do what Max August says. Explore but verify. ( )