Darkman: In the Face of Death by Randall Boyll

 

(pb; 1994; final entry in the book-only Darkman quadrilogy.)

From the back cover

“Darkman: Once Peyton Westlake was a brilliant scientist conducing ground-breaking work with artificial skin─but his life was changed forever when vicious gangsters destroyed his lab and left him horribly burned beyond recognition. At that moment, Peyton Westlake died and re-emerged from the hellish fire as DARKMAN, a creature of the night driven by superhuman rage. Using his artificial skin process and his ability to become anyone for ninety-nine minutes, DARKMAN extracted a deadly revenge on the men who destroyed his life.

 

“Now, Darkman must take to the night once again to stop a vicious, rogue CIA agent known only as Rondo  who wants the secret of Darkman’s skin for his own evil plans. Once he possesses Darkman’s technology, he will use it to impersonate the president and forge an empire with himself as leader. With time running out, Darkman must somehow stop Rondo or else the entire world will fall under a madman’s will.” 

 

Review

Boyll’s fifth Darkman book is as comic book-y and over-the-top action-exciting as the franchise’s previous novels. This time out, there’s an international element and one-note, cliché-spouting villain (Harold Ferguson, a.k.a. Rondo R. Rondo) who is more comic relief than serious bad guy, one who tries to steal Peyton Westlake’s groundbreaking false-face formula while Westlake/Darkman and Darla (Jennifer) Dalton (from The Gods of Hell) try to rescue her ransomed American diplomat brother (Adam) from his South American captors. 

Tone-wise, Face is lighter than its prequels. It still has plenty of cinema-worth wild action scenes and settings (e.g., when Rondo runs goes crazy in a shopping mall, and Davis City, a jungle town where the US Confederacy still thrives). It also sticks to character-true storylines and events, another trademark element of Boyll’s Darkman works, with an open-ended series wrap-up that doesn’t demand a sequel while leaving it open for one─worth reading and owning, Face.