"That does it for him, huh?" says Armstrong. In particular there's a laugh out loud scene where Rock, moments after capturing a high-ranking mafia lawyer, blows the guy's head off in front of everyone. Armstrong strikes up a friendship of sorts with Rock - while chained in the boat house, remember - and often comments on Rock's sadism. Really, this is torture porn more than anything else. Instead, the mobsters come off more like the innocent here, with Rock a murdering automaton who blitzes his way through their ranks. Late in the game we learn that one of the bosses is known for a sadistic streak (he's got nothing on Rock, though), and also toward the very end the mobsters apparently kill a beloved cop so they can lay the blame on Rock and therefore set him up, but we never see them do it. Also it didn't help that not once in Blood Bath do we see the "bad gus" do anything bad. I had a hell of a time keeping track of the various members, but it seemed Rossi did, too. Rock's mission this time out is to crush a Jersey mafia family. This is only the tip of Rock's psychological torture later on, when he murders a few of his captives, he tosses bodyparts or entire bodies to the rats, so they can eat them right in front of the other captives. Eventually he spreads food through the area and then opens the cage so the rats can run loose. Here Rock ties up Armstrong and his mistress, shackling them in a boathouse and placing a cage full of those rats right beside them. Rock, due to his omniscient powers, has of course tracked Armstrong here and so captures the guy and takes him to his own safe house, off the Jersey shoreline. Rats are all through Blood Bath these particular rats in fact are basically co-stars in the lurid tale, so all those who have a rat-phobia should steer clear of this particular installment of the Sharpshooter series. Rossi delights in graphically describing the bloody mess, the feasting rats. Alley cats lap up the pools of blood while Armstrong watches in shock. Turns out there's a mutilated corpse hanging in the basement, half-eaten by huge rats. (I mention that Armstrong is black because Rossi reminds us about a zillion times, so it's now stuck in my brain.) In this dank, rotting house in the Jersey wildlands, Armstrong awakens in the dead of night, disturbed by a constant dripping sound. The "horror" connection shows itself in the opening pages, when Jessie Armstrong, a black guy who works for the FBI but is secretly an informant for the mafia, hides in a mob "safe house" while on the run from Rock, who has discovered him. Rock is once again more depraved, cruel, and "evil" than the mobsters he wars against. There are only one or two shootouts, with the majority of the "action" given over to Rock murdering unarmed opponents or knocking them out with chloroform and taking them back to his hideout so he can torture them for info. But on the positive side, this "Rossi" doesn't shrink from describing graphic brutality - in fact, Blood Bath is more of a horror novel than action. The occasional sentence I had to re-read as it was such a confused mess. The prose is rough and run-on sentences prevail. It's obvious from the start that this "Bruno Rossi" is different from the others who penned the previous two volumes. Johnny "Sharpshooter" Rock however murders, tortures, and maims throughout Blood Bath, usually for no reason at all. The only men's adventure novel I can think of that comes close to this level of graphic sleaze would be Gannon #1, but I'd say Blood Bath is even more twisted at least Gannon had some semblance of humanity about him, and he was fighting for a cause. Good lord! If I had known this volume of The Sharpshooter was so lurid, so exploitative, so friggin' twisted, I would've read it a whole lot sooner. The Sharpshooter #3: Blood Bath, by Bruno Rossi
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