Meanwhile, people around him are being murdered. Not that it matters, for as it opens Nicholas has resigned his post after a breakdown.or something.Īnyway, it’s all just a convenient setup so that, when we meet him, Nicholas Linnear is a broken man, despite only being in his 30s, sort of living like a bum along the beach outside of New York City. Raised in Japan, Nicholas eventually came to the US (after becoming a ninja, though Lustbader keeps it a “mystery” for several hundred pages), where he apparently got a job at an ad agency (just like Darrin on Bewitched!).

Nicholas (and no, it’s never just “Nick”) is one of the more stoic/boring/unmemorable protagonists you’ll ever encounter, lacking much spark. Our hero is Nicholas Linnear, improbably-named modern day ninja of caucasian and Japanese descent. What makes it so funny is the story is quite simple it’s just been overblown to staggering extremes. The book should come with a pack of No-Doze. Comically overwritten, The Ninja is one of the more pretentious reads I’ve ever had the displeasure of enduring, as if Dow Mossman, after penning his similarly-overwritten Stones of Summer, had decided to take a stab at writing “something Oriental.” You’d think I was joking if I told you that a novel about a ninja was boring, but there it is – I tell you the truth.

Even the cover of the mass market paperback seemed to suggest Sho Kosugi, who came to brief fame via Cannon’s Enter the Ninja - which, I seem to recall reading, was rushed into production to jump onto the ninja bandwagon which was kicked off by the runaway success of this very novel.īut here’s the thing…as shoddy, goofy, and bad as Enter the Ninja sometimes is, it’s still a hell of a lot better than this novel. I bought The Ninja fresh off the racks in the mid-‘80s, desperate like other kids my age for anything about ninjas. This read has been decades in the making. No month stated, 1980 Fawcett Crest Books

The ninja book by eric van lustbader