The Immune by Doc Lucky Meisenheimer Reviewed by Chuck McGlawn

Sat, 05/14/2011 - 4:49pm

This is going to be the strangest opening to the review of The Immune by Doc Lucky Meisenheimer as anyone is apt to read. Because this reviewer is cursed with a tendency, by experience and training, to find flaws, faults, failings, errors, weaknesses, shortcomings, etc in everything including books. However, even with the flaws, faults, and failings, this reviewer found The Immune by Doc Lucky Meisenheimer an incredibly readable contribution to the book world..

As a reader that is somewhat affected by Attention Deficit Disorder, fiction had not been a priority for me since the early 1970s, I just couldn’t stay focused on the fiction I was trying to read. Out of necessity, I switched to reading the more concrete non-fiction, centered around, political, historical, Libertarian and Conservative materials. If this sounds like you as well, then quickly go online to  http://www.theimmune.com/ and place your order for this book Hardcover Fiction.342 pages. LJS&S Publishing. $23.95 . The Immune by Doc Lucky Meisenheimer is, if nothing else, a temporary cure for “A. D. D.”. And who knows, it may bring us back to reading some fiction from time to time just for fun. With the promise of a Libertarian theme, I was motivated, as I hope you will be as well.

The first few paragraphs establish John Long as a successful doctor in the not too distant future. He has taken his “ideal woman” (Cassandra) on a Cayman Island vacation highlighted by a very romantic proposal of marriage. The author moves ahead quickly, by the middle of page two we get our first hint that Dr. Long has some libertarian leanings, as he laments, “With all of medicine’s issues, he couldn’t think of one improved by paperwork. Yet, the government’s answer to every problem was invariably another form”.

By page six, the good doctor is already postulating conspiracy theories. For the next thirty pages (the first six Chapters), the author cleverly weaves Libertarian, Conservative and Tea Party agendas into the plot development. This is the author casting a wider net over more possible readership than he would “catch” by simply writing a very good science fiction novel, which Doc Lucky has surely done.

These Libertarian, Conservative and Tea Party ticklers include the following: Revealing how crisis is used to justify increased government power and spending. However, in life as in Dr. Meisenheimer’s writings, the lion’s share of the appropriation always goes not to end the crisis but to Special Interest groups as earmarks. As one-time Obama’s Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel’s has famously said, “Never let a serious crisis go to waste”. Followed quickly by, “Every social-political cause…” is tied to the author’s crisis. There is an abrogation of the First Amendment free speech rights. The author includes the habit that power elites have of jailing members of the press for opposing their plans in print. This list would not be complete without the government declaring privately owned guns illegal and begin confiscation, along with threats to “manage” the Internet.

With the Libertarian, Conservative and Tea Party ticklers well established and in place, what follows are a few hundred pages, which will seem like half that many, filled with well-defined character development, good and evil, hated and sympathetic, human and alien. A compelling storyline complete with conflict, compromise, and compassion, peppered with plot twists, edge of your seat, page turning, spine-tingling, narrative.

The story that unfolds as Dr. Long and Cassandra learn of a worldwide devastation that is taking place. That thousands of slow-moving, lighter than air, bio-genetically created creatures named airwars have found and are filling a niche by stinging to death with long dangling multicolored tentacles and then lifting and digesting humans and other animals for food and the gasses that keep the airwars afloat. Millions suffer this fate including Dr. Long’s beloved Cassandra.

Normal defenses against these creatures are ineffective even counterproductive. When killed the airwar creatures release hundreds perhaps thousands of juvenile airwars, which grow into more airwars.

A multinational organization called the Airwar Scientific Council (ASC) emerges to manage the defense efforts. It quickly expands to a shadow world government managing and controlling every aspect of life ostensibly to ameliorate damage by the airwars.

John Long and some others are immune to the airwar stings, thus the title, “The Immune.” John Long, managed by a PR guru Admiral Beckwourth, leads a cadre of these immunes named the World Immune Corps. With their immunity to the stings, they can kill airwar creatures without the release of juveniles.

Yet another plot twist reveals that an advanced, alien race (referred to as Krones) have actually created the airwars as a diversion in their plan to destroy the human race and take over the earth. The Krones elicited the support of the select group of scientist, politicians, and military (the “Chosen”) in the formation of the ASC with wildly intoxicating promises of power and even immortality.

You will never know just who the good guys and who the bad guys are until the last few pages, which you will find yourself reading way sooner than you expected.

The only glaring fault I found in the book was the feeling that the Libertarian, Conservative and Tea Party agendas seem to have been an afterthought added to the beginning of the book to increase sales. Nothing wrong with that, and it does not dissuade me in the slightest from recommending that you go out or go online and order the book for yourself and perhaps another as a gift.

The book is available in all major bookstores and Internet outlets as of May 13, 2011. You can even order an autographed copy through http://www.theimmune.com/. The few extra dollars that you pay for the autographed book go to the YMCA Aquatic Center in Orlando, just one of Doc Lucky’s extracurricular interests.