I had a friend who loved these books, and I finally tried this one at their repeated urging.

You know that fight scene in They Live? It is a masterpiece of filmmaking and anyone who says otherwise is wrong in wrong sauce, but what they say in wrongness about it is absolutely true about the interminable sparring session between The Hero and some other character just a few pages into this book, which is where I mercifully bounced off book and author forever.