Nerding Day: Doom Infernal Sky🌭

You could not do more to convince me that you have never played one second of a DOOM game than to write the four DOOM novels that were published in the 1990s. Alleged science fiction writers and probable shave club subscribers Dafydd ab Hugh and Brad Lineweaver sat down and pounded out roughly 600 adult-length pages of hastily-researched fanfiction to trick their friends into thinking they knew everything about a game they weren’t allowed to play, and the end result is the worst crime to have ever been committed with a home computer.

I’m not going to spend much time recapping the first two books in the series, because I did that already. You can get a refresher in article, t-shirt, or coffee mug form. But if for some reason you want to start here with Part 3 like some kind of maniac, like the most grounded juggalo on the field trip, all you really need to know is that Book 1 was weirdly horny, and Book 2 was weirdly horny AND full of Mormon propaganda. Book 3 is horny, Mormon, and, uh, pretty racist. But mostly horny.

You cannot find a physical copy of this book, except in the ransom demands of several anonymous perverts on eBay. It’s only available in digital format, because incriminating evidence deletes more quickly than it burns. I’d long since thrown my copy away so I had to spend six new dollars on the digital version. I’m collecting that fee from each and every one of you at the moment of my death.

For a 13-year-old nerd in 1996, reading DOOM: Infernal Sky was like getting a Playboy subscription from your mom – theoretically this is what I wanted, but I don’t appreciate the gesture, and it’s not what I wanted at all. You see, for authors Dafydd ab Hugh and Brad Lineweaver, the DOOM series was a unique opportunity to tuck thousands of words of far-right conspiracy theories into a story that’s SUPPOSED to be about demons getting their assholes ripped out by a rabid space marine who is deathless to the point of insanity. The amount of monster-slaying exponentially decreases from book to book to make room for these rambling monologues so that by Infernal Sky, we only see one cyberdemon, and he’s asleep. Probably because Doomguy won’t stop talking about Jesus. Nobody should be asleep in DOOM. Least of all me.

The subtext of these rants flew straight over my seventh-grade head like a copy of DOOM: Infernal Sky yeeting itself out of an occult bookstore and back into the Faith and Spirituality section at Border’s, where it belongs. At the time, I just thought this book was bad, which it is, but that’s not a strong enough word. That’s like calling Ted Bundy a law student. The internet was two tin cans and a string back in 1996, so if I wanted to look up any of the references the authors tucked into their DOOM story I’d have to heave my ass to the library, and there were simply too many Goosebumps books and Mortals Kombat in my room for me to leave the house for all that. But today, with 30 years of ghosts fueling the new internet, I don’t have to go ANYWHERE. (That’s how the internet works, look it up. On the internet.) So I can finally tell you that DOOM: Infernal Sky is not merely bad. It’s a recruiting tool for white supremacists.

The book opens with Doomguy, AKA Flynn “Fly” Taggart because the authors named him after their Shadowrun characters, relaxing hornily on a beach with his best friend Arlene:

Arlene is hot and knows everything about obscure science fiction and pulp horror, but constantly needs to be put in her place by men, because this book was written by TWO geeks. There are no demons anywhere in sight for the first 50 pages, and after that they don’t show back up for another 100 pages, like the A24 version of DOOM where everybody leaves the theater angry. Technically there are no demons in this story at ALL, because the authors take several hundred words, directly up front, to reassure us that the “demons” are just evil aliens PRETENDING to be demons, to scare humans. This is integral to their plans for world domination, because the authors are frightened of demons. At many points in the novel they seem to be trying to convince themselves that demons aren’t real.

“Sweetie, if it were a REAL demon, would it need a rocket launcher? Of course not. Go to sleep, Dafydd. I mean David.” Anyway, I lied to you. That’s how the book really begins. In case you thought we were going to get one full page into this DOOM novel without quizzing us on scripture, you were dead wrong. This prologue ends with a woman and child in Demon-Occupied France quoting the Chad Kroeger song from Spider-Man, five years before Spider-Man was released. This means Chad Kroeger has read DOOM: Infernal Sky and it stuck with him. Ok, back to the nudity.

We get our first naked boobs five paragraphs into Chapter 1. Arlene Sanders, the spilled Shasta bottle to the divining rod that is Doomguy’s penis, points her breasts boobily at the horizon like a sextant, because the authors saw the first three letters of that word and stopped reading. Doomguy tries to calm his raging erection by carefully sipping whiskey, which the authors continually refer to as Jack Daniel’s. The only people who call Jack Daniel’s “Jack Daniel’s” are people who do all their drinking at home, far away from other people.

Doomguy goes on to assure us that normally he would never drink or do drugs while trying to send Arlene telepathic dick pics. He painstakingly describes her body like create-a-character prompts fed into ChatGPT by a corpse defiler. Then he immediately insists that Arlene is doing the same, so no big deal! It’s not weird AT ALL. He and Arlene have been relaxing on the beach since the last novel, which ended in a cliffhanger. As Arlene points her tits around like she failed the gun safety class with the fewest working lights in the strip mall and Doomguy psychically edges himself into the abyss, a character we never see again begs our heroes to tell him how the last book ended. This goes on for five chapters. But not before the action comes to a complete stop for the characters to share their conspiracy theories about Pearl Harbor, while the authors admit how stupid it is to name a character after the base’s historic commander.

Doomguy loves quizzing Arlene, because this book was written by two geeks. He himself is such a mega nerd for America he prays to freedom every Independence Day:

What kind of utter psychopath reads the Declaration of Independence out loud? The Doomguy, that’s who! Speaking of utter psychopaths, Fly and Arlene constantly wrestle with his supernatural horniness as it tries to conquer their minds. Fly talks about her like a decorated sex veteran with hundreds of confirmed nut-bustings, but Arlene ALSO navigates sexuality like three homeschooled kids in a trenchcoat trying to buy condoms.

I guess in DOOM you’d call it fragging a nut. Anyway, onto the white supremacy!

J. Neil Schulman was a right-wing fig-juggler who wrote The Rainbow Cadenza, about a libertarian utopia wherein gay marriage is legal and the president is a lady, but women are required to perform three years of sexual servitude and clones are hunted for sport, because such is the price of Woke. More importantly, the book Fly discovers, Stopping POWER, is a rambling treatise explaining how there wouldn’t BE any violent crime in America if HYSTERICAL anti-gun PUSSIES would just shut up and OWN GUNS ALREADY:

He quotes Hitler and immediately brags about quoting Hitler to his liberal Jewish relatives after they saw Schindler’s List (see “right-wing psychopath,” above), and this is all in the book’s preface.

You stalwart Hotdoggers who have been following this series of articles already know how the authors of DOOM: Infernal Sky feel about bringing up Hitler and the Holocaust in their novels about a monster-killing game for children – they absolutely love it. They go hog wild with it. They can’t get enough. The J. Neil Schulman sack of quackery fits neatly on their bookshelf, is what I’m getting at.

Remember kids, “the Holocaust wouldn’t have happened if the Jews had guns” is a notorious white supremacist talking point!

And no DOOM novel would be complete without at least one weird scene of Fly trying to strangle his statutory lust to death:

Important context: Jill is fourteen.

Doomguy sincerely cannot WAIT to fuck Jill. Luckily, he’s too honorable to have sex with the teenager and tells her she’s too young to be thinking about such things.

I wonder if the authors are making an obtuse reference to rules about adults leering at minors in YA fiction. Either way, Doomguy releases his throbbing frustration in a furiously nude swim, during which he cums so hard over Arlene’s feet he scalds his dickhole with salt water.

He would go to war and die to protect those gorgeous hooves. Also I guess he drank his cum. Meanwhile, Jill starts hanging out with Dr. Ackerman, a character who is described as looking exactly like Vincent Price because the authors have no imagination. That corner of their brains died from oxygen deprivation after years of excessive gooning. The authors accidentally make him an arch pervert, because you also depend on imagination to conceal evidence of your many crimes.

Ackerman tries to impress Jill with random geek trivia, which is the same way Fly interacts with Arlene, because quizzing women is the universal love language (see “written by two geeks,” above).

Mercifully Ackerman is decapitated almost as soon as he is introduced, and we never have to pursue this uncomfortable line of horniness any further. There are plenty of OTHER lines of uncomfortable horniness for us to follow. For example, Doomguy’s other sidekick is a devout Mormon named Albert who regularly lapses into alarming monologues about how Arlene should be making babies instead of fighting demons.

The authors LOVE Albert. They’re constantly writing him clever ways to out-logic Arlene and tell her to shut up. Plus, he was a sniper in the Marines, AND in the CIA, where he killed drug dealers, just like Mel Gibson in the Lethal Weapon movies. And he totally COULD be crushing SO MUCH ASS, you guys:

See? It doesn’t even MATTER that he’s never had sex before, because he’s a Mormon, and Mormons aren’t ALLOWED to. But women are throwing so much sex at him all the time that he COULD have sex any time he wanted, he just doesn’t respect THOSE women. Because THOSE women can’t answer trivia questions about the Book of Mormon. Then we take a break for some good old fashioned 90s racism.

Also, the authors continue their undefeated streak of sexualizing every female character including the dead ones, which is a phrase here meaning “especially the dead ones”, because there have only been two living female characters in this saga thus far. But in case you were worried the authors are misogynists, fear not – Arlene has special lady powers that allow her to detect female zombies by their drab appearance.

It doesn’t take them much longer to bring up Hitler and the Holocaust again! But don’t worry, this time they do it by equating him to Malcolm X.

Also, the human computer character Ken, whom we allegedly met in the previous novel although I have no memory of that and his existence here feels like a savage lie, reveals that the human defenders of Earth plan to construct a socialist utopia after the aliens who are definitely not demons but aliens pretending to be demons are defeated. We’re given exactly zero details about this vile New Eugenics plan, except that it MIGHT involve cyborgs and ALMOST CERTAINLY involves eugenics, probably.

But it would all be the fault of conniving, villainous socialists who want to strip away individuality. It sounds a lot like the dystopia from The Rainbow Cadenza, only painted in much broader strokes, because the authors are bad at the job they have been paid to do. The child inside of them who fueled their imaginations was gooned to death in the darkest corner of a comic book store.

Everyone’s favorite CIA sniper starts quizzing us about the Mormon faith, carrying on a fan-favorite tradition from the previous novel.

He also mixes in some Dispensationalism, an extreme belief that celebrates the idea of a global holocaust wiping the slate clean and leaving only God’s true believers to rebuild society the RIGHT way.

It’s uh, usually pretty racist.

Meanwhile, Arlene reassures Jill that a woman can do anything she wants, whether it be get married or have babies, or fight the traitors within the government.

Next we meet Captain Hidalgo, who speaks Spanish and whose favorite things are everything that a casual racist from Utah can tell you about Mexico. Hidalgo is the series’ first genuinely chilling character:

Hidalgo interrupts the boring and disturbingly horny DOOM novel with a HARROWING psychological thriller in which his estranged wife aborted their child without his knowledge while he was off fighting the demons who aren’t really demons, mom, they’re just aliens, so you can’t ground me. It’s an exceptionally grimy storyline to suddenly throw into this chastely turgid DOOM adventure. But then again, this is an exceptionally grimy DOOM adventure. Hidalgo’s increasingly deranged narration also never lets us forget how Latino he is, which, again, is exactly as Latino as a casual racist might imagine him.

His very real descent into madness hits a crescendo when he kisses his dead wife’s torso and laughs:

The authors hate women but they sure love teenage girls. And DEAD women! Anyway, this clearly villainous character just becomes part of the team and we never question his allegiance or morality again, because the authors were bad at the job they were hired to do. The novel comes to another complete stop for some bullhorn lip-wiggling, this time delivered by Albert. He spins a chair around and raps with the group about the evils of socialism by pointing to Stalin and Hitler as “perfect models of socialism in practice.”

In reality, both men led violent fascist dictatorships that simply referred to themselves as socialist movements in order to deflect and obstruct, but when you’re a hatchet-dumb weirdo hammering out Mormon porn to your favorite PC game of 1993 you miss out on nuance like that. That is, if you’re not avoiding it intentionally, but we have no reason to believe that Dafydd ab Hugh and Brad Lineweaver would do that.

Hitler and the Holocaust have been mentioned in every book of the series!

But you know what NEVER leaves people out to dry? CAPITALISM! It automatically values every man according to the service he renders to his fellow men. Of course, that value will have to be determined based on some kind of currency, subject to fluctuating exchange and inflation rates, the value of that “service” versus other services, how the value of service equates to the overall “value” of the human life providing it, etc. But these petty concerns are no match for Albert’s stone-cold logic. Capitalism is simply the bestest and most fair system ever conceived, and it gave us DOOM, so it’s hard to argue with that. But it also gave us the DOOM novels, and it is IMPOSSIBLE to argue with that. So, Capitalism is undeniably a net bad. There, we finally solved it. Also the book Albert brags about reading twice was written by Ludwig von Mises, an economist who argued that socialism was inherently evil but that fascism was an emergency measure that helped save Europe and had just been wielded improperly in the past. Also, this is the fourth Hitler shout-out in this DOOM novel. Hitler has appeared more times than the cyberdemon. Anyway, here’s another scene of Doomguy’s awesome fury:

Doomguy badassily throws up in his helmet, LIKE A BADASS. Meanwhile, Captain Hidalgo starts thinking about Star Trek, because he’s just as fucking bored as we are:

At the time the book was published, the most recent Star Trek film was Generations, film number 7. So at the time, the authors were calling their shot for the next few Star Trek films, because it’s a book that takes place in the future and sometimes fiction makes predictions that don’t come true. Like the Jaws 17 gag in Back to the Future. That’s fine. It happens. I only highlight it here because Dafydd ab Hugh also wrote several Star Trek novels, and I’m willing to bet he has an unpublished manuscript titled Star Trek Exodus somewhere in his house. We meet some aliens, which the authors can barely muster the energy to describe, so much of the awe-inspiring discovery of First Contact is left entirely to the reader’s imagination. Not Star Trek First Contact, though. That movie hadn’t come out yet.

We can tell we’re in trouble because the authors believe in the galactic sanctity of Mensa, an organization of geniuses that accepts new members based on their IQ, a completely unscientific measure of intelligence created and perpetuated by white supremacists. Doomguy Fun Fact!

But don’t you think for one second that Doomguy took a break from keeping score of everyone’s blasphemy! At least on the alien spaceship things FINALLY get a little less horny:

Back on earth, Jill reminds us what we’re fighting for – a chance to finally rid the planet of all those subhuman homeless people.

Then Jill overhears two OTHER homeless people talking about joining the aliens and she burns them alive while saying a prayer to our heroes as they speed off to spread the word of the angel Moroni to the galaxy.

Meanwhile, back in space, Doomguy’s feelings are hurt:

While you were watching cartoons, Doomguy was busy preparing mentally, physically, and spiritually for his role as cosmic savior. You apologize to his pet skink Sorbo THIS INSTANT. Speaking of apologizing, the authors continue to prove that they only kept Arlene around so that the male characters have someone to condescend to when they’re explaining important concepts:

“If you find my analysis unacceptable, we will say nothing more about it.” Oh hell yeah, Albert, fuck me UP with that message board haughtiness!

And here is where the authors ask us to believe that the central conflict of DOOM is two alien races arguing over the validity of literary criticism.

Nothing makes DOOM cooler than knowing you’re sticking it to those demons for their unfair reviews of genre fiction. Let’s try and frag this nut together! Deconstructionism is kind of a complicated and heady philosophy about the relationship between words and meaning, and how words have no inherent meaning beyond their relationship to other words … uh, I think. I don’t really understand it, and I’m not willing to do any more reading. Like, ever again. But in the world of literary criticism, deconstructionism essentially means taking apart the text and inferring meaning the author didn’t necessarily intend. For instance, one could examine the text of the DOOM series and come away thinking that the authors really hate women. And Arlene specifically calls out science fiction critics, as though she has a bone to pick with them over their reviews of her previous adventures in excruciating horniness. Although I can’t imagine anyone of note actually reviewed these books. Mass market paperbacks like these generally don’t get reviewed, so it seems like ab Hugh and Lineweaver are raging against literary critics on someone else’s behalf. Maybe all the crackpot science fiction writers Doomguy keeps bringing up, because the only thing he’s read more than the Bible is everything in Alex Jones’ bookshelf. Meanwhile, Albert continues wooing Arlene with his terrifying arousal:

“I want to FUCK you Arlene, but like a FATHER!” But he’s not repressed at all. Don’t you even fuckin’ try to say he is.

In the vastness of space, against all odds and with the fate of the universe on their shoulders, Doomguy and friends still find moments of real camaraderie that remind us why the demons aliens are trying so hard to kill them all:

Even Captain Hidalgo takes a break from the psychopathic glee of his wife’s death to become one of the gang:

Yep, definitely no creeping darkness that needs to be examined, just good old-fashioned brotherhood among the stars!

Just wall to wall friendship and good vibes, yessir, nothing weird going on here AT ALL:

Arlene and Albert even get engaged! For some reason! The human race is going to be OK!

“For the last time Arlene, I said I want to fuck you like a FATHER!” The two unleash their passion in an embrace so haunted by the ghosts of future homicide detectives that Arlene should have been blown across the room by psychic energy:

Being married by an officiant who was recently planning to murder his own wife is good luck for any newlywed couple. Fly and Arlene have to make a trip to the alien home world, which will result in an Interstellar-type time dilation that essentially means they will never see Albert again. So Arlene writes him a blazing love letter containing the most passionate words in all of literature:

If you’re marrying someone who has a favorite collectivist, it’s already too late. For you and for humanity. At one point, Doomguy laments not having any books to read on the alien spacecraft, and here is where shit gets real. He wistfully brings up his favorite passage from The Camp of the Saints by Jean Raspail, except he gets the title slightly wrong and doesn’t mention the author, almost like he doesn’t want any stinkin’ casuals to look it up:

The Camp of the Saints is a NOTORIOUSLY RACIST piece of fiction that helped propagate both the great replacement theory and white genocide, the conspiracy theories at the heart of modern white supremacy!

The Camp of the Saints cannot be misconstrued! It is grotesquely racist on its face! It’s the literary equivalent of a Nazi’s birthday card!

This MIGHT have something to do with why DOOM: Infernal Sky is not currently in print. By this point, you might be saying to yourself, “I thought this was a DOOM book, where’s all the monsters and explosions?” Don’t you worry – the characters are wondering the same thing:

Better keep away from the spider-minds, Fly. We wouldn’t want you to throw up again. Speaking of throwing up, the authors pick up the pace 12 pages later, when Hidalgo fulfills his destiny and is killed in a teleportation accident that transforms him into ManBag:

At least he still has his mouth, so he can smooch his dead wife. Thus ends the most sinister character in butt-pocket literature. When our heroes arrive at the homeworld of the evil aliens, who are totally aliens and definitely NOT Malebolgian slaves of the infernal deep, Doomguy comes across a pair of them knocking space boots and watches for way too long:

Nothing weird going on here! It definitely doesn’t mean anything that Fly executes them by blasting off what he assumes are their genitals!

I’m genuinely terrified to start the next book.

Tom Reimann is the co-founder of Gamefully Unemployed, where he is quietly atoning for purchasing a Dafydd ab Hugh novel twice. Check out their new show BADICAL, if you’re rad enough.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: SEEED, who types their names in all caps as a secret message telling their mom goodnight at the end of an article. Isn’t that super sweet?