"The Age of Ruin" is a 1968 science-fiction novel by John M. Faucette, published as one half of an Ace Double, with the other half being Code Duello by Mack Reynolds. Faucette was not a prolific author, having only a few books published, and this was the first book I read by him.
This book is told in the first person, with the hero/protagonist being a purple haired barbarian warrior named Jahalazar, who lives in a terrible post-apocalyptic earth. The first person narration is also often phrased in archaic grammar:
I, Jahalazar of the purple locks, sprang awake, a sinewy arm reaching for Chernac, the Throwing Sword, as I rolled from the bed to alight upon shoeless feet crouched.
We know this is earth because he is part of "Clan Chevy", which along with Clans Dodge, Oldsmobile and Caddy live in a place called "Bomb Valley". Something bad has happened to the earth, as it is inhabited by solcs, canine creatures, zharks, mutated
sharks, and most dangerous, the Diss, parasitic worms that can strip a person,
piranha style, in a minute. Jahalazar learns that he was adopted from another purple-haired woman who crash-landed years ago. While there are many
mutants in this post-apocalyptic world, Jahalazar's purple hair is referred to as especially noteworthy. He sets out to find his true people, a quest that takes him across a
patchwork earth full of things like friendly giant spiders, fish people who ride dogs, building-sized tanks---a weird mixture of post-apocalyptic and
sword and sorcery tropes are thrown out in the books short, 110 page length. Many of them are disconnected and don't add anything to the overall plot--- the thousands mile trek that Jahalazar takes on the back of friendly mutant giant spiders adds almost nothing. It seems like a
fever dream of disconnected visions without any real plot or character development. Which isn't terribly bad, because it does provide an imaginative
kaleidoscope of weird stuff. Finally, at the end of the book, our hero discovers that the earth was laid siege to by a powerful alien race, and that his tribe (which is actually described as
homo superior), is destined to gather the spirit of man back together to reconquer the earth. It concludes with a statement about the human spirit:
The earth survives. Man is unbroken. Though the Vish bomb the Earth a thousand times, Man will not be conquered.
What was interesting to me is that while, in general, Ace Doubles tended to avoid jingoistic or "alien invasion" stories with humans as the victim, when they are fantasy stories, they do tend to get a little...troubling...in their implications. The Bane of Kanthos, for example, was pretty blatant in its story of heroic Viking barbarians fighting against "swarthy" people. "The Age of Ruin" also seemed possibly troubling in its tale of a "superior race" fighting off aliens. Which is why a small bit of research I did after finishing the book provided a surprise: the author, John Faucette, was an African-American man who was born in 1943 and grew up in Harlem. Which, after the fact, changed how I viewed the book: people noticing the hero's bright purple hair and judging him based on it (even in a world where people are walking around with extra eyes and arms) seems to be a statement about racism, and not just a fantasy detail. And the conclusion about the spirit of man overcoming adversary as it fights against aliens seems to be an earnest statement of human unity, and not a coded xenophobic message.
By coincidence, yesterday I finished a book that seemed to just be a literary experiment, but turned more nefarious when I found out the author had ties to white supremacist figures. And today, I finished a book that seemed to have nefarious undertones, but when I researched the authors' basic history, had a very different message. Knowing just a little bit about an author can really change how I read a book.