Hellboy and the B.P.R.D. 1952 (2014-2015): written by Mike Mignola and John Arcudi; illustrated by Alex Maleev and Dave Stewart: Mike Mignola's Hellboy goes on his first mission in this graphic novel, accompanied by a team from the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense (B.P.R.D.). Weird things are happening in a small town in Brazil. Evil monster monkeys. Disappearances. That sort of thing.
It's an enjoyable story, scripted by perennial B.P.R.D. writer John Arcudi and illustrated in a mostly realistic style by Alex Maleev. You know, and monkeys. There's a bit of continuity stuff that I'll be damned if I remember what it's about. I probably need to read all of Hellboy again and all the volumes of B.P.R.D. I haven't read. That's like a job! I don't think this would work for someone without at least some familiarity with Hellboy. It is an enjoyable diversion with a number of nicely choreographed battles. Recommended.
Hellboy and the B.P.R.D. 1954 (2016-2018): containing:
Black Sun: written by Mike Mignola and Chris Roberson; illustrated by Stephen Green and Dave Stewart: An assignment to the Arctic to investigate a mysterious monster plunges Hellboy into a battle with... flying saucers? Looks that way! A nice diversion.
The Unreasoning Beast: written by Mike Mignola and Chris Roberson; illustrated by Patric Reynolds and Dave Stewart: Almost an X-Files episode, if Hellboy worked for the FBI. Hellboy and the B.P.R.D. investigate a vengeful ghost monkey in suburban America. Enjoyable stuff, though illustrator Patric Reynolds is maybe a bit too realistic to maintain supernatural dread.
Ghost Moon; written by Mike Mignola and Chris Roberson; illustrated by Brian Churilla and Dave Stewart: Hellboy gets dropped into a John LeCarre spy scenario by way of some sort of soul-eater and a bunch of traditional Chinese demons who are perhaps not the problem but part of the solution. Brian Churilla's pleasantly cartoony style reminds me of the animated Hellboy movies.
The Mirror; written by Mike Mignola; illustrated by Richard Corben and Dave Stewart: A short from Hellboy creator Mignola and horror-comic legend Richard Corben involves a magic mirror and a lesson to Hellboy on how to deal with the supernatural. Slight but beautifully illustrated.
Overall: Recommended.
Hellboy: Into the Silent Sea (2017): written by Mike Mignola; illustrated by Gary Gianni with Mike Mignola and Dave Stewart: Beautifully illustrated in an almost classically fine 19th-century style by Gary Gianni, Into the Silent Sea occurs during Hellboy's time spent walking the Earth and especially the oceans of the Earth somewhere back around midway through Hellboy's main arc. What we have here are ghost ships and crazy monsters from the haunted deep. It doesn't take long to read, but one can profitably linger upon or return to Gianni's fine linework. Recommended.
Five Million Years to Earth (aka Quatermass and the Pit) (1967): written by Nigel Kneale, based on the BBC miniseries of the same name; directed by Roy Ward Baker; starring James Donald (Dr. Roney), Andrew Keir (Prof. Bernard Quatermass), Barbara Shelley (Barbara Judd), and Julian Glover (Colonel Breen): British writer Nigel Kneale created three television serials for the BBC back in the 1950's featuring British rocket scientist Bernard Quatermass, a sort of proto-Doctor-Who figure, albeit a fallible, human one.
All three serials, along with a fourth starring John Mills in the early 1980's, pitted Quatermass and company against various alien invasions of the British Isles. This 1960's Hammer Film was based on the third Quatermass serial, Quatermass and the Pit, in which the excavation of a site in London, England for a new subway line uncovers strangely deformed ancient human skeletons and the remains of what appears to be an alien spaceship.
History reports that strange occurences plagued the site whenever digging or some other form of vibration took place over hundreds of years. And something does indeed seem to be waking up. Will the military and the government do something incredibly stupid, leaving the fate of the planet in the hands of Quatermass and his dedicated scientist friends? What do you think?
This is a very English science-fiction movie in many ways, not least of which is Kneale's WWII-enhanced concern with fascism at home and abroad -- and the fear that fascistic group-think can overcome anyone, no matter how intelligent or empathetic that person normally is. We're the Nazis now.
Five Million Years to Earth is a well-done movie, small of budget but big on ideas and weirdness. It's one of a relatively small number of old science fiction movies that could be improved with just a few minutes of good visual effects, as a key visual effects sequence has to be explained at length to the viewer for any sense to be made of it. However, there's also a truly disturbing visual effects shot towards the end that I don't think modern CGI could capture, simply because modern CGI tends to go for the overly detailed literal rather than the suggestively obscure. In any event, highly recommended.
The Thief of Broken Toys (2011) by Tim Lebbon: This lovely, lonely, haunting short novel is a thing of disturbing beauty from Tim Lebbon. There's a Ray Bradbury quality to some of the story elements (especially that eponymous being). But it's the leaner Bradbury of the 1940's, the one capable of horror.
The loss of a son to an undiagnosed genetic disorder has left the novel's protagonist, the boy's father, in an emotional purgatory as The Thief of Broken Toys begins. His wife struggles to move on -- in part by having left him. He stays at home, for the most part, where he's been for the most part of a year. And then, on one of his nightly walks on the English sea coast, he encounters the eponymous being -- an old man who offers him the ability to heal. Beware strangers bearing supernatural gifts, no matter how seemingly benign!
I don't know that all of the elements work. The occasionally intruding narration speaks to larger things outside the events of the novel, but it never entirely convinced me, or at least convinced me that it was necessary to the tragedy and horror of the story itself. Nonetheless, this is stellar work from Lebbon.
Technically this is 'quiet horror,' but it's horror nonetheless. And the final catastrophe horrifies without any blood being spilled or tentacled monster making an appearance. Actually, a tentacled monster would probably have been comforting. Highly recommended.
The Keep (1981) by F. Paul Wilson: F. Paul Wilson's first 'big' novel is also his best. A dreadful movie adaptation in the mid-1980's, directed by Michael Mann, got pretty much everything wrong about Wilson's original. The Keep is a clever synthesis of vampire novel, cosmic horror, and high fantasy, though that last bit doesn't become evident until the last 50 pages or so. Its best horror moments come in its first half, while the full nature of the adversary remains hidden from reader and characters alike.
The Keep would soon be folded into Wilson's 'Adversary Cycle,' a six-novel arc that is itself part of a much larger body of work dubbed 'The Secret History of the World' that includes Wilson's multi-volume Repairman Jack series. My version of The Keep ends without any sort of cliffhanger or 'stinger' ending, but this may not be true of later editions of the novel. Wilson rewrote a number of novels to eradicate inconsistencies within both the Cycle and the Secret History.
The genius of The Keep lies in its use of the Nazis as foils to the greater evil growing inside the Keep. It's 1941. Much of the action occurs in an isolated part of Romania where German infantry have been entrusted with taking control of that mysterious Keep. The name itself is a misnomer -- there was never a castle surrounding the structure, and the name was simply attached as a matter of convenience. Why are there unusually designed crosses embedded in the walls of the Keep? Why does anyone who tries to sleep there awake from nightmares of confinement? Who's been paying to maintain the Keep with a long line of well-recompensed villagers from an adjacent village for the last 500 years? And why has the German Army Captain in charge of the Keep telegrammed High Command to ask for help because "something is killing my men"?
Well, there's the novel. Wilson's strongest character work involves the fraught relationship between the German Army Captain and the SS Major sent to deal with the problem. The Captain hates the Nazis, but he's also a loyal soldier. The SS Major is a coward and a sadist who dreams of the money to be made once he takes control of Nazi preparations in Ploesti for the coming Romanian Holocaust. As problems at the Keep continue despite the SS presence, they agree to summon a Romanian-Jewish scholar who's the world's only known authority on the Keep. As the scholar has been crippled by a wasting disease, along with him comes his bright, unmarried daughter.
Props where props are due: that daughter makes for an interesting and unusual character in a horror novel written by a young man in the late 1970's and early 1980's. She becomes the focus of the third-person narrative, and Wilson makes her a compelling figure who wants a life of intellectual achievement in a world where both her gender and her ethnicity stand against any such achievement. While this character is put in jeopardy on numerous occasions, Wilson never makes her a stereotypical female victim. By the climax of the novel, she's one of the two most important characters in terms of opposing the ancient dark force inside the Keep.
As noted, the strongest moments of horror come in the first half, as a mysterious, unseen force stalks the Keep. But the revelation of the horror doesn't immediately deflate the narrative of its mystery: the creature explains what it is, but there are odd gaps and curiosities in its story. And the discovery of a cache of Lovecraftian banned texts points the way towards an explanation that has nothing to do with vampires or werewolves or ghosts. And they are literally Lovecraftian texts, the Necronomicon and a number of other fictional 'banned' books mentioned by H.P. Lovecraft and his fellow Cthulhuists over the years in a nod by Wilson to his American horror forerunners.
Once the novel passes that midway point, elements of a more conventional thriller begin to blend with elements of both dark and high fantasy. There are even riffs on the sort of material made popular by The Lord of the Rings and Robert E. Howard's Conan series. But Wilson also keeps things rooted in the historical setting of 1941 Eastern Europe, with the seemingly unstoppable Nazis about to embark on their betrayal of the Soviet Union. It's a relatively long novel, but it's briskly told in Wilson's competent, unflashy prose. To nod to an old chestnut, if you read one novel by F. Paul Wilson, it should be this one. Highly recommended.
Hellboy: Masks and Monsters: written by Mike Mignola and James Robinson; illustrated by Mike Mignola, Scott Benefiel, and Jasen Rodriguez (Collected 2009): Short volume collects two Hellboy miniseries team-ups with three other characters -- DC's Batman and Starman in one adventure and Dark Horse's own Ghost in the other.
A good time is pretty much had by all. Though I'm not familiar with Ghost -- a two-gunned female ghost fighting crime -- Hellboy's adventure with her makes a certain amount of sense given their supernatural backgrounds. Mignola's script presents an interesting mix of mythology and the mundane as organized crime gets mixed up with ancient gods who want Hellboy's giant hand for something nefarious. The art by Scott Benefiel, from Mignola's layouts, is fairly smooth, though perhaps a bit too representational for Mignola's blocky, occasionally impressionistic Hellboy.
The Starman/Batman team-up, plotted by Mignola and scripted by Starman's James Robinson, is really serious fun, with Mignola handling the art. Batman and Hellboy team up to fight magical Aryan Nation types in Gotham. With Batman temporaily sidelined by a re-appearance of the Joker, it's then up to Hellboy and second-generation Starman Jack Knight to rescue the Golden-Age Starman (who's also Jack's father Ted Knight) from a Nazi base in South America. There, the Nazis have supernaturally coerced Ted into helping them bring a very large, evil God back to Earth.
Oh, Nazis! Mignola's Batman is shadowy and bulky, while his Starman is quite a change from the more representational art generally seen in Jack Knight's own title. The whole volume goes down nicely, and is also an enjoyable break from the increasingly labyrinthine continuity of Hellboy's own adventures. Recommended.The Sandman Volume 5: A Game of You: written by Neil Gaiman; illustrated by Shawn McManus, Colleen Doran, George Pratt, Stan Woch, Dick Giordano, and Bryan Talbot (1991-92): The fifth volume of Gaiman's now twenty-year-old+ Sandman adventures presents a mostly self-contained tale concerned with gender, identity, race, and childhood dreams. Minor characters from previous story arcs do reappear here, along with the Lord of Dreams and his attendant (wise)-talking raven Matthew.
The six issues focus on one minor character from an earlier story arc, Barbie, whose previous encounter with the world of the Dreaming destabilized her marriage to Ken (!), along with her own carefully constructed self-image, and sent her to New York to figure out who she is. That previous interaction with the world of Dreams also had an unintended consequence. She's stopped dreaming.
However, somewhere in dreams, a ragtag group of talking and sometimes imaginary animals continue to search for the vanished Princess Barbara, who is the only person who can defeat the all-devouring Cuckoo and its conquering hordes. But she's going to need the help of her neighbours -- the lesbian couple Hazel and Foxglove, the transvestite Wanda, and the mysterious Thessaly -- to negotiate an increasingly unstable fantasy world.
The real world and the dream world are, of course, connected, in both obvious and less-than-obvious ways. Things do not necessarily go well for everyone involved in this adventure, with its echoes of Narnia and Tolkien and The Wizard of Oz's game-changing tornado. We also learn an awful lot about the life-cycle of the cuckoo bird. Why did someone put these awful things in clocks to begin with? Recommended.
The Night Boat by Robert R. McCammon (1980): This enjoyable, overstuffed, pulpy as all get-out early novel from McCammon gives us a World War Two U-Boat filled with undead Nazis terrifying a Caribbean Island in the late 1970's after the explosion of an old depth charge releases the U-Boat from its burial beneath tons of sand on the ocean floor.
One of McCammon's strengths throughout his career has been the density of his inventiveness in his novels -- stuff just keeps on happening even when it doesn't necessarily build from anything or to anything. Here, that density gives us three Ahabs in search of their great black-hulled Nazi whale, one of them suddenly appearing with about 60 pages to go. It also gives us a former Nazi Ishmael who shows up and then has almost nothing to do. Was this novel edited down from a much longer manuscript? I wonder.
Anyway, an expariate American scuba diver with a tragic past which will, of course, become a vital part of the story's machinery is compelled to unearth the submarine that's lain on the sea floor since 1942. It's the same sub that shelled the small Caribbean island of Coquina during World War Two before being sent to its apparent death by several sub-chasers and a lot of depth charges. But rise it does, to the astonishment of all, whereupon it drifts into the harbour and gets stuck on a reef. So the good people of Coquina elect to tow it into an abandoned military dock despite the fact that the sub managed to kill one fisherman during its trek into the harbour.
And from within the decades-sealed submarine...is that the sound of someone pounding with a hammer? Well, let's open it up and find out!
Did I mention that Voodoo plays a role as well? Of course it does. And undead zombie Nazis with an unquenchable thirst for blood and the ability to use tools. They can smash you with a hammer or fix a submarine. These are not your garden-variety stupid zombies. They have an ethos, and it's called National Socialism!
All in all, The Night Boat is a wild romp that pays off on enough plot threads to be pretty thoroughly enjoyable. McCammon would write much better novels, but no more enjoyable ones on the basic level of pulp melodrama. Recommended.
The Chosen Child by Graham Masterson (1997): Solid and mostly riveting horror-thriller from the prolific and talented Masterson. And you'll learn tons of interesting things about the history of Poland, where the novel is set in the present day! It's like a twofer -- come for the horror, stay for the history of Warsaw.
In the late 1990's, something or someone periodically emerges from the sewers of Warsaw to kill and behead seemingly random victims. The murder as the novel begins threatens to derail the construction of an American hotel group's new Warsaw location, so Sarah Leonard, the Polish-American woman in charge of the hotel's construction, ends up inserting herself into the investigation, led by old-school detective Stefan Rej.
Soon, all hell is breaking out on a number of fronts as corporate and civic corruption, organized crime, and office politics threaten to derail the investigation. And the body count continues to mount both beneath the streets and above them.
The main characters here are surely drawn and sympathetic when they need to be, while the horrors caused by the killer -- dubbed The Executioner by the press -- are evocatively and brutally shown in several setpieces. The revelation of what The Executioner really is may strain one's suspension of disbelief -- it certainly did mine -- but overall Masterson manages a fairly fascinating mix of the police procedural and the supernatural thriller.
Rej is an especially well-drawn character, occasionally mourning the moral clarity of the bygone days of Communism while doggedly continuing his investigation regardless of opposition from above or danger from below. And the history of Warsaw, especially its opposition to the Nazis, really is gripping stuff. With a number of key scenes set in reeking, filth-clogged sewers, The Chosen Child generates a real sense of dread and bodily horror: it's about as cloachally horrible as a thriller can be. Recommended.
