Hellboy: House of the Living Dead, written by Mike Mignola; illustrated by Richard Corben (2011): Fun original graphic novel set during Hellboy's "lost months" while on a bender in Mexico during the 1950's, during which time he professionally wrestled and fought various supernatural menaces, generally while either drunk or severely hung over. Forced to kill a young wrestling, monster-fighting ally after vampires turned the young man into a bat-headed monstrosity, Hellboy went on a blackout-inducing bender, the end of which we see here.
Richard Corben's art combines the grotesque and the voluptuous in a variety of fun, pleasing ways, while Mignola's script strikes the right balance between humour and heartbreak. Hellboy has to face his guilt before he can get out of Mexico, but the whole voyage of self-discovery avoids the usual rote, Afterschool Special platitudes and lessons we often see in such a story. Recommended.
The Outsider (2018) by Stephen King: 40-year-old Terry Maitland is a beloved high-school teacher and Little League coach in the small Oklahoma town of Flint City. But overwhelming witness, fingerprint, and DNA evidence suggest that he brutally raped and murdered an eleven-year-old boy.
So Detective Ralph Anderson makes the call to arrest him. Because Anderson is freaked out by the fact that his own son played Little League, Anderson decides to arrest Maitland in as public and humiliating a way as possible -- during a Little League game, with the stands packed.
A problem soon develops, however, as Maitland's lawyer and his own investigator discover: equally overwhelming evidence shows that Maitland was nowhere near Flint City at the time of the rape and murder.
Does Maitland have an accomplice? Did he try to commit the perfect crime? But if he tried to commit the perfect crime, why did he go out of his way to talk to witnesses before and after the murder while wearing a blood-soaked shirt? Why do the plethora of fingerprints and bloodstains suggest that he went out of his way to leave physical proof of his crime?
So begins The Outsider, Stephen King's new novel. This one is in many ways like a very detailed X-Files episode. No Mulder and Scully, but halfway through the novel Holly Gibney of King's Bill Hodges Trilogy (Mr. Mercedes, Finders Keepers, and End of Watch) will be called upon to fill the role of an outside investigator with experience when it comes to the paranormal.
For King the novel is pretty tight (it's 500 pages, so yeah, maybe there could be some trimming -- though I really only wished for more, not less). The details of the investigation are ably portrayed. The characterization is superb. It's a mash-up of the supernatural and the police procedural that works really well, perhaps in part because King practiced with End of Watch.
The novel also examines how good police can make catastrophic mistakes, as Ralph Anderson does with that initial public arrest. Anderson is the protagonist here, a good cop faced with something beyond his normal experience. Thankfully, brave, extremely intelligent Holly is there, a most unlikely Van Helsing, but an effective one. Her A/V presentation on what kind of thing they're facing is a miniature masterpiece of horror laced with unlikely comedy that rapidly turns to dread.
There are certainly derivative elements -- there are always in King, a master of synthesis far more than thesis. But the characterization and the pacing keep things going, along with some new (for King) locales. The climax is a dandy, another dark descent made by unlikely heroes in service of the light. Highly recommended.
