Hellboy and the B.P.R.D, Vol.1: 1952

Hellboy and the B.P.R.D., Vol. 1: 1952 by Mike Mignola
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Weird. Yeah, I know that 'weird' is essential to Hellboy. But this was really weird. A hodge podge of horror with science fiction. Hellboy is awesome as always. His team kind of blurs together for me. Good action, but nothing that stood out and made me say wow. Having said that, it's Hellboy, so it's good.

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BRPD: Hollow Earth and other Stories by Mike Mignola, Christopher Golden, and Thomas E. Sniegoski

B.P.R.D., Vol. 1: Hollow Earth and Other Stories by Mike Mignola

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is the first in the spin-off series from Hellboy, about the other members of the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense.  It starts just after Hellboy quits, and it's all on Abe Sapien to be the leader of their team to go out and save the world from paranormal threats.  Abe and his crew are still reeling from Hellboy's departure, but they have to move on because the world isn't safe. Along with Abe, and Roger, the homunculus, Johann Krauss joins the crew. He is a powerful medium who unfortunately had his body fried during an out of body experience during a seance.  He was powerful enough to keep his spirit together, and now he had to wear a specially designed suit that contains his essence.  Being spirit form comes in handy a lot in this story, and his special skill adds a lot to toolbox of the BRPD.  They are dealing with a race of primitives who have traveled from the inside of the earth, yes the earth is Hollow, at least in this story. An old friend and former BRPD member needs their help big time, and they follow her trail into the earth.

This is a weird idea, to say the least. What does that say that I still gave it four stars? I guess I have to admit, I like weird stuff.  Glad there are stories out there to cater to weird fiction lovers like myself.

I like seeing Abe take the wheel in this series. Abe is a cool character. He seems to be mostly cerebral (compared to the brawn and bravado of Hellboy), but he can hold his own.  Additionally, he is a very empathetic, and caring person.  That's a good combination in a leader. 

While Hellboy's absence is felt, I still enjoy the BRPD stories, because the other characters are appealing and fascinating in distinct ways from Hellboy, and there is plenty of supernatural oddness to go around. And there is more Mignola to read, especially with Golden and Sniegoski along for the adventure. All good things.





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Joe Golem and the Drowning City by Mike Mignola and Christopher Golden

Joe Golem and the Drowning City: An Illustrated Novel by Mike Mignola

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Joe Golem and the Drowning City is a lovely sort of homage to HP Lovecraft and the Jewish golem folklore tradition. One wonders how they can exist together harmoniously in the same work, but Mignola and Golden do exactly that.

New York City is a very different place from the one we know and love in this book.  Some sort of ecological disaster turned half of the city into what is essentially a Venetian-like, water-logged environment.  Downtown flooded, and those who lived there are cut off from the denizens of Uptown and forced to fend for themselves. Like humans are apt and known to do, they adapt to a semi-aquatic lifestyle, living on the top floors of the taller buildings, constructing bridges and mazeways between buildings and using watercrafts to navigate the flooded streets.

This novel is initially about two of its citizenry:  An elderly magician named Felix Orlov, who can communicate with the dead, and his unofficially adopted daughter, fourteen-year-old, redheaded, former street kid, Molly McHugh.  Their somewhat harmonious lifestyle is brutally interrupted when strange, inhuman creatures abduct Felix, failing to capture Molly when she is saved by a big, rough-looking man named Joe.  Joe is special, more than they realize initially. His colleague is the ancient British gentleman, Simon Church, a man who has adapted his failing organs with mechanical parts (added a steampunk-like flair to the story). He also uses a mix of science, machinery, and magic to monitor the supernatural barometer of the city. He happens to detect a very large spike in activity the day that Felix is kidnapped, and Molly teams up with them both to find out what happened to Felix and to save him and save the world in the process.

This is a rather solemn tale.  Joe's past is very tortured, and along with Simon's regrets about the past, and Felix's special legacy, the storyline is fairly dark.  Molly is a spunky and energetic young woman, who's seen more bad things than a person of her age should. She has trouble trusting, with good reason. We feel her pain as she is helpless against forces that pull the man who is as close to a father to her as any man could be away from her by events beyond their control.

In addition to the somber tone, the Lovecraft-type storyline adds a cosmic horror to the story.  While I am personally a bit alienated by Lovecraft's concept of an ancient, extra-dimensional cosmos and its denizens (which are indifferent to our moral concepts and even our right to exist as humanity),  Mignola and Golden add an emotional context that makes this typical idea more relatable and almost heartfelt.

One of the downsides to this book is the villain truly never feels invincible or formidable. He comes off more as a petulant child who is playing with matches (dabbling with magics and science far beyond his ken), than a disturbing force for evil. He felt like a paper tiger, which is a bit of a pet peeve of mine.  I need a villain who is truly formidable--one that I question if the hero will be able to prevail against.   His creations were disgusting, and while repulsive and off-putting, they don't add much in a positive way to the creepy tone of the book. 

Despite being somewhat disappointed with the villain, I was drawn to Joe's character, his painful struggle, his search for identity, and the integration of past and future. I also liked Molly. She feels like 'me' in the sense that she is the everyday person put in bizarre and non-ordinary circumstances. I think a good weird fiction tale needs that kind of protagonist.

Mignola just does it for me, with his stories and his creations. His collaborations with Golden have been unilaterally successful so far, and I add this one to the list.  I hope to see more of Joe Golem and Molly McHugh, and more of the Drowning City.  Recommended to weird fiction readers, and avowed fans of classic horror motifs and loving homages.



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SEAL Team 666 by Weston Ochse

SEAL Team 666: A Novel by Weston Ochse

My rating: 3.25 of 5 stars


Jack Walker’s dream was to be a Navy SEAL. He was going to make it through BUD/S training, no matter how much it punished his body. Just four more weeks.  But he’s pulled out of training early, and drafted into an ultra-secret, elite SEAL team, one that has an unusual team number.  This team fights threats against the free world that are supernatural in origin.  And Jack is specially equipped to be a member.  For the dark scars of his youth mark him with a special ability to sense evil. 

I liked the idea of this book, a military special ops story with a supernatural twist.  Ochse’s attention to detail as far as military ops lends credibility to the writing.  I really appreciated the look at how a SEAL team operates and the whole involved procedure of keeping the world safe, top secret-style, with the ancillary support of various defense agency personnel.  His focus seems to be more on this than the supernatural component, but he grafts together the two aspects of the story fairly well.  Still this book seemed thin to me.  Like it was serviceable, but merely scratching the surface of possibilities.  Yes, I think that was the big issue I had with this book. It lacked depth.

I wanted more character exploration.  While I felt I did get to know Jack fairly well, I didn’t get more than a surface portrayal of most of the others.  I realize that the story occurs in a short period of time, but I had this feeling that the characters merely existed to move the story, or to get killed off.  That saddened me.  The death of a team member and the ritual associated with his passing, had more time spent on it than seeing that team member as a living, breathing human.  Of course, death is an everyday experience for these men.  They know they could die on any mission they undertake.  But I needed to know them better, because knowing someone is part of the process of caring for them, that they live and die for a purpose.  Otherwise, our mental health defenses build a wall between us and the suffering of others in the world, because to cry for every person who dies will destroy you. We just don’t have that capacity.    But if you know someone, even a little, it breaks your heart to know they have died.  To introduce a character only to kill them without much effort to infuse depth makes a mockery of that.  I really dislike the tendency towards presenting characters as sacrificial lambs in a story. Just enough to introduce a character and then they get killed off.  I felt this was a shortcoming of this novel.

The action is well done.  The pace was intense and appropriate.  I got the real sense that I was going on ops with these guys.  In this case, all in relation to the supernatural threats in this book.   If even possible, that brings a higher level of threat to the situation.  There’s only so much a gun can do against an undead, immortal threat, or one from a world of strangeness that doesn’t follow the rules that govern this physical one.

The supernatural storyline was intriguing and definitely horrific.  Ochse does build the sense of wrongness and weirdness that would disturb an average person.    I like a weird supernatural story like nobody’s business, but I had some moments where I was thinking, “That’s just wrong!” Imagine being a SEAL, trained to eliminate lethal threats all around the world, but previously naïve to the supernatural darkness in this world. You have to keep moving and do your job, and you don’t have time for “WTFs”.    So yes, that part was very well done.  The particular threat they faced in this book felt novel and very intimidating, and the author ties it into things going on in the world arena.  While the climax was too abrupt for my tastes, it definitely had impact, and as I said, I enjoyed the action moments.

With this book, I had that feeling that everything was scratching the surface when I wanted things to get deeper. With an intriguing storyline like this, I get excited to see what journey the author will take me on.  Overall, this was a book that kept me reading.  It was a pretty good book.   A nice mélange of spec ops action and supernatural weirdness.  I think the author could have given me more as far as characterization, which is the biggest shortcoming of this novel.  However, I would keep reading this if it becomes a series.

Overall rating: 3.25/5.0 stars.



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Occultation and Other Stories by Laird Barron

Occultation and Other Stories by Laird Barron

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Laird Barron clearly knows how to unsettle his readers. If there was a universal theme of the various stories in this book, it would be that every single story was unsettling, albeit in different ways.



Mr. Barron evokes memories of reading Caitlín R. Kiernan, HP Lovecraft, Arthur Machen, and even Algernon Blackwood in his tales in this volume. He finds the fearsome in such diverse subjects as the entities from beyond, the power of guilt, the overwhelming and uncomprehensible enormity of the natural world, and lets not forget, the darkness of the human heart. He even has shades of black magic and the diabolical in his stories. I would hesitate to compare him to the comparatively gentle horror stylings of M.R. James, other than the subtle nod to MR James in the antiquarian/bookish leanings of some of his characters. He's a bit more overt in his horror methodology than Mr. James. For all that, he never steps over the line into 'gruesome' and 'debauched.' Indeed, there are moments when sex and violence intertwine closely until they are hard to separate. Fortunately, this is done adeptly and with a subtlety that one such as I (who is admittedly quite squeamish of the combination of the two) didn't feel that she'd stepped into a no-woman's land where she felt she could no longer keep her feet traversing on the path into the dark world of horror that he creates in his stories.



This is a volume best not attempted at night. Even in the cloudless, startlingly bright, azure-skied and sun-washed landscape in which I read, I still felt those stirrings of unease that a good horror work should birth in its reader. This book is equally successful as weird fiction. I had that feeling that I didn't quite get what was going on--that there were questions unanswered, and the 'fearful unknown' was hinted at, and maybe I didn't want to go through that door that Barron leaves barely cracked.



Occultation and Other Stories exists in that gray area between modern-styled horror and the old-fashioned gothic horror that I prefer. And this was successful. I was not alienated in that I found the subject matter too extreme, too shocking, too overtly unpalatable for my tastes. Instead, this caused that shuddery feeling that I can appreciate, although some of the stories made me feel like I needed a sponge bath to remove the miasma of the dark, unfriendly organic, and somewhat visceral arena I had ventured into. But that is horror, my friends. Admittedly, I prefer my horror with an emphasis on the atmosphere, the shivers, and less on the repellent. But horror does have to take us out of our comfort zones, to make us feel unsafe, and Mr. Barron knows how to do that.



Recommended to readers who want to go to that dark, uncertain place for a few hours.



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Fungus of the Heart by Jeremy Shipp

Fungus of the Heart by Jeremy C. Shipp

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Fungus of the Heart is a short story collection that is rather aptly named. The stories do probe into the mysteries of the human heart, although their subjects are not necessarily human. However, they show emotions that humans would be intensely familiar with. The fungus part of the title represents the weird, strange, perhaps even unpalatable edge hinted at in many of these stories. I like that Mr. Shipp was able to capture that dichotomy between being a monster--so alien on close examination--and inside, so identifiable, nearly ubiquitous, like fungus is in our world.

Not exactly stream of consciousness storytelling, but quite free-flowing and non-linear story structure, often leaving me scratching my head mentally, trying to figure out exactly was going on in the stories. They begin and end at seemingly random moments, but there is a feeling of closure in most, at least for the moment. Not a full resolution, but enough conveyed to give the reader the feeling that whatever Mr. Shipp wanted told about that particular story ends up on the written page. Beauty might not be what Mr. Shipp was going for, but I did see beauty in these offerings. The open, honest emotions flowing through them, and the highly visual and sensory imagery appealed to me, although he does go to some dark places here. These offerings ponder the highs and lows of life: love, loss, war, rage, alienation, fear, identity, all those things, and more.

The imagination exhibited here was impressive. I would love to sit down with Jeremy Shipp and ask him what his source of inspiration is. How he is able to fearlessly put down on paper what must wander through his mind, and do it in such a way as to avoid pretentiousness. There was never that sort of feeling as I read. Merely honesty, a sharing of himself with the reader. That’s pretty brave and fearless, because people aren’t kind to each other when a person opens himself up to others for examination. I definitely admire him for doing this here.

Although I didn’t always ‘get’ the stories, I got them on an emotional level, and that’s what spoke to me as I read Fungus of the Heart. Mr. Shipp has a way with short stories that will lead me back to him, probably in the near future. I think fans of Caitlin R. Kiernan would like this collection.





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