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| Saturday, October 13, 2007 04:53 PM |
| Book Report - Hellboy: Odd Jobs |
 by Fëanor |
This is that book of short stories I got for my birthday, which I mentioned a few posts back. It consists of a series of short stories about Hellboy (or at least, set in the Hellboy universe; one of the stories doesn't actually involve Hellboy at all), written by "some of today's top names in horror," most of whom I'd never heard of before. They vary quite a bit in tone, theme, quality, and even in what tense and person they're written in. Let's take them one by one, shall we?
"Medusa's Revenge" by Yvonne Navarro
The first story made me a bit wary about the book as a whole, because it's really not very good. The plot, however, is classic Hellboy material: Hellboy is called in to investigate a strange and terrible occurrence in a small town and discovers that an ancient myth is at the heart of the incident. In this case, the town is in Greece and the myth is, as you might have guessed from the title, Medusa. It could have been at least a decent story in the hands of a more talented writer, but Navarro's style is pretty clumsy and poor, and although he nearly captures Hellboy's voice, he ultimately fails. Hellboy would never make so many awful, pun-filled one-liners. When Medusa offers him the chance to rule the world at her side, he says, "Me rule something? Nah, I never was the management type. The only thing I want to do in that respect is-- Rule you out!" Agh! C'mon, that's terrible. The real Hellboy would have just said, "Screw you!" And I would have thanked him for it.
"Jigsaw" by Stephen R. Bisette
This second story reassured me a bit. It's a straight up horror story that jumps back and forth in perspective between Hellboy and a janitor at the Faculte de Medicine - which is apparently an old medical school in Paris. The janitor finds something mighty strange when cleaning out an old storage room - something which at first terrifies him, but then begins to take control of him. Meanwhile, Hellboy, in Paris for another case, is having extremely disturbing dreams that ultimately put him and his team on the trail of that same strange old item that the janitor found. The story is a real page-turner, gripping and involving, but also very creepy and even disgusting. It's good stuff!
"A Mother Cries at Midnight" by Philip Nutman
I was pretty wary again when I realized this one was written in first person. I had a feeling it would be difficult to pull off well; too easy to tell us too much about Hellboy's thoughts and ruin the story. And it turns out I was pretty much right. Nutman does tell too much, not only about what Hellboy is thinking and feeling, but about the message he's trying to convey. He makes too obvious his already rather familiar and uninspired message about how awful the atomic bomb is.
This one's set at Los Alamos in New Mexico and features a cameo by Oppenheimer. It involves Hellboy looking for a child and running into a traditional Native American ghost called the Weeping Woman. But he doesn't end up having to fight anybody, and things don't turn out very happily. Overall, it's actually a pretty good little story, and vaguely moving. But it could have been more powerful if it hadn't been quite so obvious.
"Delivered" by Greg Rucka
Another story in first person - oh no! But this one totally nails Hellboy's voice, and is probably the best story in the collection. It's a comedic short about Hellboy getting his gun stolen while hanging out in NYC, and the odd business meeting that the incident leads to. It's very funny and very clever.
"Folie á Deux" by Nancy Holder
This one's pretty easy to summarize: it's a Hellboy Vietnam War story. In 1967, Hellboy is called to Vietnam to investigate some peculiar incidents wherein lone survivors of massacres of US soldiers claim their fellow men weren't killed by Vietcong, but by a monster. The story isn't awful, but it also isn't particularly interesting, and its message - that the Vietnam War was bad - isn't particularly stunning or insightful. Definitely not one of my favorites.
"Demon Politics" by Craig Shaw Gardner
This is another one with a painfully clear message. Why do the Republicans and Democrats seem to be so contentious and divided? Because they're possessed by demons that thrive on chaos, of course! And how did Hellboy's old pal the Senator let them in? One compromise too many! Yeah, I see where you're going with this one. Still, it was definitely interesting to see what happened to Captain Freedom (the guy who gave Hellboy his gun), and I actually found the ending to be genuinely moving.
"A Grim Fairy Tale" by Nancy A. Collins
You can pretty much see where she's going with this one right from the title. She takes a bunch of the elements of old fairy tales and twists them around and updates them into a story about Hellboy and his pals trying to figure out what's making the children of New York disappear. I like the concept, and the story starts out pretty promising. It's even pretty well told, in that it keeps you turning the pages. But it's ultimately not all that interesting. Mignola has already done much, much better stories based on grim, updated versions of old fairy tales.
"Scared Crows" by Rick Hautala and Jim Connolly
This could very well be the worst story in the whole collection. It takes what might have worked as a very, very short story - about Hellboy meeting an old pal in a bar to drink to the memory of a comrade who died during an old case in which a serial killer managed to transfer his soul into the body of a scarecrow - and drags it out to an agonizing 16 pages. It's told mainly from the perspective of a young woman who stops in the bar for a drink on the way to her sister's baby shower, and finds herself both fascinated and horrified by Hellboy and the creepy story he tells her. The problem is, it's hard to sympathize with her perspective, and thus hard to get on the wavelength of the story's emotional arc. After all, at this point we've obviously all met Hellboy before; we know his deal. We know we don't have to be afraid that he'll do anything to her, and even if there is something disgusting in the cooler he has with him, we know it's not because he's a psycho. So... why do we care? Sure, the story he tells about the scarecrow killer is kind of interesting, but the shape of it becomes obvious quickly, and we still have to wait through the whole story, and through many irritating interruptions, before Hellboy and his friend finally get through all the details. And then the thing in the cooler turns out to have nothing to do with anything. And I'm not even going to mention the totally idiotic redneck characters, or the clumsy writing style. Gah.
"Where Their Fire Is Not Quenched" by Chet Williamson
This is another story that has an obvious point to make, this time about the difference between doing things in the name of God, and actually doing God's work. Hellboy is called in to investigate some rather odd cases of arson at local churches - churches which turn out to be part of a local cult. Because it wasn't obvious enough who the bad guy was, it turns out he's also a demon. And there's a wizard involved, too. Despite its giant metal hammer of a message, the story is actually relatively fun (I particularly liked the cameos from some of the classic evil texts in the wizard's library), and pretty fast-paced.
"I Had Bigfoot's Baby" by Max Allan Collins
Max Allan Collins is one of the few guys in this book whose name I recognized. He wrote Road to Perdition, as well as a couple of other comics and graphic novels that I've read. I can't say I'm a huge fan of his work, though; I find that he comes up with good concepts and then doesn't execute them very well, and this story is kind of in that same vein, though it turns out to be pretty fun anyway. The title is great, and the idea of Hellboy following up on a ridiculous story in a tabloid newspaper and discovering that it's mostly true (although there's also a drug smuggling plot buried in the middle of it) is definitely an amusing one. But it also ends up being a bit muddled and nonsensical. Essentially this is like reading a particularly filthy and non-child-friendly episode of Scooby Doo where the gang has been replaced by Hellboy, a photographer, and a reporter.
"The Nuckelavee" by Christopher Golden and Mike Mignola
The editor of the book and the dude who created the character that it's all about team up for a pretty good story here. Hellboy is involved, however, not so much as a character in the story, but as a witness to the story; he gets to see a great old Scottish curse/family legend play itself out. It's just a simple, chilling little ghost story.
"A Night at the Beach" by Matthew J. Costello
This one keeps building up and building up like it's going to go somewhere really dark and cool, and then ends without much exciting having happened. Still, there are some neat bits, and it is set on Coney Island, and features a creepy sideshow, a crawling hand, and evil fish people.
"Burn, Baby, Burn" by Poppy Z. Brite
I thought I'd heard of Poppy Z. Brite before, but I can't think where; my own poppy tells me she's a well-liked horror author. But this isn't really so much a horror story as it is a little coming-of-age drama about Hellboy's friend Liz. It's the only story in the collection that doesn't involve Hellboy at all, and other than the fact that the main character can start fires with her mind and can't be burned, it's actually not genre fiction at all, but instead "serious," straight fiction. It shows us Liz on the cusp of womanhood, still trying to find herself and deal with her power and her dark history, and still running away from everything. It's a nice little piece.
"Far Flew the Boast of Him" by Brian Hodge
If "Scared Crows" isn't the worst story in this collection, than this one probably is. Hellboy is called in to investigate a massacre that occurs when a bunch of guys get together to reenact an old Viking battle, only to discover that their reenactment has somehow inexplicably brought Grendel back to life. Unfortunately, Grendel turns out to be a whining emo goth monster who you will immediately wish had stayed dead. Luckily, Hellboy takes care of him relatively quickly. I kind of like the concept (after all, I'm a huge fan of the original Beowulf, and of the modern novel Grendel), and the story does have its moments (I kind of liked the bit where Hellboy talks to the dead guy, and the connection Hellboy ends up feeling between himself and Grendel), but Hodge's writing is mostly just awful.
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Okay, that got a lot longer than I'd intended. The point is, it's a pretty good book, with a lot of interesting experiments, some of which succeed, and some of which fail. |
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