Corpus Monstrom!

The Monstermen first appeared in the pages of Hellboy. All of the stories were written and drawn by Gary Gianni, a remarkable artist who has since gone on to be the successor to John Cullen Murphy on the venerable Prince Valiant comic strip, only the third artist on that venerable American creation.

He has moved on from Camelot in more recent years still, but as with this volume his early Dark Horse work is still with us and is fascinating in many respects.

"The Monstermen" is a small (somewhat undefined) group also called "Corpus Monstrum" and are dedicated to fending off supernatural attacks of various kinds.  You get the sense that there are others, but the two we actually meet are the helmeted Benedict who takes the lead and his associate Lawerence St. George, a movie magnate who seems to be an assistant. We also encounter a villain of sorts named Crulk who reappears in very peculiar ways.

In the stories contained in this volume the team battles vengeful ghosts, dark demons and shambling monsters across the globe. My favorite story is titled "The Skull and the Snowman" in which the team encounters a most familiar monster. The stories are exceedingly luxurious in their image, but frankly I found the storytelling a bit too spare in places to allow me to keep up. There is though a wonderful atmosphere to the stories as a whole that elevates them, even with some meager plots.

The volume from Dark Horse contains the whole canon was supplemented by several classic horror and fantasy stories by the likes of William Hope Hodgson, Clark Ashton Smith and Robert E. Howard. Gianni is an outstanding illustrator and he adds to classics like Howard's "Old Garfield's Heart" and Smith's "Mother of Toads".

I found this book for cheap, but it's really rather worth its price if you can find it. 

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The House On The Borderland!

I've long wanted to read William Hope Hodgson's The House on the Borderland, and at long last I have done it. The title of this story is fantastically evocative, one of the best in all of fantastic fiction. But the story beneath that title is not exactly what I was expecting.

The story is set up in a wonderful frame, when two fisherman discover a diary in a ruins of a weird house in Ireland. The diary tells of an old man called only "The Recluse" who along with his aged sister and his loyal dog Pepper find themselves quite literally living on the edge. The house they have chosen to live in is apparently perched on the cusp of at least two dimensions which allow the Recluse to see another quite peculiar world inhabited by some ferocious pig-headed humanoids among other things. Eventually the narrative shifts from the conflict between the man and the creatures and we go on an extended tour of the far-flung future where the not only is the man's world diminished but the very sun itself cools.

I had to admit I had to make myself keep on going through it. The early parts of the story when the Recluse and his sister are under attack it's a wonderfully vivid creepy tale, but the latter part when he goes on his excursion into the distant future, the yarn begins to lose momentum.

The later section was clearly inspired by H.G.Wells and his seminal The Time Machine, but I was also put in mind of Olaf Stapledon's sprawling epics.

You should read The House on the Borderland, but be ready to shift gears. I still love the title.

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The Breath Of God!

Sherlock Holmes: The Breath of God by Guy Adams is a delightful romp of a Sherlock Holmes pastiche. It has a great momentum as Holmes and Watson come up against the supernatural and find themselves among a gaggle of somewhat infamous associates. Dr. John Silence created by Algernon Blackwood finds his way to 221B Baker Street and enlists Holmes to help him battle the magical machinations of "The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn", or at least elements of it. Reluctantly Sherlock relents and allows himself to be brought into the case which eventually ends up taking the detectives to Boleskine, the lair of Alesteir Crowley. Along the way they meet up with Thomas Carnacki, the ghost detective created by William Hope Hodgson and Julian Karswell, the warlock invented by M.R. James for his story "Casting the Runes" which gave inspiration for the movie Night of the Demon.

The action is hectic and there is plenty which seems totally out of this mundane world, much which presumably would ultimately challenge the logic of Sherlock Holmes. Seeing Holmes and Watson in particular battle against the onslaught of the irrational is the key to this sprawling tale, from England to Scotland and back again. The personalities of the various magical types are vivid and entertaining.

I hesitate to say much for dread of spoiling this story, but I found Adams a worthy writer who doesn't so much ape the work of Doyle, but blend the elements of sundry writers into a satisfying whole. I have my reservations about what happens to one character alas, but nothing is ever ideal.

This is very much recommended.

This novel precedes Sherlock Holmes: The Army of Dr.Moreau which I looked at here. Having now read both, there is little direct connection between them.

Here are some tasty volumes to find out more about the sundry characters found in this tale. I just picked up the Hodgson volume myself and hope to read it soon.

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Night Land!

Here's a vivid website dedicated to the William Hope Hodgson novel The Night Land. I've never read this one, but prowling this site and seeing the Stephen Fabian illustrations above among others, has really got me jazzed to round up a copy and give it a try. The site does link to it online too. Weird, truly weird.



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