By Mike Mignola & Christopher Golden (St. Martin’s Press)
ISBN: 978-0-312-64473-4
Win’s Christmas Gift Recommendation: merry hell and utterly engrossing… 8/10
As well as being involved with some of the very best superhero yarns of the late 20th century, Legendary fantasist and comics-creator Mike Mignola has carved himself a splendid and memorable niche in the industry’s history by revitalising the sub-genre of horror-heroes via his superb Hellboy, B.P.R.D. and Lobster Johnson tales, creating his own very special dark place where thrill-starved fans can wallow in all things dire and dreadful…
Clearly he has far more ideas than he can successfully manage in one lifetime as well as a deep and abiding love for the classical supernatural thriller medium, as evidenced by this superb pastiche of the writings of horror pioneers H.P. Lovecraft and August Derleth tinctured with lashings of pulp adventure flavourings in the manner of Clark Ashton Smith, Walter B. Gibson and Robert E. Howard…
You won’t remember it, but in 1925 a horrific earthquake shifted the bedrock of Manhattan and half of New York City sank 30-odd feet beneath the greasy, salty waves. The rich glitterati relocated to shiny Uptown towers with the most incredible seafront vistas whilst the less fortunate had to adapt to a life of crushing, inundating poverty and ramshackle survival, scavenging in the appalling, un-policed canals and underwater alleys of the sordidVenice that was “Downtownâ€.
The decades passed in this tidal backwater and the lowly ones who had no place else to go adapted, as always, to radical changes. One such was Felix Orlov, a stage conjuror who discovered over the years that he had a rare and genuine talent as a medium. Felix could speak to and for the dead but, now in his twilight years, could never leave the drowned theatre he loved. Thus he eked out a tenuous existence among the bereaved and bereft with only 14 year old Molly McHugh as his housekeeper and companion.
Years ago Orlov had saved her from the ubiquitous degenerate prowling scum dubbed Water Rats, and as his faculties diminished she had come to think of him as her father. She was certainly most useful whenever clients came seeking his unique services…
Increasingly over the last fifty years Felix had been plagued by impossible dreams of uncanny rites, shapeless monstrosities and a ghastly sacrifice, but this morning was the worst ever. All the same the old trouper brushed aside Molly’s concerns and carried on with the morning’s scheduled séance. It was the last he would ever conduct…
During contact with the Other Side something appalling and unknown gripped him, just as in the material world impossibly sturdy and terrifyingly vigorous gas-masked thugs burst into his home and kidnapped the possessed Orlov’s withered corporeal frame.
They wanted Molly too but her survival-honed instincts enabled her to escape and lead them a deadly dance through the submerged underworld of Downtown.
She had no plan except escape and was down to her last erg of energy when the mysterious hulking brute named Joe intervened, battling the pursuers and discovering that the hunters were anything but human…
Joe’s rescue of Molly was no accident: he had been dispatched by his boss to save both magician and assistant but had arrived too late. With only half his mission accomplished, the bluff, friendly giant was in no mood to deal with Molly’s very sensible suspicions. When she tried to bolt again, Joe chloroformed her…
The frantic girl awoke within a fantastic sanctum and was introduced to the world’s most famous consulting detective, a ghost-haunted genius who had worked with Scotland Yard since Victoria’s time, now keeping his feeble frame alive long after his human meat had failed by installing self-built organs powered by steam and run by clockwork.
…And magic; bleak, black magic…
The man named Simon Church had an incredible tale to tell: of a prolonged duel with a mad thaumaturgical scientist named Doctor Cocteau, an astounding threat from the outer depths of human imagination, elder gods and the harsh unpalatable truth about Molly’s missing employer and father figure…
What he didn’t tell her was the even more incredible truth about Joe, even as he sent them both off to recover the fabled mystic artefact Lector’s Pentajulum and quite possibly save all of humanity from a madman’s lethal hubris.
However Cocteau wasn’t the only driven savant with an audacious hunger for forbidden knowledge which might result in a malign, supernal invasion from things utterly beyond mortal comprehension…
Fast-paced, moody and completely captivating, this rollercoaster of tension and thrills by Mignola and long-term co-writer Christopher Golden blends the ghastly brooding chills of Cthulu with the derring-do of Indiana Jones in a boldly alternate time and place to maximum effect.
This excellent late night love-affair with a grotesque golden age rattles and roars along buoyed up with ebullient, heroic-culture distillations both refreshingly familiar yet engagingly novel, with ghosts and monsters rubbing misshaped shoulders in sunken lairs and seedy dives (sorry, couldn’t resist) as a tough-as-nails big softie and a hard-bitten slip of a girl unite to save a world not quite our own…
Described as a steam-punk adventure, the scintillating saga contained within this reassuringly square-cut, hardbound and satisfyingly rustic tome is adorned with 69 grittily monochrome full, half, third and quarter-page illustrations by the artist to comprise a joyous homage to the necromantic good old days.
Miss it at your peril, fright fans…
© 2012 Mike Mignola and Christopher Golden. All rights reserved.