Where Hellboy Fights Ghosts. And Werewolves.

Hellboy: The Ice Wolves by Mark Chadbourn
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This one didn't really work for me. It's somewhat entertaining, enough to finish and give it a 3-star review, but I didn't like a lot of it.

I have read other books by this author and I usually like his work, but this story was slow and disjointed and full of holes--IMO. It is essentially a haunted house story, but the problem is that it lacks focus. For much of the book, Hellboy and the others wander around the house, poking at things, getting cryptic warnings and some scary shocks. But they don't really know how to make any progress on finding what they want. They're looking for a relic ("The Kiss of Winter"), but they don't know what it looks like or really what it does, and they don't know what to do with it if they find it.

Then they are randomly transported at times to strange scenes, to ancient times and distant places, where they get filled in on the backstory of the relic and the haunted house, and how that works or why it works we don't know. Meanwhile, the house is besieged by werewolves. (TBH--the werewolf story, the bit that kicked off the novel, was really promising. I wish the focus had stayed on them, somehow.) It feels like there was a werewolf story and a haunted house story that they mashed together so they'd have enough to make one novel. It's awkward, no matter how it came about.

Some scenes are fun, though, and some parts are pleasingly spooky, so I kept on. And the writing overall is good enough that I wanted to finish. But I got pretty bored in the middle and wouldn't read more of these if I thought this was the norm. (I don't recommend anyone start here, in other words.) I see other people gave it 4 or 5 stars pretty consistently, so it works for some people. I guess I'm not seeing what they're seeing.

YMMV.

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