From Zombos Closet

JM Cozzoli

A horror and movie fan with a blog. Scary.

Graphic Book Review
Hellboy: The Midnight Circus

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Hellboy-midnight-circusZombos Says: Very Good

There’s magic to be found at the circus. Mischief, too. Especially when creepy clowns bang noisy drums in the middle of the night down dark, lonely roads to attract the attention of little boys. Little hellboys, that is.

Mike Mignola (story) and Duncan Fegredo (art) provide the mischief, and colorist Dave Stewart adds the sinister atmosphere in this short graphic novel that takes place when Hellboy’s too young to smoke, but old enough to be tempted to burn.

He’s also too energetic to be cooped up in the dusty confines of the Paranormal Research and Defense Headquarters, circa 1948, so he sneaks out in the dead of night to grab a puff or two. But something else is looking to grab him instead.

Also sneaking about, “from the clock strikes midnight…to the fearful crack of dawn” is a creepy circus with strange animals and stranger attractions, which would give Cooger and Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show serious competition.

Enticing him into the wondrous rings of the big tent is a mysterious ringmaster with nefarious plans, and his daughter, who also has a few sinister plans of her own. Both father and daughter have a hellish time seeing eye to eye, but each one has their eyes dead set on the little red hellion with a promising future: for evil or good.

We know which way they’d like to see him go even if he doesn’t. In turn, they try to entice the little kid with the big red hand into a future potential that’s different than he or anyone else back at headquarters had thought about; except for one worrywart quoting ominous passages from books no one else is reading.

The artwork dutifully captures the mystery and the damnation while the story delivers all the circus devil-fleas and Hellboy could-bes you would expect from Mike Mignola, especially as experienced through young Hellboy’s desire to grow up faster than he really ought to.

This title will be available October 23, 2013.

Dying is My Business
But Living is Hardest
Book Review

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Dying-is-my-businessZombos Says: Good

Once you get past the funny sounding names of magical things and strange places, urban fantasy can be a lark. That’s what’s usually the main hurdle to surmount when writing an urban fantasy story: the whimsical and mystical nature of it can become too light-hearted, which is detrimental to suspense-building, or all those weird sounding names can take it too far out-there, making it hard to get that suspension of disbelief going while you’re figuring out their pronunciations.

Nicholas Kaufmann in Dying is My Business clears the hurdle. His main character, Trent, wakes up from death in a Queens Playground–possibly his ninth death, but he can’t be sure since he only remembers the past up to a year–and winds up being the muscle to a crime boss who strings him along, promising to tell him all about the whys and wherefores of those other years. Once Trent gets involved in the hunt for a mysterious old box his end of the business is complicated when the Black Knight, razor-clawed gargoyles that work for the Black Knight, and Bethany, a five foot whirlwind that may look like an Elf–he thinks–but kicks like a mule, shows up looking for the box, too. While he kind of saves her while she’s kind of saving him, cue the romance as their bruises heal and the mystery of Trent’s abilities grows. Is he a mage himself? Or something better? Or worse? Bethany has her charms and spell-castings, but Trent seems to have the golden touch of magic without needing objects to channel it through.

The book’s title and the hunt for the mysterious box may bring to mind Mickey Spillane’s Kiss Me Deadly, but Trent’s soft-boiled exterior doesn’t take the novel to that level of bleeding gums and bruises. It’s breezier, less grime-crime ridden, and with a touch of romance conducted in-between the gunfire and fighting more suitable for anyone who enjoys a novelous time of fantasy and magic. Kaufman brings likeable characters encountering fantastic events with a tone much like a Warehouse 13 or Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode: a little tongue in cheek, a lot of shadow and crimson. It’s not the reinvention of urban-fantasy, but a well executed storyline that uses the genre’s tried and true elements against the backdrop of New York City and the Cloisters.

Where Kaufman needs to conjure a little more magic is in his descriptions of scenery and people. He stops short of fleshing them out more vividly, leaving you with a good idea instead of a fuller picture. For instance, I’d beg for more on the city beneath New York City, hell, I’d even call it the land beneath New York City, and Gregor the Dragon ruling it. I’m sorry I didn’t get to spend more time in it, but maybe in the next novel in the series we’ll return and spend a few days.

And of course there are zombies. Not the messy people-eating kind, but the more traditional dead body controlled by Necromancer kind: also known as the revenant. And there are lots of them, topped off with walking-skeletons called Shadowborn, who can wink in and out, appearing anywhere in the blink of an eye, making them a bitch to kill. Lucky for Trent he has Bethany and her little group of evil-stompers, comprised of a werewolf, vampire, and magician, to fight along side of.

With the Black Knight and his gargoyle minions against them, and a Necromancer sending hordes of rotting corpses after them, they will need all the help they can muster. But only Trent has the knack for coming back alive after being killed. That comes in handy for him, but his friends aren’t so gifted.