It is not often that you can read the same character portrayed in more than one way. If you read all the Dirk Pitt books by Clive Cussler, they all pretty much read the same. Not to say they aren’t good reads, but a Dirk Pitt book is a Dirk Pitt book. In the realms of Science Fiction and Fantasy, however, sometimes you can find a character who is written by several authors, and those authors can be very distinct in their styles. Conan, for example, has been written by dozens of authors, and if you read enough of them, while Conan himself remains relatively the same throughout, his surroundings and the tales in which he is enmeshed change.
Hellboy falls in here also. Many of the Hellboy books I’ve read and reviewed here are akin to superhero novels. Hellboy and his band of misfits saving the world from one monstrosity or another. Emerald Hell on the other hand is a much more sedate book by comparison. More brooding. More searching.
Within the pages we find Hellboy on his own, and after hearing some tales about the six silent daughters of Bliss Nail and the little Georgia swamp town of Enigma, he decides to check them out and see if something sinister is afoot. Of course there is, but its not the potential world ending calamities of the other books. Instead its about a pregnant girl who needs protecting from a misguided undead minister who murdered the girl’s mother. More so than the other books, this one is all about mood and sorrow.
I don’t think I’d put this book at the top of my Hellboy pile, but I enjoyed it just the same.
