I’m never quite sure about ‘famous name’ authors these days. Whether the authors are genre or not, I’ve heard too many stories of books being ghost-written, or the publisher using the name to promote books and little else. Going further back, I have a few books from the 1980s and 90s ‘written in collaboration’ with another author – Arthur C Clarke, for example – where, despite protestations to the contrary, I do feel that the lesser known author has done the bulk of the work.
I’m sure there are exceptions – authors who have spent years toiling over a manuscript but have only now managed to get their work published, people who are now able to use their celebrity status to finally get their cherished prose published. But they do seem to be a minority.
Which brings me to this, the latest collaboration between famous film director Guillermo del Toro and his novelist, screenwriter and producer collaborator Chuck Hogan. Now I happily admit that I was pleasantly surprised by their trilogy of books written about a plague that turned people into zombies. I reviewed the first, The Strain, HERE, and the second, The Fall, HERE. They were undoubtedly successful and were turned into the not-quite-as-good-as-the-novel (in my opinion) television series The Strain.
But this is a new story.
The Hollow Ones is focused initially around Odessa Hardwicke, an FBI agent who witnesses something horrible whilst involved in a homicide where Cary Peters seems to go berserk and murders his wife and two of his three children. At the scene, whilst trying to save the killer’s remaining daughter, Odessa shoots the killer, only to find that Walt Leppo, her long serving work partner, then tries to kill her and the child. The result is that Odessa, in self-defence, has to shoot her partner dead.
As you might expect, such events are not taken lightly by the FBI authorities and Odessa finds herself on probation and side-lined to menial tasks in New Jersey. There she finds in a murky back-office room property belonging to Earl Solomon, one of the first people of colour in the FBI, who seems to have had a similar experience to hers, but back in the Deep South of the USA in 1962. It leads to her contacting the enigmatic Hugo Blackwood, a man who allegedly has been alive for centuries and is brought in to help with situations that are not ‘normal’. As the plot continues, we discover that there are connections between what happened to Odessa and Earl in the Sixties and we further discover that Hugo has been involved before. Is he insane or is he possibly a guardian against things that most of us have no knowledge of?
That summary reads like something from the X-Files, admittedly, but it can’t be denied that it is well done. The co-writers manage to create characters that are identifiable and likeable, in a contemporary setting, but also manage to convey the racial challenges of parts of the USA in the 1960s. Whilst I could knock a point off for Blackwood coming across as a stereotypically mannered Brit, he does seem to fit the bill as an mysterious character who knows more than he is letting us know.
In the fine tradition of Seabury Quinn’s Jules de Grandin or perhaps William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki the Ghost Finder, not to mention the character’s namesake, Algernon Blackwood, Hugo is astute, knowledgeable and appropriately odd, although the reasons for it are partly explained. Blackwood has a past and one of the plot threads shows us how events in his past have led to him being here and affect him even now. This fills in some of the details and makes Blackwood more than he first appears to be.
It’s also clear that the co-writers have done their research, managing to create enough detail to make what happens seem realistic without going into the information dump quagmire that lesser writers tend to blunder into.
When the horror happens, as you expect it might, it is suitably creepy. The Hollow Ones, as you might expect from del Toro, are Lovecraftian in their sense of timeless epic dread that they generate. Although their presence is fairly fleeting, it is memorable and suggests that there is more to come.
I must admit that I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from this novel. Whilst it does feel a little like we’ve covered similar territory before, it does, as expected from such experienced writers, do a great job of telling a story that is readable and entertaining. It takes traditional tropes and turns them into the author’s own version of the occult detective novel for a modern audience. The Hollow Ones is a great first-novel in a series that deserves to continue. And yes, it would make a great television series.
The Hollow Ones by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan
The Blackwood Papers Volume 1
Published by Del Rey
ISBN: 978 1 5291 0094 5
311 pages
Review by Mark Yon
