THE HOLLOW ONES

After The Strain

RELEASED 4 AUGUST 400 pages | Hardback/ebook

Authors Guillermo del Toro,

Chuck Hogan Publisher Del Rey

It’s been nine years since Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan’s last literary collaboration on The Night Eternal, the final book of The Strain. Now they’re back with the first in a new series of horror/crime procedural romps, featuring a very entertaining fresh kind of monster – the Hollow Ones of the title.

The book opens in dark fairy tale style, with a short chapter about a mysterious letterbox on Wall Street that will surely have readers checking out the location for real (it could become New York’s very own Platform Nine-and-three-quarters). This, it turns out, is the best way to summon the help of John Blackwood, a remarkably long-lived former barrister from Elizabethan England, who’s now a supernatural beastie-hunting cross between John Constantine and Algernon Blackwood’s psychic sleuth John Silence.

FBI agent Odessa Hardwicke needs his help. She’s been reassigned to desk duty, pending an investigation into her shooting her partner dead while on duty. Nobody believes her when she says she had no choice because he suddenly went loco and held a knife to a little girl.

When Hardwicke learns of other cases of otherwise levelheaded people suddenly going kill-crazy, she meets up with an ageing FBI agent who tells her to post Blackwood a letter. Soon, the latest twist on Mulder and Scully are on the trail of a body-hopping serial killer who just loves personally experiencing the thrill of a violent death.

It’s a rum old tale, told with a lightness of touch, fun characters and plenty of flashbacks to Elizabethan England and ’60s Mississippi, all of which would make for a great TV pilot. It’s pacy, slick and peppered with droll humour, so in tone it’s more Supernatural than The X-Files.

On the downside, it all feels very slight, maybe even rushed, with too many plot elements left irritatingly vague, even given the fact that this is the first in the series. Having said that, we’ll certainly be coming back for more. Dave Golder

Del Toro and Hogan did a lot of their plotting for the Strain books over really long (often three hours) breakfasts.