|
|
| Sunday, January 27, 2008 07:09 PM |
| Book Report - Baltimore, or, The Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire |
 by Fëanor |
I received this book from my parents for Christmas, but since it was something I specifically requested by putting it on my Amazon wish list, I hope they won't be offended if I say I was rather disappointed by it. It's a novel by Mike Mignola and his frequent collaborator on prose projects of this sort, Christopher Golden (Golden wrote some Hellboy novels, and edited and contributed a story to a Hellboy short story collection, besides also writing a whole slew of Buffy the Vampire Slayer novels). Mignola also provides numerous black and white illustrations throughout the text.
The story is a horror/fantasy epic set during WWI. At first I thought it was meant to be an alternate history novel, as in this world WWI just sort of peters out when a terrible plague sweeps across the world, but while I was reading the book I happened to catch part of a special on the History Channel late one night that talked about an influenza pandemic that swept the world at the end of WWI, so perhaps Mignola and Golden are just trying to offer an alternate, fantastic explanation for a real-world event. Regardless, Baltimore's universe is one in which monsters and magic lurk secretly in all the corners of the world, and the real cause of the plague, unknown to almost everyone, is vampires.
The novel takes the form of a series of separate stories told from varying perspectives that all combine to form a complete tale. It starts during the war, from the perspective of Lord Henry Baltimore, a British nobleman. Baltimore nearly dies on the battlefield, only to awaken and find himself in conflict with something far more horrible. They are monstrous scavengers of the battlefield's dead; in a word, vampires. Next we jump forward in time some years and begin following the perspective of a Greek sailor arriving in a nameless city that has been turned into a mournful tomb by the plague. He is an old friend of Baltimore's and he's been asked by Baltimore to come to an inn in the city. There he meets two other friends of Baltimore's, and the meat of the book commences, during which each of the men tells two stories - one which gives us another piece of Baltimore's tale, and a second mostly unrelated story about a weird horror from their own past that explains why they had no problem believing Baltimore's stories of vampires and monsters. After they're all done telling their tales, a journal and letter are delivered to the inn that together fill in even more of Baltimore's story. And finally, after those have been read, the three men find themselves witnesses to, and soldiers in, the final battle between Baltimore and his enemy, the head vampire, whom he refers to as the Red King.
Sounds like a pretty good story, huh? And indeed it is. Or at least, Golden and Mignola do a reasonably good job at making you want to turn the pages, to find out what happens next. The problem is, the actual writing is horrible. I mean, really, really horrible. I feel similarly about most of Stephen King's books - I always say he's a good storyteller, but a bad writer - but this is even worse. I know that Mignola can write well, but he certainly doesn't here. The prose is painfully melodramatic, overdone, repetitive, clumsy, and obvious throughout, constantly committing the cardinal writing sin of telling and not showing. The book could probably be at least 100 pages shorter and be much better for it. The main characters, besides the differences in hair color, and number and nature of limbs missing, are all pretty much interchangeable; none of them has a unique voice. Baltimore stands out a bit, especially in his later incarnation, pale and determined, festooned with weapons, and dragging an articulated wooden leg pounded full of nails. But he also ends up being distressingly similar to Mignola's most famous character, Hellboy; just like that character, he's a nigh invulnerable warrior against evil whose coming was predicted by prophesy, and who even has a non-organic limb which he uses to defeat his enemies.
The final battle is anti-climactic (though apparently deliberately so), and the very ending of the story is quite odd, and even a bit out of place and unbelievable, despite all of the strange and fantastic things that have already happened. It doesn't help that this ending is yet another in a long line of references to Hans Christian Andersen's rather lame and mawkish short story "The Steadfast Tin Soldier" (which you can read in its entirety online). Besides being referenced in the title of the novel, the story is also quoted before each section of the novel in epigrams, and is referred to by the characters themselves throughout the book. But it's really just not a very good story, and its continual reappearance is far more puzzling and annoying than it is meaningful and resonant.
It's a shame, because there are a lot of good ideas in the book, and one gets the sense that if it had been written by someone else, it could have been quite good. Even with the terrible prose, some of the sequences do manage to be quite effective and eerie, especially the mostly unnecessary ancillary stories that Baltimore's three friends tell, one about a bear demon, another about a haunted city of puppets, and a third about a monster in a lake. The latter is probably the best and most effective.
But the ideas and potential of the book are just not strong enough to make up for the clumsy execution. And so I have to sadly recommend against reading it. And offer my sincere hope that Mignola sticks to the graphic and comic book mediums from here on out. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Jim Genzano's books on Goodreads
