Customer Reviews

Hellboy: The Ice Wolves

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

The Ice Wolves is a lame attempt at a haunted house mystery blended with Chadbourn's usual mystical end of the world mumbo jumbo. The addition of Hellboy might have made this second hand garbage palatable had the author managed to tap into any of the attributes that make the Big Red One great but he doesn't. As well as disrespecting the chronology of the graphic novels Chadbourn's characterization of Hellboy as sensitive, intelligent and somewhat talkitive are so against type that the reader is forced to the conclusion that this is not Hellboy at all but some cheap English knock-off.

The human characters in this book are Brad and Lisa. Brad (like seriously, Brad, in a haunted house, has this guy not seen Rocky Horror) and Lisa are both photojournalists fresh from Iraq (or central casting). When we first meet Brad he is refusing to leave his appartment on the ground that he saw some bad stuff over there. The thing is Brad's dad comes from working class Boston Irish stock and he doesn't approve of Brads cissified career as a war journalist and wishes his son had a more manly job like an engineer (seriously). This upsets Brad but it will upset the reader even more when they realise Brad's working class Boston Irish father is actually a multimillionaire recluse living in a haunted mansion. Lisa is a girl; she's tough, hot, asexual and she screams a lot. Try and imagine a barbie doll without the personality.

What allows this book to sink below the usual level attained by superhero tie-in novels is the poor quality of the writing. Chadbourn is overfound of the double adjective and nothing is ever "said" in the book if could be otherwise "noted", "whispered" or "added unconvincingly" etc.

If you want a good action adventure I reccommend Matthew Rielly's Ice Station Or if you must buy a Hellboy tie-in get Lobster Johnson: The Satan Factory (Lonster Johnson)

This is the latest of the Hellboy novels, and it does not disappoint. Hellboy is his usual gruff self, but is shown to display concern for the side characters on many occasions.

Much like the Golden Army movie, creatures of all sorts pop out of nowhere, making this an engaging and interesting read. The idea of being stuck in a house may seem like a plot that will go nowhere fast (at least in novel format), but the time travel spices things up a bit. Through this we learn not only the background of what's going on, but the main antagonists' origins and goals as well. The whole book is a struggle for survival, and it seems impossible for even Hellboy to survive.

The book's only weak point is the human characters; I found them just "eh" and seemed rather contrived to me. Plus when they try to give them a past, none of them are fully developed, and there is one plot point that is never resolved. Thankfully, it's really minor in the grand scheme of things, and you can get along with it.

I highly recommend this to Hellboy fans; it's creepy, action-packed, and has a crazy imagination going for it. So, pick it up!

The character were boring. He gives absolutely no dimensions to the characters, and they're constantly fumbling over themselves emotionally WHILE THE WORLD IS FALLING APART AROUND THEM. For God's sake, man, do you really think people would sit around and pour out their bottled up emotions while werewolves are trying to tear your house down.
This is the worst of 5 Hellboy books I've read by far.

Hellboy has waged war against diverse antagonists, including Nazis and the witch Baba Yaga, over the years. In Mark Chadbourn's turn at the intellectual property created by Mike Mignola in 1993, Hellboy is pitted against an army of werewolves on the snow-covered streets and hills of Boston.

Because of Guillermo del Toro, Hellboy is almost a household meme; everybody thinks they know Hellboy, although they actually usually know only del Toro's version, as embodied by Ron Perlman.

Chadbourn's Hellboy seems different to me and the novel's setting is pure Chadbourn: haunted houses, ancient races, archetypal creatures, running amok in the major cities of the world. In The Ice Wolves, the eponymous wolves are more the incarnation of the dark, primal instincts of man, released into the modern world through the operation of two occult devices created by a shaman to save his tribe from ravaging wolves in a pre-historical world of Eastern Europe. Through magic, the wolves are absorbed by man and their murderous instincts internalized to lie dormant until their release during the Time of the Black Sun.

The novel begins with Kate Corrigan at the folklore department of New York University, awaiting Hellboy. Through her research, she has determined that certain periods of history have witnessed epidemics of lycanthropy and that these occurrences involve a prophecy of the coming of the Time of the Black Sun. She and a colleague have discerned a pattern of movement and mayhem that indicates that there is a modern epidemic and that the wolves are converging upon the United States.

Hellboy's arrival coincides with the appearance of the wolves in the United States and the death of Kate's colleague, Daniel. Daniel's last act is to materialize to Kate and Hellboy and warn them that the wolves have activated the Heart of Winter and are headed to Boston to retrieve the second relic, the Kiss of Winter, in order to initiate the Time of the Black Sun. Daniel informs them that the Kiss of Winter is hidden in the Grant Mansion in Boston, a house rumored to be the most haunted house in New England.

With the introduction of the Grant House, Chadbourn leads us into H. P. Lovecraft territory. He also delves into several sub-plots: the story of Brad Lynch and his estranged father, now owner of the Grant Mansion; the story of the Grants and the origin story of the Kiss of Winter; the birth of the lycans and their involvement with and search for the two relics; a haunted house story; time shifting and time travel; and a pastiche of Gothic elements that align the novel with the works of Poe, H.P Lovecraft, and Henry James.

Chadbourn handles each narrative level competently; however, sadly, I did not find the parental tales particularly interesting, although they are integral to the plot and must be developed in order to resolve the conflict. Nevertheless, Chadbourn shines when dealing with mythic and archetypal elements and action.

Ultimately, the two stars of the novel are Hellboy and the haunted house and these two characters are worth the journey through the work. Chadbourn writes a smooth crystalline prose and he knows how to tell a story. The Gothic aspects of the novel are true to the genre and the pastiche of Lovecraftian elements is convincing.

I was particularly intrigued by Chadbourn's recreations of the past and the origin of the wolves and the two relics: the Kiss of Winter and the Heart of Winter.

The novel is a fast read, loyal to the genre and its hero--Hellboy.

This was my first Hellboy novel. I've never read any Hellboy comics or seen the film so didn't know what to expect.

Werewolves are gathering from all over the world in Boston. They already hold one powerful artifact, the Heart of Winter and are searching for another, the Kiss of Winter. With the two they can come into their own and humanity will be at their mercy.

It falls to Hellboy, and two photojournalists Brad and Lisa, to find the missing artifact which has been hidden in the most haunted house in America, owned by Brad's estranged father.

It really didn't matter that I knew nothing of Hellboy's history. He's the tough secret agent with the big gun and even bigger fist. Brad and Lisa have their own stories to tell and the relationship between Brad and his father is explored and explained.

There are plenty of scares and it's a proper supernatural ghost story with wisecracks throughout. I thought it was a total blast, a fast paced entertaining action read. It does have a deeper level if you want to scratch the surface; about wasted lives and inner horrors or just enjoy the fun that is Hellboy. You really don't need to be in to comics to like this, just ghosts, werewolves and action heroes.

I'm a big fan of the Hellboy comics and its spin-off B.P.R.D. but I could barely get through this supposedly Hellboy related novel. The most glaring error being that the character of Hellboy is so marginalized that he might as well not even be there, revealing what I suspect to be the author's complete unfamiliarity with the character. The focus is almost entirely on the three mundane human characters of Brad, Lisa, and Brad's father, William. The story might have been saved if the author had bothered to flesh out these characters a bit more beyond repeating the same three or so characteristics over and over again. As it was I just didn't care about them and felt incredibly annoyed at having to read about these fools stumbling around trying to avoid getting killed. The repetitiveness gets so bad near the end that I caught myself thinking "Well it's been about five pages, time to mention that Brad was horribly scarred by his experience in Iraq again!" The non-human characters aren't treated much better by the author. At no time during the novel did I get a clear picture of what the wolves looked like. At times they are described as having hands, at other times their "talons" are repeatedly mentioned. They lope across the snow suggesting a four-legged creature, but they are apparently able to grab things as a human can. At certain points they speak clearly, at other points they have trouble speaking out of "bestial mouths." Are these werewolves in wolf-form, human-form, some kind of hybrid human-wolf form, are they changing back and forth? To top it off the author has a habit of using some really strange vocabulary. Besides the above mentioned "talons" to describe whatever kind of nails the wolves have, mouths and doors are repeatedly "torn wide" meaning opened wide or gaping, and instead of asking questions characters "query." Why not use the same words that pretty much everybody else uses to describe these things? This story might have worked as a short story or a novella but in novel form it's almost unreadable due to the poor writing, unlikeable characters, and repetitiveness. Add a silly ending ripped straight from Back to the Future (no kidding) where the reader isn't even allowed to know the answer to one of the book's big mysteries (even though Brad is) and this book is heading straight for the used book store. The concept of the house and the origin of the wolves is mildly interesting but not enough to save this wreck. As my title suggests this reads very much like a first draft that was edited for spelling but absolutely nothing else. There are some good Hellboy novels out there such as "All Seeing-Eye" and "Bones of Giants." I'd recommend checking those out and giving this one a pass.

The bottom line of my review is this; the book suffers from trying too hard to incorporate too much. It could have easily been a good book about Hellboy if Brad and Lisa were not focused on so heavily. It could have been a good horror novel with issues of estranged families if Hellboy was not in it. I cannot get over the overwhelming impression that this book was meant to be two different stories.

The little things also added up for me as I was reading it. Brad has issues from his time in Iraq, and this fact is repeatedly beat into the reader's mind. So much so that he quickly goes from being seen as a tragic figure to a whiny one. Lisa is supposedly a lean, mean, kicking machine. This is something that has to be repeatedly told to the reader by the other characters though, because at no time does she show it in the book. Hellboy's gun being used by Brad. All little things that add up in the end.

The story of a man (Brad) making peace with his father. Cliché.

The haunted house where most of the story takes place is interesting.

Hellboy punches a few things & shoots a few other things. He's apparently armed with a smaller caliber weapon than he normally carries because Brad shoots a few rounds with it.