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HELLBOY: THE BONES OF GIANTS
by Christopher Golden
Pocket Star, February 2004
304 pages
$6.99
ISBN: 0743462831


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

I had to fight with my 11 and a half-year-old grandson to keep this book and read it first. It's the second Hellboy novel (the first, THE LOST ARMY has been reviewed on this site) and is based on Norse mythology.

North of the Arctic circle, fisherman Jan-Olaf sees lightning coming out of a clear sky and striking the earth. He goes to investigate and finds a strange corpse.

Meanwhile, at an amusement park in Virginia, Hellboy is called in to exorcise a monster. He finds a tall, thin, red-skinned, long-haired naked creature with trees growing out of and through rides (and through the monster's ribcage as well). The monster is Caypor, a Brazilian forest demon who frightens children away from the rain forest. He had been called to the amusement park by a group of Brazilian mothers who thought their children were losing their culture. Hellboy vanquishes the demon and gets back into his limo, where he is told he is going to Sweden the next day.

Abe and Hellboy go to the site with Jan-Olaf and find a partially mummified giant, as big as Hellboy, wearing a bronze serpent pendant and holding a war hammer which also acts as a lightning rod. Lightning fuses the hammer, which is Mjollnir, the Hammer of Thor, to Hellboy's stone hand. He then gets a vision of the last days of Asgard. And it is worse than anything he could have imagined. Abe and Hellboy learn they must find Thrym, evil King of the Frost Giants, who is trying to destroy Midgard (Earth), and with the help of a folklorist and some other creatures from Norse mythology eventually they do.

This is a skillfully-written novel based on a comic book character. The author assumes that we know Hellboy's back story, and doesn't repeat it. The book is fast-moving and fun to read and could lead middle school children to investigate Norse mythology which is just as fascinating as the more familiar Classical mythology. It might also help identify some of the demons bedeviling the sisters in CHARMED. The book goes off in the mail to my grandson tomorrow.

Reviewed by Barbara Franchi, April 2004

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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