I just completed (indeed, this very morning before leaving the house) Mike Mignola and Christopher Golden’s latest effort, Baltimore, or the Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire. I am a long-time fan of both of these creators, particularly Mignola, whose fantastic and oft-times hilarious (while simultaneously creepy) Hellboy has entertained me for many years. Golden has written quite a bit as well, though I am only familiar with him as the author of a couple of Hellboy novels, and the editor of a couple of short-story collections. It is my understanding that he is big in the Buffy-authoring community, but I never quite “got” the whole Buffynominon.
None of that has anything to do with this book, though. This is an illustrated volume, enhanced with art of Mignola’s spectacular and unsettling artwork. When rendered in black and white, his drawings achieve something of a wood-cut quality, which makes them even more impressive. They are throughout the book, both as text-enhancing decorations and the occassional full-page image, and they add signifigantly to the story’s effect.
I say story, but in fact Baltimore is essentially a frame story, in which three strangers, related only by their acquaintance with Lord Baltimore, tell tales of supernatural horror. The frame is the story of Lord Baltimore himself, and his experiences during a slightly altered (from our own experience) Great War, and the plague that follows. Each story is in and of itself entertaining, and also serves to create an aura of mounting dread a’la Lovecraft, that all that we know and think we know about the world may very well be wrong. There are (obviously) vampires in the book, but the tales of the three companions seemed to me more unsettling, dealing as they did with less explicable horrors. This is not to say that the story of Lord Baltimore, that ties the book together and gives it its structure, is not both entertaining and creepy. Even Baltimore’s story is a significant divergence in many ways from the “traditional” vampire tale, which is a welcome thing.
Goden and Mignola both think in a highly visual way, and it is evident here: there are several moments, several visual vignettes of text, that will stay with me long after the remainder of the book has rotted away to a gray paste at the back of my brain. Really, if you are looking for a tale of supernatural suspense that leans more towards the unsettling than the gory (though don’t be mistaken: there is the occassional flash of crimson), you probably couldn’t do a lot better from modern authors than Baltimore, or the Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire. (for those of you interested in such things, “The Steadfast Tin Soldier” is a rather depressing little tale by Hans Christian Andersen, that weaves its way throughout the book in interesting parallel paths)
