Literateur: "Hellboy: Oddest Jobs"

Alright, this week's episode is all about the collection of words on pages titled Hellboy: Oddest Jobs.

True story: I looked at the contributors and saw "China Mieville" and was like "Whoa, the classic literary author wrote a story in this?!?" Well, turns out I was thinking of Chinua Achebe, author of Things Fall Apart. Published in 1958. So, yeah. The author of that renowned 1958 literary classic is not represented in this book.

Some other cool people are, though! Joe R. Lansdale, Garth Nix, Brian Keene, John Skipp, and Tad Williams among them!

(Real quick, if you're not familiar with the character: Hellboy is a boy and he's from hell. Okay, you're all caught up now.)

Hellboy's been appearing in comics for over two decades- I've read every issue- with two remarkably solid movies adapted from the comic, and has had many books written of his exploits. This is the third in this series. Odd Jobs was first, then Odder Jobs, and now Oddest Jobs. I skipped Odder Jobs, but I enjoyed Odd Jobs and have to say the stories in this collection aren't markedly odder than the stories in that book. False advertising, I say!

There are some gems in here:

-Eco-activist students use occult rituals to call up a gigantic, Cthulhu-esque monstrosity to devour mankind as penance for our environmental unfriendliness.

-What really happened to Robert Johnson and every musician that sold their soul to the Devil.

-A comatose 30's pulp fiction fan manifests his rage as a ghost train with black dragons swooping in to murder entire cities and store their remains in the train.

-The truth behind the Roanoke Croatoan disappearance.

-Salamander men kidnap an entire town as ransom to demand the return of their stolen egg.

-Mucho phantasmagorical hallucinogenic mojo goodness.

-Hellboy eats pancakes.

And some nice quotes:

"We're talking class-A uggos here, tentacles and dripping teeth and putrescent flesh all dark and oily with larval eruptions that drip phosphorescent goo. And don't get me started on all the begatting that's going on at all hours."

"They looked like target dummies, or puppets on long, loose strings being lowered to a stage, jumping and dancing as they were struck by bullets, bits of uniform and bone and faint fragments of decayed flesh spraying out above them."

"I feel like my head's been drilled open and filled with cotton candy."

Half the stories are fun, the other half suck. I'm trying to behave better with my book criticism now that I'm a published author, so I'm not gonna rant about the sucky parts. If you like Hellboy enough to read this book, you'll recognize them. Overall, it's about what you'd expect from franchise fiction.

-Phony McFakename

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