Thursday, March 25, 2010

"This isn't just a series of books; it's a force to be reckoned with..."

Anton Cancre over at Horror News, had glowing praise for Scott Christian Carr's, Hiram Grange and the 12 Little Hitlers:

"What I am coming to adore about Hiram is his fragility, the simple realization that this is the last person anyone would want to depend on for their salvation. It makes him more human, more real to me. Within these pages, Scott shows us Hiram at his most vulnerable. An incredibly weak, insecure and utterly shattered person upon whom a practically unbearable weight is placed and he simply cannot face it all. So he dives face first into any drug he can get into himself, begging for the oblivion his mother chased and eventually found staring down the barrel of his Webley.

In anyone else's hands the pathetic fallacy in which Hiram mental state is regularly reflected in the music playing wherever he went could very well come across as a cheap, clumsy and ineffective trick, but he handles it with such grace and subtlety that it is nothing less than magic."

Anton also recognized the work of the artistic team that lent their talent to give the Hiram books their unique look and feel:

"The marvelous cover and interior artwork by Malcolm McClinton that has become, in my mind, inseparable from H.G., is once again present. This time out, the images are slightly skewed, twisted and stretched in a way that reflects Hiram's state of mind quite nicely. I should also mention the often unremarked upon woodblock illustrations of Mr. Danny Evarts, something ubiquitous with Shroud publications. Slight and unobtrusive, as they should be, but always placed in a way that adds to the writer's work without drawing attention to themselves."

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