Selected Book
Baltimore,: Or, The Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire
- Hardcover
- Author: Mike Mignola, Christopher Golden
- Publisher: Spectra
- Release Date: August 2007
- ISBN-10: 0553804715
- ISBN-13: 9780553804713
- List Price: $25.00
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Summaries and Customer Reviews provided by Amazon
SummaryFrom celebrated comic artist Mike Mignola and award-winning novelist Christopher Golden comes a work of gothic storytelling like no other. Reminiscent of the illustrated tales of old, here is a lyrical, atmospheric novel of the paranormal—and a chilling allegory for the nature of war. |
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Gothic Horror
Rating:
Three men gather at a dingy inn on a grim night, awaiting the arrival of a third. To pass the time and to make sense of their presence, they take turns telling their tales and their relationship to the mysterious Lord Baltimore.
Taking Hans Christian Andersen's The Steadfast Tin Soldier as both a framing device and as a literary allusion, "Baltimore" is a gothic horror in the classic style. It is full of dank atmosphere and lugubrious woes, with supernatural beasts beating at the edge of reality and only a few brave stalwarts to stand against them. Purposely old-fashioned in style, it re-creates the old style of illustrated novelettes of the pulp era. I don't know who did most of the writing chores, but Mignola's style comes through clearly especially in the treatment of vampires and some of the imagery.
Much like Scott's Rob Roy, the title character does not even show up until near the end of the story. It is not actually Baltimore's tale, but more of a collection of linked short stories, each a tale of one of his companions; how they met Baltimore and how they came to understand the darker side of the world. This might disappoint some readers, but I was fully involved in the stories and loved the "gathering around the fire" feel of the book.
Strangely enough, if there is a weak point to "Baltimore", it is Mignola's illustrations. There are simply not enough of them, and they are all small and stark pictures that peak out like little windows in the text. The cover is the only fully colored illustration, which isn't bad in and of itself, but it would have been nice to seem some more fully rendered work.
A decent book but...
Rating:
A simple book with the simple writing style that you'd expect for a comic book writer, but even more simple then it should be.
There is nothing new or revolutionary in the story telling or the themes. The overall book was a lack luster thing. The small amount of imagery that is peppered through out it is more a gag then really adding anything to the over all feeling of the work.
Plus I felt a bit cheated by what it is described as. This book is almost entirely a standard word fiction. Yes there are images in the pages of the text. But they are little more then vague distracting icon level imagery without any of the depth of real art work I've seen from these artists before.
So I'd love to give it a higher rating, but just can't. The overall disappointment and cheapness of the end product is dragging it down from the 3 start it should deserve.
Was expecting so much more
Rating:
Beware of spoilers...it's the only way I can really review the book...
It was good, but I was really expecting so much more. Why was 3/4 of the book NOT about Baltimore? If I had written this, I would have expanded the scope and made it a true epic by cutting it into two parts - the first part was about the three guys in the bar telling their stories about Baltimore and why they thought they were summoned. And then, as a surprise, have Baltimore in the bar the entire time, listening and testing them to see if they had the guts to join him in hunting down the main vampire. And then part 2 would have been "the hunt"...
I love reading Christopher Golden, but I'm beginning to tire of the "same" ideas throughout all of his stories - Strangewood, The Veil, this...they all involve classic legends/myths/folktales...
Anyway, it was good. Just wasn't great.
BALTIMORE by Mike Mignola and Christopher Golden
Rating:
Baltimore, or, The Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire is an illustrated gothic horror novel by Christopher Golden and Hellboy creator Mike Mignola. This is the tale of Captain Baltimore, who encounters a vampire in World War I, and of his three friends, who meet and share their own experiences of gothic horror while they wait for him.
Thusly this volume is, more or less, a bunch of smaller tales that are connected. Many of them draw heavily on folklore, which is vintage Mignola. And most of them are entertaining, although some are fairly predictable. None, however, is more predictable as the novel's climax and ending, which also manages to be rather anticlimactic. On top of this, the characters are not particularly well developed.
While the story is lackluster at times, the authors have done an excellent job with the tone. The writing, while overwrought at times, captures the gothic horror atmosphere for nearly the entire novel.
Mignola does the illustrations here. They are stark, black and white pieces, often extreme close-ups of objects, that do much more to help set the mood of the novel in a general way than specifically depict any particular scene. So even if the art is somewhat underwhelming, it still works.
A work of gothic horror like this cannot help but address religion. In Baltimore, faith is weak, and Christianity seems particularly neutered. The authors have thrown religion by the wayside in favor of hack-and-slash encounters with the supernatural.
Baltimore, then, is a decent but unspectacular gothic horror novel. It should appeal to fans of that genre, as well as fans of the authors, but probably not beyond that.
Is it good yet? Is it good yet?
Rating:
Might as well start off with the background -- I love Mignola's art and writing, and when I saw this title and the plethora of raving reviews that came with it, I one-clicked it so fast it made my head spin. It came in the mail and I ripped the package open, plopped down on my bed...
...and began several hundred pages of monotonous disappointment.
While Mignola's woodcuts are beautiful (as well as few and far between), they don't excuse a meandering story of poorly-described fantasy and vapid, indistinct characters. Despite the book's format -- three acquaintances exchanging stories with chapter-by-chapter switches in narrator -- the novel is carried by a single, somewhat uninteresting voice. The characters are indistinguishable, and none of them are particularly good at telling stories. I felt also that the reading level was far beneath the book's content, and the authors leaned heavily on a restricted vocabulary to establish time and place.
Yet, as a Mignola apologist, I read the whole thing. On the toilet. With each turned page I lied to myself -- "It's about to get good -- I can feel it!" -- and eventually, mercifully, the story ended. I kid you not, the only way I was able to make it through the entire novel was by convincing myself that it was "about to get good", page by page, for the duration.
This is not to say that Baltimore isn't a good story. It is a good story. It's just really, really boring and anticlimactic. The fastest parts of the read are at best tolerable; the worst bits are like reading the slow parts of Dracula on barbiturates. I'd say skip it, skip it, skip it, and if we're all lucky Mignola will take his (as I said, good) story and draw it for us.
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