Bad Men

Another really fantastic narrative, always a dangerous storyline! WOW NOW I NEED MORE like THIS!

John Connolly delivers an impressive thriller, which I found almost impossible to put down after jumping into its exquisitely elaborated plot. He switches back and forth between the past and the present with ease, demonstrating his skills. Dutch Island is situated at a one and a half hour ferry ride from Portland, and it has been the setting of mysterious and unsettling events throughout its history. This is the setting for the marvelous story presented by Connolly.In the late seventeenth century Indians consistently raided the various islands in the area outside of what is known today as Portland, pushing the white settlers away. But in 1691 thirty individuals arrived to Dutch Island, which at the time was also known as Sanctuary, and decided to give it a try. Bauer, one of the men that formed part of the group, was justly accused of attempting to rape another man's wife. When he asked his own wife for shelter against his pursuers she did not comply and he was captured. However, he was able to escape and he returned years later with renegade Indians as his "hired help" bringing mayhem to the village. After the horrible events that developed in the island, the ghosts of the dead were left behind to cohabitate with the living. Usually, they do not interact much with humans, but now something is growing, and some people in the island can feel it.Connolly creates interesting and well-developed characters, like the giant Joe Dupree, seven feet two inches and three hundred and sixty pounds, who is in charge of the police department in Dutch Island. He is courting Marianne, a woman who has some secrets in store, but he also has some secrets of his own. Moloch is sitting in jail awaiting his forced appearance before the Grand Jury, and knowing that when that happens he will be facing charges that deserve the capital punishment. When he sleeps, he has disturbing dreams, in which he leads a gang of renegade Indians into an island in search for his wife who had betrayed him. Finally, there are a couple of other characters that add flavor to the mix: Jack, a painter with little talent, but whose paintings evolve after he is done with them, and Richie, a twenty-five-year-old "kid" who has the ability to see unnatural events unfold.It is reinvigorating to find authors that besides creating exciting stories that keep you reading all night, possess the gift of writing. This is the case of John Connolly, who not only leads us towards the end of the story with a fast-paced plot full of suspense, but who also knows how to make us enjoy the ride to get there.

I suppose it is impossible to see similarities between John Connolly's "Bad Men" and the novels of Stephen King, not just because the main setting for this horror novel is an island in Maine, but more because the title characters really are bad men and they are joined in the festivities by some supernatural counterparts. But even with King's penchant for engaging in gross out gore, Connolly takes it to a level more akin to true crime books.The novel's heroine, Marianne Elliott, was married to a psycho-killer named Edward Moloch that she betrayed to the police. He is in prison back in Virginia and even though they have thrown away the key Marianne has taken a new name, changed her look, and found herself on a remote Maine island called Sanctuary. However, it seems that way back in 1693 the island was overrun by a gang of "bad men" who raped and pillaged before they slaughtered the entire community. There is a feeling in Sanctuary, articulated by "Melancholy" Joe Dupree, the 7-foot-2-inch gentle giant who is the island's only police officer, that the massacre tainted the land. This seems a reasonable interpretation of events since any one who ends up wandering around in the forest near where the bones of the settlers are buried tend to meet mysterious deaths. Now giant gray moths are appearing all over the island and the ghostly figure of a little girl has been seen. All the signs suggest that something wicked will be coming this way.Of course, that terms out to be Moloch. All these years in prison he has been spending his days obsessing about finding and butchering Marianne, but at night he is having dreams of the massacre on Sanctuary during colonial times. It also turns out that he has a fan club and in due course Moloch has his own gang of "bad men" that are moving north on a bloody killing spree taking heads and visiting other indecencies on their victims. The climax takes place on the requisite dark and stormy night on Sanctuary, where Marianne turns out to have some allies in welcoming her husband to her new home.Ultimately the comparison that comes to mind by the time you finish this blood-drenched book is not Stephen King or Thomas Harris but Laurell K. Hamilton. Like Hamilton, Connoly's book will probably never be filmed because to do it right would be to mandate at least an NC-17 rating. If you can stomach the blood and gore, then you will fine "Bad Men" a good late-night read. The pace is brisk and each of the characters is made memorable, although some of them in a way you might prefer not to remember. I have not read any of Connolly's other novels featuring the Portland-based private eye Charlie Parker, which makes sense to me because if they were anything like this one I surely would have heard about him and his work because when you have somebody who can carry off this sort of a bloodbath word gets around.

Until BAD MEN I had not read a John Connelly book since EVERY DEAD THING, his debut novel. I have no excuse; I liked EVERY DEAD THING and was apparently in good company, since it won the prestigious Shamus Award. But I somehow missed the others, all featuring driven and disturbed private investigator Charlie Parker: DARK HOLLOW, THE KILLING KIND and THE WHITE ROAD. I accordingly was sandbagged when I picked up BAD MEN. Somewhere along the way, Connelly went from a writer with an impressive debut to one of our best in the space of just a few novels.BAD MEN is not a Parker novel. No matter; if you're a fan of Parker you won't be disappointed at his absence, for BAD MEN reads like a collaboration between Dennis Lehane and Stephen King, with Garth Ennis throwing in an occasional farthing. Parker does make two brief appearances that very tangentially tie in to the haunting incidents of BAD MEN, but the protagonist of this brilliant work is Sanctuary, also known as Dutch Island, a dot on the map off the coast of Maine. Sanctuary has a unique history, one that Connelly introduces early on here. The original settlers of Sanctuary were betrayed and slaughtered by enemies led by one of their own. The island took its own revenge, and in the intervening 300 years, things have been quiet, with its inhabitants being a somewhat quirky and, for the most part, harmless assortment of characters.The island, however, is awakening. Joe Dupree is Dutch Island's policeman; nicknamed Melancholy Joe, he stands over seven feet tall and bears his status as a freak with a quiet grace that has earned him the respect of the island people. But Dupree knows the secrets of the island and can sense its awakening in response to the coming of evil. The evil is coming in the form of Ed Moloch, an escaped convict who has assembled a disparate and degenerate crew of personalities for the purpose of bringing down a long simmering and terrifying revenge upon the person responsible for his incarceration. Moloch does not know it, at least not initially, but he is on a collision course with Dutch Island, a place that has been calling to him in his dreams and that he knows intimately, though he has never been there. BAD MEN is written in the omnipresent third person, a literary device that permits Connelly to reveal the thoughts of each of his characters. As a result, the reader is made aware of the nightmarish workings of Moloch's mind, which are not only driven but also infused with pure evil. Willard, one of Moloch's crew, is even more terrifying than Moloch himself. A quiet, almost angelic looking youth, Willard possesses a cruelty and yearning for mayhem made all the more frightening by the casual manner in which he wields it. The element of Willard's persona that is the most terrifying, however, is his relatively ordinary appearance. He's the type of person you might encounter without giving a second glance, believing him, at worst, to be a little odd, perhaps a bit mentally slow, wit

Forget what you know about thrillers or for that matter horror novels. Mr. John Connolly has re-written the book and broken all the rules. The result is a novel of exquisite horror and 'down to the bone' suspense.Being a fan of the horror and thriller genre for more years than I care to say.....BAD MEN is the pinnacle of blending a story of revenge with a tale of redemtion and survival on a small island off the coast of Maine. Known many years ago as 'Sanctuary' this island is the home to ordinary people living out their daily existance unaware that a group of human demons are on their way to exact revenge and claim 'what is theirs' and no one will stand in their way.The lead BAD MEN named Moloch is a creation from Mr. Connolly who in the past has brought readers villians such as Mr. Pudd from THE KILLING KIND and the evil Caleb Kyle from DARK HOLLOW. Both Charlie Parker novels. BAD MEN is a departure for Mr. Connolly and a stand alone novel. But readers will note that Charlie Parker does make a cameo.I don't want to give too much away. So, sit back forget all you know about 'what scares you' and delve into a novel that blends the best of everything.....the undead, cannibalism, adultery, compassion, honor and revenge. As it has been said: "Sanctuary does not always mean safety"!

Three hundred years ago, white settlers found themselves forced by hostile Indians to flee the mainland and make their home on the inhospitable but unpopulated island they called Sanctuary. They forced one of their own to leave, a vengeful, violent man, who returned to massacre most of the colony. The violence left a mark on the land, if there wasn't something there already. The descendents of those left behind still live on Sanctuary. Today Sanctuary is a calm, peaceful place called Dutch Island, policed by a solitary local cop, a melancholy giant named Joe Dupree, who is over seven feet tall, and one police officer borrowed from the mainland (or Maineland), a probationary rookie, Sharon Macy. Macy doesn't know very much of the island's violent past, Dupree knows all its secrets and its entire haunted history.The story really centers on Marianne Elliot and her young son Danny, who have settled into life on the island. As Marianne becomes drawn to Dupree, secrets from her past start to come out. She'd been married to a monster of a man named Edward Moloch, who treated her cruelly, so before he had a chance to kill her, she dropped a dime on him, took his money and disappeared to Dutch Island.Needless to say, Moloch is going to want revenge and when his hand picked team of rapist, murderers, deviants and child abusers breaks him out of jail, he sees his chance. And about this time many of the islanders start seeing visions, paintings showing figures from the past, strange moths appearing in the evenings and people start to dream of ghosts. There is something bad brewing on the island and Melancholy Joe knows it.Working their way through Marianne's friends, relatives and contacts, they leave a chilling trail of depravity, death and mutilation. The emotionless assassin Shepherd is bad enough, but hot-tempered Tell has a hair-trigger and kills unnecessarily, while the awesomely gorgeous, young Willard does it slowly. Even Moloch, who coldly dominates this awful crew, is unnerved by him. When they reach Sanctuary, a freak snowstorm rages, power and communications fail, and the locals who stand between the hitmen and Marianne are easy prey. And one would think the gentle giant Joe Dupree and his female rookie would be easy to kill, but something else, as we know from Moloch's own dreams, is waiting.This book wasn't a bit like I thought it was going to be, not like the John Connolly I was used to. But I must say, I was captivated, enthralled, enraptured, scared, frightened and terrified all at the same time. And I loved it. What a surprise. What a masterpiece. The second I finished it, I started over. I hardly ever do that.