And here we end our visit to Hemlock Grove.
In the end, the show is a different take on a classic monster mashup, think Frankenstein meets the Wolf Man but in an updated version.
Throughout the season, the series attempts to show how these mythical beings would act and interact in a contemporary setting. In many ways it can be considered Magic realism, but in terms of a Horror, rather than a Fantastic setting.
In many ways the show is a success in what it sets out to do; the vampire, werewolf, and monster elements work in a "real world" setting. In many ways the story works more as a thriller with horror elements than simply a classic horror story.
The pacing of the series does sometimes work against it - as the story attempts to stretch across the course of thirteen episodes, most of the episodes work, but I ended up feeling like the series could have worked at ten, rather than thirteen, episodes.
The series works best when it focuses on the growing relationship between Peter and Roman, showing how their friendship changes and grows during the course of the murder investigation, and although my personal favourite character was Shelley (the series version of the Frankenstein's monster), the human side of these characters is what worked best for me.
In the end, I'm not sure whether I'll be following up with the later seasons - but as the first season was a pretty straight adaptation of the novel, I'd like to see what the creators end up doing with these characters once the go off book.
Thanks for hanging out with me for another Ocotober!
Without going into too much detail of the second episode, this is the one that confirms that yes, Peter is a werewolf, and it does it in one of the more startling transformations sequences I've seen in quite a while.
For me the gold standard will always be Rick Baker's transformation effects in the 1981 film An American Werewolf in London (the makeup for that film was so good that the Academy Awards introduced a new category, Best Makeup, because of it), and although much of what you see in the episode is clearly computer generated, the effects are pretty impressive nonetheless.
The episode itself largely focuses on the murder mystery, but does introduce (through email), Roman's older sister Shelley, a giant girl suffering from some undefined deformities, who wheezes loudly and speaks through a small mechanical device in person, but through her emails, shows herself to be well spoken and quite intelligent.
I actually preferred the second episode to the pilot, and am definitely looking forward to the rest of the season.
While I focused most of my efforts last month on the books published under the Penguin Horror imprint, I did set some time aside to read a number of non-horror titles, and by far my favourite was my October book by Charles de Lint, Wolf Moon.
Taking place in a realm of High Fantasy (a world of magic with no obvious connection to Earth), the novel is actually a rather small story of a Harper (a travelling musician) and his attempts to kill an escaped werewolf. The twist is that the werewolf is actually our protagonist, and the Harper the villain. For de Lint, who in every previous book he had written, to take the travelling musician (usually a good guy and protagonist in books such as Harper of the Grey Rose, Mulengo, and The Riddle of the Wren), the idea of focusing the story on the monster, and more importantly, making him sympathetic, was a lot of fun and added a lot of heart to the story.
The main character, Kern begins the story on the run from the evil Harper Tuiloch, and throughout the story finds friends, love, and perhaps even a home, if only he can find a way to outwit or defeat a man who uses his control of music and magic to control those around him.
Although the story doesn’t have the usual quest structure of high fantasy novels, its focus on the characters surrounding a small inn that Kern comes across makes the book a joy to read. A lot of fun, and yet another reason I’m really excited to be working my way through the works of Mr. de Lint.
