This horror-thriller takes us back to familiar territory – a small town in Maine that looks idyllic on its peaceful surface, but which hides a terrible secret: something dark and malevolent lurks out in the woods, something cold and growing and mindless in its urge to main and destroy. Who will win the day? The familiar lineup of good guys, i.e. the good-hearted but misunderstood small-town cop; the pretty woman with the past she must suppress and hide; the sensitive little boy who sees things no one else can see; the mentally-impaired youth who’s sweetness personified; the bookish middle-aged guy who speaks in paragraphs' worth of prosy historical background? Or the menagerie of sadistic rapists and killers who have been ensnared and infected by the nameless evil whose time has come? Stephen King is yet again – oh, wait, check that; who wrote this book? – John Connolly is yet again putting on a stock show here, with little originality in evidence. This has all been done before -- and done better -- so I’d spend my reading time elsewhere. It’s a pity, since Connolly’s Parker novels are weird and wacky in a much more entertaining and original way. ( )

The first half or so was very good, but the bloodbath in the end was to predictable, and the justification of the deaths morally unsupportable. ( )

I think that Bad Men marks another step towards the supernatural and horror for John Connolly. When I started reading him (four books ago), he wrote great, noirish mystery novels featuring Charlie Parker and his somewhat left of the law friends, Angel and Louis. But I noticed that as the novels progressed, what started as Parker’s intuition for things was turning into a kind of sense for the supernatural. The crimes in the books took on a more and more preternatural cast. Bad Men is a stand-alone book—and it is a full-blown horror novel.

Bad Men starts with a prologue set about 400 years ago. It described a massacre of settlers on the Maine (or what would become Maine) island of Sanctuary, also called Dutch Island. After the massacre, the island seems tainted by the violence. The landscape gets kind of warped by it. Bogs grow and shrink unnaturally and weeds overgrow and reveal trails. And it seems that the island has a way of getting rid of the violent, killing wife beaters and poachers and no-counts in bizarre, unexplainable accidents. At times, I think that the setting is more interesting that the plot.

As the story moves on, it becomes clear that the island is gearing up for a showdown with the evil that warped it 400 years ago. A man named Edward Moloch, who may be a reincarnation of the man who instigated the massacre (though this isn’t stated explicitly), escapes from jail and goes after his wife who now lives on Sanctuary. As Moloch comes closer to the island, the weirdness factor on the island increases. It builds and builds until the last forty pages or so, when the books comes to its startling and bittersweet end.

This is a great book if you’re looking for something different to read. It’s not a traditional horror novel as I’ve come to know then, and it certainly isn’t a mystery.

This is a great story. Chilling in the extreme, not least because much of the terror is caused by the base cruelty of an abusive husband. Mix this with revengeful ghosts and you have one scary tale!

Some of the plot was fairly predictable, which is why I gave it a seven, but there were some twists as well.

All in all a good read. ( )

Not very good. When you have to name the bad guy Moloch just to show how bad he is, you're being lazy. The main character reminded me of the Chief from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. That guy never would have wound up as a sheriff. ( )