Shadows in the Mist

Shadows in the Mist and I got off on the wrong foot. I went in expecting a schlocky World War II horror story about Nazis and their obsession with the occult. What I got at first was a schlocky DaVinci Code clone set in the present day with a main character so thin he didn't even have two dimensions. About fifty pages in, I was ready to give up on the book.

Sean Chambers isn't so much a character as he is a chess piece the author moves around to advance his plot. We are told that he is an Air Force pilot with a wife and child. Those facts never factor into the story in any way. Sean is able to immediately fly to Germany on his grandfather's suggestion without seeming to make any sort of arrangements. It just felt like clumsy show more storytelling.

Fifty pages in though, the book flashes back to World War II and gets a LOT better.

Jack Chambers (Sean's grandfather) and his Lucky Seven have been through some of the worst fighting of the war. When a top secret O.S.S. X-2 commando squad approaches Chambers to assist on a mission behind enemy lines with a promise that the survivors will be sent home, Jack grudgingly accepts. They discover their target, the town of Richelskaul, is the site of a massacre. The Nazis occupying the town have been butchered. What have the Lucky Seven gotten themselves into?

Shadows in the Mist is Brian Moreland's first book and it shows. He has a lot of growing to do as an author, but he is very skilled at handling action and his atmosphere wasn't too bad either. The pacing of the story never flags even as the tone morphs from eerie to over the top action through the course of the story. The characterizations are pretty weak, but since they are better than Sean from the beginning of the book, they felt like an improvement. I'm not sure that the opening, set in the modern day, really added much. In fact, it made me doubt the wisdom of continuing the book. I wonder if it would have been better to cut it. Towards the end, as action came to dominate the book it all got to be a bit too much, but by then I was having enough fun that I was willing to roll my eyes and stick with it.

Shadows in the Mist isn't the scariest horror story, but it is an interesting one, drawing on the Nazi interest with all things occult, references to Kabbalah, Norse mythology and the Freemasons.

A fun read. Not a classic. But if it were turned into a movie I'd see it. show less

I love reading WWII books fact or fiction. I was pleased that most of this book takes place back in the 40’s. This was the first book I have read by the author and it has a nice flow to it.