Last night his crying wife had left the room and he had remained seated and his child had taken his hand across the table with the grace of the sunrise, and in that moment when there wasn’t another comprehensible thing left to him he had a feeling. The fact was he could provide no rational explanation for why he was here. “Today I have seen the Dragon …” said the man.īut the man took her hand and held it, a flower known to be extinct.

“Is there like a summer camp for serial killers?” said Peter.īut then, bam! He will throw out some gorgeous lines that stick in your head like poetry “The only reason we started burying the dead in the first place was to keep predators from getting a taste for human flesh,” said Roman. A few paragraphs will go by and you will think that you have it - matter-of-fact descriptions befitting the teenage protagonists of the work.

What makes the book special is not only the fun that McGreevy has had playing with various horror tropes, but also the relationship between Roman and Peter, whose dialogue is often just very clever, realistic, and cool at the same time. Other characters in the book are Roman’s sister, Shelley, who is a Frankenstenien creation Roman’s mother, Olivia, a seemingly ancient and ageless upir Roman’s cousin, Letha, who is experiencing a “virgin” pregnancy Peter’s cousin, Desi, who is a cross between a seer and a voodooist and a variety of other interesting characters that round out the quirkiness of the town. Teenagers Peter (a gypsy werewolf) and Roman (an upir, a kind of vampire) team up to find and stop the killer, as well as prove Peter’s innocence of the crimes. Someone is killing young girls in Hemlock Grove and tearing them up, limb from limb, much as a wild animal might.

First, the book.Īt it’s heart, the book is a murder mystery - a serial killer murder mystery. Reading the book again I often found myself thinking, oh, I guess that was in the series and not in the book. But, I’m getting ahead of myself. This particular work is interesting to me in that the TV series (the first season, anyway) actually seems to be a very nice complement to the book. Recently I re-read the book for a book club, and I have also watched the two seasons of the TV series on Netflix. It was one of those nice surprises that I sometimes find on the library shelves - completely unheard of up to that point, a complete unknown. When I first read Brian McGreevy’s book, Hemlock Grove, a couple years ago, I fell in love with it. It is the most natural and right thing you have ever seen. He had not actually known what to expect in coming here tonight, much less that it would reveal to him two essential truths of life: that men do become wolves and that if you have the privilege to be witness to such a transformation

Hemlock grove novel