Rating: 3 1/2 stars
As you all should know by now, Germany explored occult angles for their military campaign. It's one of those weird facts of life that has been twisted countless times in the fiction word, kind of like one of DC Comics Elseworld graphic novels, or one if Marvel's What If issues. What If...Nazi Germany defeated the Allies using demonic dragons and witchcraft? And on that note...
Hurtgen Forest, Germany, 1944: The Allies find, instead of Axis opposition, nothing. Empty villages, deserted machine gun nests with messages in blood on the walls, absolutely no German soldiers anywhere. It's puzzling, to say the least. So when the Allies finally encounter a Nazi solider that kills eight of the squad and is neither dropped by bullets nor fire, the mystery intensifies. As they begin searching for answers, the answers find them. But the answers are inhuman, bloodthirsty, tireless killing machines. What started as a mission for Allied victory quickly becomes a soldier's nightmare as the friends die, the ammunition runs out and the chance for survival decreases with every passing minute.
Nazi monsters never work in film. Look at Zombie Lake and Night of the Zombies (not the cool Bruno Matei one with the cannibals and infected rats in the HOPE Center, the one with the talking Nazi Zombies). They suck. I'll give you Urotsukidoji 2, but the Nazis in that were more of a plot device than anything else. Anyway, point is, forget about occult Nazis in movies because it never works. But in print, it's a whole different story. Shadows in the Mist cranks out a very enjoyable little read with plenty of supernatural and plenty of solid ideas to back it up. Without spoiling anything, Brian Moreland take the generic Nazi monster, tries something new with the concept and in doing so, provides us with a very entertaining debut novel.
However, for whatever reasons, Moreland also gives us some chapters in the present day which were completely unnecessary. Present-day chapters in a novel set in the past, in my opinion, provide nothing but the knowledge of who survives. This really cuts down the suspense factor and in a novel like this, keeping the reader on the edge of their seat and guessing who will survive and what will be left of them is a good portion of the fun. So your novel would have been 30 pages shorter, so what? You don't get paid by the word with a novel and you could seriously use the present-day ideas to write a companion novel. Here you go: Shadows in the Mist 2: Electric Boogaloo: Present-day Nazi agents try to steal the book to raise a supernatural 4th Reich. Get writing, Moreland, you now owe me royalties.
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Publisher: Berkley Trade Pub
Pub. Date: September 2008
ISBN-13: 9780425224335