"This is a honeycomb world. It hides a hollow heart.

The truth of nature, wrote the philosopher Democritus, lies in deep mines and caves. The stability of what is seen and felt beneath our feet is an illusion, for this life is not as it seems. Below the surface, there are cracks and fissures and pockets of stale, trapped air; stalagmites and helactites and unmapped dark rivers that flow ever downward. It is a place of caverns and stone waterfalls, a labyrinth of crystal tumors and frozen columns where history becomes future, then becomes now.

For in total blackness, time has no meaning...

But sometimes that choice is made for us: A piece of the present simply falls away, and the past is exposed like old bone. Afterward, nothing can ever be the same again, and we are forced to reassess the form of what we believed to be true in the light of new revelations about its substance. The truth is revealed by a misstep and the fleeting sense that something beneath our feet rings false. The past bubbles out like molten lava, and lives turn to ash in its path." --THE KILLING KIND, John Connolly, pgs. 4-5.

Sometimes stories shift on us, like a dark road through the middle of a wood, negotiated after midnight; what we thought was solid rock underfoot becomes quicksand, plummeting us irretrievably through into that same "honeycomb world" about which novelist John Connolly writes so well. Thus it is that Connolly's backbone series of novels, originally conceived as character-driven mysteries with a thread of deeper horror, have--over time--transformed into existential/occult horror stories coccooned in the bare trappings of mystery. Having begun with a narrative securely located in Thomas Harris and Michael Marshall Smith territory, he's since slipped straight into a world-view more familiar to fans of Clive Barker or Mike Mignola: Hard-boiled, fatalistic, literally Apocryphal.

In EVERY DEAD THING (1999), which freed Connolly--formerly a successful Irish journalist, though all his novels take place in or around the state of Maine--from the restrictive bonds of objective nonfiction forever, we first meet private eye Charlie Parker, our diffident, morally-grey and literally haunted "hero": Once a drunk, once a cop, once a husband and father, until a serial killer known as the Travelling Man intruded upon his anything-but-perfect life, single-handedly peeling back the veil on an underlying well of darkness which lies beneath...well, everything, pretty much.

Parker's pursuit of the Travelling Man leaves him with a reputation for attracting and exterminating "evil", a close-knit (if constantly shrinking) posse of similar eccentrics for friends/enablers--stone-cold hitman Louis and Louis' excitable thief boyfriend, Angel; Parker's second wife Rachel, a psychiatrist who did consulting work as a profiler, now mother of his second daughter; the disconcertingly gentle Rabbi Epstein, who keeps a man who claims to be a fallen angel named Kittim eternally imprisoned underneath his synagogue, and knows far more than he should about various pre-Christian mythologies--and an ever-widening roster of enemies, both human and non-. And with each book Connolly writes (roughly one a year since EVERY DEAD THING hit the shelves), exactly which side of the divide Parker himself falls on has become an increasingly murky--if also increasingly fascinating--matter of speculation.

But never let it be said that Parker's ongoing tour of Hell doesn't come with at least some type of equally grim humor attached--like this moment here, from pgs. 152-153 of THE LOVERS (Connolly's most recent Parker novel), where deluded and possibly doomed true crime author Mickey Wallace meets a source in New York's scuzziest watering-hole:

"By late that afternoon, [Mickey] was sitting in what was, by his standards, and by the standards of most other people who weren't bums, a dive bar, and considering what he could order without endangering his health...Mickey was the only person in the place, the bartender excepted, and he looked like he'd consumed nothing but human growth hormone for the past decade or so. He bulged in places where no normal person should have bulged. There were even bulges on his bald head, as though the top of his skull had developed muscles so as not to feel excluded from the rest of his body.

'Get you something?' he asked. His voice was pitched higher than Mickey had anticipated. He wondered if it was something to do with the steroids. There were peculiar swellings on the bartender's chest, as though his breasts had grown secondary breasts of their own. He was so tan that he seemed at times almost to fade into the wood and grime of the bar. To Mickey, he looked like a pair of women's stockings that had been stuffed with footballs.

'I'm waiting for someone.'

'Well, order something while you're waiting. Look at it as rent for the stool.'"

Through all eight current installments--EVERY DEAD THING, DARK HOLLOW, THE KILLING KIND, THE WHITE ROAD, THE BLACK ANGEL, THE UNQUIET, THE REAPERS (mainly Louis and Angel, with a side-order of Parker), THE LOVERS and a novella, "The Reflecting Eye", which introduces the creepy "Collector" who calls himself Kushiel ("Scourge of God", according to Davidson's DICTIONARY OF ANGELS)--Connolly's "honeycomb world" continues to fall away in sections, exposing a darkness composed of ever-deepening layers, a darkness worse than night. His characters are a glorious mixture of free will and inescapable predestination, fated to kill and die for things they barely understand, to slosh around in a corrosive mixture of hubris and moira. He posits that while serial killers may be wannabe dark angels, the demons they imitate very definitely DO exist, making the dreadful universe Parker inhabits a grab-bag of Apocryphal weirdness, Grigorim and nephilim, little pieces of a shattered original, like neurons in a hive-mind bent headlong on the propagation of corruption and despair--the much-mauled chew-toy of things who both crave the flesh and despise it, things which have the shadows of lost God(s) burnt into their eyes, apiaries for swallowed souls, implaccable connoisseurs of human pain.

By THE BLACK ANGEL--still Connolly's masterpiece, in my opinion, though I'll obvciously take whatever else he's got--what seemed to begin as a paranoid's worst nightmare had become simply the coldly literal truth. Which is why, these days, Connolly is a mystery author only in the same way that ALIEN is a science fiction movie. A more immediate kissing cousin, in terms of themes and world-view, would be William Hjortsberg, whose novel FALLING ANGEL was made into the movie ANGEL HEART. Like Harry Angel, Charlie Parker knows far less about his own true nature than is good for the people around him. Though he endures, they suffer, which makes him suffer. And the cycle goes 'round.

For him, not so great a ride. But for US...

THE END