Barton Paul Levenson's Reviews > Hell Holes: The Complete Trilogy

Hell Holes I, II, and III: The Complete Trilogy
By Donald Firesmith

In brief: This is a good book. Buy it. The action scenes are awesome, the good guys are likeable, the bad guys are irredeemably evil and they get theirs in the end, though not without great, wounding losses on our side. A very satisfying book.

In detail: Exxon-Mobile contacts Professor Jack Oswald, petroleum geologist, and his climate expert wife (!), Dr. Angela Menendez, asking for help. Mysterious holes in the tundra have opened up in Alaska, and the corporation fears they might open under the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, causing both an environmental disaster and, more importantly, the loss of mucho bucks. An annoying reporter, Aileen O'Shannon, tags along as they go to the site with a couple of grad student assistants. The hole turns out to be a Hell Hole--demons come out of it and try to eat them. They wind up fleeing down the Dalton Highway (it goes roughly north-south through Alaska), fighting demons as they go. Aileen turns out to be Curatrix Maxima Aileen O'Shannon of the Tutores Contra Infernum, a secret demon-fighting order (non-religious, despite the Order structure and Latin name). She's a sorceress who can kill demons with her spells, channeled through her magic amulet. The order collects the amulets by killing demons; the high type called devils have one each at the base of their skulls. Jack recognizes the amulet as advanced tech rather than magic, to Aileen's distress. The pseudo-Christian demonology of the middle ages turns out to be based on alien invaders. As more Hell Holes open up and more demons pour out, the whole northern hemisphere is threatened, with the south eventually on the timetable of conquest. The demons have no redeeming features; they hate humans and all other species not from their home world, and regard them only as food, to be killed as painfully as possible since it improves the meat. (Philosophy nerds will recognize this as an echo of a famous thought experiment in ethics.) The military is brought in and our friends have to go through a dimensional portal to try to stop the demons on their home world.

Things I liked:

* The good guys always have each other's backs.
* Serious, scary problems keep popping up. The good guys think out solutions instead of relying entirely on brawn or athletic ability.
* Firesmith did research out the wazoo on Alaska, geology, military organization, and White House protocol, which pays off in realistic detail.
* The demon homeworld orbits an orange dwarf star (spectral type K), which is a good type of primary for a habitable planet. As a planetary astrophysicist, I really liked that bit.
* The book includes photographs of every major character--that's right, photos of fictional people. Photoshop, I assume, but it lent rather a cool touch to the book.

Things I disliked:

* This is just me, and petty beyond belief, but although a lot of Latin is used, and I'm no expert on the language, I knew enough to spot some errors. Few readers will care that he got a declension wrong ("Huh? What's a declension?"), but I noticed it.
* Too many characters are introduced. I just couldn't keep track. Characterization is good for the major characters but not so much for the minor ones. Oh, well, not everybody can be Stephen King (although I, for one, tried hard for many years).
* The portraits of the various types of demons looked obviously like artwork--very good artwork, don't get me wrong, but it struck a discordant note with the photorealistic portraits of the human characters. All the artwork should have been one or the other. The blend doesn't work for me.
* The ending drags on way too long--I was reminded of the "orgy of hobbit-hugging" at the end of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies.

None of the above dislikes should dissuade you from reading the book. These are just holdovers from my writer's workshop days. This is an engrossing story, and even the long ending held my interest.