A BOY'S HAMMER

Grass’ audacious mix of dark fantasy, horror, apocalyptic fiction, and Finnish folklore pits a lost boy against a mythic goddess of death who is trying to remake the world in her dark vision.

Fifteen-year-old Alan and his mother, Lena, disappeared in a plane crash off the coast of Helsinki and were presumed dead. But 20 years later, when a “massive, inked savage” inexplicably appears after an explosion creates a crater in a petroleum refinery outside of Philadelphia, the amnesiac giant eventually remembers that his name is Alan—and that for the last two decades he has been wandering in a place called Tuonela, a purgatorial realm of the dead in Finnish mythology, where he has had to survive a never-ending onslaught of hellish creatures bent on his annihilation. Covered with ritualistic hammer tattoos and 7 feet tall, Alan is brought to the home of his affluent aunt by Jefferson O’Brady, a Philadelphia homicide detective who is a walking cliché—the proverbial overworked, alcoholic cop with no significant relationships who numbs himself daily to forget the horrors that he has seen. But as Alan attempts to reconnect with his aunt and his next-door neighbor Rebecca—who used to be his childhood best friend—O’Brady is tasked with finding a prolific serial killer who is terrifying the inhabitants of Philadelphia. As O’Brady finds tangential connections between the serial killer’s crime scenes and the strange arrival of Alan, the murders begin to increase, and soon the body count is in the hundreds. As an otherworldly terror blankets the city, Alan sets off on his own quest—to go back to Helsinki, locate his mother, and somehow figure out his role in the interdimensional conflict.

In this genre hybrid—which seamlessly fuses elements of horror, police procedural, and mythology—the sheer uniqueness of the storyline is an obvious strength. Readers will be kept off balance throughout, and the numerous plot twists make for a satisfyingly unpredictable read. Additionally, Grass, whose previous novel was Dreck (2021), ably creates layered, emotionally astute characters. Alan and O’Brady are deeply and insightfully portrayed, and so are numerous secondary characters, like Alan’s aunt Mimi, his friend Rebecca, and Christian Henneman, a cultist who is fittingly described as “a cross between Ra’s-al-Ghul and Tony Robbins.” Along with the genre elements and bombshell-laden storyline, the richly described worldbuilding helps create a wildly immersive read. The various interdimensional worlds, and their nightmarish creatures, come alive on the page: “The biggest swarm were eyeless, humanoid devils with double-joints, obsidian black skin and long tongues slithering out past needlepoint teeth; their wings stretched from their waists up to their deformed wrists, odd-angled bones jutting out like compound fractures.” An excerpt from the novel perfectly describes the reading experience: “A bloody feast. A bountiful cornucopia of carnage, to be relished, to soak in.”

A darkly delectable, fresh blend of horror and Finnish myth.