Hellboy

In 525 B.C., the Persian king Cambyses sent fifty thousand soldiers across the conquered Egyptian desert to take an oasis city not far from where the Libyan border stands today. According to Greek history, a hurricane-force sandstorm struck near the end of their six-hundred-mile trek. The army -- all fifty thousand men -- vanished without a single trace. Fast forward to 1986. A British archaeological team, sent to the edge of the Great Sand Sea to exhume evidence of the incident, has also gone missing. So the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense is sending the world's greatest paranormal investigator, Hellboy, to find the missing Brits and to discover what became of The Lost Army. Dark Horse is proud to present a milestone in the history of Hellboy. This illustrated novel is written by Christopher Golden, best-selling author of the book Of Saints and Shadows. Hellboy creator Mike Mignola has done sixty-eight black-and-white illustrations for the story, and those illustrations alone are worth the price of admission.

Hellboy comes to the crossroads in Enigma, Georgia, a small town plagued by strange occurrences. Sent to keep an eye on Sarah Nail, a young girl hiding from the curse of her family, Hellboy becomes entangled in the blood debt of evil mystical preacher, Brother Jester. Stuck between human malice and the mysteries of the occult, Hellboy comes up against an intrigue of ghosts, demon trees, talking bullfrogs, and a race of lost mutant children. An all-new Hellboy novel!

Hellboy is called to Amalfi, Italy, by Franca, a young member of the Esposito family. She fears that a dark curse on her family is about to claim her cousin as its next victim. Hellboy makes his way to their large home... and he encounters a flaming demona fire wolf which he successfully fights off. Hellboy and Franca make their way to Pompeii, where Franca remembers seeing an image of the fire wolf whilst on an archaeological dig. Hellboy unearths the shriveled corpse of a demon hunter who was buried during the AD 79 eruption of Vesuvius, and it tells him of the fire demon that escaped the grip of the volcano... leading to that devastating eruption. As the volcano rumbles again, with a new thirst for human blood, an eruption even more devastating than that historical catastrophe looks very, very close.

In Cancun, Mexico, police investigate a slaughter at a wedding ceremony. In Dublin, Ireland, the clientele of a backstreet pub are found dead. In Kyoto, Japan, the bullet train pulls into the station with blood-spattered windows. It is the time of the Black Sun. Across the world, the wolves are calling to each other. Locked in bodies that had no idea they were there, they rise from the depths of the unconscious and turn towards America . . . For Hellboy, it's a race against time to prevent a devastating wave of primal savagery washing across the land. And so he is drawn to Boston's Beacon Hill and the Grant Mansion, believed to be the most haunted house in New England, where the truth may lie buried.

In a London funeral parlor, the dead rise and walk again. On a train in the London Underground, a young couple is terrorized by a demon. In a suburb, a poltergeist forces a family to flee their home. Hellboy has his hands full. While the supernatural is on a rampage in London, a series of brutal "Torso Murders" turns up at various sites around the city. All of the corpses are headless, limbless, and drained of their blood. Called in to investigate the killings, B.P.R.D. agents Abe Sapien and Liz Sherman discover a wellspring of black magic under the London streets. They also find a sack of heads. Hellboy descends into the dark underworld of London, encountering demons who prophesy the coming of plague and the opening of an Eye to the otherworld, bringing forth death and destruction upon the land.

On the frozen shores of Sweden, lightning strikes from a clear sky. The skeleton of a huge man is revealed, its fingers clutched around the handle of an iron hammer. No one who comes to see this marvel from Norse mythology can lift it - no one but Hellboy, who lifts the hammer just in time for lightning to strike again, welding it to his hand and leading him towards a bizarre series of visions and encounters.