The Golem of Hollywood by Jonathan and Jesse Kellerman

A New Old Horror Story

The Golem of Hollywood, Paperback, by Jonathan Kellerman and Jesse Kellerman, Headline, £7.99, Kindle edition £3.99 (Correct at time of publication)

I’ve been a reader of Jonathan Kellerman’s books since the first Alex Delaware title back in the 1980s, and have suffered through the ups and downs of the books over the years. Mostly they’ve been good years, with the occasional stinker (The Web), and the occasional less than perfect novel. These days I read them when they come out because I’m so used to the family of Alex, Milo et cetera, that I feel I’d be deserting old friends if I didn’t. Jesse Kellerman has been a star right out of the gate, and, although it would be fair to say that all of his work is high quality, it’s not all the “highest” high quality that he can manage (if you see what I mean).

Towards the end of the 80s Jonathan Kellerman wrote a book, The Butcher’s Theatre, which was startlingly good. A non-series novel, set in Jerusalem (the “butcher’s theatre” of the title) and featuring a Yemenite Jew as its hero, it was an extraordinary grand guignol tour-de-force, and aside from the lack of a supernatural presence, an amazingly good horror novel. Jesse has previous form here: The Genius (also published as The Brutal Art – be careful potential purchasers!), bought a kind of weird, building, menace to the art world, and he delights in a mixture of the grim and the bizarre.

Put these two together, and what you get (apparently), is a fully-fledged, old-fashioned, horror novel that oscillates between the historic and imagined past of Jewish legend and mysticism. The book explores the implications of supernatural and natural reincarnation, and combines this with an honest-to-god monster movie/noir thriller hybrid. Almost like Harry Bosch fighting the Creature from the Black Lagoon, but much, much, better on both the Harry Bosch and the creature fronts.

The problem with horror novels is they almost always disappoint. Think of all the Stephen King books you’ve read. How many of them had satisfying endings? My take on this is always that I’m willing to go along with Steve for the ride, because the ride is so good, but I’m not kidding myself that the end of, for example, It, Is particularly good. It’s not. Steve has written a blurb for the front of this book “brilliant, page-turning fiction with mystic underpinnings… The book is like nothing I’ve ever read before. It sort of took my breath away.” Steve is right. Frankly I wasn’t expecting a great deal from this, I bought it in Amazon’s “three for £10 deal” as a book to take away on holiday with me. It knocked my socks off. Give it a chance to knock yours off too.

Peter Mann

The Golem of Hollywood