Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan are back with another collaborative effort. Those who read their Strain trilogy or watched the television series adaptation on FX are probably still experiencing nightmares, or perhaps comparing our current crisis to the one that took place in the latter stages of the story. Apparently, Del Toro and Hogan are not permitting any mental or emotional respite to occur among their readers. Their newly published novel, THE HOLLOW ONES, promises wild literary rides for some time to come.

As with the best roller coaster rides, the book begins sedately enough before rocking you back into your seat. Rookie Odessa Hardwicke and veteran Walt Leppo are partnered-up FBI agents who are having lunch in Newark, New Jersey. It is quickly established that Odessa is bright and upwardly mobile, while Walt is eccentric but smart.

"As with the best roller coaster rides, the book begins sedately enough before rocking you back into your seat.... THE HOLLOW ONES is not a bad way at all to scare yourself silly."

You don’t want to get too attached to Walt because he isn’t around long. Their meal is interrupted by an urgent, all-hands-on-deck call to a hot crime scene. They are in the thick of it when Walt inexplicably goes homicidal, and Odessa is forced to kill him in the line of duty. That is troubling enough, but as Walt dies, she thinks she sees some sort of mist leaving his body.

Placed on desk leave pending a full investigation, Odessa is assigned to clear out the office of Earl Solomon, an elderly agent who has had a stroke and appears to be near death. This task leads her to him; though bedridden, he is somewhat lucid. It turns out that they have more than a few things in common, a bond that leads Odessa in an extremely strange manner to an enigmatic character named John Silence.

This present-day narrative is interspersed with two stories. One revolves around Solomon’s first FBI case in 1962, when he was sent to Mississippi to investigate a lynching with possible racial undertones that seemed highly unusual. The other concerns John Dee, a 16th-century alchemist attached to the English Royal Court who is meddling in areas that are best left alone. Unfortunately, Dee’s efforts are successful and will affect the lives of many people over the next few centuries.

Odessa finds herself in an uneasy professional relationship with Silence, who in turn regards her as an ally and an annoyance. It is important to her that he believes her story regarding what she saw after she killed her partner. He gradually reveals what occurred as they attempt to track a centuries-old evil that is loose in our world, is creating havoc and seemingly cannot be destroyed.

Anyone who has ever witnessed an abrupt personality change in an acquaintance and wondered Why did they do that? will find much to love here. Del Toro and Hogan borrow just a bit from H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos while invigorating it enough to draw the curious back to the source material. One could be forgiven for thinking that THE HOLLOW ONES would be a better screenplay than a novel (not that there is anything wrong with that), but horror fans who read this occasionally shocking tale will be back for seconds. They also will eagerly await the second volume of The Blackwood Tapes, which is all but promised in the subtitle.

THE HOLLOW ONES is not a bad way at all to scare yourself silly. And who knows? It might even be true, at least in part.