The Green Woman

New York Times best-selling author Peter Straub resurrects his most sinister creation, Fielding “Fee” Bandolier, the unstoppable serial killer last seen in Straub’s bestseller The Throat. Aging and tired of a life devoted to death, Fee is preparing to end his long career of bloodshed. Bob Steele is a disillusioned New York detective out for redemption and to him redemption means a one-man crusade to stop Fielding Bandolier. Steele’s father cruelly named him after a Hollywood cowboy hero. The name has been a curse because Bob has very little hero in him. But he’s going to give it one last try. Cop and killer fi nally face off in a mysterious midwestern pub, “The Green Woman Tavern.” And in that abandoned place, an unspeakable evil stronger than either of them lies waiting to seal the fates of both men.

Amazon.com Review

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From Publishers Weekly

First the good news: Bolton's painted artwork for veteran horror novelist Straub's first (co-written) graphic novel is as uncanny as it's supposed to be--richly textured, vertiginous, built around creepily mottled flesh tones and images whose terrors always seem to be bubbling up from their darkest hues. In places, his characters are so obviously drawn from photographs the book might as well be fumetti, but Bolton's feverish super-realism gives it a hallucinatory tone. Unfortunately, the story (by Straub and Easton, who's best known as an actor) is a straight-to-video erotic thriller with supernatural elements, alternately banal and incomprehensible. An addendum to Straub's 1988–1993 Blue Rose trilogy of prose novels, it involves serial killer œFee Bandolier reflecting on his formative experiences as his final destiny intertwines with that of a weary but sexually irresistible detective named Bob Steele. There's a lot of gruesome Vietnam imagery, a number of central-casting stereotypes, a modicum of purple prose, and several pretty young women in various states of undress and intactness. The book's jumbled chronology and conflation of heavy symbolism with actual plot points do it no favors. (Oct.) (c) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Fee Bandolier, the many-monikered maniac from Straub’s The Throat (1993), lives again in this moody take on the tortured cop/serial killer genre. Bob Steele is the boozy detective who seems cosmically destined—or doomed—to come up against Fee. But before the satisfying climax, Steele needs to fight past another psycho dubbed “The Virgin Killer.” Straub’s first foray into graphic novels retains a novelistic feel, skittering back and forth across time (bodies show up before we see the murders, that sort of thing), giving readers a heavy psychological picture of the two foes. This is especially productive with Fee, who we trace back to his military service in 1968 Saigon even as he suffers the present-day torment of both his victims and the ghost of a haunted ship. Bolton’s fast-moving panels prefer to segment faces during dialogue, like a restless film editor, and his stylized blood, copious nudity, and especially his delusions—like when a group of fish on a line turn into murdered women—pack a cinematic punch. This kicks the door wide open for a sequel, too. --Daniel Kraus

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