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Hellfire
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
April 2, 2026
This was a slightly uncomfortable read because it's basically violence-porn; the protagonist is a professionally ruthless killer (he is a Nazi SS colonel, but in order not to make him too unsympathetic we are given to understand that he never had any particular ideological belief; he just went into the army and ended up as an expert in fighting partisans at their own game, i.e. killing outside the rules of war) and a war criminal on the run. And according to the footnotes referring back to previous novels, he is the hero of a whole set of equally violent books about his earlier SS activities.
But you are clearly intended to sympathise with him, because he is simply trying to survive in a dog-eat-dog world where everyone else is as bad or worse; this is a bleak view of post-war Europe, but from the bits I know something about it's not all that far from the truth. And you do end up sympathising with him, in the way that you almost inevitably sympathise with any hunted protagonist on the run, which means you then end up complicit in the trail of cold-blooded killings - which he is well aware are classified as 'war crimes', but which in his worldview are simply pragmatic and necessary - throughout the book. The hero is further humanised by having him recoil from worse atrocities committed by other people, since so far as we can tell he takes no particular pleasure in what he does and doesn't seek out unnecessary slaughter. Unfortunately 'necessary' slaughter involves things like killing an entire village full of women and children in order to decoy their menfolk away from ambushing his small force...
It's undoubtedly a tense thriller and appears to be historically well-informed. I just had the feeling that it was being deliberately transgressive, and that this was a conscious part of the appeal - like serial killer novels where the audience gets to cringe and thrill at the delicious horrors going on.
Edit: apparently the author was a pseudonym for a respectable military historian. This does not surprise me.
But you are clearly intended to sympathise with him, because he is simply trying to survive in a dog-eat-dog world where everyone else is as bad or worse; this is a bleak view of post-war Europe, but from the bits I know something about it's not all that far from the truth. And you do end up sympathising with him, in the way that you almost inevitably sympathise with any hunted protagonist on the run, which means you then end up complicit in the trail of cold-blooded killings - which he is well aware are classified as 'war crimes', but which in his worldview are simply pragmatic and necessary - throughout the book. The hero is further humanised by having him recoil from worse atrocities committed by other people, since so far as we can tell he takes no particular pleasure in what he does and doesn't seek out unnecessary slaughter. Unfortunately 'necessary' slaughter involves things like killing an entire village full of women and children in order to decoy their menfolk away from ambushing his small force...
It's undoubtedly a tense thriller and appears to be historically well-informed. I just had the feeling that it was being deliberately transgressive, and that this was a conscious part of the appeal - like serial killer novels where the audience gets to cringe and thrill at the delicious horrors going on.
Edit: apparently the author was a pseudonym for a respectable military historian. This does not surprise me.
Displaying 1 of 1 review