"I'm avoiding spoilers and ratings, as usual with my reviews, while still trying to convey a broad sense of this book. Coy Hall's latest novel delivers the historical mayhem, murder, and maggots one has come to expect from a writer of his caliber.

The story follows the occult detective, the alternately respected and maligned Dorin Toth (with his critical canine companion, Vinegar Tom) to 17th century Austria, which is being afflicted by not one, but two apparent plagues -- one, the almost prosaic smallpox (hard to imagine smallpox being upstaged by another epidemic, but it happens, here); the other, a mystically malevolent miasma in the form of dreadful changeling-type beings operating with ill intent in the Austrian countryside in a sort of zombie apocalypse, a picaresque cosmic horrific rampage in a world where the insights of Copernicus and Galileo are still comparatively new, where the ink hasn't yet fully dried on the hand-drawn maps of this world.

Hall is, as ever, unafraid to wallow in the putrescence of truly monstrous villainy, and there is plentiful gore to slake even the blood thirstiest of horror readers. Fans of Hall's style will find much to savor in this macabre tale of the occult. Toth has a willfully Hammer-horror kind of fussiness to him as the occult academician, and the villains of the story are appropriately ghastly, with morbid detail ladled upon them in a grisly (and gristly) manner that leaves unforgettable impressions in the mind of the reader.

Vinegar Tom offers a feral counterpoint to Toth's priggish propensities, and the two of them are a good team, able to literally and figuratively sink their teeth into the sclerotic heart of the mysterious malediction plaguing the land. Toth and Tom aren't Holmes and Watson, but there is an undeniably strong rapport between them -- they are there for each other, and it's hard to know who is actually in charge between Toth and Tom at times, and a visceral sense that Toth could not long survive without Tom beside him.

Whether the start of an occult detective series or simply as a one-off, THE PROMISE OF PLAGUE WOLVES serves up harrowing historical horror that'll carve canals in the craniums of heady horror fans of every stripe. —D.T. Neal