Oh, how I long for a good solid werewolf novel. Not a drippy teenage romance or an arty examination of man's inner beasts... but a nice, suspenseful, bloody book. 
 And sadly, "Hemlock Grove" is not that novel. There are a lot of things in this book that could have been awesome if they had been done well, but they're stitched into a seething, schizophrenic mess that seems to be trying to appeal to all sorts of audiences. And Brian McGreevy's stumbling, meandering writing and vast cast of underdeveloped paper dolls don't help. 
 There is a werewolf in the small town of Hemlock Grove -- a girl has been found dead. Some blame the local biotech corporation, while other suspect that a human is doing it. It doesn't help that "gypsy trailer-trash" teen Peter has been telling people that he's a werewolf. Another major suspect is Roman, a wealthy young man with a freaky-as-hell family. 
 However, Roman has some supernatural secrets of his own -- specifically, he's an upir (or vampire) -- so he teams up with Peter to discover who or what is killing people. Along the way, they must deal with their own bizarre problems even as they investigate the dark biotech experiments and the source of the deaths. 
 "Hemlock Grove" was an exercise in frustration. It seems like McGreevy had a lot of awesome ideas -- a poor Romany teen who claims to be a werewolf, a girl claiming to be impregnated by an angel, the Frankensteinian Shelley (Shelley? Like Mary Shelley? SO CLEVER) , and the linking of a biotech lab to supernatural attacks. 
 These are GREAT ideas. Handled well, they could have been brilliant, especially in a clever deconstruction of American gothic novels. 
 But... they're not. McGreevy seems to have ideas and nothing more -- he just stitches together a bunch of stuff he thinks is "cool," and lets the tottering patchwork of ideas stagger through a halfhearted plot. Occasionally he fills in the gaps with sex and grotesquerie, but it's a poor distraction. And at the same time, it feels like a chaotic stew of spinning wheels -- lots is supposedly going on, but nothing is REALLY happening. 
 And his writing doesn't help either. McGreevy's writing screams, "Look at me! Look at me! I'm arty and different and COOL!", with meandering sentences that ramble off into other topics. It ends up feeling both amateurish and slickly overpolished. Just a few pages were enough to give me a splitting headache. 
 The characters are all interesting in their conception (even the cliche ones like Roman's mom), if not the execution. The problem is that McGreevy never really develops them, and they don't go anywhere -- they're a collection of weird and/or disaffected character traits, loosely bound together. Some of them, like Letha and Shelley, seemed like they needed their own short story rather than a part in a novel. 
 Somehow it doesn't surprise me that "Hemlock Grove" is being adapted for TV by Eli Roth -- it's both graphic and pretentious, with interesting ideas that are never fleshed out. Stick to screenwriting, Mr. McGreevy.