Trollhunters

Guillermo Del Toro

Illustrations by Sean Murray

Cover design by E. M. Gist

All rights reserved. Published by Disney • Hyperion, an imprint of Disney Book Group. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For information address Disney • Hyperion, 125 West End Avenue, New York, New York 10023.

ISBN 978-1-4847-1086-9

Visit www.hyperionteens.com

Contents

Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Part I
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
Part II
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
Part III
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
Part IV
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
About the Author

To my children and the time of dreams and hope.

May it last us all a little longer.

—GDT

For Craig Ouellette

—DK

They call me Troll;

Gnawer of the Moon,

Giant of the Gale-blasts,

Curse of the rain-hall,

Companion of the Sibyl,

Nightroaming hag,

Swallower of the loaf of heaven.

What is a Troll but that?

—Bragi Boddason the Old, ninth-century poet

You are food. Those muscles you flex to walk, lift, and talk? They’re patties of meat topped with chewy tendon. That skin you’ve paid so much attention to in mirrors? It’s delicious to the right tongues, a casserole of succulent tissue. And those bones that give you the strength to forge your way in the world? They rattle between teeth as the marrow is sucked down slobbering throats. These facts are unpleasant but useful. There are things out there, you see, that don’t cower in holes to be captured by us and cooked over our fires. These things have their own ways of trapping their kills, their own fires, their own appetites.

Jack Sturges and his little brother, Jim, were oblivious to all this as they sped down a canal bed on their bikes in their hometown of San Bernardino, California. It was September 21, 1969, a perfect day from a vanished era: the dusk light spilled over the peaks of Mount Sloughnisse to the city’s east, and from the nearby streets the boys could hear the buzz of lawn mowers, smell chlorine from a pool, taste the hamburger smoke from somebody’s backyard grill.

The high walls of the canal kept them secret and provided perfect cover for their gunfights. That afternoon, as usual, it was Victor Power (Jack) versus Doctor X (Jim), and they swerved around piles of rubble to take shots with their plastic ray guns. Victor Power, also as usual, was winning, this time decisively because of that new bike: a cherry-red Sportcrest so new the birthday ribbons were still attached. Jack was thirteen that day but rode his present as if he had been riding it all his life, up suicidal banks, through grasping weeds, sometimes without hands so that he could fire off a particularly good shot.