Remember with fear . . .Sometimes horror is in the mind. And sometimes it’s real. Telling the difference isn’t always easy.
It wasn’t for Joe Creed. He’d just photographed the unreal. Now he had to pay the price. Because he always thought that demons were just a joke. But the joke was on him.And it wasn’t very funny. It was deadly . . .
Sometimes horror is in the mind. And sometimes it’s real.
Uh huh…and sometimes it just ain’t that good.
I’m truly starting to wonder why I’m doing this to myself. For the longest time, I’d only read Herbert’s first two novels, way back when they were first released, almost fifty years ago. Of course, over the intervening five decades, as a horror fan, his name kept coming up and coming up. When he passed away ten years ago, I decided I really need to read more of his stuff (why do I do this? I’m doing with Cormac McCarthy right now, too).
Anyway, long story short, covid came, along with the lockdowns, so I gathered up all the James Herbert audio books and started going through them, roughly chronologically. But there came a point where I felt I was getting seriously diminishing returns. I could almost feel the ideas abandoning Herbert’s once-fertile mind. It felt like he was very much writing to a formula.
So, for exactly a year, I didn’t read any more Herbert. I broke that ban four days ago and while I’ve decided, with only seven more books left to go, I might as well finish him off. But, after this novel? Yeah, I’m kind of regretting that decision.
There’s really nothing to like about this book.
Joe Creed himself is utterly unlikeable. He’s presented as someone willing to bend any rule and—true to Herbert form—screw any woman. I have a particular distaste for any fictional character who, while in the middle of an extremely horrific, life-threatening moment, still finds himself getting aroused because there’s a hot woman around…even if he hates her. Creed does this more than once in this novel.
To be fair, it’s a signature Herbert move, and I’m to the point where I expect it. But I still hate it.
And his supporting characters aren’t much better. They’re filled in with lackluster, sloppy distraction, so you don’t really get to know any of them. However, that’s not a bad thing, because none of them are really worth exploring. Honestly, his ex-wife and son feel like they’re tossed in as an afterthought, and it’s only to give Creed some motivation to keep going, after his son—who’s also truly unlikeable—gets caught up in the plot. And Creed’s ex-wife? She’s given the most blatantly false, stupid explanations as to why she can’t talk to her son, and she…just…accepts them. And Herbert can’t decide if she’s a shrew with an unpleasant face, or she’s hot…because Creed decides she’d still be worth throwing a hump into.
God, this is an awful book.
The story itself seems to have been made up on the fly, with no concern to making it cohesive, or to even, at times, make sense. And then Herbert, having written himself into a corner, also has to resort to giving the reader the climax, such as it is, then gamely keep going to have a character come back and then provide the info dump required to allow the reader to make some sense of what the hell they just read.
And, finally, there’s the curious narrative voice that Herbert busts out with no rhyme nor reason whenever he happens to require some quick explanation. Instead of working it into the story—like he also should have done with that ending info dump—he instead basically stops all forward action and breaks into the story, not necessarily stating, “Hi, I’m James Herbert, and I’m gonna tell you some stuff you need to know right now,” but coming damn close. He basically uses the voice of someone who knows everything about what’s going on, and is just helping you get some context.
Honestly, there was a point, about three-quarters of the way through this, where I began to think James Herbert had a thought, and maybe even made a bet with either his agent or his editor or his publisher.
Something along the lines of, Hey, so, I’ve kinda got nothing here. It’s really thin story that doesn’t make a lot of sense, so I’m not even gonna try at all. Instead, I’m just gonna slapdash some scenes together, puff out the length of the manuscript with some name-dropped scenes of him trying to photograph celebrities, then, whatever needs explaining, I’ll do at the end. Should take me…oh, I don’t know…a week to throw it all together? How much you wanna bet having that ‘James Herbert’ name with still shift a lot of product, despite it being inked up toilet paper?
By the time I finished the book?
Yeah, I was convinced this was the case.
This is one of the laziest, nonsensical, padded-out, boring, underwhelming horror novels I’ve ever had the misfortune of reading.
Another one like this from him, and I’m done.
