NOBODY TRUE summary:
What happens when you lose your body?
Jim True knows. He has returned from an out-of-body experience to find he has been brutally murdered and his body mutilated. No one can see him, no one can hear him, no one, except his killer, knows he still exists. Freed from his body, True embarks on a quest to find his killer and discover why and how he has managed to survive.
As he closes in on his murderer, True discovers that even the very people he loved and trusted have betrayed him. He meets his killer, a strange and sinister figure who can also leave his body at will.
In James Herbert’s Nobody True, an epic and deadly battle ensues between True and a seemingly unstoppable and hideous serial killer – a man now intent on even more murders, including True’s wife and child . . .
THE SECRET OF CRICKLEY HALL summary:
The Caleighs have had a terrible year… They need time and space, while they await the news they dread. Gabe has brought his wife, Eve, and daughters, Loren and Cally, down to Devon, to the peaceful seaside village of Hollow Bay. He can work and Eve and the kids can have some peace and quiet and perhaps they can try, as a family, to come to terms with what’s happened to them…
Crickley Hall is an unusually large house on the outskirts of the village at the bottom of Devil’s Cleave, a massive tree-lined gorge – the stuff of local legend. A river flows past the front garden. It’s perfect for them… if a bit gloomy. And Chester, their dog, seems really spooked at being away from home. And old houses do make sounds. And it’s constantly cold. And even though they shut the cellar door every night, it’s always open again in morning.
The Secret of Crickley Hall is James Herbert’s finest novel to date. It explores the darker, more obtuse territories of evil and the supernatural. With brooding menace and rising tension, he masterfully and relentlessly draws the reader through to the ultimate revelation…one that will stay to chill the mind long after the book has been laid aside.
Well.
Consider me—for the first time in reading all of Herbert’s novels—actually blown away by one of his books.
What’s even wilder? I read the three David Ash books back to back, so I end my years-long reading of everything Herbert with this, his second-last book, The Secret of Crickley Hall. And I have to say, had he written any other books this well-written, this well-plotted, and without his usual man-meets-woman-eventually-have-explicit-sex feature?
Yeah, that twenty-three book read would have been far more enjoyable.
I enjoyed this novel possibly because it was lacking the standard Herbert elements, but also because, quite frankly, it was just so well written and so well plotted.
I actually started this final novel with a lot of trepidation, having just DNF’d the novel right before it, Nobody True. Herbert had seemed to completely forget about maintaining interest, or plot, or story…hell, it was like he’d forgotten how to write a damn scary novel. Instead, he opened with a killer line—I wasn’t there when I died—then he proceeded to completely kill any forward motion with the plot, spending about the first hundred pages—a solid fifth of the book—dragging the reader through James True’s entire freaking life, from childhood to current job…and not in an entertaining way. And that current job? Yeah, Herbert gives far more information than any reader would ever need on the inner workings of an ad agency.
It literally takes him thirteen chapters—thirteen motherfucking chapters where no story happens—to finally get back round to James True not being in his body when he died.
And by then?
…Yeah, I just didn’t care.
So, when I started Crickley Hall, I got a little worried when he launched into the engineering project that Gabe was taking on, but it was just lightly sketched in, and then we got on with the story. And it’s an incredible story. So many elements that, before this novel, I would have sworn the author could never have juggled.
And yet, juggle them he did. And very well. This novel has it all. Grief. Sorrow. Anger. Hate. And a slow burn of terror running underneath all of it, like the river under Crickley Hall.
This was just brilliant. I’m so glad I didn’t give up on Herbert, and finally got to read the best book he ever wrote.
