Remember the fairy stories you were told as a child? Tales of tiny, magical, winged beings and elves, wicked witches and goblins. Demons …What if one day you found out they were true? What if, when you became an adult, you discovered they were all based on fact? What if you met the fantasy and it was all so very real? That’s what happened to Thom Kindred. The wonders were revealed to him. But so were the horrors, for not far behind the Good, there always lurks the Bad. And the Bad had designs on Thom. The Bad would show him real evil. He would see the hellhagges and the demons. He would be touched by perverted passion. And corruption. And he would encounter his own worst nightmare. The Bad would seek to destroy him. And only the magic of the little beings would be able to help him. Once, James Herbert’s masterful novel of erotic love and darkest horror, will take you to a realm where fantasy and fairy tales reside, where faery tales really can come true.
Ah, here we are back to Mr. Herbert once again.
I have two more novels to go, and I’m truly looking forward to finishing Herbert’s bibliography, because while I’m glad I’ve read him, I’m really not in love with much of his stuff, and his formula is getting old.
As for this one, though. ONCE… This one I have to liken to a meal that went down okay, but then just didn’t sit right with you, leaving you ultimately unsettled and unsatisfied. The writing was okay, as it should be for an author on their twenty-first novel, but…well…
There’s several things that just didn’t sit well with me.
The first is, there’s not a lot of story here, and the pacing seems off, because the entire novel seems padded with extremely long scenes involving…
- approaching a destination,
- walking through woods,
- dwelling on how much fear a character is feeling instead of getting on with the horror,
- sex, sex, and more sex,
- massive info dumps on how this entire world of elves and fairies works.
In between all that is a very thin plot.
I will admit that much of my problem with this novel is that I have zero patience with fairies and elves. It’s not that it doesn’t scratch my itch, it’s that I have no itch to scratch when it comes to this topic. So, to be forced to go through pages and pages of Herbert tying himself in knots to explain how it all works—with a triple scoop of a lot of woo-woo semi-science gobbledygook—didn’t help.
As per usual for a Herbert novel, men are described in the vaguest of terms, unless they’re a major player, but every single woman is described from their hair, to eyes, to figure, to pert braless breasts, to legs, to what they’re wearing, to precisely how stunning each and every one of them appears to the male characters. And then, because of that, you know…you just know…that Herbert’s going to give you a long, gratuitous sex scene involving them.
But I’ve got to say, the lesbian sex scene in this book? Yeah, he probably drew that one out twice as long as most of his others. Herbert obviously loved his women.
In the end, this is more of an erotic fantasy novel than horror. Yeah, it’s got a few horror elements, but overall? Nah, it’s urban fantasy.
So, if you like fae, elves, and gratuitous sex? You’ll love this one.
Me? I’ll have forgotten it by this evening.
