Games, Books and Films

James Herbert, 1996, Thriller

James Herbert has been writing horror fiction for many years now, with such classics as “The Rats” and “Haunted” to name just a couple, these books have pushed him to the forefront of British horror and rightly so.

Up until recently I didn’t know much about Herbert as I was stuck in a bit of a rut, where I would want to read something, but not know of any good authors, seeing as I had already read all the Stephen King books and the James Patterson ones, I felt like something different, so I picked up my dads copy of Herbert’s “Nobody True” and have since read about six of his books over the course of a couple of weeks.

So after a few novels I had started to realise that I had found a writer that did horror better than most, so that brings us up to date.

This book was first released into the world in 1996, and is also only Herbert’s 17th Novel, which is quite surprising since he has been writing for such a long time, but with quality pieces like this and the rest of his catalogue he can be excused!

Anyway onto the book…

The war is about to end, the Germans have pretty much lost and everything seems to be going to plan, or It would have been but unfortunately no one realised that Adolf Hitler and his men had a devastating new weapon up their sleeves. Hitler unleashes a bunch of bombs around the world, causing a slow and painful death to almost everybody, except people of a certain blood type.

Roll onto 1948 since this is where the story is set.

Here we are introduced to Hoke and his dog Cagney. Hoke is an American Air force pilot, with an interesting history and quite a few skeletons in his closet, he is also one of the lucky ones that has the unaffected blood group.

Unfortunately that doesn’t mean Hoke is safe, in fact he is far from it, as he seems to be head hunted by a scary bunch of people that seem to have the blood disease. Along the way Hoke happens across a small group of unaffected people and they fight for their survival in a war ravaged London.

Among these that join him along the way are, an upper class woman, Muriel, A working class girl, Cissie, and A German named Stern, whom Hoke takes an obvious dislike to. Over the course of the story the group will travel through some interesting London landmarks such as Buckingham palace and the underground.

That is basically the background to the story, but what is it actually like?

Firstly you probably want to know if its an overly long book or a short story, well luckily its neither it’s a perfectly balanced book which at 330 pages is just about right for a few nights of reading, or if your like me a few hours of non-stop reading.

The story’s chapters are all quite short meaning that you get a real feeling of pace, something that really makes this an exciting novel is that it almost feels like an action movie. From the opening few pages to the end you never quite know what is about to happen, with some well written, pacy and descriptive action set pieces this isn’t a slow read, for example the first time we meet the evil blackshirts is in the first twenty pages and it’s during a tense nail biting race through the centre of London on a motorbike.

When the story does slow down a bit we find out a bit more about the various character’s and how they tend to interact with each other, for example Hokes immediate distrust of Stern due to him being German, this is very well written as you could imagine the hatred between the two during the war.

Each person in the story was well filled out with enough information for you to imagine them as living people and they were all different enough to cause some interesting sections during the story.

The story isn’t really in Herbert’s usual horror style, it’s more of an action suspense thriller type novel, although it isn’t short of its own horrific scenes and shocks. Herbert’s description of the war wracked London are all very realistic and as in any good book, you almost feel as you are there watching the action as an innocent bystander.

Over the course of the story there are enough clever plot turns to keep you interested and you don’t quite know how things are going to turn out until the very last page.

At first this was one of the few Herbert books that didn’t jump off the shelf at me, it didn’t seem to feature his usual ghosts or other horror aspects, but as soon as I started to read it I realised how wrong I was to dismiss it straight away and it soon turned into a very enjoyable story that certainly passed a good few hours late into the early morning.

Obviously the book isn’t perfect, no book is, but overall the story is gripping, the character’s are fairly realistic and given enough life to make you believe in them. You should be able to pick this book up for about 5 pounds, but it might be worth looking in charity shops as they tend to have these sorts of books in a lot of them!

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