Why I don't read James Herbert

When I opened “The secret of Crickley Hall,” James Herbert’s latest ‘chiller’ – the publisher’s description - I was seized, like many of his characters, with a nameless sense of dread.

Ahead of me lay a chunky read, topping the 500 page mark. It wasn’t the length that frightened me, though, but an overwhelming fear that it would be full of formulaic rubbish.

My options were limited. Either I could hand the book over to a top-notch psychic for telepathic analysis or venture into its pages alone. With psychics thin on the ground in this part of the world, there was no help for it. I was on my own. Before I started, though, I jotted down some of the plot lines I was convinced I’d find. If wrong, it would reveal my prejudices in all their ignorance. If right……well, put it this way. I also left my family a farewell note just in case I sank into a non-reversible catatonic trance half way through.

The book, I wrote, will be about a family with a trauma meeting a house with a secret. OK, so the title was a bit of a giveaway – it obviously wasn’t about a carbon neutral executive home set on a gated estate in Warrington.

Despite being set in the present, the setting would appear to be untouched by contemporary life. The locals would all be local - nobody would ever leave, except in a box after a brush with the supernatural. There would be a shop cum sub post office untouched by the dead hand of government. Business would be booming, despite outsider-hating staff whose idea of stock rotation would be dusting the newspapers announcing the relief of Mafeking.(Evil spirits are obviously big users of the counter services when it comes to renewing the pitchfork license or sorting out PAYE for the many minions of hell on the payroll).

The family would contain a) one person pathologically incapable of seeing anything wrong until he or she was engaged in hand to hand combat with Satan himself, and not always then and b) a troubled person who would exhibit an extraordinary degree of sensitivity to evil but whose wounds/screams/strange noises would be ignored or rationalised.

On hand would be a neighbour who would make elliptical allusions to the past, which the family would totally ignore.

Then I opened the book, the heavy front cover creaking almost imperceptibly as it swung ajar………

And here they are, the family with a trauma, arriving at Critchley Hall. Clearly not themselves James Herbert readers, the husband, Gabe, has successfully rented a house that every family with two small children and not an ounce of common sense would opt for, given half a chance.

There’s the gardener who comes every few days to give heavy hints as to the nature of the mystery surrounding the place. Then there are features to die for – often literally – like the approach to the front door, a slippery bridge over a swollen stream, the unlockable cellar door opening on to a deep well that plunges down to the handy underground river, and the rusty swing that moves all on its own. And that’s without the battery of funny noises, shapes and smells from dead and undead who spring on to the scene at every possible opportunity.

Eve, the mother, is grieving her third child, a son, lost a year ago. He may be dead, or abducted. She thinks he’s communicating telepathically with her, possibly to let her know that he’s escaped through one of the gaping holes in the plot to a book with a better structure and is trying to persuade her to do the same.

By page 40, the family has settled into a natural routine, ignoring the enigmatic gardener’s sinister comments about the house, and dismissing the strange children’s voices and footsteps initially as mice, then, as they increase in intensity and volume, as rats and, finally, squirrels.

With the supernatural not so much manifesting as flaunting itself, it would have taken a troupe of performing badgers out on a stag night to have shouldered the blame. No triple mortice lock can ever keep that darn cellar door shut and puddles of water keep appearing on the stairs. The good ghosts are eleven WW2 orphan evacuees, presumed drowned in flood at Crickley Hall – but two bodies have never been found. They are victims of the murderous teacher appointed, with his sister, as their carer. He, too, is a ghost regular, appearing at one point completely naked and flagellating himself with a cane, something that would make him a popular guest at many an extreme suburban wife-swapping event.

It’s no wonder that Lili, the tormented psychic Eve attempts to recruit via a two-year old small ad in that flourishing village store, has second thoughts about accepting the case – it’s a toss-up as to whether her efforts will nail her a ghost or a bit part in an extreme makeover TV property programme.

With ghost activity in overdrive, the book ends in a pyrotechnic display of blood, flood and mud, with the past revealed in all the glorious detail that James Herbert can muster, including a generous dollop of titillation in the form of paedophilia and sadistic child killings. And if your idea of a happy ending is one where a troupe of child ghosts appears on the stairs in period costume, waving goodbye before setting out for heaven, rather like the Von Trapp children in the farewell scene of ‘The Sound of Music,’ then settle down for a cracking finale.

By the end, I, too, felt as if I’d died, but missed heaven and ended up in a state of numbing limbo. But then, I re-thought things. OK, I hated the book. But, as I scanned the papers, full of stories about Polonium poisoning, killings in Iraq and Afghanistan and terrorist threats, I started to realise why people might turn to Mr Herbert’s chillers. They have a pleasant, reassuring feel to them. In real life, nobody seems to have the resources or will to sort out the nightmares that surround us. In James Herbert’s world, evil is real, touchable and, reassuringly, remains confined to a few cellars in rural locations, capable of being knocked out by a single family armed only with a bunch of clichés.

And if his readers continue to find that comforting, frankly, who can blame them. Good luck to the man.