100 Books in 2011: Others

This is the last book in the 100 Books in 2011 challenge and it is Others by James Herbert. A man's soul is in Hell, tormented, and is given a chance to redeem himself. He accepts the offer.

Nick Dismas is a private investigator running a small, successful business in Brighton. He happens to be mishapen and ugly and so encounters much of the worst of humanity. A woman approaches him and asks him to find her long lost son. She was told that her baby didn't survive but she believes that he is still alive and now wants to find him.

After he takes this commission he is plagued by nightmares which he tries to explain away as the result of the drugs he takes to deal with his condition. The woman is revealed to have been recently widowed, requiring a son in order to benefit from her husband's will, and acting on the advice of a psychic. Dismas tells the woman he can't help her, but a combination of psychic phenomena, intuition and pressure from the psychic pushes him into following up the one lead he has. He thinks it's pretty tenuous but it leads him to a place where deformed and mutated children are kept secretly from the world, experimented on and exploited.

Dismas rescues them and comes to remember who he was in his previous life. Then, having redeemed himself, he dies.

This is definitely a book on the warm end of the spectrum of writing technique. We spend most of our time in Dismas' interior world as he ruminates on what is true and what is not, follows his intuition, and explores his feelings for the people around him.

Much of Others feels more like a thriller than a horror. Dismas is trying to find a missing person whilst battling personal demons. It's ok. It's pretty readable but I didn't find the characters that engaging. There is a motif of 'ugly but good' and 'beautiful but evil' running through the book like a freight train, which I found unsophisticated and heavy-handed.

As a thriller, it was alright until the ending, which was Dismas remembering the bargain he had struck and then all the loose ends being tied up in a couple of expository pages. It felt hurried, especially as the final escape from the burning building had taken over sixty pages to play out. The action was tense and exciting in places but the pacing was a little haphazard. As a horror, I didn't really get it. I suspect the horror lies in what has been done to the 'others', how they have been treated and how society has effectively erased them. The horror is in how easily we decide people aren't people. But choosing to tell the story from the POV of the private investigator distances us from that for most of story. Unless, of course, you're freaked out by the idea of demons invading your nightmares. I don't believe in an afterlife of any kind and so I find it hard to be afraid of that sort of thing.

Anyway, it's alright. If you enjoy mild supernatural horror, you might like this.