Everyone loves a ghost
story; unless you don’t believe in ghosts, and find the idea of people hanging
around after they’ve died to be a load of codswallop. Even so, a piece of
clichéd formulaic tripe like James Herbert’s Haunted can get away with such things, because fantasies are a necessary
part of telling any story. If a writer wants to alter the rules of the world
somewhat in order to tell a genuinely good story or – in Herbert’s case – to
make money and retain his position as big-league cheap horror thriller writer,
then he can go right ahead. Because this book does indulge in fantasy, no
matter what kind of supposedly ‘real-world’ issues it feels as though it may be
addressing. Actually, I’ve only just realised he died a couple of years ago,
aged 69, so I may be a bit more reserved on judging his worth as a writer –
after all, it’s not polite to speak ill of the dead (at least, the recently
dead), so we might have a vaguely interesting discussion about this book
specifically about ‘the afterlife’ in light of that.
If you know anything at all about ghost stories, then it’s
quite possible you can guess the entire plot right at the beginning. The whole
book seems to be constructed entirely out of clichés, tropes and hackneyed
nonsense, so there is very little here that surprises or enthrals. Perhaps
James Herbert is better examined through some of his other novels, such as his
flagship The Rats, or The Fog, or The Secret of Crickley Hall, because it’s damned difficult to do
anything even remotely interesting with a tiny little story about ghosties –
but considering this is the only James Herbert I had on me at the time, and I
wanted to get at least one review done for February, this’ll have to do.
The story is this: David Ash – because the borderline
alcoholic, hard-smoking sceptical paranormal investigator with a tragic origin
story has to have a cool name so that he’d be even more irresistible to the
ladies – has been contracted to investigate strange goings-on at the manor of
Edbrook, near a village called Ravenmoor, a desolate and ill-maintained old
house in the middle of nowhere. Spooky location and hard-bitten manly
protagonist, check. The only people who live there are the Mariell siblings:
Robert, Simon and Christina, three adult orphans who have free-reign of the
manor and who seem to delight in tormenting the only other occupant of the
house, their dear old housekeeper and aunt, Nanny Tess. Mysterious, isolated
and possibly insane residents, check. They have a big scary dog, and a girl in
a white dress can occasionally be seen strolling the house and grounds at
night. Wandering spirit; check. There, now you have all the ingredients you
need to write your own ghost story – just don’t get too creative with it, or
you might end up being a tad original.
In all honesty, it’s not actually a dreadful book; Herbert
knows how to make clichés work for him, and obeying a formula with as much
dedication as this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The surly, cynical
protagonist was necessary in order to fit this scheme, if only so that it could
result in some emotional conflict between him and the ‘reality’ of ghosts and
afterlives. There is nothing original in the characters, or the setting, or the
idea behind the story, but the writer at least can handle all the elements
competently, no matter how silly it gets. When the true horrors of the setting
are revealed, it actually gets a bit boring – mostly because you’ve been
expecting so much for the previous three-quarters of the book. Actually, there
was a film purportedly based on this book – using the same names, only
everything has been completely changed: the personalities, the story, the
time-period, even the genre. I’m not sure what’s worse; reading a piece of
tripe like this, or watching a movie-adaptation afterwards that changes
literally everything about it, yet still can’t do anything remotely interesting
with it. The movie also happens to be terrible, but I don't know if I'm angry at for not including anything but a token relation to the source material - no matter how awful that source material may be.
But if there’s one thing that annoys me about this novel –
because, as I’ve already outlined the predictable plot, the clichés, the
writing style, none of that bothers me too much as it’s just McDonalds level
story-telling – then it would be the pseudo-science used to explain ghosts. The
protagonist had to be of the sceptical persuasion, so that his rational
scientifically-based ‘illusions’ about the world could be well and truly
smashed by the ‘reality’ of lost souls wandering the Earth. He works for an
institute of paranormal investigators, or something Scooby-Doo-ish like that,
who are shown to work very hard in order to disprove fraudulent mediums and
uncover rational explanations behind so-called hauntings – yet the presence of a
genuine “medium” amongst their number, the use of telepathy, psychic links, and
the pseudo-scientific concept of after-images as an explanation for
ghost-sightings, all of this just reinforces how silly the whole thing is. The
protagonist himself, the hard-line rationalist of the group, states at one
point:
“’I’m prepared to
believe that emotions of certain distressed people can be so strong at the
moment of death, whether through pain, unhappiness, or shock, that an
impression is left behind. An after-image, if you like, that can take years,
maybe centuries, to fade completely.’”
[Hodder
and Stoughton Limited. Pg. 95]
So, not ghosts, but
sort-of ghosts? I find this idea to be even more ridiculous than the notion of
ghosts-proper, that somebody’s consciousness could survive death and remain
disembodied and wander around a particular location, jumping out at particular
people and scare them. It seems that humans feel so much pride in their own
self-awareness that they can’t see it as anything less than extraordinary – for
the view that they may one day die and that a consciousness will simply cease
to exist, a permanent end to consciousness, leaving no trace that they once
were alive, seems more difficult for them to grasp than the idea of wandering
spirits and life after death. The human imagination is a powerful thing, it
seems; no less powerful than a bit of hysteria coupled with the nonsense
sprouted out by “mediums” (See: Fraudulent Individuals).
If you want a ghost story, then this is quite average, almost banal. Don’t
bother reading it; your life will not be markedly improved for having done so.
And James Herbert, rest in peace – because if you come back to haunt me for
giving one of your books a not-very-good review, I won’t be especially pleased,
especially due to my stance on this issue.
Bibliobrook
Herbert, James. Haunted. Hodder and Stoughton Limited.
(1988)
