Number 64 - Children of the Dark - Charles Veley

 I love a good "devil child" novel - as regular readers of this blog will know, I also like the occasional bad "devil child" novel (see my review of Margaret Bingley's The Unquiet dead for proof).

What I don't like is tedious medical soap operas that very very clumsily change genre in the last three chapters. 

That unfortunately means that, despite the rather eye-catching cover, this one is a definite miss.

The storyline is supposed to be about children who suddenly turn evil and kill those around them. What we get is the politics and love lives of the staff of the doctor tasked with solving the problem. 

An ex member of staff is sleeping with his receptionist whilst planning a hostile takeover of the clinic run by our noble doctor, who also has to deal with troubles at home and the fallout of a legal case that is referenced many many times. The receptionist is feeling guilty about cheating on her military vet husband who has serious PTSD. All this is going on instead of the story about children going mad and killing people.

Also in place of juicy shreddies, we get seemingly endless pages of medical detail on how to separate out viral particles, medical jargon and gobbledygook that all turns out to be pointless when the source of the plague of suddenly violent children is revealed.

There really isn't much to recommend this.  It's been in my TBR for probably 20 years and it really should have stayed there.  That Les Edwards cover really is the best thing about it. 

One of my biggest questions - the lead character is called Neils - is that pronounced Kneels or does it rhyme with Miles? I was switching pronunciation all the way through.

A lot of the time, these mass market paperbacks from the 80s are worth silly amounts of money.  This isn't one of those. If you see a copy going cheap online - ignore it.  It's not worth your time. 

File under "I read this so you don't have to".

Number 11 - Somebody Come and Play - Clare McNally

 

Yet another 80s mass market horror novel with a gloriously tacky cover. I have way too many of these. 

I was in the mood for something trashy and this certainly fits the bill.  There are four other books by Clare McNally listed in the front of this one. Three of those are the Ghost House trilogy so proudly proclaimed on the front cover. A quick clance at Amazon shows she was a busy little bee in the 80s with around a dozen books to her name.

I wonder if they're written as well as this one was.  If they are, they're probably not worth picking up unless the price is in pennies rather than pounds (which a few of them are - these are not books that have accumulated fiscal value).

If this one is a fair one to judge by, they don't have much literary value either.  I imagine that if I'd read this in my early teens I might have been impressed - but even by my late teens I was starting to read good horror authors and I would have let her fall by the wayside.

The basic story of this is a haunted house with a devil ghost child who lures people to violent deaths on a fairly regular basis. She uses an imaginary toy room to attract children to her for her own reasons that we discover very late on.

It's not very well written at all. None of the dialogue feels real. None of the characters are convincing. The denouement lacks drama or tension and it's generally not scary. There are numerous typos and sloppy editing on view throughout.

So why did I enjoy reading it?

I have no idea on this one. I know how bad it is. It's not so bad it's good.  It's just bad. But I had fun with it anyway. The storyline is just good enough to keep the interest going and there are character deaths I didn't see coming despite the overfamiliarity of nearly every aspect of the plot. 

Basically this is pure trash but fun pure trash. I'm glad I only paid £1.15 for it from whichever second hand place I found it in whenever I bought it (and that could be decades ago...). 

This is not an investment book. This is a switch off the brain and critical faculties book. It might be a good intro to horror for a younger reader. The prose has no gloss to it, which makes it a very easy read.

Maybe the nostalgia factor is a reason I liked it. I honestly don't know why.

Number 72 - The Unquiet Dead - Margaret Bingley

 

The second book in my October horror marathon.

Margaret Bingley is an entirely new name to me although she apparently published a dozen or so books back in the 80s.

I think I found this in the charity book section in my local Tesco.  With a cover like that I was hardly going to leave this one behind.  I can't help it, it's a weakness I have for 80s horror novels with tacky covers.

Sometimes, just sometimes, the inside is worth the time and effort needed to read a full novel.

The question is, was this one worth it?

I'm honestly not sure. Objectively I know this is a badly written novel.  There are grammar slips bad enough to drag me out of it time and time again. 

It's overblown and melodramatic. The characterisations are strictly cookie cutter.  There are plot holes big enough to drive a busload of devil children through - chief of which is why, if he'd had the childhood described, did one of the characters not have a body covered in scars - a point which the chief character would certainly have noticed. 

The prose, when it is grammatical is plain to the point of bland, and occasionally just plain bad. There isn't a believable conversation at any point in the entire book.

But...

I had fun with this book.  The story is overblown, but intriguing enough.  It does take a few unexpected turns and there's a vein of viciousness at the heart of it that actually captures what horror is supposed to do. The ending was actually pretty nightmarish in concept.

The story -

In the village of Lower Ditton, a pretty young mother is mysteriously killed and the police have no clues as to the identity of the murderer.  She's the third mysterious death in as many months. 

Her sister Amy moves in to help her widow look after the children. She starts to become suspicious that her nieces, along with the rest of the gang they hang around with have more to do with the outbreak of violence in the village than anyone would have predicted.  Can they possibly be guilty of all these horrendous crimes?  And why?  And how does Carlo, the impossibly handsome shop owner she falls in love with, tie into the whole affair?

It probably helps that devil children are a favourite cliched trope of mine. This has a nice take on the old theme that, whilst not original, feels quite fresh. I also like the fact that the characters take most of the book to believe in what's happening around them. Unlike the last novel I read where they accepted every silly plot turn on face value, our heroes in this book take a much more believable route of 'No that can't be true... you must be joking.... oh he's dead now as well... Oh bugger, it's all true...'

It's rare that I want to like a book less than I did, but I can't help it.  Godammit, for all the bad writing I actually enjoyed reading this.I will almost certainly buy more of her books if I see them, and hate myself for doing so. 

I can't give it a score out of 10 - it has a shifting score somewhere betweenn 4 and 7 depending on enjoyment or quality...