Customer Reviews

The Inheritor

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

I love this book and can't believe the bad reviews it has received here. This is a modern gothic/dark romance, and perhaps not for everyone. If you like Barbara Michaels modern gothics, or Mary Stewart's Thornyhold, you'll like this. MZB builds on her knowledge of San Francisco, and puts a wealth of detail into the book, that makes you see and hear and feel the setting with the characters. I could totally relate to the main character, on her own, buying a house with a questionable history, and struggling to deal with a supernatural world thrust upon her unwanted. This is a book to curl up and relax with, and feel a little chilled at reading. MZB also considered this book at least equal to anything she'd written. It is also part of a series that begins, I believe, with Dark Satanic, and has several novels after it, but this stands well on its own.

I generally adore MZBs work, and really enjoyed the later books in the so-called "Light" series, but I find it completely impossible to get into a book where the none of the main characters are likable, and are only very remotely even believable.

Leslie, the protagonist, starts out as a closed-minded snob, who is fairly rude to everyone she meets, despite being a therapist. She breaks up with her fiance because he's a chauvinistic pig, only to start dating a man she knows has raped, killed and tortured for purely selfish gain. On the scale of good and evil, I'll take the pig, thanks. Of the main supporting characters, one is a mean-spirited spoiled rotten brat (the younger sister), and the other is the murderer/rapist.

Some of the book is nonsensical, some is self-contradictory. But mostly all in all it's a boring drawn-out plot with annoying people doing stupid, annoying, and evil things. And the end? It makes me want to puke. Definitely not her best work, and definitely a disappointment.

As a story, I found it reasonably entertaining. However, I couldn't decide if it was meant to be a thriller or a fantasy. It didn't seem to fit in either category. The fantasy setting that worked beautifully in Mists of Avalon doesn't gel with the modern-day characters and storyline. I found it hard to believe that they were both written by the same writer.

I also found it mildly annoying that all the characters just seemed to relate to each other as a very neat jigsaw puzzle ... it was too pat. Then there were parts of the story that just sort of hung in mid-air, i.e. the patient's poltergeist activities were explained away, but what about the main character's? And the old boyfriend just faded away into the background without so much as a squeak.

The author's tone was also a bit too preachy for my taste. I must admit it was rather difficult for me to finish it, but I did it anyway. If you're really stuck for a book to read on a rainy day, then this is ok. Otherwise, I would suggest you to give it a miss.

I must disagree with the other reviewers, I think this book was captivating. It is a surprise if you are used to only her books of swords and sorcery, to suddenly read her descriptions of modern elements. Never the less, this book shows remarkable style for her first foray into uncharted waters. Kudos for Mrs. Bradley!

The Inheritor is an early attempt at occult fiction of the type that came to fruition in books such as Ghostlight. All things considered, this is a good idea for a novel. The problem is, it needs about a hundred extra pages to resolve all the character development and side plots that Bradley builds up. The story centers around a psychotherapist named Leslie and her sister, Emily. Leslie has been experiencing psychic phenomena before the story begins, and "The Unseen" seems to be tracking her down. She buys a house in San Francisco (the book was written in 1984, before the idea of a normal person buying a house in San Francisco would have been the most fantastic element of the story) which happens to be a vortex of occult power. The place was owned by another psychologist, an occultist named Alison Musgrave who died without training a succsessor. The reason she didn't train a successor is because the person who would have filled that role, a musician named Simon, had a nasty habit of sacrificing cats and junkies in the garage. Leslie is, of course, sleeping with Simon. These could have been the ingredients of a very good book, if Bradley were to follow through. However, so much is left unfinished that the novel feels like a Persian carpet with a thousand frayed ends.

I enjoyed The Inheritor, I only wish Bradley had seen fit to finish it before sending it to her publisher.

It was difficult for me to believe that MZB had really written this book. I found it slow and full of irrelevant details. I also did not care about any of the characters. I managed to finish it, but only because I have loved some of her other work and kept hoping she could save this one. Alas, I felt very disappointed when I finished.

I discovered MZB with the Darkover novels. While in college, I went through our backsmoker library (a dorm area for smokers where people left second-hand books) and read every single Darkover book that I could get my hands on. I also admired The Mists of Avalon, even though I occasionally make nasty remarks about it. The nasty remarks are more about the book's fans and imitators than they actually are about the book itself.

Also, through a series of circumstances which I may explain sometime. I wrote Bradley one of my only fan letters ever as a very young woman. Not only did she answer, but she included her personal telephone number in case I had any other questions. I can't tell you how much that meant to me. As a result, I feel a kind of residual loyalty to her and everything that she wrote.

But, there's no getting around it. The Inheritor is bad. It is really bad. I wanted to read something from the Colin McLaren series and this is what I picked up but oh-- now I'm dreading the thought that I have another one of these books sitting in the to-be-read pile waiting for me.

To be fair, defenders of the book say that its detractors just aren't romance fans. And that is true. I am not a romance fan. Still, Simon is way past the dangerous-hero-with-a-troubled-past. He has tortured and killed for fun and profit. And somehow we're supposed to believe in a hero who love him anyhow. It is so terribly far past anything that I could stomach or admire that Leslie becomes entirely unsympathetic. It isn't awful to have an unsympathetic main character. However, the book is written so that you can pretty clearly tell that she was supposed to be sympathetic. It troubled me.

In general, I didn't like the characters very much.

The plot also felt stiff and awkward. This is unusual for Bradley, and makes me sad. It had its lovely moments. There were some little twists and turns around the way that the ghost story plays out that struck me as very nice. It kept me reading despite my overall problems with the novel. In the hands of a lesser writer, I would have put this down very quickly.

In short, not something that I would recommend unless you already like Bradley so much that your opinion cannot be too negatively influenced.

I have been a long time admirer of the Mists of Avalon, so when I came across this novel in a used bookstore, I was anxious to give it a try. What a HUGE disappointment!! The characters were so unbelievable and the dialog cringe-worthy. What teenager do you know sounds like Scarlet O'Hara? "Why, there's an herb garden in the backyard! Why, it's lovely!" **rolls eyes**. Like other reviewers I found the characters unlikeable as well. Too bad, I really wanted to like this one!

Hated it. Zimmer's style, so wonderful in "Mists of Avalon" does not translate to the modern world at all. The story was weak, and there wasn't one character I liked. Emily, in particular, I wanted to throttle. She was an eighteen-year-old who acted like a six-year-old, did nothing but whine, sulk and eat. I kept scribbling disgusted comments in the margins. But to be fair, I did finish the book. And if the characters drove me to respond, I guess that says something...

I was really bored by this book; so bored, that I stopped reading it half way through. Being a former opera singer, married to a pianist/conductor, I found the music references interesting but it took so long to get to some action in the tale, that I gave up. Overall, the book didn't offer any new plot twists; in fact, ghost stories of this type are so common that I felt that I had already "seen the film." Loved "Mists of Avalon" but was bored by the sequels. Too bad she stopped writing scifi.