Customer Reviews

The Secret of Crickley Hall

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

James Herbert's latest book, The Secret of Crickley Hall, uses an old and established formula - an ageing, deserted Gothic house that has been left to decay because of some tragic event whose circumstances have been clouded by the passage of time. The villagers in the neighbourhood all have their own theories about what happened but no one really knows the truth. However, when a family - in this case the Caleighs's move in, they find the house has been haunted by these past events, and is inhabited by ghosts with 60 years of repressed anger to vent.

Even though this is an old, established formula, it is also a very good one. Most horror writers use it at some point in their writing careers. (Herbert has used it at least once before with Haunted.)

An old Gothic mansion is a great starting point for a ghost story, with wind and rain crashing against the windowpanes, and strange noises and visions that have either ghostly explanations or, for the more cynical in the story, more rational explanations, such as tricks of light, and wind rattling through the floorboards. (Cynics are always the idiots in these stories: in this book the Dad of the family, Gabe Caleigh, insists that nothing is wrong, and there are no such things as ghosts, while everyone else - even you, the reader - is yelling at him just to get the family into the car and drive away!) But that's what we love about these stories - the atmosphere, and the stupidity of the people being haunted. (Personally, if I saw ghostly spectres dancing around my house or if my child insisted she had a new set of friends to play with who I couldn't see, I would be out of there!)

James Herbert's new book is a refreshing visit back to this old formula and fails to disappoint. It builds atmosphere, while recounting the tragic circumstances surrounding the happenings in the house, leaving you, the reader, to figure out the truth behind the mystery of what actually happened to the characters. This book has all the elements a good horror novel should. (An array of suspicious villagers, a psychic and a few covered up murders.)

In sum, The Secret of Crickley Hall is a good read - a must for Halloween, when the wind and rain are pelting against the windowpanes, and the only sound you can hear is the wind rustling through the floorboards... ...

This here's a haunted house novel. I read Herbert's "Once..." and thought it was kind of ok, and was willing to give him a shot at the classic haunted house story. The author has a very simple style of writing that reads like a young adult title. He repeats himself constantly, as if he's talking to a young child. Not sure if he's just padding the page count or what. As well as the simplistic style that repeats itself constantly, the characters are stock and thin, and the plot a yawner. This one adds nothing to the haunted house genre. Try Jackson's "The Haunting of Hill House" or Matheson's "Hell House" instead.

Out in Hollow Bay, a gloomy house (in fact, the entire neighborhood is pretty grim) is rented by a family who have recently suffered the tragedy of a missing son. But there's something wrong with this rental property. The dog hates the place. A cellar door won't stay shut. The tree swing has ideas of its own. Closets make an unearthly racket. Teeny disembodied footsteps are heard. And a naked man walks down the stairs with a wooden switch. Switch-thwack.

I'm a big fan of James Herbert and this is a departure from his usual fare. Its an old-fashioned (in a good way) ghost story. Complete with a 70-year-old caretaker who supplies the back story of this former "orphanage," the psychic who's afraid of readings, a spook hunter, and spectacularly stormy weather (Herbert's setup of atmos can't be beat).

There's some surprising twists and tragic turns (especially where the orphans and the lost son is concerned.) And unusual too, is the treatment of hauntings which are not grounded. (Ghosts following people . . . away from the place of the original haunting). I won't reveal anymore other than I gave it a 4 because the father, Gabe, took more than half the book to believe his house was haunted!! Engineers, what to do???

This is the perfect book to curl up in an armchair with your sharp-eyed dog in your lap. And better yet, if the branch of that birch or oak is banging on the glass panes of your window and and the rain and wind is beginning to sound like soft whispers . . . eek

This is the first James Herbert book I have ever read despite having been a horror fan for many years, and to be honest I was extremely unimpressed. The story revolves around the ancient manor of Crickley Hall set deep in the Devonshire countryside and a young family escaping from the anniversary of their son's disappearance who come to inhabit it for a short break. Then things go bump in the night, and ghostly events begin to unfold as the family struggles to understand what is happening, and begins uncovering the house's disturbing history and their place in it's future. Despite being somewhat constrained by the trite nature of it's genre (the haunted house story), the opening and first few chapters really exhibit some potential, however as the pages turn, Herbert basically ends up giving us nothing more than a rather bland and obvious tale, populated with a small host of matter-of-fact characters that fails to engage.

As a first time reader it was also interesting to experience Herbert's writing style as well, which to be honest was as unimpressive as the tale he was telling. This is Britains best horror novellist?? Really?!? I found his whole style to be extremely repititious, whether it's the use of language as he describes people or places, or the fact that he feels the neccessity to frequently remind us of bits of story and events that happened as little as two pages previously. I almost felt in places like I was reading a book aimed at a young adult audience, as if he actually mistrusted the reader to 'get' his plot points, or perhaps that he had decided to write a 600 page novel and could not deviate - kind of like Little Britain's Dame Sally Markham 'How many pages Miss Grace?? - Oh publish...'

A lot of Herbert's style is probably what detracts from the novel, he goes into too much detail where it's really uneccessary, and not enough when it really IS neccessary. A good example of this is the character of Lili, versus the ghostly events themselves. Herbert spends probably a combined sum of some 40 odd pages dedicated to Lili's back story. To me as reader, a back story is only neccessary in so much as it maps the character out, and that we understand their relationship to the unfolding tale. We don't need to know about what happened to her when she was 12, how she became psychic, how she was bullied at school, what she eat for breakfast etc. All that we really need to know beyond her place in the story is the experience she had that makes her reticent to be involved with the Hall. This large scale meandering by Herbert really stifles the book's pace in many places, especially (and most criminally) towards the end and to be fair you can skim read this pointless waffle and be no worse off for it - perhaps a note for your editor Mr Herbert..? Adverseley, The moments of 'horror', the nights spent at the house are delivered very basicically and are almost over as soon as they've began, there is little tension and atmosphere - it is all pretty matter of fact, and as a result is neither scary nor horrifying.

So perhaps the wrong introduction to James Herbert, or maybe this is an apt appraisal for most of his work, in which case I would definitely stick to Clive Barker if you want to fly the flag for British horror.

This is my first James Herbert book, and if it's one of his worst I do apologize, but I very much doubt I'll be picking up another. I'm not sure what I was expecting - something more along the lines of Stephen King's work, perhaps - but anyway:

The first thing that struck me about 'The Secret of Crickley Hall' is that, for a so-called page-turner, Herbert's writing is unbelievably turgid and repetitive. There's too much pointless description, too much stilted and unrealistic dialogue, too much everything. At times I was left wondering if the author himself knew what on earth he was talking about.

As far as the plot goes, it's your average horror fare: a family and their dog moving into a creepy old house and resolving to stay there despite many bizarre happenings and lots of suspicious, meaningful looks from the local villagers. You know the score. The cast consists of your average horror stock characters with very little sparkle, all of them talking like automatons and at times behaving in an inhumanly dense fashion. It makes it hard to feel any fear or sympathy for them as the book drags on and on.

Overall this could have been a decent book - not a great or original one, but a decent one - if not for Herbert's amateurish, inelegant prose. Any suspense or scare factor that the book might have had can't really be appreciated when you're dozing off in mid-sentence.

Not recommended, as much as I tried to enjoy it. How Herbert can be a bestseller with writing like this is quite beyond me.

The title suggested a sinister old house with a ghostly secret and the story doesn't disappoint.

At 600 pages it's well worth it's money and Herbert builds up the tension nicely so that I had to read nearly all the last three hundred pages in one sitting!

For fans of James Herbert's earlier books, this isn't in the same gory style...however I like both styles, and it shows the authors talent to be able to write a thrilling book that doesn't have to rely on the gory side of horror to be thrilling.

I liked the characters (although I did find the husband, Gabe, a bit two dimensional) and some of the 'haunting' descriptions certainly had an effect on my vivid imagination.

I hadn't read a James Herbert book in years, not for any particular reason, it's just that none of his recent efforts had particularly appealed to me. However I heard such great things about The Secret of Crickley Hall that I decided to revisit one of my old favourite writers. Well, Herbert is back on form and how!!! This scared the bejesus out of me. It's dead creepy, the tension mounts right from the start and it never gets boring. In literary terms Herbert is up with Stephen King as the Godfather of horror, so it's a breath of fresh air to see him showing the new kids on the block just how an old master does it. It may not have the modern day MTV thrills of something like The Ruins, but if you like your horror the good old fashioned way, and written by someone of great literary ability who knows a few of the new tricks to add to his old classics then The Secret of Crickley Hall should be right up your street. Whisper it quietly but this might just be the best horror of the year....

When I was a teenager, a feature film was 90-100 minutes long and an epic novel was about 300-400 pages long. Crickley Hall is a really great story and has the right level of spookiness and tension. The end of each chapter contains a snippet that wants you to read on and find out what happens next. Reading this book during the torrential rain and floods that were suffered by most of Britain in the Summer of 2007, made the story even more poignant. However, this book is at least 200 pages too long. Herbert could easily have reached the same conclusions in about 350 pages (actual length is 633 pages) and it would have been an excellent book. As it is, you will need serious stamina or a lot of time on your hands to embark on this read.

SPOILER ALERT!!!!! SPOILER ALERT!!!!!

I must take strong exception to several of the reviews here. But I want to begin by saying that I'm no die-hard fan of James Herbert. I discovered Herbert's novels when I was living in Bangkok, Thailand, where his books are quite apt to turn up. I've read perhaps four of his other novels, a couple of which I felt were quite good, and a couple that were just "okay". And over the years I've read a number of "ghost stories" by other authors. And, quite frankly, I find most ghost story novels to be quite disappointing. They are typically filled with episodes that have become quite cliched. The more serious flaw in many ghost story-novels is a lack of sophisticated writing that would elevate the stories above the mundane.

This, however, is the best ghost story-novel I have ever read. Yes, there are cliches here, but I'm beginning to wonder how many variations on ghostly apparitions there can really be. But, even where there are those cliches, and even when you sort of begin to know which way the plot is moving, the quality of the writing here is so good that it makes it an enjoyable read. In fact, this is a rather long novel -- the edition I have is over 600 pages. And as a result, Herbert fleshes out (pun intended) the characters of the ghosts and living humans better than most authors tend to do. And, the detail he gives to the historical plot is done quite well: you get parts of the story throughout the first two-thirds of the novel, and then he begins to tell what led to the haunting in detail. This keeps you guessing for a long while, while giving you enough to keep the plot moving intelligently...which is about as far as most ghost story novelists take you. But then Herbert fills in the missing pieces of the incidents which led up the haunting. It's really quite cleverly done, and also quite a tragic story -- orphans who have been tortured by an evil guardian, then murdered, but not free to "move on"...all wrapped up in a WWII context. And, perhaps it's the inclusion of an American husband, but this novel doesn't seem as "British" as most of Herbert's novels, so it's more comfortable to American readers.

I highly recommend this book if you are into supernatural novels. Excellent read, right up there with the best.

There's a Stephen King novel called "Bag of Bones", in which the Protagonist (a writer), after the untimely death of his pregnant wife, suffers an extreme case of writer's block. To offset the impending loss of his job he publishes two of his earlier, unseen manuscripts, that have been lying in a safe, retained for just such an emergency.

That was fiction. But one can't help feeling that, in publishing "The Secret of Crickley Hall", James Herbert is doing just the same thing as King's hero: this is a novel that surely could not belong to "Britain's No. 1 bestselling writer of chiller fiction". Could it?

The Caleigh family, supernaturally-sensitive family dog in tow, move into a haunted mansion, and begin to uncover the tragic secrets of Crickley Hall's murky past.

Now, read this next bit carefully: The Caleighs (a family with a dog), who have a dog (who is sensitive to ghosts), move into Crickley Hall (a spooky, scary sort of manor, now home to the Caleighs, a family with a dog who is sensitive to ghosts), a Manor that is both spooky and scary (called Crickley Hall).

This is the most basic flaw of Herbert's novel: the repetition of basic plot elements occurs at such a frequent rate that after a few short chapters we wonder how he's managing to forward the (basic) plot at all. Also, this repetition becomes tiresome after a while: we KNOW that Lili Peel's a psychic, we were introduced to her as one, we don't need to be told again two pages later. We are WELL AWARE that the Caleigh's little boy is missing and that father Gabe is emotionally detached from that fact: that point was laboured plenty already, why keep doing it? Things go on in this manner for almost all of the novel, and the promising characterisation and relatively interesting premise of the Manor and its history are left, sadly and wastefully, unexplored.

There's not a lot one can do with a Haunted House premise anymore - personally, I think Shirley Jackson ("The Haunting Of Hill House") and Steven King ("The Shining") said all that can be said on the subject - but that's not to say "The Secret of Crickley Hall" has a boring premise, or is pointless in its subject matter - quite the contrary. There's a definite sense of a terrific novel lying underneath the frankly amateurish quality of the prose and the absent characterisation - Herbert obviously has talent (50 million copies worldwide can't mean that one million stupid people bought fifty of his books apiece), and in places, there's plenty of atmosphere and tension - the scenes where Serafina and her brother break into Crickley Hall immediately spring to mind, as well as the initial supernatural goings-on that befall the Caleighs - but sadly, and confusingly, Herbert's good bits seem to be accidental - they are few and far between, and it's in the mundane, irritating in-between that the essence of a great novel is totally lost.

Avoid. Like another reviewer said, Clive Barker's where it's at, as far as contemporary British horror fiction is concerned.