Moon By James Herbert

Moon
By James Herbert
1987 Onyx (New English Library)
Paperback, 316 pages

                James Herbert can be great or grating, depending on your mood. Of course, his Rat books are all top shelf, but he can sometimes get into some serious overwriting and drag down the proceedings. All that said, despite a horribly flawed main character, Moon was a very satisfying read for me, as both a horror and a mystery novel.

 

                Jonathan Childes left the mainland of England three years ago to start over on a small island off the coast. He was escaping his past and supposedly freeing his wife and child from being hassled. He had been involved with helping the police find a child murderer with his psychic abilities and the press had gotten to be too much for him, so he took off. On the island, he settles into a computer teaching job at some of the local colleges and now has a young pretty girlfriend. See what I mean about flawed character? Even though he tries to ignore his psychic gift, he starts getting violent visions again, like before. He witnesses gory, ruthless killings and he knows that he has tapped into another maniac’s mind. This doesn’t bode well for him, his job at an all-girl’s college or his relationship with his girlfriend and her rich father. As his visions become clearer, he hooks up with Detective Overoy on the mainland whom he’d helped on the previous case. It’s up to the two of them and the unbelieving local police to figure it out before more deaths occur.

 

                Childes is indeed childish and pretty hard to root for. (My wife quit on the book because she didn’t like him.) He is able to grow a lot during the course of the story, but he is still self-centered and a bit smarmy. But as he figures out his own tragic past you can kind of understand it. Unwanted “gift”, horrible upbringing and a high intellect make him pretty confused. If not for Herbert’s excellent way with words, I wonder if I would have stayed with the book. I am glad I did, though.

 

                This is a tightly scripted murder mystery that unravels at a quick pace, and it made me really turn the pages to find out just what the hell was going on. A number of thrilling set pieces (a raging fire is a squirming standout) keep the excitement level going. I do have a few quibbles besides Childes’ off-putting personality. The undercurrent of sexist ogling from some of the male characters towards the females, even the young girls, and the (POSSIBLE SPOILER) exposition from the killer when at last Childes is confronted (END POSSIBLE SPOILER), but nothing ever really pulled me out of the excellent storytelling.

 

                This was Herbert’s first book to achieve hardcover status in the US and it is evidently still in print. Playing out almost like an Italian giallo film, I recommend this one with reservations. I loved it but I can see where it wouldn’t please everyone. There are some interesting words about the future of computers, too, which were less common at the time.