Sue Gates, Gerry's lover and fellow journalistĮach chapter begins with a quote from a famous literary work, often a fairy tale or poem dealing with folklore, like the Grimms' canon, Peter Pan, and Hans Christian Andersen.Monsignor Delgard, paranormal investigator for the Catholic church.Molly Pagett, Alice's mother, a devout Catholic.Joseph's priest, Father Hagan, however, senses spiritual danger. After Alice performs several ' miracle' cures in front of the tree, and claims to have seen the Virgin Mary there, it starts to be treated as a Lourdes-like shrine by Catholic pilgrims. She is found by reporter Gerry Fenn and, when news of her cure spreads, their village becomes ablaze with publicity. The story is about Alice Pagett, a deaf-mute child who is cured one night when she runs to an oak tree behind St. It doesn’t even do anything that James Herbert hasn’t done before, but that doesn’t necessarily make it a bad book.Shrine is a 1983 horror novel by English writer James Herbert, exploring themes of religious ecstasy, mass hysteria, demonic possession, faith healing and Catholicism. If you like those kind of stories, you’re probably going to enjoy this book, even though it doesn’t really do anything that hasn’t been done before. Obviously it’s not quite what I do, but I am a career writer who makes music as a hobby, and so there was a nice little bit of synchronicity there.īut mostly, it’s just a bog standard haunted house story, with all that that entails.

I also liked that the main characters worked in creative fields, with the guy finding work as a session musician and the woman illustrating children’s books.

It also takes a while for the characters to now that there’s definitely something wrong, which helps us to avoid one of those awkward situations where we, as the reader, want to shout at the characters to get the hell out of there. There’s none of the gore that I find Herbert excels at, and it instead focuses on establishing a slow but steady sense of dread and paranoia. It’s also pretty cool how it uses animals to tell the story, a bit like an old nursery rhyme or fairy tale. It actually takes all of the familiar tropes that we’re used to from this kind of thing and plays them up to dramatic effect, like someone telling a joke with a deadpan expression and the faintest hint of a wry smile. I don’t think that there was anything particularly groundbreaking here, but Herbert is a talented horror writer who’s already proved himself at this kind of thing through The Secrets of Crickley Hall and the rest of his work. That’s pretty much all you need to know about it. This book is basically a haunted house story, except that the house in question is a cottage and instead of it being haunted by a ghost, it’s haunted by the memory of magic.

James herbert domain review