Necroscope - Brian Lumley > Reviews > Clumsy prose winds around an imaginative tale

Author's product rating:   

Would you listen to it again?	Yes
Story	Satisfactory
Characters	Satisfactory
Listenability	Pretty compelling but not addictive
How does it compare to audio works by the same author?	Quite good

Advantages:	A splendid thriller, and the most innovative take on vampires thatyou'll read .  .  .
Disadvantages:	Clumsy, unsubtle prose .  .  .

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

If you've been in a bookstore's horror section in the past fourteen or so years, at least in Britain, then you've almost certainly seen 'Necroscope' sitting on the shelves there, George Underwood's strikingly grotesque cover leaping out at you. 'Necroscope' is the book that spawned… well, lots more books, basically. A slew of sequels with more longevity than most movie franchises. So is it that good?

Harry Keogh is the necroscope in question, a communicator with the dead, a man who offers those dead someone to talk to, to pass the years with. Harry has no choice. The dead are chatty, and he's the only one who can listen. Russia too has her speaker to the dead, a necromancer who violates corpses and literally tears their secrets from them. Boris Dragosani is his name, and he works for an ultra-secret paranormal agency behind the Iron Curtain. When Harry is recruited by the British equivalent of this organisation, he discovers that Boris has been researching more than the secrets of the dead. Boris has found a vampire, buried in a Romanian mausoleum, and plans to unleash its power to gain control of the world.

Essentially a Cold War secret agent thriller, except that the agents have strange powers and gifts, 'Necroscope' works extremely well for what it is. Interestingly, Lumley seem far more interested in Dragosani than Harry himself, spending a large portion of the novel with him. After Dragosani's back-story, and his connection to the vampire, is fully investigated, there doesn't seem to be a lot of time left for poor Harry, an otherwise engaging hero. In some ways this is a problem, for Harry seems to make great advances in his understanding of situations while the novel is focused elsewhere, and this can be a little jarring.

Possibly more interesting than either character is Lumley's unique, and somewhat dazzling, take on vampires. Feeling in no way constrained by popular tradition, Lumley recreates the creature into a true terror, an unpredictable monster that we can no longer be certain we understand, following rules twisted out of all recognition. It's fine work, and leaves us off-balance, and all the more prone to fear for that.

Imaginative storytelling then, but hardly great writing. Blunt and unsubtle, with an over-reliance on exclamation marks that makes you feel as though you're being physically battered by the author's enthusiasm for his own tale, it can be glaringly distracting at times. Get past it though, and you have a fine Cold War chiller, featuring some deft imaginative twists on your expectations. And yes - since reading it I have bought the second novel. There is no escape.