PROPHECY by Peter James

(Signet 7th October 1993 pp368 £4.99)

After a historical episode of Cavaliers and Roundheads involving a red-hot poker, all of the gore in Peter James' novel explodes in the present day, but, as heroine Francesca Monsanto discovers, it's all her fault, because a few years ago she let her student mates hold a ouija session in the basement of her mum's cafe, and as we all know oiuja sessions let out demons which can be expelled only by angelic exorcists at great risk to themselves. If there is an exorcist, mustn't there be a child?

Frannie met Oliver Halkin and his son, Edward, on a train to the north, and then re-met through a small ad in Private Eye. Down on his stately mansion, Edward does unpleasant things to dogs, beetles and his cousin, all through the unwilling use of his mind. Can Edward be saved, do Frannie and Oliver have a future, what actually happened in that basement, where have all the students gone, and what did Edward consume along with his chocolate milkshake in that coffee bar? You won't really care. Halkin is an actuary (though the book calls him a mathematician and a statistician), who believes in the numerical laws of probability. In contrast there is the inheritance of horror. What there is not in this book is any sort of prophecy. The title is supposed to be ironic, but it isn't, and the gore will not take you by surprised.

TWILIGHT by Peter James

TWILIGHT consists of two lives brought together by a third person's death. Harvey Swire was knocked off his bicycle when at public school, and was so close to death, the ghost of his mother had to be very firm about his going back. Harvey grew up to be a successful anaethetist, and to either murder or not some of his patients so that he could experiment with their near-death experiences.

The book begins with the exhumation of one of Dr Swire's ex-patients, and journalist, Kate Hemingway's increasing suspicion that there has been a cover-up of a premature burial. Later on, Kate herself is involved in an accident, and is able to rise above her body and watch Swire, by chance on duty in casualty at the time, as he swaps medicines and injects her with something nasty. As an unconscious extra-corporeal, however, does not make a convincing witness in court, Swire has to be stopped in other ways, and plucky Kate nails the villain and scoops the story.

TWILIGHT is a very mainstream thriller, with little horror attached to it (although I haven't mentioned the worse thing about the premature burial). However, Peter James has very slickly hidden the inconsistency of his story - Swire has his near-death experience, reaches the entrance to heaven, and returns to earth to become a psychopath; Kate Hemingway, has her experience, solves the muder mystery and saves a little bit of the world. Swire's medical experiments scientifically induce very exact conditions - why should a glimpse of heaven have the opposite effect?

I did read to the end, though.

GIDEON by Stephen Laws

(New English Library 1993 342 pages £15.99)

In a city not far from Whitby (well, Newcastle is nearer than London) a vampire will draw three respectable women into degrading sexuality, ruining their home lives, and leading them close to suicide, before being shot by the united women. Unfortunately, this scene which begins the book, is only one of their troubles, and not the last.

This vampire is not as the others: seven of its relatives are on their way to join and fight for the succession, for this is a phoenix-like creature of which only one can exist at any one time. Whenever two of these potential heirs meet they fight to the death in a sort of knock-out cup. The places they meet include a beach-hut on the Nortumbrian coast, and a mall that is either the Arndale in Newcastle centre or the Metro Centre out at Gateshead. Luckily, Mr Van Buren, the vampire hunter, is there to blow away the bloodsuckers with his sawn-off shot-gun.

A name like that gives away the game of why this is not a great horror novel: while claiming to be different its origins are pretty obvious. If Dracula was hunted by Van Helsing, the last name for a vampire hunter is anything beginning "Van". Giving the vampire the name of an angel does not do enough to reverse the situation.

The review copy comes with PR material in which Stephen Laws calls for "optimistic horror" - "a feeling that the supernatural threat has been defeated and the human spirit triumphed". That is something I did not feel at the end of this book, and I reckon he has missed two important elements. The vampire is defeated by another character I have not otherwise mentioned, and the women are left with ruined lives. And secondly, human solidarity is of no use, the women's working together does nothing to improve their situation. I don't say that the book is anti-women and anti-social, but it is one reading.

Lastly, something Gideon has in common with a lot of modern horror is a reference to the rotten social conditions in which many people live, but only as an intensifier to characters' handicaps, not as a cause of horror and despair in themselves. Somehow it seems to miss the point.

THE PRESENCE by David B. Silva

(Headline 1994 pp472, £5.99)

The sadness of children is immense, and is not affected by the slightness of its cause. This is not an original idea, but people still try to describe and account for it. With two or three children to feel sad, guilty and desiring of expiation there would be plenty of material for a novel. That's what David B. Silva has done. Why he had to look for telepathy and an inhuman horror as well, I'm not sure: the lives of the kids he describes are bad enough even before The Presence starts to make itself felt.

Allie Turner has been deserted and left with two boys in a town on the California/Oregon border, where the shops have followed the mill in closing. One son and two others go into the mill basement, where one boy dies and Sean, before he is badly burned, sees his missing father walk through the fire with his head covered in green slime. From his hospital bed he sets his brother off on a hunt through the green slime covered animal life of the country.

Fortunately for Darrell, the local fire investigator is a little concerned, too, and in the final graveyard they discover that the source of the slime is literally a colour out of space.

Anyone who knew the town of Kingston Mills would love the songs of Morrissey, and they would sing "This is the town they forgot to close down". The horror of a place like it is in the town itself and the people who have to live there, not in its strange visitors. In the end I felt that David B. Silva confused horror with despair. It is horrible to have to go on, not to have the chance to struggle.

THOR by Wayne Smith

(New English Library 1994 pp242 £4.99)

Thor is a German Shepherd dog living with Mom and Dad and their three kids out in the 'burbs, enjoying occasional trips to the beach, and runs with Mom every morning. Those mornings Thor likes to run down and trap rabbits, which the rabbits do not enjoy mainly because they do not understand that Thor is not a hunter and does not intend to eat them.

The rest of the family are Thor's pack, and their protection is his overriding concern. Big as he is, though, Thor is not the leader of the pack, that position is shared by the Mating Pair, with the male dominant - lucky old Mom and Dad. And Dad is a clever lawyer when he leaves the pack and goes to work.

However, into this world of anthropology and cynosophy (if that is the doggy equivalent of man-watching), comes the world of lycanthropy. Mom's brother Ted has been away, in Nepal, and is a little distant when he returns, not wanting to see the pack, nor have them go visit him in the hills where torn apart corpses lie littering the undergrowth. Ted knows he has a problem and tries to chain himself at night to stop his turning into a werewolf and going out on the hunt, but somehow he doesn't put on the handcuffs so well.

Thor's reaction to the threat of a man who is not what he seems could be misunderstood and the plot demands that it is.

THOR is mostly a very weak horror, with the added interest of animal behaviour, but ethology, I suppose, is a science.

SINEATER Elizabeth Massie

(Pan, 1992, 332 pages £4.99)

I feel sure that I've come across the idea of a sin eater (I'll write it as two words) before, but I do not have a dictionarary of mythology to check. I know that the idea that sin is unique and transmissible like a relay runner's baton is old one because it goes back to the Biblical scapegoat. Elizabeth Massie's sin eating has re-developed in a fundamentalist church in the backwoods of West Virginia, where the communicants believe that a final meal placed on the body of a corpse which is then eaten by one man who is otherwise an outcaste can take away the sin and allow the sin-free soul entry to Heaven. An alternate church has grown up in the same town, with some strange beliefs about blood. The followers of the two churches hate each other - like sin. Each one they declare is one or more parts of Satan.

The sin eater's job is not hereditary, but the ostracism associated with it (no one looks at or speaks to the sin eater, and he believes that they should not) means that his family does not find much social favour. Avery Barker, the sin eater of the title, is the first to be married and his son Joel does not get much joy from the matter. Joel's friend, Burke, is staying with his aunt who is the mainstay of the rival church, but Joel cannot trust Burke's friendship.

Something is in the air, a little girl has disappeared and Joel has never seen his father. Someone is planting bombs. There is much talk of evil. Before the book ends Joel has decided to take his father's job.

And now for something completely different. Sineater is a study, in fictional form, of the economic and social background to religious belief among a socially deprived group of whites in Virginia, U.S.A. Centered on the life of adolescent Joel Barker it particularly indicts the lack of expenditure on education and roads in the southern states. More particularly, Route 536.

In the end that is what the horror of Sineater is. Education is the answer to supernaturalism.