The Holy Terrors - Simon R. Green
I received an advanced reading copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley.
Have you ever read a book that had you convinced someone wrote it explicitly to annoy you personally? Simon R. Green's The Holy Terrors is that book for me. Spoilers ahead.
The pitch had me hooked immediately. A cast of Z-list celebrities enter a haunted house to film a reality TV show only to find that it's really haunted and everyone is about to die? Sign me up! Here's the blurb that grabbed my attention and convinced me to give this a go:
Six people locked in a haunted hall . . . Cameras watching their every move . . . And then someone dies . . . This first in a spine-tingling new paranormal mystery series from New York Times bestselling British fantasy author Simon R. Green will make you doubt your judgement – and believe in ghosts!
Welcome to Spooky Time, the hit TV ghost-hunting show where the horror is scripted . . . and the ratings are declining rapidly. What better way to up the stakes – and boost the viewership – than by locking a select group of Z-list celebrities up for the night in The Most Haunted Hall in England ™ and live-streaming the ‘terrifying’ results?
Soon Alistair, a newly appointed Bishop, actress Diana, medium Leslie, comedian Toby and celebrity chef Indira are trapped inside Stonehaven town hall, along with June, the host and producer of the show. The group tries to settle in and put on a good show, but then strange things start happening in their hall of horrors.
What is it about this place – and why is the TV crew outside not responding? Are they even on air? Logical Alistair and intuitive Diana attempt to keep the group’s fears at bay and rationalize the odd events, but there are things that just can’t be explained within reason . . . Can the pair stop a cold-blooded would-be killer – even if it’s come from beyond the grave?
This locked-room mystery with a paranormal twist is classic Simon R. Green, featuring his trademark humour and imagination, irresistible characters, and thoroughly entertaining plotting.
I went into this expecting a tense chiller that evoked horror classics like Ghost Watch and The Borderlands and poked fun at shows like Most Haunted. I haven't been more disappointed by something failing to deliver on its promise in a very long time.
It does start strong, introducing us to a pair of main characters who I felt like I could get along with. Alistair is a young bishop who's a hit on TV, and Diana is an aging actress trying to stay relevant and maintain her career. Their initial meeting is fun and we're given a strong sense of who these characters are, and I was optimistic. There's also some fun cynicism aimed at the premise of the show - "Am I to take it you don't much care for the programme?" Alistair asks early on, to which Diana replies "Of course not. I've seen it." - and I was looking forward to seeing it subverted once the action starts and the real haunting begins.
Unfortunately it's all downhill from there. The rest of the characters are flat and one dimensional - Toby, a washed-up comedian who responds to everything with one-liners that aren't even worthy of a child; Leslie, a TV medium and co-host of the show who we never really learn anything about; June, the jaded host of the show who can't decide whether the guests should act scared or not and spends all her time insulting them and the audience; and Indira, the winner of a TV cooking show who turns up with shopping bags full of food and that's her entire gimmick. We never learn anything about any of them, even though some of them (comedian and cook, plus Alistair and Diana) develop incredibly deep relationships very quickly. After Indira dies Toby is absolutely distraught, crying over her body and talking about how she was the daughter he never had. We never, ever see any of this relationship develop on the page. Perhaps there's an argument to be made that Green was making a commentary about the way contestants on reality TV forge quick, fake relationships in order to try and avoid getting voted off, but typing that and expecting anybody to take me seriously feels like an incredible stretch. If that's what the aim was here then it doesn't go anywhere far enough to deliver on it.
The characters may be empty and boring but that, unfortunately, isn't the novel's biggest sin. The main problem here is that we're never given any reason to believe anything that we're seeing. Two things contribute to this.
The first is the problem of June, the host. From the moment the group steps through the doors of the allegedly haunted house she spends all her time undermining any attempt to make the haunting feel real. She constantly talks about everything being fake, about how her tech team have "been all over this house" fitting it with hidden cameras and wires and switches to dim the lights. (Having seen The Borderlands I assumed this also meant they had hidden speakers inside the walls to make noises, which turned out to be an accurate guess.) She says all this despite the show being broadcast live, telling us that "Derek [the director] will make sure the nice people at home only see and hear what we want them to. He can fade the mikes in and out, and use camera angles to force the audience’s attention to where we want it. We also have a built-in delay, to give him plenty of time to make up his mind."
Unfortunately, we as readers act as the stand-in for the live audience here. The audience may not be able to hear June talking about how it's all fake and how the people who watch these shows are idiots, but we can. Every time she opens her mouth we're reminded that none of this is real, and the contempt with which June treats both her audience and her guests - and thus, us - oozes off the page and poisons the reading experience.
June is also entirely inconsistent in her demands on the guests (and, through them, on us as readers). She wants them to act like they're scared any time something weird happens, but the second they seem to believe that what they're experiencing is real she rolls her eyes and tells them to behave themselves. It's deeply frustrating.
The second issue is that the events are presented to us through Alistair's point of view. We see what he sees and feel what he feels. This means that at some point he has to start believing that what's going on is real, otherwise we can't believe that it's real. The problem lies in the fact that he enters the house believing it's all an act and is never given any reason to doubt it. Green does seem to try to wrestle with this, and we see brief moments of Alistair wanting to believe what's happening is real, but we never tip over into him being actually scared and actually convinced there's something supernatural at play here.
This is also the reason why the ending completely fails to land. After discovering what June has been doing and why people are dying, Alistair somehow convinces her that there are, in fact, supernatural things happening in the house. Her response to this is an irrational, terrified attempt to flee that ultimately ends in her downfall. But there's no reason June would ever believe any of this, because she knows that the whole thing is fake and that she's been in control of it all the entire time. Why would she ever, for a single second, believe that Alistair can summon demons to hurt her? It makes absolutely no sense.
The final insult to the intelligence of the readers comes in the dying words of the novel, as Alistair and Diana stumble out of the house and dub themselves "The Holy Terrors". Does this name call back to anything that happened in the novel? No, absolutely not. Does it feel like they do this purely because Green intends this book to be the first in a series, and this is the name of the series? Yes. It's a final act of cynicism that puts a capstone on a thoroughly miserable reading experience. I feel insulted as a reader, as a fan of horror, and as a fan of locked-room mysteries.
The Verdict: Avoid this.