Book Review: "Sam: A Horror Novel" by Iain Rob Wright

“May the road rise up to meet you. May the wind be always at your back. May the sun shine warm upon your face; the rains fall soft upon your fields and until we meet again, may God hold you in the palm of His hand.”

Now I am not usually into possession books because they all pretty much sound the same. Be that as it may, I love books like The Exorcist because at least that was frightening. I felt like this book could have done more. It had already explained at the beginning that it was attempting to be a homage to The Exorcist and The Omen, but I do not think it did either of those things very well. Why? There was really no actual atmosphere for horror. Nothing is introduced right away that we can say, yes, we know this is a horror novel. Apart from most of the actual horror getting passed off by the protagonists, there is nothing really deep and meaningful happening and I didn't feel I even liked any of the characters. Let's have a look at what is so important for horror and where this book fell a bit short.

First of all, the fact that it states it is a homage to books like The Exorcist and films like The Omen means that people like me had high expectations. Unfortunately, through repetition of the same kind of thing over and over again without much new being offered, there was a question of whether this book was just a rip-off of the previous two. For example: we have an ex-priest who 'no longer believes' for some reason or other who is clearly a rip-off of the famed priest (which I regard as one of the greatest literary and film characters of all time) Father Karras. It's not even a good rip-off though, it seems laboured and the character of Angela falls into being uninteresting and cliché.

Secondly, we have the storyline. I feel like it takes a very long time to actually get interesting and then, as the readers, our interests are quashed by the fact our hosts and protagonists are such non-believers. This kind of kills the mood for me. There always seems to be a strange and convoluted explanation for everything and though once or twice it may present us with these M R James-esque non-believer protagonists, after a while it can really just make the book a labour to read. The atmosphere dies with these guys and its not good to keep doing it over and over again. To have a good mood, you need some people who have their beliefs challenged as the books grows in tension.

The next one is the simplicity of the storyline. I feel like there are too many side-stories going on in this book for us to truly respect the story of Sam. Honestly, I could have done without that chapter about Angela sitting at the bar early on in the book because it really did not add anything. The reader does not end up caring about her character. Another thing we have is the different characters that the mother seems to play between this grieving and depressed woman and this quite determined and powerful woman. It was a little inconsistent and made me feel like I didn't know the characters well. The storyline was so complex with all of its character's side-stories, I think we just did not get the main story fleshed out enough and that kind of brought down the atmosphere too.

The final thing was the atmosphere because there really wasn't one. It didn't feel like the writer had worked on building something intense and terrifying, but rather it felt like a crime thriller. It was nowhere near as frightening as The Exorcist at all and in no means was it anywhere near as atmospheric. I felt like there was too much concentration on the characters that the reader didn't really care about rather than the horror that was taking place. It just could have been so much better than it was.

All in all, if you like horror then I probably would not be recommending this book to you. Filled with clichés, tropes that aren't built upon and characters that are boring and hollow - this book really did not interest me at all as a horror lover.