Shrine - James Herbert

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There are certain things in life that you know are flawed, but still love. People will look at you and wonder why you rant and rave about something which the vast majority see as average at best. In music it is my love for the obscure indie band ‘David Devant and His Spirit Wife’ and in fiction one example is ‘Shrine’. It is hard to explain why you are able to look past the flaws in something to see its core, but I will give it a mini go in this book review. Fenn is your typical local town reporter and he does not think anything exciting is going to happen on his night shift. This can't be further from the truth when he stumbles across a small girl lying ...  Read the complete review

Alice Pagett is an ordinary 11 year old living in the village of Banfield who likes nothing more that helping her mother clean the local church, she's definately skipping along with ribbons in her pigtails and those little buckle shoes your mum always made you wear. Gerry Fenn, journalist and hard drinker, another of those characters that Herbert revels in. He's driving home from another boring assignment for the Brighton Courier. Passing through Banfield a small child runs in front of his car, he chases after her in case she is injured. He finds Alice in front of an old oak in a field next to the church of St Joseph's. When he reaches her all she ...  Read the complete review

This was one of the first Herbert novels I read and as such my memory of it is pretty sketchy, however, I do remember thinking how different it was from The Rats which was my only other Herbert novel up till that point. This story was more of a ghost story as opposed to the horror element in The Rats, luckily I’m into both elements so I knew then that I’d found an author whose work was going to interest me. Anyway, the story itself. A liitle deaf mute girl called Alice has a vision of the Virgin Mary and is miraculously cured, this leads to the area where she had this vision (beneath an ancient oak tree) becoming a shrine. However, ...  Read the complete review