This review was originally published on Goodreads on 23/09/2022
Peter James’ novels have been improving as they go, with the stories becoming more original and his characters better drawn. “Prophecy” felt like both a forward and a backward step in some ways, as whilst the story and some of the set pieces were very good, the characterisation seemed to lose a little from the previous novel I’d read.
The novel starts with disaster, as an evil man is killed by having a red-hot poker inserted into his body and then, over 300 years later, a young boy and his father are in the wrong place to see his mother killed in a road accident that leaves her decapitated. A few years later, the two of them meet Frannie, a researcher at the British Museum and a relationship starts.
As things progress, it seems that Frannie and the father, Oliver, have lives linked by seeming coincidences. It transpires they had met before and the café where she once worked had a link to Oliver’s titled family and a Ouija session she had once held there with some university friends has released some evil stored in the walls which has had an impact on Oliver’s son, Edward and their time together is interspersed with incidents and accidents.
Whilst some of the plot felt like a bit of a reach, if nicely explained by the whole plot revolving around coincidences, some of the scenes were different to what Peter James has written previously. Some of the deaths are far more detailed and visceral in description than I’d seen in his writing in earlier novels. The opening scene with the poker and a couple later on were particularly nasty and felt like a step in a different direction for James’ writing.
However, I didn’t feel that the main characters were as well drawn as in the previous novel I’d read, “Twilight”. The focus was very much on the story and the coincidences that link the people, more than the people themselves. We find out very little about Frannie and Oliver’s previous lives, which seemed largely incidental and whilst this kept the pace of the writing high as they moved from one situation to another seemingly without break and everything felt to be happening far too close together.
That isn’t to say that “Prophecy” wasn’t a good read and had I read it prior to reading “Twilight”, which was the best of his pre-Grace novels I’ve read so far, I might have felt better about it. This is still a good novel, but it has a few gaps in characterisation that the previous novel seemed to have improved upon and that leaves a slight hole, but this is very plot driven and visceral, so regardless of the minor limitations, the horror novel fan in me did still enjoy it.
sohoblack 