I’m a big James Herbert fan, and am always happy to dive into the any of the author’s work I have yet to read. Thus, I was eager to see what The Jonah would bring.

Ok so my horror revival continues - this book (along with the other works of James Herbert) was the next stop after exhausting Stephen Kings prodigious publication list. This story to me at the time was totally different to what I was used to. Where Stephen King concentrated on characterisation and how they dealt with terrible and impossibly situations both physically and ethereal - James Herbert took his characters and put them through hell with all the blood and guts he could find.

REVIEWS of CREED by James Herbert

Etchison, Dennis, ed. (1991a). Masters of Darkness III. New York City: Tor Books. ISBN 978-0-8125-1766-8.

More than anything, I loved the way this was written. This is a proper story-telling narrative, with the author explaining things for us and injecting some brilliant humour in the process. It's clever, witty, and I found myself just really enjoying the narrator as a character himself. Herbert's 23 novels have sold 54m copies worldwide. He was published in 34 languages, including Russian and Chinese. In 2010 he was made an OBE and received the Grand Master award at the World Horror Convention. In an interview last year Herbert said: "I hate violence and I didn't plan to write horror; it just poured out of me. The great thing is that you can write humour, romance or political thrillers under that genre."A context may be the Fatima manifestations in Portugal in 1916/1917 which, even today, divide liberal 'rational' Catholics from simple faith conservative Catholics, Anglo-Saxon reasoning catholics from 'peasant' deep faith Catholics. Herbert was born in London in 1943, the youngest son of East End market traders, and got his first work in advertising, becoming art director and head of the agency he joined.

And for the politically correct: The characters depicted in this novel portray Jews as heartless, snakelike agents of Satan, Arabs as terrorist closeted homosexual sadists, Poles as flesh-eating psychopaths who will do anything to survive, Americans as mindless thugs (well, I have to say the cliche is a bit closer to the truth there), and the Irish as vengeful misguided political executioners. The English of course are all saints until the "English Rose" character is morally corrupted by the Sumerian-Jewish baddie, who leads her into the dark ways of drugs and bondage masochism. But, never fear, (spoiler alert!) the Englishman will save her through discipline and mediocrity (read: perseverance). (Actually he's morally conflicted, which would have been interesting except even that was racial--his Irish side was weak, insane, murderous and cruel, while his English side was uniformed, rule-sensitive, and capable of love. Ha!)A reporter almost hit a little girl with his car while he was crossing a small town at night. After that he starts to run after the little creature, not sure if he saw a ghost or a real person. She crosses a graveyard near a small church and get lost of his sights When he sees her again, the girl is neel infront of an ugly dead tree, smiling and all of the sudden she said, "She is beautiful!"