The Others Weren't What I Was Expecting

On Friday I took a little driving trip to investigate some stores in a town about 2 hours away. One of them was a pleasant little bookstore, where I grabbed many cheap paperbacks to help while away the time*. Somewhere along the line, I had this sudden** urge to read a book about ghosts. Not in the sense of a scary book, more just about what a ghost would do with its spare time, if say, they couldn't remember what their unfinished business was, how would they amuse themselves? So I took a chance on a book in the horror section that seemed marginally promising. The cover had white, ill-defined shapes floating on it, so I figured "ghosts". Nope.

The Others, written by James Herbert, is a mystery, with horror trappings around it. There are no ghosts involved, not really, anyway. A investigator named Nicholas Dismas is hired by a woman to find a son she gave birth to 18 years ago, which she was told died shortly after birth, but which she believes is still alive. The fact that her recently deceased, rich husband (whom she married after this birth) had his will written so that half of his fortune is in a trust that can only be accessed if he has an heir (not necessarily of his blood) likely has something to do with it. Dis thinks it's a waste of time, but then he starts getting haunted, and a clairvoyant that convinced the client her son was still alive encourages him to keep going, and the trail leads to an old folks' home called PERFECT REST (always written in caps), and things get progressively freaky. Horrible experiments are exposed, evil is punished, love is found and lost, true rewards are revealed, and so on.

The book has a twist to it, though. It starts with an unnamed character residing in Hell, or Purgatory, one of the two, who is visited by angels, who tell him he's getting a very rare second chance, which he could you to earn his way into heaven, but it'll be hard, and if he fails, he'll wind up somewhere even worse than his present location (which is why I figure he's in Purgatory at that point). Then next chapter then starts with Dis and the client, and the story progresses from there, with Dis occasionally seeing this handsome face he vaguely recognizes in the mirror. See, Dis had a hard go of it. He has a humpback, his spine is crooked, one leg is shorter than the other, which enhanced the crookedness of the spine, he was left behind a church, and grew up in a boy's home, where one of the adults tried to molest him, leading to Dis accidentally stabbing himself in the eye with scissors while trying to defend himself. Oh, and he has a drug habit, primarily weed, sometimes coke. It's not all bad for him. He has friends, his own business, with employees, he has bars where he can go and be accepted, but still, people stare as he walks by, they make jokes, they pick on him, it can really suck.

I don't think I'm spoiling anything (seeing as I figured this out about 20 pages in, and I'm not usually terribly perceptive), when I say Dis is the soul from the beginning, getting his second chance***. Now all the ugliness that was in that person's soul has been transferred to the outside, where people can see and react to it, as they would have if they'd truly known him in his earlier life. This kind of bothers me. Sure, the soul agreed to it, even having been warned of how hard it would be, but Dis doesn't know any of this. All he knows is he's had a hard life, one certainly not helped by his physical condition, and he's had to press on regardless. It feels as though he's being punsihed for shit he didn't do, which I guess gets into the question of whether the sins of a past life should carry over to the present one. Still, I can't help but feel it a little Silver Age Superman by the Big Fella upstairs. You know, "Ha, ha, I've used my immense power to make your life difficult to teach you a lesson, but it might not work, so you could be screwed in this life and the next! Ha, ha!" Then again, I tend to be somewhat cynical about religion, so I'm sure that's part of it. I mean, he does get a second chance to get into Heaven, so it's not like there isn't a possible benefit, I just find the circumstances somewhat unfairly stacked.

Two other things about the book. One, Herbert likes to rehash certain points frequently. So there are multiple sections that discuss Dis feeling everyone staring at him, and how that makes him feel, or him cursing God, or how wonderful a particular lady makes him feel. I suppose it's repetition to provide impact. Herbert really wants us to recognize how Dis' physical state is a constant part of his life, and that no matter how much he might insist he's grown used to the jeers and stares, and pain, he hasn't. So that makes sense.

The second thing is somewhat related to the first. Herbert likes to spend several pages describing people who were really dealt a bad hand in the genetic lottery, and does this frequently, occasionally in detail that made me grateful I wasn't eating anything at the time. To be fair, at the end he says he drew most of these descriptions from actual medical reports, so they're real in that sense. He also says he sincerely hopes we have been disturbed by reading this. Yeah, well, mission accomplished there, Jimmy Boy. It did make the book go faster, since after a time I started just skimming those passages. I've already read three pages worth of these descriptions, do I really need another eight, getting progressively weirder? It's interesting how even Dis draws a line somewhere between those who he considers to be people like himself, and those he thinks of as "beasts". Having read the physical descriptions (or skimmed enough to get the gist), I think it has to be based on their surroundings, the effect it had on their psyches that creates the line in his head, but it's curious to see him regard others as lesser, when he'd been treated that way as well.

Maybe everyone just wants somebody they can look down on? The book went quickly enough, but I'm not sure I would really recommend it. Maybe because I was hoping for one thing, and it wasn't what this book was meant to be.

* The one negative aspect was an middle-aged lady who entered the store, apparently on a search mission for a friend, because she kept calling someone on the phone, then loudly asking about which author she was supposed to be looking for, or loudly reading titles. Really, just speaking very loudly in general, which kept disrupting my attempts to silently read book titles and determine whether they sounded interesting enough for me to read the book jacket. If one is going to seek out specific books or authors for someone, have them make a list so there's no confusion. Is that so difficult?

** And I really mean sudden. As in, I was perusing shelves in the mystery section, and just then, decided I wanted to find a book about ghosts.

*** This raises another question with me. Clearly, the higher powers arranged for the soul to be placed in a body they felt would reflect the soul's ugliness. So, did they interefere with the embryo's development? Did they control the parents, forcing them to abandon a child they might have otherwise been willing to raise, because it would make things harder? Was the body simply created out of the aether, to spare anyone else any suffering? Or maybe they just waited for the proper circumstance, and took advantage of a genetic mutation or the inner weakness of people. I kind of hope it was that one, because purposely altering a child to make it seem abhorrent to the parents, or making the parents want to get rid of the child, would be pretty kind of dirty pool.