In Tim Lebbon’s latest horror novel, BERSERK, a man named Tom still grieves over the death of his only son, a decade after losing him to an accident in a military training exercise. A snippet of a conversation overhead in a bar confirms Tom’s suspicions that there was more to his death than they were told. Stranger still, that snippet includes the cryptic suggestion that “they kept monsters.”
One clandestine meeting and secret map later, Tom is off for the site where his son died, unsure of what to find. What he finds is a mass grave, filled with rotted corpses chained together, including a little girl who – despite all those years underground – isn’t quite dead. She communicates with him telepathically, promising to take Tom to his son. Little by little, she reveals pieces of information about herself, the race of berserkers she belongs to, the experiments the military was using them for and the man who’s chasing them, desperate to keep the secret just that.
As a parent, it’s easy to sympathize with Tom, still suffering through every parent’s worst nightmare. Except that nightmare grows even worse as his bizarre journey progresses. The air of mystery surrounding his son’s death is palpable early on in the novel, slowly giving way to an ever greater mystery, that of the little girl. With her intentions every bit as an unknown variable as her origins, anything can happen. And in a horror story, such uneasiness is essential.
For what is essentially a three-character piece, BERSERK is a little long in the tooth at 350 pages. Also, the payoff is not quite as satisfying as one would hope after the lengthy ride. Still, it’s a testament to Lebbon’s talent that I wanted to see it through to the bitter end. Tom is a compelling Everyman character, driven to extremes by his broken heart, so his excursion into the berserker world – marked with murder, mayhem and reanimation – is undoubtedly an interesting one. With slight echoes of the film 28 DAYS LATER, BERSERK isn’t what I would consider scary, but it’s definitely unsettling and – I can’t say this very often – unlike any horror novel I’ve read before. And there’s something oddly comic about a guy on a road trip, conversing via telepathy with a passenger with withered skin and dried-up eyeballs. –Rod Lott
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THIS BOOK WILL BE OFF THE CHAING AND IT WILL KICK ASS