Title: Possession
Author: Peter James
Type: Fiction
Page Count/Review Word Count: 292
Rating: 3.75/5
I picked this up because I’ve been slowly but surely working my way through each of Peter James’ releases. It’s interesting because despite being mostly known as a crime writer these days because of his Roy Grace books, it turns out that James started by writing sort of supernatural horror thrillers.
He’s pretty good at that, and I actually think that this one was better than Sweet Heart, which he published a couple of years later. Sure, it still has a lot of the clichés that you’d expect from a haunted house story, and there are also echoes of Sweet Heart in that instead of having someone regressing into a past life, someone’s using a medium. There are also a bunch of conversations about Christianity that I didn’t particularly care for, but which I guess tie in with public opinion towards religion in the UK during the late eighties.
If you’re just looking for a pretty mindless horror/thriller novel that will help you to pass the time, this is a good one to go for. I whizzed right through it in just a couple of days, and it never felt as though it was slowing down. Considering that at the time, I was working on dropping my currently reading list to below 140, that was a massive bonus – and in fact it’s the reason why I picked it up.
This book probably isn’t for everyone, but it does have a certain amount of mainstream appeal that I think would mean that most readers would enjoy it for what it is. It’s the kind of book that’s hard to either love or to hate.
