Book Review: Hekla's Children by James Brogden
Published by Titan Books Ltd
The blurb:
“A decade ago, teacher Nathan Brookes saw four of his students walk up a hill and vanish. Only one returned – Olivia – starved, terrified, and with no memory of where she’d been. After a body is found in the same woodland where they disappeared it is rest believed to be one of the missing children, but is soon identified as a Bronze Age warrior, nothing more than an archaeological curiosity. Yet Nathan starts to have terrifying visions of the students. Then Olivia reappears, half-mad and willing to go to any lengths to return the corpse to the earth. For he is the only thing keeping a terrible evil at bay...”
My Impressions:
When I picked up this book, I was looking for some good, classic horror—and hoping to find it on the shelves of Tesco Extra. I might have been experiencing too high of hopes. However, the blurb captured my intrigue, and for £3.87, I felt I probably couldn’t go wrong.
The preference definitely intrigued me, with tales of the hunger of man devouring these somewhat mythical villages in the form of a blood-crusted creature with an overly large head and bloated, starving belly. I had found my horror novel to be chilled by.
The book then jumps to the real world, several years ago, with a teacher (Nathan) taking out his class to his overly-detailed park, and trying to have sly conversations with another teacher who he’d had relations with. Four of the kids disappear, and while he was found not guilty of any charge of their disappearance, he decides to leave for Wales and forget teaching altogether.
As it turns out, there’s an entity which watches over the park, which doesn’t exist in time, nicknamed Barkfoot, which is meant to protect the worlds from this hunger that was mentioned at the beginning. An archeological excavation discovers its remains and thus it is no longer able to protect these worlds, and this hunger is released, somewhat.
The main characters that are in the “real world” are Nathan, the archeologist that discovered “Barkfoot”, and the other teacher that the initial teacher had an affair with. While trying to keep the three of them safe, Nathan is transferred into the world of these villages in the beginning, where he is able to find two of the initial missing children (now grown up). He spends part of the second half of the book with one of them, then the other part chasing after the other, which is essentially where the climax is, all wrapping up very fast and abruptly.
The book gets confusing, trying to intertwine the concepts of this demon being human, and its transformation from human into being. However, as the book goes on, the characters are always being chased by it, in some manner or another. When the thing finally catches up to Nathan, it is abrupt, sudden, and without much time for the concepts and actions to sink in for the reader, or to be developed as a whole. I felt like the creature had a very deep purpose, and something that should have been brought out more, explored more heartily, but never was given the opportunity to. As a result, I was very unfulfilled with the climax.
What’s more, for the most part, the remaining characters in the real world were forgotten about, and had little to do with the story. The archeologist was necessary, since she was needed to make Barkfoot disappear and thus a new protector to be born. But the love interest of Nathan had no point at all in the story. There was no reason for her to be there at all, and yet the story concluded with her and her family.
As I got into the novel, I found myself questioning whether or not it was meant to be Young Adult fiction. The interaction between characters, between adults, seemed somewhat juvenile, and most of the writing, aside from the initial description of the horrors of the hungry thing, followed suite, seeming dumbed down for its audience. I wasn’t particularly impressed with the story-telling ability of the writer.
However, I absolutely have to give some insane props to him for his progressive character writing. The cast as somewhat diverse, broke the idea of gender norms, created strong female characters, and also broke down what should be considered normalities regarding sexual orientation. There was a lot of progressive ideas in this novel, and for that I can’t completely discredit it. I think that Brogden does a fantastic job in portraying how easy and normal it can be to simply be outside the “standard” of society’s expectations. I think that is incredibly important to note. Any writer with a platform should be working hard to help bend the media expectations of entertainment, and Brogden does do this.