The Devil's Numbers

G. M. Hague

This horror novels opens far in the past but quickly switches to the present day, with a story of industrial espionage: a trade in an incredibly powerful new computer chip that causes the violent deaths of a number of people. It isn't long before the story shifts towards its main storyline, that of a journey on an incredibly advanced Ocean Liner. Things start going wrong quickly, unexplained accidents and the bodies gradually start mounting up. A weird religious cult and a computer system gone haywire, all the elements you need for a great yarn. Still not convinced? Neither was I.

OK, so where did it start to go wrong? Quite early unfortunately. It attempts a cloak and mirrors story with technobabble, and if you're of a technical bent it stretches credulity just a little too far. A man who through a few tweaks manages to turn an existing computer chip into something so incredibly powerful that it doesn't just solve any computational task in record time, but also harbours a conscious evil bent on destruction. You can forgive this for a while, but so called computer experts sprout nonsense all the way through the book.

Then there's all the clever threads that run parallel to the main story, having little more than a tenuous link to it. They could all have been excised with barely impact on the novel at all, in fact they felt like padding designed to get the novel up to the required King/Koontz thickness. There's nothing wrong with slim horror novels, in fact that and short fiction is where the genre's strength lies; the thicker the novel the more difficult it is to maintain that sense of tension a good horror story needs. A doorstop of a horror novel frequently ceases to be a horror novel and becomes something altogether different, sometimes, as with King or Barker, that is a good thing; but sometimes you just end up with a mess. This book is two novels and an unfinished short story masquerading as a single novel.

The opening segment, with a young child encountering witchcraft, isn't the strongest of openings and never really leads anywhere. Introduces a background which is never really expanded upon. Then there's the other novel, the one I haven't mentioned yet, the Second World War haunted U-Boat story that became intensely irritating by the end of the novel. If you wondering how these disparate elements can be brought together into a consistent whole then there's an easy answer: they can't, at least not in this novel. You spend the length of the novel waiting for them to convincingly tie up in some way, realising you're reaching the end and it just isn't going to happen. The way it was done it would have been better to just tell the stories chronologically and forget about flicking between them. In the end it just distracts away from what in isolation, might have been an interesting novel, but instead becomes a clumsy collision between two separate plot strands. In the hands of a skillful novelist this can work, but in this case it was more reminiscent of channel hopping. And it's an appropriate analogy as it did have a kind of TV movie quality to it.