Tom Holland: The Bonehunter (2001)

Edition: Abacus, 2002
Review number: 1175

Dinosaur bones are something that people have been obsessed by since the earliest investigations into fossils, and the field was especially exciting in the second half of the nineteenth century for several reasons: the possibility of making sensational discoveries, and the thrill of being involved in the controversies about Darwinism and geological ideas of the ancient earth. Tom Holland has moved from historical horror novels to historical thriller with The Bone Hunter, a novel which features several men obsessed with finding dinosaurs in the American West in 1878.

Holland's story begins in a liner crossing the Atlantic, heiress Lilian Prescott returning home to New York after a trip to England culminating in her (Henry James style) engagement to a peer. She and her brother meet another passenger, a former British army captain named Dawkins, who is travelling to New York to meet their father. Captain Dawkins is, like their father, a dinosaur fanatic, but when he meets Sheldon Prescott it soon becomes clear that something is going on which is more serious than the admittedly fierce competition that exists between rival dinosaur hunters. This rivalry is stirred up when Prescott offers to see a great secret to the two best known Americans in the field; and this is is when people start dying.

The novel's first part is mainly set in New York, and is similar to another story set in the same time and place, E.L. Doctorow's The Waterworks. The second half, a quest into the still Wild West, is far more brutal, a picture of a sordid and vicious culture of violence without the romanticism later provided by Hollywood.

The Bonehunter is generally gripping (as might be expected from a writer who cut his teeth writing horror novels) and well written, an unusual thriller and proof that Holland can produce as good a novel without the supernatural elements of his earlier work. The one flaw it has is the treatment of the romance which grows up between Lilian Sheldon and Captain Hawkins; the descriptions of their inner feelings and of their conversations seem artificial and unconvincing.

For anyone who wants to read something different in the historical thriller line, however, The Bonehunter is a novel well worth looking out for.

Tom Holland: Deliver Us From Evil (1997)

Edition: Warner, 1998
Review number: 1150

Deliver Us From Evil, a historical horror novel, starts at the end of the Cromwellian Commonwealth in England, just before the restoration of the monarchy and the reign of Charles II. Captain Foxe, an officer in the militia based at Salisbury, begins an investigation into a series of ritual murders at ancient monuments (the cathedral and Stonehenge are the best known), and becomes convinced that they are connected to strange events in his home village of Woodton. There, the manor house has been abandoned, as many are, by exiled supporters of the king; but in Woodton the gentry were rumoured to have been involved in black magic.

When Captain Foxe and his wife are killed by the evil he has been seeking out, his teenage son Robert begins a quest to gain revenge, to be able to face and destroy the evil power which has taken over the manor and possessed the villagers of Woodton. To this end, he spends the remainder of the book travelling through a Europe beginning to recover from the Thirty Years' War and to the American colonies, and spends much of his time in the company of 'blooddrinkers' (vampires).

Though Deliver Us From Evil could never be described as a conventional historical novel, it quite naturally needs to excel in many of the same ways that a member of that genre does - notably in terms of its background. It must feel accurate once the horror elements are removed (and it is helpful if even the supernatural side respects seventeenth century ideas on the subject). Deliver Us From Evil succeeds admirably in this respect, particularly in the way it uses well known people of the time (the Earl of Rochester and John Aubrey are particularly prominent).

As a horror novel, it lies squarely within the traditions of the vampire story, particular debts being owed to Bram Stoker and Anne Rice. Holland rings enough changes to make Deliver Us From Evil original within the tradition, and he is also occasionally much nastier than eithe Stoker or Rice (for example in the description of the anal rape of Robert Foxe by a demon wrhich ends part one). If you can cope with the nastiness, Deliver Us From Evil is a fascinating novel, well worth reading.