Ash (David Ash, #3)

by James Herbert

[pamela]

Ok, 80% through and I just had to nope on out. I was forcing myself to keep listening to Ash through Audible but I realised it was just making me grumpy, so I've given up.

It's hard to know whether my visceral reaction to Ashis because of the book itself, or if it's because of the audiobook format. A lot of the reasons I really disliked it can certainly be put down to the performance. While I'm sure that Steven Pacey is a decent actor, the way that he performed female characters made me want to scream. He voiced them so insipidly and weakly that it was hard to divorce his performance of them from the characters on the page.

I also had huge issues with James Herbert's treatment of homosexuality in Ash. Our main female protagonist, Delphine, is taken advantage of by a bitter, jealous, and predatory lesbian. The entire premise was written in a way that made the reader feel like women could only have meaningful relationships with men (written as part of a sex scene with Ash, no less!), and that all same-sex relationships are either abhorrent, or mistakes. There is a scene were Delphine actually apologises for having consensual sex, as if sleeping with another woman somehow made her dirty.

The character of Ash himself was not particularly interesting or nuanced. He seemed a cliche investigator with a haunted past and an obligatory drinking problem. I must admit that this was the first David Ash novel I've read/listened to, so perhaps a familiarity with him in Herbert's other works may have changed that - but from the perspective of approaching this as a standalone novel, his entire characterisation seemed rather cliched. And don't even get me started on the romance... Instalove is usually a YA trope, and one that I don't particularly like in the genre either. But to have it in a horror novel for adults felt especially jarring.

Combine all of the above with the way Ash treats disability and mental health and you end up with a book that I thought was pretty repugnant, if not downright offensive. While I liked the idea of a castle that was hiding the world's conspiracy theories, the pacing characterisation, and downright horrible treatment of a lot of its themes, and it's just not a book that I can recommend to anyone.