Book Review: "The Devil's Whispers" by Lucas Hault

I have always said that when writing a horror novel, you need to try to make the storyline as simple as possible whilst having on the most important characters named and play a role in the story. This book does just this and it does it quite well. The success of the book truly comes from having a good amount of emotional connection to each character since the narrative shifts around so often. Unfortunately, this is also its undoing as the entire book is written in a series of diary entries by different characters in which the tone becomes so similar from time to time that you more or less lose who is talking and who is telling you which subplot.

The story of helping a dying man in his final affairs is something that I heartily enjoyed. The echoes of Dracula and even ideas surrounding older gothic tropes such as castles and antiquity are inviting when you are looking to read something chilling and atmospheric. However, the way in which the story is told breaks the book up too much and too often. Your ability to get stuck into the text becomes short-lived and feigning as the narrative switches from one person's diary to another person's diary and back again.

I think the letters were far more successfully written than the diaries since the letters were written for someone else to read. The problem with the diary entries is they too, were written as if someone else was going to read them. For example: someone explaining who their cousin is in a diary entry wouldn't happen. They aren't looking for someone to read their diary so the fact that they are cousins should have been established through the language they use towards each other. Another example would be the sheer amount of dialogue in the diaries. Dialogue in diaries is all perfectly fine, but when entire conversations go on for minutes at a time with hardly any room or place for extra thought because of a conversation between two or more people, then you are moving far towards the first person narrative storytelling aspect rather than a believable diary.

I think this book would have succeeded better in being told like Frankenstein. A series of letters followed by a straight first person narrative story. I think the mixture between the post-modern narrative style and the old-world 18th century gothic sense didn't really work. However, it was a great attempt and someone had to be brave enough to try.

Another thought I have on this book is that there was far too much concentration on gore and chilad abduction rather than the essence of the monster itself. Yes, it was somewhat chilling but after a while, that chill dies out and the monster becomes a bit predictable. However, I think that this book would've worked better again if advertised as a pastiche novel of Dracula or something rather than just a stand-alone original seeing as a lot has been borrowed but also some has been changed. A concentration on the ideas of mystery and otherness would have brought it closer to the 18th century gothic strangeness it was so aptly searching for.

In conclusion, I believe that this novel was a great attempt at a gothic post-modernist nightmare, but turned out to fall a bit flat towards the end. With various plot holes and the fact that the diary entries didn't sound like diary entries at all, we are forced to come to the conclusion that this book definitely has its ups and downs - unfortunately for me personally, there were more downs than ups.