HORROR FICTION REVIEW : JOHN SINCLAIR : CURSE OF THE UNDEAD

JOHN SINCLAIR BOOK 1

Some of you may remember the adventures of John Sinclair for their distant past.  The series first began in 1973, featuring a dashing Scottish hero, who mixed James Bond heroics, with Hammer Horror devilry, it was a roaring success.  The series has now returned in an all new series of adventures, that pits the dashing Sinclair against all manner of beasties and monsters.  

Curse of the Undead  is the first new story in the series and it sees our hero go up against a dastardly necromancer and his horde of the undead.  Don't groan this isn't yet another zombie novel it is so much more.  

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Curse of The Undead  is a odd sort of book, I don't know why I decided to stick with the book past its extremely annoying introduction.  It almost feels as though another writer penned the clumsy introduction.  It is full of phrases like 

"BUT HE HAD HEARD IT.  OR HAD HE"


"MAYBE IT WAS AN ANIMAL? HE THOUGHT. OR MAYBE THE WHISKEY.... OR MAYBE NOT"

There is just something particularly annoying about a writer using this turn of phrase once never mind filling up a whole section of the book with it.  And yet there was something intrinsically gripping about the book and its premise that made me plough through this clumsy introduction.  It is not normally something I would do, but I am glad I did.  

If we ignore the first few pages of the book, what we the readers are left with is a brilliant modern reworking of the  classic pulp novels from the 1970s.  Curse of the Undead  has a lot to love about it.  A hero so suave and dashing, he makes James Bond look like a grubby detective sergeant, a plot that reads like it came straight from the great vaults of Hammer, and enough action and derring do to keep even the most ardent pulp fan smiling with glee.  

I always worry when books are set in Scotland, so many authors don't have an idea about setting a book a Scotland, they think that we all speak the same, and nine times out of ten it just reads wrong.  I won't say that this book gets it right, as it doesn't  really matter as the whole book just reads like a 1970s horror film, with characters like Dr Orgoff, Sir James, and Anne Baxter, the plucky reporter, who you are just waiting to pull the hair pins pout of her hair and shake her hair like she is in a Timotee advert.  While these all seem like terrible cliches, Gabriel Conroy pulls it off with such aplomb and love for the source material that it just doesn't matter.  Even when we visit the Black Keep we the readers are so engrossed in the the pulptastic story that these things just don't matter.  

A tight, punchy read that heralds the start of a great new series of pulp horror.  Highly recommended. 

There are so many ways a person can die. Sooner or later, everyone's number is up, and no one comes back ... or do they? 

On a cold November night, a grieving father picks up his hunting rifle and shoots his only daughter in the head. The police are mystified. Why was the girl even at the house? Why wasn't she at the mortuary ... awaiting her burial? After all, Mary Winston had been declared dead two days before. The incident is only the first in a series of mysterious attacks in the small Scottish town of Middlesbury. Dead bodies go missing. A cemetery caretaker is devoured alive. An ancient curse is about to be unleashed ... Detective Chief Inspector John Sinclair works for Scotland Yard's Special Division, an elite unit that deals with extraordinary cases. DCI Sinclair is a battle-hardened veteran of Afghanistan, a man haunted by the past. But nothing could have prepared him for the horrors he's about to face. He goes to Scotland to investigate the gruesome murders but what he finds is a town in the grip of fear. The people of Middlesbury are harboring a secret. A secret that is about to explode ... 

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