Discount Price: $10.40
Price fluctuation possible.
How soon does it ship: Usually ships in 2 to 4 weeks
Shipping? Absolutely FREE if you qualify for Super Saver Shipping.
Type of bind: Paperback
EAN num: 9780330411684
ISBN number: 0330411683
Label: Trans-Atlantic Publications, Ltd.
Manufacturer: Trans-Atlantic Publications, Ltd.
Page Count: 400
Printing Date: May 04, 2007
Publishing house: Trans-Atlantic Publications, Ltd.
Sale Popularity Level: 284196
Studio: Trans-Atlantic Publications, Ltd.
Other books you might be interested in perusing:
Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
There is an old, empty house in Devils Cleave, a deep gorge that leads from the high moors down to the harbour village of Hollow Bay. The house is Crickley Hall and its large and grim, somehow foreboding. Its rumoured to be haunted. Its thought to hold a secret. Despite some reservations, the Caleighs move in, searching for respite in this beautiful part of North Devon, seeking peace and perhaps to come to terms with whats happened to them as a family. But all is not well with the house. They hear unaccountable noises. A cellar door they shut every night is always open again in the morning. They see things that cannot be real. The house is the last place the Caleighs should have come to, for the terror that unfolds is beyond belief. Soon they will discover the secret horror of Crickley Hall . . .
User popularity level:
Rated by buyers -
When I was a teenager, a feature film was 90-100 minutes long and an epic novel was about 300-400 pages long. Crickley Hall is a really great story and has the right level of spookiness and tension. The end of each chapter contains a snippet that wants you to read on and find out what happens next. Reading this book during the torrential rain and floods that were suffered by most of Britain in the Summer of 2007, made the story even more poignant. However, this book is at least 200 pages too long. Herbert could easily have reached the same conclusions in about 350 pages (actual length is 633 pages) and it would have been an excellent book. As it is, you will need serious stamina or a lot of time on your hands to embark on this read.
Rated by buyers 
-
This is my very first James Herbert book, and if it's one of his worst I do apologize, but I very much doubt I'll be picking up another. I'm not sure what I was expecting - something more along the lines of Stephen King's work, perhaps - but anyway:
The very first thing that struck me about 'The Secret of Crickley Hall' is that, for a so-called page-turner, Herbert's writing is unbelievably turgid and repetitive. There's too much pointless description, too much stilted and unrealistic dialogue, too much everything. At times I was left wondering if the author himself knew what on earth he was talking about.
As far as the plot goes, it's your average horror fare: a family and their dog moving into a creepy old house and resolving to stay there despite many bizarre happenings and lots of suspicious, meaningful looks from the local villagers. You know the score. The cast consists of your average horror stock characters with very little sparkle, all of them talking like automatons and at times behaving in an inhumanly dense fashion. It makes it hard to feel any fear or sympathy for them as the book drags on and on.
Overall this could have been a decent book - not a great or original one, but a decent one - if not for Herbert's amateurish, inelegant prose. Any suspense or scare factor that the book might have had can't really be appreciated when you're dozing off in mid-sentence.
Not recommended, as much as I tried to enjoy it. How Herbert can be a bestseller with writing like this is quite beyond me.
Rated by buyers 
-
Reading some of the reviews on both Amazon and Amazon UK infuriates me as reviewers are trying to peg James Herbert as some Stephen King wannabe. As most true horror readers realize, this assertion is totally absurd as King has written three good horror novels in his career ('Salem's Lot, The Shining and The Tommyknockers)while Herbert, in my opinion, has spent twenty five of his thirty two year career writing excellent horror novels. The Rats, The Fog, The Survivor, The Spear, Lair, The Dark etc., not a clinker in the bunch.
Unfortunately, Mr. Herbert has lost a few miles on his fastball as his novels after the outstanding "Ghosts of Sleath" have devolved into overly introspective, sentimental and maudlin very first person narratives (the wickedly funny Creed being the exception).
"The Secret of Crickley Hall" is no execption. I purchased the hardcover with high hopes of a cracking good Herbert ghost story complete with his excellent pacing, scene construction and characterization and instead got more of the same overwrought and overlong occult drama that should have been half the length of it's 500+ pages. Fortunately, Herbert regains his form in the last 100 pages and is able to rescue this novel from total dreck to something on the border of readable to good.
Gabriel Caleigh rents an old manor in the Devon area of England in an endeavor to alleviate some of his wife Eve's grief over the diappearance of their son. The very first anniversary of his disappearance is upon them and Caliegh believes that a change of scenery may help his wife. The family has the requisite other two children (Loren and Callie) and a dog named Chester that freaks out and attempts to run away when the family settles into Crickley Hall.
Anyway, mysterious things start to occur, a locked cellar door at night is found to be partially open in the mornings, mysterious puddles form on the floor, strange noises come from a wardrobe and the dank and forbidding cellar complete with a well and an underground river and mysterious flashing lights that seem to become ghosts of children. Investigating further, the Caleighs discover that Crickley Hall housed eleven orphans during WWII under the supervision of a most unpleasant man named Augustus Cribben and his sister Magda. All the orphans along with Cribben believed to have drowned in a cataclysmic flood in 1943, but only nine of the bodies were recovered and buried. Of course the family tries to get to the bottom of the Crickley Hall mystery as to whether the place is haunted and by whom. They are assisted in their quest by an old groundskeeper who believes that the children died under more sinister circumstances than publicly reported, a psychic who is trying to help Eve contact her missing son and a psychic investigator who doesn't believe in ghosts.
James Herbert's past reputation and the last 100 pages of this novel gives this book 4 stars. If someone is interested in reading James Herbert, this is not the novel to start with. I would recommend "The Spear" which I believe is his best work, or "The Survivor" which is almost as good, as books to start with. These were published when Herbert was younger, nastier, and a much leaner writer than he now.
Rated by buyers 
-
There's a Stephen King novel called "Bag of Bones", in which the Protagonist (a writer), after the untimely death of his pregnant wife, suffers an extreme case of writer's block. To offset the impending loss of his job he publishes two of his earlier, unseen manuscripts, that have been lying in a safe, retained for just such an emergency.
That was fiction. But one can't help feeling that, in publishing "The Secret of Crickley Hall", James Herbert is doing just the same thing as King's hero: this is a novel that surely could not belong to "Britain's No. 1 bestselling writer of chiller fiction". Could it?
The Caleigh family, supernaturally-sensitive family dog in tow, move into a haunted mansion, and begin to uncover the tragic secrets of Crickley Hall's murky past.
Now, read this subsequent bit carefully: The Caleighs (a family with a dog), who have a dog (who is sensitive to ghosts), move into Crickley Hall (a spooky, scary sort of manor, now home to the Caleighs, a family with a dog who is sensitive to ghosts), a Manor that is both spooky and scary (called Crickley Hall).
This is the most basic flaw of Herbert's novel: the repetition of basic plot elements occurs at such a frequent rate that after a few short chapters we wonder how he's managing to forward the (basic) plot at all. Also, this repetition becomes tiresome after a while: we KNOW that Lili Peel's a psychic, we were introduced to her as one, we don't need to be told again two pages later. We are WELL AWARE that the Caleigh's little boy is missing and that father Gabe is emotionally detached from that fact: that point was laboured plenty already, why keep doing it? Things go on in this manner for almost all of the novel, and the promising characterisation and relatively interesting premise of the Manor and its history are left, sadly and wastefully, unexplored.
There's not a lot one can do with a Haunted House premise anymore - personally, I think Shirley Jackson ("The Haunting Of Hill House") and Steven King ("The Shining") said all that can be said on the subject - but that's not to say "The Secret of Crickley Hall" has a boring premise, or is pointless in its subject matter - quite the contrary. There's a definite sense of a terrific novel lying underneath the frankly amateurish quality of the prose and the absent characterisation - Herbert obviously has talent (50 million copies worldwide can't mean that one million stupid people bought fifty of his books apiece), and in places, there's plenty of atmosphere and tension - the scenes where Serafina and her brother break into Crickley Hall immediately spring to mind, as well as the initial supernatural goings-on that befall the Caleighs - but sadly, and confusingly, Herbert's good bits seem to be accidental - they are few and far between, and it's in the mundane, irritating in-between that the essence of a great novel is totally lost.
Avoid. Like another reviewer said, Clive Barker's where it's at, as far as contemporary British horror fiction is concerned.
Rated by buyers -
This here's a haunted house novel. I read Herbert's "Once..." and thought it was kind of ok, and was willing to give him a shot at the classic haunted house story. The author has a very simple style of writing that reads like a young adult title. He repeats himself constantly, as if he's talking to a young child. Not sure if he's just padding the page count or what. As well as the simplistic style that repeats itself constantly, the characters are stock and thin, and the plot a yawner. This one adds nothing to the haunted house genre. Try Jackson's "The Haunting of Hill House" or Matheson's "Hell House" instead.
Find other books like this one:
