Product Description

Nicholas Dismas is a private investigator, but like no other that has gone before him. He is hired to find a missing baby and his investigation leads him to discover the dark secret of the "Others", and to resolve the enigma of his own existence.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #55983 in Books
• Published on: 2000-07-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 512 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
A book that starts in Hell has got to be expertly paced, and no-one has ever accused British King of Horror James Herbert of lacking any of those skills. Hardly has a damned soul agreed to an angelic offer he cannot refuse than Nicholas Dismas is limping down the mean streets of contemporary Brighton searching for a child who may not even exist. Nicholas has only one eye and is short, lame and hunchbacked; he finds himself living daily with the hatred a society obsessed with normality dishes out to those who cannot conform. This is a book about exploitation and prejudice which touches some raw nerves; it makes you think as well as making you shudder. Dismas--who feels sorry for himself but not too much of the time--is one of the more three-dimensional characters in Herbert's work, and his love for the tiny and beautiful Constance is genuinely touching while not entirely avoiding sentimentality. There is horror of a classic visceral kind here--one of Dismas's colleagues dies in a peculiarly vile fashion--and a nursing home turns out to contain a real heart of darkness, but the real horror is the shabby ways in which people treat each other. --Roz Kaveney

Review
James Herbert's reinvention of himself as a writer of style and consequence is supported by this chilling epic, a world away from his early books. The memorable first line - 'My redemption begins in Hella' - may not quite have the du Maurier ring, but it's a good index of the stylish writing on offer here. Nicholas Dismas is a private investigator, but one with a remarkable secret to which not even he has the answer. Hired to find a missing baby, his investigations take him to a clandestine location called Perfect Rest. Is this a nursing home for the elderly? As Dismas investigates the bizarre secrets of the Others, revelations about his own past are in the offing. Herbert concentrates on the power of an inexorable narrative rather then on artificially injected shocks, and Others is all the better for that. (Kirkus UK)

Prolific horror writer Herbert (Portent, 1996, etc.) revives a sentimental favorite, Victor Hugo's Quasimodo, dresses him up in a modern setting, and sends him forth as Nicholas Dismas, private investigator. Dismas was so malformed at birth - hunchback, spinal curvature, twisted and withered right leg, birdboned chest, a forehead overlapping his eyes, overlarge ears, flat nose, backhair that formed a tail between his buttocks, and so on - that his mother left the newborn monster by the trash bins behind a nun's convent in a poorer part of London. A prologue set in Hell reveals that Dismas is actually a damned soul, a once irresistibly handsome movie star who is being given one last chance at redemption. This time around, he must live in an exemplary fashion completely at odds with his former evil ways - which he will not be allowed to remember. Thus, Nick Dismas struggles daily with God: why has he been born such a hideous monster to suffer an entire lifetime of humiliation, vilification, and punishment? (The reader knows: every card is stacked against Dismas's atonement.) Now, he's hired by widow Shelly Ripstone to find the bastard she bore before she married. Shelly never saw her baby, having been told by the hospital that it died almost at birth. But Louise Broomfield, a clairvoyant, has confirmed Shelly's intuition that the child lives. Will Dismas find it for her? As birds and whisperings invade Dismas's mind, Herbert leads his hero into ever more shocking traps while dropping in spells of garden silences under vast clear-blue skies. All clues lead to the Perfect Rest nursing home, whose care-supervisor has the same malformed body as Dismas but an inner beauty that rings bells: her name, Constance Bell ("The bells, the bells!) Midway, the gore gathers and the plot veers into The Island of Doctor Moreau territory. Even so, Nick Dismas remains one of the most tenderly drawn monsters since Hugo's bell-ringer. (Kirkus Reviews)

Customer Reviews

Disturbing but brilliant
This James Herbert book was very different from the other books I have read by him (The Rats, The Fog, The Dark). The whole story is told by the ppint of view of one charactor and there are only a few gory scenes (although when there are bloody scenes, they are very gory and vividly described).

Although I found this book quite upsetting as the main charactor has spinobifoda and is physically deformed and for the first half of the novel we are told a lot about how unhappy he is and how hard the world is for people like him. However, the story is origional and very well told and I found it very difficult to put down. The last 200 pages are amazing, very creative and suspenceful.

Nicolas Dismas was a handsom, famous and well-loved actor in the 1930's and 40's, but on the inside he was a horrible person. 50 years after his death he is given a chance to live again to put right what went wrong and show that he is a good person (but he will have no memory of his previous life). He is born as Nick Dismas, a man made miserable and lonely by his deformity's. He is a Private Investigator and is one day asked to look for a woman's long lost son, which leads him on a terrifying and disturbing journey to Peacefull Rest, a nursing home for the elderly, and the horrors that it conceals.

An Absorbing Work of Horror Fiction
Upon reading the synopsis and having read other Herbert books before, you would be forgiven for thinking this book is about a private investigator who is hired to solve a mystery and is pulled into a world of ghosts and spirits he can't control.
To an extent, part of this is true.
What however makes this book so different and so original, is the central character Nicholas Dismas; a man with such physical deformities, he resembles the elephant man. Quite a stark contrast to other "heros" who are 6ft tall, handsome and charming.

Whilst by it's own admission Others is a gripping thriller expertly written, it is society's intolerence and prejudice of Nicholas's character that will linger a long, long time after you have turned the last page of this book. Enthralling.

Herbert's best... by far
Not only is the premise extraordinarily clever, the pacing of the story is perfect.

A matinee idol, after inhabiting hell for half a century, is given the chance to leave in a very rare offer from on high. The conditions are that he will be reincarnated, will help a group of innocents, and, crucially, will not know anything about the deal.

Cruelly (perhaps), he is put into the body of Nicholas Dismas, a private detective with spina bifida who was abandonned as a newborn, who is contacted by a mother who suspects that her "stillborn" child has, in fact, been kidnapped.

Told in the first person, Others spirals rapidly from an apparent cut and dry PI story into a very disturbing (indeed) tale of extreme "medical malpractice".

If you can stand the deranged ending, this is excellent.