Book Review: The Stonehenge Legacy

The summer solstice is approaching and something nasty is happening amongst the ancient megaliths of Stonehenge. Hooded figures flit about in the shadows planning a human sacrifice to appease the old gods, the police are baffled and the only people who can save the day are the estranged son of a famous archaeologist and a police officer willing to suspend her disbelief to the point of dislocation. Yikes!

Before we go any further I should get something off my chest; this is a very silly book, pure weapons grade hokum in fact. Now we’ve got that out of the way I can get on with making an objective case for why it is still worth reading.

Sphere have done Sam Christer few favours by describing this book as a thriller to ‘rival the best of Dan Brown’, it is nothing of the sort, mostly because it is nowhere near as pompous.

Everything from the pounding strap-line on the cover ‘A thriller 5000 years in the making’ to the sub John Wyndham way it locates outlandish events within a prosaically pastoral English landscape puts this book firmly in the tradition of the sort of horror films Hammer made in the sixties. The adherents of dark ancient rites here aren’t so much the keepers of some vast conspiracy as a collection of oddballs who just want to dress in strange outfits and do outlandish things after dark; a sort of homicidal version of the local golf club if you like.

I could be rather snotty about all this, but I don’t really feel like it, mostly because a silly book is not necessarily a bad book and it is often much better than a pretentious one. There is, admittedly, little about The Stonehenge Legacy that will surprise its readers; but there is little to disappoint them either. Competence trumps high concept because Sam Christer demonstrates a strong grasp of the rhythms and conventions of the genre meaning that for all their predictability the resulting thrills are also reliable.

This is Sam Christer’s first novel and like most first novels it is a little too long, but if, like me, you spent your formative years reading James Herbert you will enjoy it enough to hope it isn’t his last.

The Stonehenge Legacy
Sam Christer
(Sphere, 2011)