published 1978
£1.99, oxfam
verdict: mostly good supernatural thriller but also very cursed
the good
- car chase where a mini is pursued by a chieftain tank possessed by the ghost of Heinrich Himmler
- final boss is zombie (you guessed it) Heinrich Himmler complete with little spectacles (they do fall off) aided and abetted by MI5 and elements of the US military
- zombie's head explodes when shot, both removing the head and destroying the brain as per the proper procedure
the bad
- sustained and very nasty weapons-grade transphobia rears its head toward the end of the book (there's more to be said on violence and misogyny in this book but this particularly stuck out!)
- the villain has a prosthetic nose so you know he's evil
the weird
- each chapter begins with an epigraph by Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, Richard Wagner or similar, weaving in the story of Parsifal and the Nazis appreciation of it.
- elements of the deep state in thrall to a nazi cult are behind the IRA, the Baader-Meinhof group, the Japanese Red Army, industrial militancy in the united kingdom (which is in the same category), as well as Palestinian resistance in a bid to discredit the left and take over the world, in a sort of proto-QAnon conspiracy
misc
- protagonist is of the same alcoholic loner template used in the other two James Herbert books I have read, this time a former arms dealer who used to work for Mossad, who epitomise a sort of action-hero ethic of righteous violence meted out against a dehumanised enemy. at the start of the book he is disillusioned with the cycle of violence and revenge and has quit to work as a PI. but by the end we're perpetrating hate crimes and machine-gunning nazis so theres a bit of having-your-cake-and-eating-it going on. it's a very violent book and perhaps a bit fascist itself.