By Tim Lebbon
(mostly spoiler free except where noted)
Summary: Tom has lost his son to a military training exercise 10 years before the book begins. Near the anniversary of his son's - Steven - death, Tom overhears a conversation that renews his uneasiness about the government's story regarding the "accident" that supposedly killed Steven. He pursues a vague set of clues and rumors that lead him to a military cover up, a horrifying secret, and new information about his son's fate.
What I Liked: After a slightly slow beginning the pace of the story picked up - it was quite an action packed adventure. Some of the ideas in the book were fairly creative, especially the background information. The writing wasn't the worst and Lebbon is decent at conveying visuals to the reader. The ending wasn't totally obvious and there were a few unexpected twists.
Now then, why are all my positive comments so trivial?
Things that Annoyed Me: Foremost, at the beginning, the "interrupting narrator" voice (maybe there is a more technical term for this?). By way of example, I mean the foreshadowing of horror to come, "But if he had only known then what was to come later..." In small doses fine, I guess the technique serves to build atmosphere. However, Lebbon over did it a bit and several times bordered on the melodramatic. Thankfully this was only a problem for the first quarter or so of the book.
The main character Tom is seriously lame. He spent a lot of time whining, saying "Oh God" or "I am confused." You might count the times someone in that book says "confused" and come up with a ridiculously high number. Find another word please. At the opposite end where Tom is pathetic and annoying, Cole - the main antagonist (sort of) - is too much of a bad ass. He gets away with unbelievably crazy behavior, not sure how he made it to the end of the book. I will admit that Lebbon did try to give both characters some depth, but I don't think he succeeded very well. In fact, many of the characters in Berserker had inconsistent personalities especially Natasha - another main character who has a rather ambiguous role in Lebbon's story.
Spoilerish problems:
There is this thing with categories. I am all for blurring boundaries, being creative, rethinking old cliches, but the author tried way too hard to create a monster that was everything scary he could possibly think of; traits of vampires, werewolves, and ghosts. In addition, he threw in scary science gone wrong, psychic powers, mind control, and viruses in combination with creepy military programs and conspiracy theories. Not to mention psychotic/terrifying children (see cover). My Quote of the Moment (top to your right) is rather perfect here. Honestly, there were just too many things going on for it to be enjoyable.
Finally, if you are going to use "science" to explain away the supernatural, I need to be convinced. This might merely be a personal problem, but the vagueness of some sort of man made super-monster turned into infectious vampire creating machine seems like a cop out to me. A random reference here and there to syringes and military secret programs gone wrong is not enough. I want to know more about where these creatures came from. And here is where I think the background story was more interesting than the one Lebbon actually told. I think had he backed the story up and not done the "10 years after" thing, I might have liked it a lot more.
3/5
(btw, I am probably way more generous with stars when it comes to horror than with other genres)
