Once is the latest in the welcome new phase of James Herbert's career after he distanced himself from the straightforward "horror" tag afforded to him by earlier novels such as the Rats trilogy and cannily reinvented himself as a writer with considerably more psychological insight and elegance of style.

Trading on a grotesque reinvention of fairy stories, Herbert has his protagonist Thorn Kindred encountering witches, goblins and demons, and being obliged to turn to some very strange sources to save his soul. The new ambitiousness of Herbert's writing may be found in the underpinning of the narrative here: this is a grim and persuasively realised spin on Nietzsche's epigram: "When fighting monsters, beware of becoming one yourself." But long-time readers needn't worry about a lack of grisly chills: Herbert is too fine a writer not to keep us permanently on the edge of our proverbial seats. And he's better than ever at orchestrating his fear-filled climaxes, so that there is a carefully worked out structure to the book that never has the stop-and-start jerkiness of the early novels. Rather in the nature of Sondheim's musical Into the Woods, fairy tale motifs are exploded and reconstituted in this dark and erotic fable. After reading Once, fairy tales will never seem the same again. --Barry Forshaw

Remember the fairy stories you were told as a child? Tales of tiny, magical, winged beings and elves, wicked witches and goblins. Demons ...What if one day you found out they were true? What if, when you became an adult, you discovered they were all based on fact? What if you met the fantasy and it was all so very real? That's what happened to Thom Kindred. The wonders were revealed to him. But so were the horrors, for not far behind the Good, there always lurks the Bad. And the Bad had designs on Thom. The Bad would show him real evil. He would see the hellhagges and the demons. He would be touched by perverted passion. And corruption. And he would encounter his own worst nightmare. The Bad would seek to destroy him. And only the magic of the little beings would be able to help him. Once, James Herbert's masterful novel of erotic love and darkest horror, will take you to a realm where fantasy and refairytaleside, where faerytales really can come true.

2008-01-05 Hopefully just a blip..

..but this is by far the worst of Hebert's books that I've read (and I've read most). It starts off as well as any other of his tales, but as soon as the fairies appear, it really does spiral into total drivel.
I was pretty dubious about the whole fairy idea to begin with, but I didn't realise quite how unlikeable they would turn out to be - it got to the point where they made me feel quite nauseous.
I can't imagine what JH was thinking when he came up with the idea for this book, but I share another reader's suspicion that he was suffering from writer's block - an example of his lack of imagination is when he throws in two almost identical and equally mind-numbing scenes with spiders.
However, I do think this is just a blip in JH's career - the excellent 'Others' and 'Nobody True' make this seem likely.
Read these instead and if you want fairies then read Peter Pan.