James Herbert

MOON

“Moon” is a story of madness and moon worshipping. It is really quite frightening. The hero in this story is unfortunate to have psychic abilities, which show him murders taking place. He does not know who the murderer is but the murderer knows who he is and who is close to him.

He had fled from the terrors of his past, finding refuge in the quietness of the island. And for a time he lived in peace. Until the “sightings” began, visions of horror seeping into his mind. He witnessed the grotesque acts of another a thing that gloried in murder and mutilation, a monster that soon became aware of the observer within its own mind. A creature that eventually would come to the island to seek him out.

I. Write out from the book words and word-combinations characterising the main personages of the novel[1]:

- he had been highly skilled, highly paid, and highly respected by his colleagues

- Childes considered himself neither teacher nor disciplinarian, merely a computer consultant to this school and two others on the island.

- His work was excellent, meticulous, and he appeared to be popular with the pupils, if not a trace too popular with some.

- Her skin appeared almost golden in the shadow of the table’s canopy, her pale green eyes and lighter wisps of hair curling over her ears heightening the effect. As usual, she wore the minimum of make-up, a proclivity that often made her resemble some of the girls she instructed, her small breasts, just delicate swelling, hardly spoiling the illusion. Yet at twenty-three, eleven years younger than Childes, she possessed a quiet maturity that he was in just a little wonder of.

The main character of this book is Jonathan Childes, an ordinary man of thirty-four, a school teacher, who had a family but divorced, who fell in love with a pretty young girl, but had got a lot of problems with her father and et cetera. He was an ordinary man with extraordinary abilities, and he was involved in a kind of nightmare, which abruptly changed him and his life.

Childes’ psychological portrait is step-by-step uncovered through the plot of the book. At the beginning of events, Childes is frightened and infirm of what should he do. Scuttling for cover from importunate press and curious neighbours, he is sheltered on a quiet island, where became a teacher of information technologies at La Roche school for girls. Because of his dealings with the police in the past, he was forced to divorce; his family needed a quiet life without any attention of the media. Childes helped solve a whole series of three murders, and the penalty he paid was false accusations and relentless hounding by the media, even long afterwards. But it was in the past. And his “visions” returned over.

He refuses to admit that his nightmare returns, that his living in peace is over, that he must make his choice again. He can lose his love, his job, his life, but he can’t be cool and indifferent when the new murderer is free to kill the innocents. The island is no more a refuge. And Childes’s attitude towards events is changed. He is afraid of going to the police because of his previous experience, at the same time he feels so helpless, so sorry for the victims:

“ - I was there, at the grave-side. I saw the body being torn open. I was pert of it somehow. I saw it all. I touched the mind of the person who did it. A feeling of being inside the person, seeing everything through their eyes. But I’m not involved, I’ve got no control. I can’t stop what’s happening!

- You’ve got to be kidding? That kind of publicity finished off my marriage and sent me scuttling for cover last time. Do you really imagine I’d bring it all down on myself again? … I can’t ruin everything again by going to the law. What chance would I have at La Roche or the other schools if word got around that there was some kind of psychic freak teaching kids on the island?”

He makes a hard decision to fight against that monster. Childes is no more a frightened man; he is a warrior who wants to protect his daughter, his fiancée, his ex-wife from the murderer, who forgets fears for the life. We can see real Childes in the scene of a fire at school, when he at the risk of one's life attempts rescued children from a fire. His transformation completes in the last scene of the mental opposition to the murderer, when Childes forces himself to be firmer, more courageous and ruthless than his enemy – a mad woman.

The sources of Childes’s exotic gift come to light at the end of the book - his strange visions in childhood overwhelmed by the ruthless father. However hid father’s pressure and the cheerless childhood has not made him be rough and severe. His tenderness shows at dialogue with Amy, with the daughter, with the ex-wife.

Only all these qualities of his nature have allowed him to gain a victory over the exotic bloody maniac.

It is impossible to say, that the writer managed to create authentic nature, whose actions would be natural in invented, mystical and supernatural situation. Maybe, the inconsistency of human nature is conditioned by a genre of the book (mystical thriller), and it superimposes a peculiar impress on the characters of the heroes and their behaviour.

In spite of a straight-line plot and flat characters of the heroes, the book touches upon many conflicts, both mystical property, and substantially possible in the modern society.

The main conflict is the eternal conflict between good and evil, Childes and the maniac. The conflict is pumped through the book, Childes’s psychological contact with the murderer plays a special role in its development.

However this conflict, which ends at the end of the book by destruction of the maniac, is neither sole, nor most interesting conflict of the book.

Another conflict is the conflict of relationships between the characters of the book: Childes and Amy’s father, Childs and his ex-wife, Childs and the police, Childs and his employer et cetera. The conflict between Childes and Amy’s father, Paul Sebire, is quite packed up in frameworks of the customary family conflict of the type parents - children. Paul Sebire supposes, that Childs is not rich, is not adequate, and, that is most important, is not stable, that he is mad. “I’d like you to end this relationship with Childes. … I believe the man is unstable. At first I thought tonight he was suffering from an epileptic fit of some kind, but soon realized the symptoms were not the same. I think the man is heading for a mental breakdown” So,Paul Sebire wants his daughter to end her relationships with Childes. And there is the conflict between the society and its exotic members with some kind of “distortions” from frameworks of the social standard – extra abilities and etc.

Really, as we find out in process of development of the plot scene, the exotic gift of Childes has served as the cause of his troubles – the divorce with the wife, the suspicion of being a murderer and many others. On the one hand, Paul Sebire and Childs’s ex-wife can be understood, no less than policemen, who suspected Childes to be a murderer. His behavior is strange, he is really unstable, and this instability attracts completely definite negative consequences (it resulted in a road accident and Amy survived by a miracle) …But on the other hand the gift is a great blessing, it can help to stop crimes and to catch the murderer, it causes no harm for anyone (except Childes himself). But the society automatically tears its inconvenient members, or overlooking about them, or forcing them to run … And, to tell truth, Childes (thanks to his gift!) would be faggoted if he lived about 500 years ago…

· Childes wished he could be sure that Amy’s father would never hurt her by going against her wish to marry him.

· Childes felt as if his mind had gone to another place and he could saw the murder through the eyes of the murderer.

· When Childes took the moonstone, he flinched as if touched by a low charge of electricity.

· Childes felt weakness as if immaterial bodies were drawing off his strength, using his energy.

· The first vision flashed before him, and Childes felt as if his head were filled with twisting cotton wool that was steadily pushing aside his own consciousness as it grew in ill-defined shape.

· If Childes hadn’t given Overoy the details of the murder, Overoy wouldn’t have believed him.

[1] The author drew the characters of the novel mostly avoiding the usage of straight descriptions. We learn about the personages’ character-sketches from their behaviour, their feelings, their actions and reactions to the circumstances. There are no straight and full descriptions in the novel’s text; we can see not many of the character-sketches of the personages.