Talk us through it
Back in medieval times young student Matthew finds it's sometimes better not to pry into your Teacher's personal papers, especially when that Teacher is shunned and lives in the dark woods far from the relative safety of the local Village. Roland Teleson has refined a computer chip to crunch numbers at a faster rate. This turns out not to have been such a good idea as both Teleson and another computer expert discover the computer network can indeed be the death of them. U.S Airforce Test Pilot Russell Cross almost becomes another fatality as first a young boy and then his dead Gulf War Co-Pilot appear in the cockpit of his jet fighter, resulting in an unplanned ejection. A World War One German Submarine U-65 experiences ghostly hauntings and more accidents than can be laid at the feet of shoddy maintenance, she will eventually sink with all hands on board. When Russell Cross joins Aussie shipping navigator Carol aboard the luxury liner Futura everything comes to a head in a Titanic sort of a way. Can Russell decipher the devil's numbers before a major maritime shipping tragedy goes down? Ready to step onto a bridge over troubled waters?
Review"I think we should be more worried about where the hell McClain's corpse is." - Russell CrossThe Devil's Numbers is G.M.Hague's fourth published novel and to a certain extent you could say Hague has finally found his voice and a decent editor. I didn't manage to find any glaring errors in the novel so either the Writer has decided to take time out of his busy schedule to proof read things or Pan Macmillan took the unprecedented step of actually employing an Editor who isn't incompetent. I'm putting my twenty on Hague having done his own editing. When I say the Writer has found his own voice I don't actually mean that in a good way I'm sorry to say. With The Devil's Numbers Hague has turned out a novel that is interchangeable with any other horror novel you might find at an airport book display. Well at least that's in keeping with the Writer's reputation as the "Down Under Stephen King". That's not to say the novel isn't without merit, it's definitely up to Hague's normal writing standard, and you will be engrossed with the storyline as it unfolds. As usual the Writer keeps the reader spellbound through the course of the first 480 odd pages before delivering a resolution that was painfully obvious from the first 100 pages or so. Once again Hague delivers a novel that doesn't in any way surprise the Reader leading I would imagine to some of the Writer's audience hitting the road so to speak before page last. It's good pulp horror writing, the story is interesting, but there's no meat with the sizzle. Overall I enjoyed the The Devil's Numbers without the novel having any lasting effect on me as I finally closed the covers and tossed it into the bookcase of "I must drop these into Vinnies next time I'm passing". Hague presents us with his take on what a U.S horror novel can do, but really should have left it to the yanks. I can forgive a lot from an Australian or New Zealand horror novel, after all arguably we are producing some of the best dark fiction currently being released, what I can't get over is a local Writer trying to pull a swift one and knock out a book aimed directly at a yank audience. It very seldomly works as our Writers tend to forget themselves and have "U.S" characters spouting off dialogue you would expect to hear either in St Kilda or on Bondi Beach. It simply doesn't ring true, and Hague has fallen into the same trap with The Devil's Numbers. Primarily the novel is a yank horror tale that sounds like it could have been situated in a pub in downtown Melbourne, assuming for the moment there's a pub big enough to have a luxury liner sailing through it in AFL land. Once again Hague shows his fondness for World War One interludes in his novels. However where this worked in his third novel Voices of Evil (1996), it's a complete miss in The Devil's Numbers. In the first novel the reader is involved in a mystery as the diggers move from training in Egypt to the blood socked beaches of ANZAC cove. We are discovering things at the same time the characters are. As opposed to this the German U-boat has a preordained fate in The Devil's Numbers and the reader is generally just treading water while Hague gets to that and things can move on plot wise. Personally if I was writing the screenplay for this novel, and yes it's definitely movie material, I would drop the whole U-boat subplot as it pretty much exists simply as a plot device or even worse as padding. There's not enough T's in twee to describe the situation where the modern meets the historic, I was actually groaning when that went down. The Devil's Numbers does have one glaring plot hole and while it wont take the reader out of the novel it does make you wonder if Hague hadn't overly plotted this one, and given the actual writing process no room to breath in or indeed to allow for new ideas to intrude. During the course of our luxury cruise of the damned a number of deaths go down at the convenience of the plot. Anyone who is a danger to the computer system or the unfolding demonic plot find themselves facing an early exit from the novel. While I can get down with the Exorcist, hey avoiding comparisons to Blatty's more famous novel this time around, and the ship's Captain meeting untimely deaths I'm at best bemused by the fates of the ship's network expert and the two engineers. On a number of occasions Hague has a character, primarily Russell Cross, note that the demonic entity doesn't know about the modern world. Hague even has on one of the few occasions where we get a demonic point of view the entity still learning about it's new found power, wait till it discovers "the blue screen of death". How then does it know the Boson, the computer dude, and various other characters poise a threat to it? It simply doesn't ring true and makes you wonder if Hague shouldn't have plotted another course here. I'm not even going to get into the whole Bermuda triangle thing or the cultists. Been there, read it before, have the tee. While I think structurally this is the least of the Hague novels I have read thus far, and that whole pandering to the yank marketing is pretty inexcusable, I still managed to maintain interest till the final page. Hague as usual writes in a quick style and The Devil's Numbers is totally accessible to any reader.
ScaryMinds Rates this read as ... If you want to be a Hague completist then go forth and find The Devil's Numbers, my suggestion
would be eBay, otherwise feel free to give this one a miss. For mine the weakest of Hague's books I have read thus far, and I'm running out of options
there with only one more novel to read.
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