‘Black Cathedral’ – L.H. Maynard & M.P.N. Sims

You know what they say, if you fall off your bike then the best thing to do is to get straight back on and try again... Last year, I thought that L.H. Maynard & M.P.N. Sims’ ‘Demon Eyes’ sounded like just the thing for a spooky Halloween read. I couldn’t have been more wrong as it turned out for reasons that are best gone into over Here.
It’s Halloween time once again and an advance copy of Maynard & Sims’ latest book came through the door a couple of days ago. Once I recognised the names on the cover I had some misgivings about picking the book up but I figured I’d give them another chance. After all, ‘Demon Eyes’ wasn’t so bad that it put me off giving their other books a go.
I finished ‘Black Cathedral’ last night and am pleased to say that it doesn’t suffer from any of the problems that plagued ‘Demon Eyes’, in fact it’s rather good up to a point. Unfortunately that ‘point’ is the very end of the book where I felt that things took a rather large dive...

Six managerial types, on a week long course, disappear days after taking up residence in a manor house on a remote Scottish island. If this wasn’t bad enough, the helicopter (and pilot) assigned to pick them up disappears as well. In fact, the island has a history of people disappearing in mysterious circumstances...
The British Government assigns this case to Department 18, a special unit assigned to investigate supernatural and paranormal occurrences. However, the manor on Kulsay Island is no mere haunted house but the home of an evil that is centuries old. The time has come for this evil to strike in the worst way possible and the members of Department 18 must race to uncover Kulsay’s secrets before this happens...

‘Black Cathedral’ opens with a haunted house in suburbia and an unexpected tragedy, cleverly linking these to events to what’s building up on Kulsay Island. Characters are introduced and relationships are both hinted at and explored. This is done in such depth to suggest that ‘Department 18’ may end up as a series of books; the concept and the characters that flesh it out certainly make this an appealing prospect.

Maynard and Sims have gone all out to make ‘Black Cathedral’ a very scary read and for the most part they succeeded as far as I was concerned. The tension is racked up throughout the book and is accompanied by generic ‘ghostly images’ (statues suddenly moving etc) that the authors make their own. The communion scene and Robert’s encounter at the fountain were key moments for me and the ‘Ley Line’ plot underpins these moments very well.
I was less convinced by the introduction of the ‘evil behind the evil’ though, not so much with what it was but more by the amount of explanation it was given (especially when certain characters had to get people to repeat themselves as they didn’t understand...) The dark atmosphere and ghostly happenings more than balanced this out though.

And then we get to the end of the book. An ending where events have been built up into a soaring crescendo of fear and terror. An ending where our heroes must face near insurmountable odds in a confrontation where it has been predicted that they will more than likely not survive...

An ending where one character discovers she is a powerful psychic ‘just in the nick of time’ and our heroes are bailed out by a secret religious order at the very last second...

Now, this could simply be a case of Maynard & Sims pulling the wool over the reader’s eyes and springing a surprise on us. If this is the case then they did the job almost too well, hiding certain players motives so well that the ending came across (to me) as an acknowledgement that the stakes were too high for the heroes to deal with and that something had to be done to get them out of a fix...
After such an impressive build up this manoeuvre just spoilt the whole book for me....

‘Black Cathedral’ is a marked improvement on ‘Demon Eyes’ but suffers from a complete let down of an ending. There’s enough potential though, in the concept of Department 18, to persuade me to look out for future books and see if there’s any improvement...

Six out of Ten