The Caretakers
by Adrian Chamberlain
$0.99 (Kindle)
Dark Continents Publishing
April 23, 2011
Review copy received from the author.

Adrian Chamberlin, a UK-based author who has been in the game for years and is well-respected within the horror community, especially in his role as one of the co-founders of Dark Continents Press, is an intriguing fellow by all accounts, and when he approached me about possibly reviewing some of his material, I thought it best to give it a shot and see. You could basically sum up The Caretakers by saying it’s about a group of people who used to go to Cambridge University in the UK, all involved with the fictional All Souls College, who were part of a group known as the Caretakers, responsible for shouldering a burden that involves an old debt to a goddess, Andraste but that wouldn’t be doing justice to Chamberlin’s novel, which has a lot more depth and goes beyond that plot summary.

The novel starts off with a prologue that goes back to the time when Romans and Druids were around, including Boudicca, who invokes something she should not have. We then switch to the modern day with and get introduced in separate plot threads (they eventually connect) to the main characters, all of whom were somehow involved with All Souls College when they went to Cambridge. Andy Hughes, for instance, is an ex-con, and he has just found out that his girlfriend left him because she’s concerned about his anger issues.

We also get introduced to Pearce, who tells Andy to find a bloke called Geoff Michaels in Cambridge whose missing parents will pay top dollar for the return of their son but he also has to contend with Jason Franklin, who is an absolute nutter (a very well-written character). But Andy’s no angel himself, having beaten a rapist to a bloody pulp, which gets him off to a rocky start in the reader’s mind to say the least.

Rob Benson also emerges as another of the principal players in the story, and he’s suffering from terrible nightmares, all relating back to All Souls College. Soon enough we meet another character, Jen, who is/was Andy’s girlfriend, as well as another former student, Emma, who has one of the most memorable scenes involving her walking into a church and seeing a wooden carving of Jesus Christ who is bleeding from the eyes and mocking her with the voice of her dead sister. I don’t say this about a lot of authors, because most fail to creep me out or scare me in any way, but this was a great scene, but this was even eerier for me as I used to imagine Jesus statues in churches I went to as a kid coming to life and being angry. I do wonder how Chamberlin knew

And although the characterization, plotting, etc, were well done, I generally don’t enjoy multi-character points of view, and switching back and forth, but when we get to Phil’s section it’s interesting because he’s a professor who wrote a popular and controversial book on the Salem Witch trials, but it almost ruined his reputation, not to mention he married a student, which can’t have elevated his status any lower :-S But he’s supposed to write a new book about the dark legends involving All Souls College and Cambridge University, he gets a better advance, and for the first time, an academic is tackling the subject, however much his former colleagues and other academics will discount his claims in the book. I thought this was a neat plot element to include, and the story, as it goes on, reveals more and more about the true nature of the hidden secrets of Cambridge.

As mentioned earlier, the Caretakers are basically a group of people who listen to the Elder, who communicates to them about fighting against the goddess Andraste, who is pissed off pretty much all the time. She demands a sacrifice to ensure that peace (or some semblance of it) continues at the College (and thus, the entire country, one would assume). The previously alluded to Jason Franklin is intricately tied in to the Elder, and holds the key to stopping Andraste’s emergence from the College, but things get complicated as characters once thought to be on the good guy camp prove otherwise, much to Andy’s chagrin in particular.

The novel ends where it should, and appropriately, and overall presents a well-crafted tale of the secrets (albeit fictional) of Cambridge University that are steeped in Britain’s rich history and mythology with an especially Celtic flavour. Anyone who’s a fan of Celtic goddesses, Boudicca, or Anglo-Saxon history would do well to give this volume a shot, and Chamberlin is a gifted writer who will keep you turning the pages.