The Block by Gerald Suster (Granada 1984)
This has a great opening hook of a prologue, recounting the events that took place at The Larches in St. John’s Wood in April 1901. The police are called to the house after strange noises are heard from within, followed by a piercing scream and a rush of intense heat – which seared the skin of the girls working at the flaggelation parlour next door! Then The Larches bursts into flames killing all who lived there. When the flames died down the police find the blackened remains of two men and one woman, also an altar bearing the charred corpse of a child.
On to present times and the large block of flats called Lavender Gardens, built in the 1920’s. Tom and Veronica Bradley move in with their young son Colin, the flat and the development seem perfect, it has it’s own squash courts, and even an interior shopping arcade. Naturally things soon start to go pear shaped.
A large cast of characters are gradually introduced to the young family, from the obnoxious advertising exec, to the pushy insurance salesman, the bestselling authoress, the retired colonel, the racist accountant, the junkie night porter and his despicable dealer. All stereotypes of course, in much the same way you’d expect an Agatha Christie cast to be assembled.
The trouble seems to start when writer Vanessa Starr hears a disturbing chanting coming from Flat 13, followed by a malevolent snarl “as though some savage and tormented beast had erupted out of the earth and was bent on devouring all before it”. Very soon strange deaths begin to occur, a brick is dropped from the roof and crashes onto the head of an old lady, then Vivien Mostyn the colonel’s wife is killed in a falling lift, one woman is bashed on the head then stuffed into a tumble dryer in the laundry room, but there are many more.
The Bradley’s son Colin meets a strange girl in one of the many corridors in the block. She’s called Perpetua and wants him to play hide and seek with her…
It doesn’t take too long for Tom Bradley to emerge as the hero of the piece, he begins to delve into the history of Lavender Gardens and doesn’t like what he finds. During the 1930’s one of the inhabitants of Lavender Gardens was a fanatical British Nazi called Hector Prestwick, who lived with a woman called Maud Naseby – both were put on trial for the kidnap, torture and murder of two Jewish children. It also emerged that the two killers had an illegitimate child, a girl they used to lure other children back to their flat, called Perpetua Naseby…
Down in the basement Percy Syme feels the Power growing, feels it has chosen him to direct it’s onslaught against the people living in the block. Already he has enlisted the weak and the cruel, the vengeful and the empty. The Power grows and radiates upward through the block, floor by floor, people answer the call and form an army with a central purpose – to kill everyone else.
Considerable bloodshed ensues as the inhabitants split into two factions, the posessed and those fighting to survive. The insanity rises, floor by floor through the block. The story becomes pretty gory from here on in, and this section is probably a bit too drawn out for my liking and would probably have benefited from some pruning here and there.
In a brief lull in the carnage some of the main charcters are treated to a shared vision of the history of Lavender Gardens, and before it the events in the Edwardian villa called The Larches, and further back still: “Before Tom’s glazed eyes, half naked savages gathered there in the night to worship dark forces with strange, cruel and terrible rites”
The survivors find themselves stranded on the roof, the maniac hordes all around them, so it’s a good time for the police and the army to show up. But it’s not quite over because mad Percy in the basement has one final trick up his sleeve…
Overall I really enjoyed this book, it was gripping from the Prologue onward, even if it drifted slightly toward the end. It’s a minor criticism. On the strength of this one I’m definitely going to be looking out for more by Gerald Suster.
