Once — Book Review

Spoiler sections clearly marked below subtitles.

I actually picked this book up thinking that perhaps the author, James Herbert, was a relation of sci-fi celebrity Frank Herbert.

Turns out that isn’t the case, but James Herbert is well respected in the British horror genre! Once is a title that he released towards the end of his long career in writing, and as of writing this review it has fewer than 5000 ratings on Goodreads—it’s not a particularly well-known book!

By the way, you can follow me on Goodreads too!

How I Found Once

I stumbled across this dense tome in a second-hand bookshop while on holiday and bookless—a fatal condition that required immediate remedy.

In the small, cramped cabin that was the bookshop, the dark cover of Once was alluring, but even more so next to its alternate release copy which has a pure white cover. I perused the shelf further, and discovered a relatively healthy first edition for four British pounds, and that was my mind made-up—this was the book I was buying to read on my holiday around the UK.

I had noticed that it said ‘for adults only’ on the cover, but I didn’t pay it too much heed… I probably should have tried reading a page first…

For Adults Only

Jeepers… now this is the kind of book which makes me wish that books had an ESRB rating system like films and games do. An ‘adult’ book to me means it probably has some intense themes and difficult writing, and possibly sex.

What it does not communicate to me is that the book is definitely an erotica, which Once by James Herbert undoubtedly is.

Y’know, alongside doing what Herbert purportedly did best, horror.

So it’s both SEX and HORROR, which are two things I don’t necessarily want together in a book!

Now, I have read books with naughty scenes in before—and you can see which books those are in our 18+ reviews section—but never before have I read a book where the sex was this inextricable from the plot.

Once simply wouldn’t exist without the sex. In many ‘adult’ books, the sex scenes serve mostly to titillate the reader rather than progress the narrative or relationship of the characters. I’m talking about the kind of sex scenes where a fade to black wouldn’t have impacted the reader’s ability to understand the story and the characters.

Don’t get me wrong, an egregious raunchy scene here or there is fine. I do believe that there is a place for titillation entertainment in society! But Once had something a bit more going on under the covers…

In Once, if you replaced the bountiful sex scenes with fade-to-blacks, you would be left with a complete mess. You’d jump from characters being friends to trusting each other with their deepest secrets—because of how loving their experience was with one another. Alternately, they could go from being friends to being mortal enemies, and you would have no idea why without reading the sex scene.

Once is not an amazing book overall, but it has some amazing insight on what sex can contribute to a story narratively, and I haven’t read a published book (or fanfiction) that has achieved this at this scale (although, Under the Oak Tree comes close!). It really changed my thought process on how I might include erotic moments in my own fiction in the future. I seriously believe I will be a better writer for having read this strange, not-so-little fantasy.

Criticisms of Once

In some of the scenes, I was left wondering if an actual woman was consulted or not, which often distracted me from the scene itself.

The book also feels very much like a harem anime with one insecure but arguably attractive male protagonist considering his various female options in life. This also felt a bit reductive to read, but I’m sure it fits a lot of peoples’ fantasies.

Most disappointingly, this book from the early 2000s contains a lot of harmful stereotypes. Fatness, ugliness, and otherness are all equated with ‘evil’, in a book that has a lot of Christian undertones to it. Goodness is blonde, skinny, heterosexual, and weirdly lacking in pubic hair.

It’s unfortunate that a book that has such a sexually honest viewpoint became wrapped up in so many other insidious prejudices.

Aside from this, the final fight being a princely assault on the castle was perhaps too traditional and missing the main thrust of the book’s narrative (namely, I had expected something more sexually charged) and the final introduction of time travel also undermined the narrative at large.

Final Notes

I came across Once by accident, and I probably wouldn’t recommend it or seek out more of James Herbert’s writing in the future, but I did enjoy it and the unique perspective of a protagonist struggling through the aftereffects of a stroke.

There’s a lot that is uniquely curious about Once, but as a book overall it didn’t thrill me like Mistborn, nor did it make my heart ache like the Kyoshi books. I look forward to completing Children of Dune now as my next literary conquest!