When Steadman agreed to investigate the disappearance of a young mossad agent, he had no idea he would be drawn into a malevolent conspiracy of neo-nazi cultists bent on unleashing an age-old unholy power on an unsuspecting world-power rising out of a demonic relic from man's dark primal past to threaten humanity with horror beyond any nightmare...This is the third and last book I'm going to read by James Herbert. I kind of liked Sepulchre, hated Haunted, and this one was just tedious in the extreme. Characterization would have to be ramped up several notches to approach the level of cardboard cutouts As in the other books, the plot twists are apparent long before they occur. The first third or so is passable, up to the point when the bad guy captures the hero and gives a four page rant to explain his master plan. It is so over the top, so cliched and cornball, that I doubt it would have been acceptable in a pulp magazine of the 1930s. Herbert writes action scenes pretty well, but his horror is almost exclusively of the gag reflex variety and is just dropped in unannounced whenever convenient, with no build up to or transition away from. The final scene is a good idea but is dragged out interminably and then is just what you've expected all along, the most obvious choice. I was hoping for some clever twist, but Herbert never came close. There are way too many authors writing better books to waste anymore time on him.