Book Review: Blood On Satan’s Claw
Blood on Satan’s Claw
Mark Morris
When I first started listening to this, I didn’t realise it was adapted from a screenplay for a film, not having come across the name before. Once I found that out, a lot more of this made sense. The film is from 1971, and there was really no effort – not even a token one – to update the story from that time period. Even though the film is only 1hr 40m, and the Audible version is 2hr 24m. There was so much they could have done to just make this that little bit better, but they didn’t.
The cast is good, and do a decent job with what they’re given, but the plot itself was weak.
Blood on Satan’s Claw is about a village in seventeenth-century England, where a skull is discovered in a farmer’s field. The skull disappears but has cast its influence over the village, and soon the children are acting strangely, a strange malady takes hold of villagers, and some disappear.
It’s folk horror, but it’s not great folk horror. It’s full of tropes and cliches – again, which could have been resolved by updating it from the film version. The ‘good’ people in this, the ones who remain uninfluenced, are the men, while those who most easily succumb are, well, not the women as such, but the girls, because we all know how terrifying teenage girls are.
This was frustrating throughout. The teenage girls are overly sexualised, and it seems the only way they can ‘trick’ the men is by offering them their bodies. It felt like every chapter there was a girl begging someone to have sex with them. It just felt really over the top, contrasted with the ‘hero’ characters who are all fairly straight laced. There wasn’t even that much tension throughout the story, as ultimately, there wasn’t enough to make you feel connected to the characters. I didn’t really care about any of them.
The voice acting was great, but a few of the voices were way too similar and it could get confusing at points. Overall I just felt this fell flat and missed an opportunity to update this to a more interesting story, rather than seemingly keeping too much of the original screenplay in a medium it doesn’t quite work for.
Review by Elle Turpitt
Twitter & Instagram: @elleturpitt
I purchased this via an Audible credit.