CW: racism, sexual assault, miscarriage

 

I’m aware that Graham Masterton has had a long and prolific career, is highly regarded by many, and even considered a master horror writer. However, The Children God Forgot was the first book of his I have read, and it will be the last.

 

I haven’t hated a book this much in a long time.

 

And I will confess I didn’t even finish it. But I hope as I go through my problems in this review you will understand why I couldn’t stomach any more.

 

I’m going to start with the less serious issues, and then move on to the outright offensive, so please note the content warning.

 

The Children God Forgot is about a series of strange happenings in East London; mysterious apparitions and accidents in the sewers, and monstrous foetuses appearing in women’s wombs. These events defy explanation, so DC Jerry Pardoe and DS Jamila Patel are called in to investigate.

 

Firstly, tone and characterisation: Not a single character is developed beyond their regional or ethnic stereotype, or they entirely lack character. Chief examples of this being our main characters; Pardoe and Patel. Pardoe is a caricature from the Dick Van Dyke school of cockney. It is very, very obvious that Masterton is not a Londoner (and for disclosure, neither am I), and I appreciate that it is difficult to write dialects and slang which are not yours and make it sound natural, but surely someone could have looked this over.

 

I normally wouldn’t mind all the wisecracking from Pardoe if we had a deeper look at his personality, but unfortunately Masterton decided to tell us that he uses humour as a coping mechanism, but there’s not any evidence that he has any feelings to cope with. This is best illustrated when he is visiting someone in hospital who has just sustained traumatic, life-changing injuries, and he jokes about it to their face. He does not come across as charming, he comes across as an insensitive prick.

 

And then we have his partner, Patel. Patel, despite being one of our main characters, unfortunately suffers from the same problem as every other woman in the book: she is utterly lacking in any discernible personality traits. What makes Patel such a good police officer is her special ability to always know when someone is lying, which if anything makes her seem even more robotic. If I were being generous I might say she’s dedicated to the job, but we’re also clearly supposed to believe there’s romantic chemistry between her and Pardoe, which is impossible when you don’t have a character.

 

Now I’m going to talk about the more serious issues, namely, the racism and misogyny. My original intention was to divide these into two sections but on reflection, they can’t be entirely separated here. Please bear with me.

 

The book opens with a Nigerian woman, Chiasoka Oduwole, months after having an abortion, being suddenly afflicted with great pain and swelling in her abdomen. She is rushed to hospital, where a white male doctor is infuriatingly oblivious to her terrifying situation, but what really got me was that he kept calling her “Mrs Oddy-Wolly”. And this is written like it’s supposed to be funny. An author I respect might be making a point about racism in the medical community, particularly in maternity services. Today in the UK Black woman are still FOUR TIMES more likely to die in pregnancy or childbirth than white women (according to figures released in November 2021), and anecdotally while I have seen many white AFABs speaking out about their experiences having their pain and symptoms dismissed by doctors (and that is important, don’t get me wrong), what doesn’t circulate as much is the studies showing that Black people on the whole are less likely to have their pain taken seriously in the medical community.

 

In more sensitive hands, this story could have been used to talk about these issues, but apparently since we can’t grow up past “ha ha funny African names”, this is what we get.

 

Up next, we have Masterton’s portrayal of Asian people. There are a number of Pakistani characters, and except for DS Patel, they are all superstitious and uneducated, with the men being violent as a bonus.

 

Joya is a young woman from a Pakistani immigrant family, her ex murdered her boyfriend because she had a secret abortion, and she has to keep this all secret from her father because he thinks she’s a virgin and she’s betrothed to a man 30 years her senior in Pakistan.

 

This feels like it was ripped from The Daily Mail. There are also casual references to honour killings like they’re an everyday occurrence in London, this is the stuff that gets reported by the right-wing press, not because they actually care about women and girls being killed but because it confirms their prejudices. These are, once again, topics worth addressing by the right person (ideally a Pakistani woman), but at the very least sensitivity readers should have had a look at this.

 

I would be amiss not to mention the token Indian doctor who is one of the few reasonable characters, but even he has to mention how uncivilised things are back home.

 

(Apologies for some of my language in the next section, as a trans man I tried to be as inclusive as possible but in this book all of the characters are cis anyway.)

 

The other major problem I had with this book is how casual it is with the casual treatment of AFAB trauma.

 

Chiasoka Oduwole had her abortion after being raped by her cousin’s husband.

 

Another character suffered a late-term miscarriage before being impregnated with one of the monster foetuses.

 

And the scene that finally made me give up on this book, in which a woman struggles while a foetus attempts to crawl up inside her. It is at one point lodged in her vagina while her boyfriend tries to pull it loose. It’s a rape scene… but I got the impression that Masterton doesn’t realise it’s a rape scene.

 

Rape, pregnancy, miscarriage; these things just don’t seem to be a very big deal in The Children God Forgot, and frankly there’s no excuse for it. The former two of those have been explored extensively in the horror genre already (admittedly with mixed results). But even if somehow you didn’t know this, if you know any women you should have some awareness.

Men Writing Women has been a kind of meme these last couple of years, but this for me is one of the more serious examples. Here we have a horror writer who doesn’t comprehend the horror of his words.