I read this for November's Horror Aficionados read.
Please note that I gave this book 3.5 stars and rounded it up to 4 stars on Goodreads.This was a good horror book, but my mind tended to wander the entire story-line. I think the problem is that the writing style was just okay, and a few times there would be a sentence or two that just read wrong in my head and I would get distracted.
This book is kind of a weird thing in itself. This was released two weeks prior to the movie being released. There were some minor changes between the book/movie, but ultimately this whole book read like a very jazzed up screenplay. I don't want to make comparisons between Dan Brown or David Seltzer, but a few times I would read something and could see the scene in my head from the movie. So Seltzer definitely wins when it comes to tying the book/movie together.
The Omen follows Robert Thorn and his wife Katherine after the birth of their son. Readers are quickly hip to the fact that Katherine and Robert's child is murdered by mysterious persons and is switched with another baby. Robert is led to believe that his baby was stillborn and is talked into switching out his baby with another baby whose mother died. The set-up to why Robert would do such a thing is that the book goes more into Katherine's mental state prior to this birth and how fragile she was due to the miscarriages she had prior to giving birth.
So this whole book is really just Katherine and Robert realizing that their son Damien does not seem to be like other boys and Robert realizing that something dark seems to be stalking his family.
The writing as I said was good but certain parts were a bit much here and there. This book included pictures from the 2006 film staring Julia Stiles and Liev Schrieber. It was actually odd that the book threw some photos in there randomly in the book. It broke up the flow of my reading. I wish that they had inserted the pictures at the end of the book, or if you are going to insert the pictures in the book, insert them in where the picture references what is going on in the story at that time. Since the book itself that I have is pretty old looking, it was weird to see the glossy colored pictures as well.
There are other books in this series, but I am going to pass on them. All in all some of the imagery in the book was gruesome here and there so that's fair warning to those out there looking for something like this to read.