MORE MASTERTON

I've been getting through a lot of Masterton books recently, so I figured I'd do another group post for them.

Broken Angels is the second in the Katie Maguire series. I enjoyed this one much more than A Terrible Beauty, which certainly wasn't horrible. I liked all the characters involved and the case was set up well, with the problems of dealing with the church and all. Everything came together well in the end and I liked that the ending had a little supernatural maybe to it, just like A Terrible Beauty.

The third book in the series, Red Light, I could not finish. It's about human trafficking and I just could not get through the chapters on 13 and 15-year-old girls stolen from Africa and forced into prostitution in Ireland. I finally gave up and skipped to the end, then just couldn't justify the pain of reading those chapters to get to an ending I didn't like.

I'm not giving up on the series. I have the fourth one sitting in my pile. But I'm not going to suffer through something just to read a shitty ending. Not that it was a bad ending per se, but I didn't agree with the choice Katie made.

The Sphinx is one of Masterton's early works from 1978. His earlier books seem to be shorter and pack in a lot of action. There isn't a lot of dragging out of details and the protagonists figure out the plot pretty quickly. They feel sort of rushed, but I'm also used to his short stories, which do the same thing. So they're kinda like slightly long short stories. Heh.

The Sphinx is on the more far-fetched side of Masterton's work. It's about a tribe of lion-human hybrid people that began back in ancient Egypt. He twists mythology though and has Bast as a male lion god, which I rolled my eyes at. But it's a horror book, not historical, so what are you gonna do? Although Bast could have been left as female very easily, since it's the females that carry on the Ubasti line and are central to the tribe. It's an interesting quick read, but I wouldn't highly recommend it.

Doesn't that cover remind you of 80s/90s young adult horror novels? Like RL Stine and Christopher Pike. Ha. Djinn is another shorter older novel, this time from 1977. It features Harry Erskine from The Manitou, only now he's found himself in a much better book with a better cast and scarier big bad. The basic plot is that the jar contains The Forty Thieves. Yep, of Ali Baba fame. Only Ali Baba was a practitioner of black magic and his forty thieves are actually one very powerful djinn, who takes the form of forty different scary as fuck things with each incarnation able to kill in a different horrifying way. Ali Baba agreed to give this nasty tribe of people a young girl every year if they would summon the djinn for him and get it under his control. So there's a lot of not so nice things that happen to the female characters, both in the past and present.

After reading as many Mastertons as I have over the past couple months, I put a bunch of them up on Paperback Swap. Aside from the anthologies, Djinn is the only one I set aside to keep. So it gets my recommendation.