I've been working on getting through this samurai detective series so I can mass review the whole set of seven and then I got totally sidetracked and I've been on a Graham Masterton kick lately, hence my lack of updates. But here's what I've read from Masterton and hopefully I can get back to the samurai detective soon and get that finished.
Death Mask is one of the Sissy Sawyer mysteries. When I got it on Paperback Swap, I had no idea it was the second one. It reads fine standalone, so you could easily pick it up without having read the first one, which is called Touchy and Feely. I actually ordered that one off Amazon and the seller marked it as shipped, but then a few days after that, they refunded my money. But the order is still open and marked as shipped, so I have no clue if the book is coming or not. I need to write them. Anyway, Death Mask is a typical Masterton crime novel: horrible crimes with a supernatural twist. But this one has a couple interesting female characters taking the main roles and the supernatural element is quite different than his usual fare. That's all I can say without spoiling, but I do recommend this one.
I also highly recommend The Doorkeepers. This is my favorite Masterton novel that I've read yet, though I still prefer a lot of his short stories to it. It feels like what if you combined Neil Gaiman and Stephen King. Several characters have a Gaiman feel, or rather specifically a Neverwhere feel, and there's the Stephen King element of a more complex plot rather than an out and out demon that needs to be stopped, which is what the next books on my list all have in common. The main plot element is that there are six doors in London that lead to different worlds and we've got a murder involved. I like all the world-hopping. It's sort of like time travel, but there's a less complicated way to get back to where you came from, although the characters having to deal with it doesn't make it easy for them, but there's no threat of "OMG, how do we get back to our world? I don't knooooooow!" It's good though. Really good.
Master of Lies is not for the faint-hearted. It opens with a really gruesome killing scene and then just keeps going. There's a ritualistic serial killer trying to invoke the Master of Lies, Belial. I love Masterton's Belial. I love it when authors make angels, even fallen ones not demonic but beautiful. This one's more on the gory side, but I do recommend it to those that like some supernatural, demonic crime reading.
This omnibus is so fat, it was actually a bit hard to read. All of these are older Masterton stories and you can tell. They have nowhere near the craft of Doorkeepers. Charnel House and Devils of D-Day were 1978, Tengu 1983 and Mirror 1988. They're shorter novels, as you can imagine, being combined into one paperback that's typical paperback size but really damn thick. Tengu is pretty good. It's got men being possessed by Japanese demons to carry out a revenge plot. I like a lot of the characters here, but can't say anything else for fear of spoilers. Devils of D-Day was the other good one. The army used thirteen demons to fight battles and this is what happens when one that was abandoned is freed and forces the idiot humans who freed it (knowing what it was even) to reunite it with its twelve brethren. This could have easily been a much longer novel with the humans going on a Da Vinci Code style quest with lots of locations for each demon. I was annoyed all twelve were in one place. The demon threatening them to move faster and how easy it was to bring them all together again felt rushed, like he wanted to just get the story over with. But it's still a fun read. It's just a shame because it really could have been something bigger and better. Mirror was boring. It went on for way too long. The concept was interesting, but then it just dragged and I almost didn't care anymore. It's another demon story, this one more centered on Satan himself. Charnel House had interesting pieces, but also eventually bored me. I feel like everything was resolved a little too easily. They're fighting against Coyote, which is more intriguing than your typical Christian demons, because you don't see it as often, but it just got dull. This is the only one of these four books that I listed on Paperback Swap. I'm actually keeping the other three, which I haven't been doing a lot of while reading through Masterton's bibliography.
All right! Hopefully I'll be back soon with the samurai detective series. I need to read the second Descendants book, too!
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