MORE GRAHAM MASTERTON

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!

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.

More GRAHAM MASTERTON

I'm still reading Graham Masterton, along with my usual bunch of things.

I finished The 5th Witch quite awhile ago. This one was fun, but also disappointing because it fell into Twilight syndrome. It provided a bunch of secondary characters that were far more interesting than the primary characters. I wanted to know more about the three modern "villain" witches, yet we got more of the Salem witch and the "good" witch. I would read backstory novels for those three witches in a second.

A Terrible Beauty (AKA: Katie Maguire) was published in 2002 and Masterton didn't continue the series until 11 years later. This was republished as White Bones and then the series continued with several other volumes (and still continues now). I have 2, 3 and 4 incoming, so I'll get to those eventually, but I figured I'd talk about this one now. Most of what I read by Masterton is horror, but this is crime/horror. It's mostly realistic with one bit where maybe something supernatural happened, but maybe it didn't. The folkloric element is nice and kept me reading. That's what it takes to get me into a crime book. I need a horror or folklore connection. I can't read straight up crime unless it's Stephen King or something. Katie is a strong, complex character and I like seeing a female detective at work. I'm looking forward to reading the rest of her series.

I also read five out of six of the main Masterton short story collections. I'll list each collection, its year of publication and my favorite stories.

Fortnight of Fear (1994): Changeling, Saint Joan. Changeling I have read before in one of the Hot Blood series and it's quite good.

Flights of Fear (1995): Probably the strongest overall collection. J.R.E. Ponsford, The Taking of Mr. Bill, Rug, Will, The Heart of Helen Day and The Jajouka Scarab were my faves. Jajouka I've read before in a Hot Blood book. It's great. I love how Masterton uses folklore, mythology and history so creatively. The Taking of Mr. Bill involves Peter Pan. Will is about William Shakespeare and his deal with one of the Elder Gods. Yes, really.

Faces of Fear (1996): This is the one I don't have yet, but it contains The Secret Shih-Tan, which is my fave Masterton thing ever, so I thought I'd mention it.

Feelings of Fear (2000): Another solid collection. Lolicia, Heroine, Saving Grace, Cold Turkey and Picnic at Lac du Sang are my faves. Picnic and Heroine were in Hot Blood books. both are very good. Saving Grace is touching. It bears a slight similarity to J.R.E. Ponsford, but it's better.

Festival of Fear (2012): I used this volume for the picture, because I liked the cover best. Fave stories are The Press, Anka, Reflection of Evil and Son of Beast.

Figures of Fear (2014): Ex-Voto, The Night Hider (the origin of Narnia), Spirits of the Age (Queen Victoria) and Witch-Compass (this should have been a Tales from the Crypt).

MISC HORROR

The Hot Blood series is an old favorite of mine. I love horror anthologies, so I picked up a volume from the middle of the series in a bookstore, then had to get them all. The stories are all horror erotica, some quite graphic, so they're not for kids or the faint of heart.

There are, appropriately, thirteen total volumes that were published between 1989-2007. I reread them every few years and they work well for that, even though I know the endings of the stories.

During my current reread, I noticed my favorite story from multiple volumes was usually the one by Graham Masterton. I don't know how I never noticed it before or got into Masterton's writing before now. He's been at it since almost the same time as Stephen King, who's a childhood favorite. Carrie was published in 1974 and The Manitou, Masterton's first, was in 1976. So I decided to start picking up some Masterton novels and short story collections.

I ordered a few off Abebooks, which is where I typically get the best deals on used books. Masterton sadly did not take off in the US like Stephen King, so I couldn't just jump on ebay and buy a lot of 20 used books. While waiting for the ones I ordered to arrive, I stopped in the used bookstore downtown and was pleasantly surprised to find several books, some of course being ones I'd just ordered. But I purchased three.

I figured I'd start with The Manitou. Honestly, I wasn't impressed with it much. It's a good first novel, but you can tell it's a first novel. It's kind of like Carrie is far from my favorite King book. Some of the characters are interesting, but some with potential die too quickly to be developed. The final battle is really drawn out and ends up being a bit on the sci-fi side instead of horror. I won't go into more details so as not to spoil, but yeah, I didn't much care for it. Not sure I'm going to continue reading The Manitou series or not, but if I do pick it up, it won't be until I've read a lot of his other books first.

Picture of Evil I enjoyed much more. This one was also published as Family Portrait, which I actually think is a better name, being the title of the portrait that's the source of all the trouble in the story. You see, this is based on Dorian Gray. The characters here get to be much more developed and interesting. Unfortunately, I had a problem with the ending again, but up until that point, I really enjoyed it. I'll skip dissecting it, because I don't like to go into too much detail on horror. Part of the fun is finding things out for yourself, like with mysteries.

I will definitely be talking about more Masterton books here as I read them. I just started The 5th Witch today.