Graham Masterton

I found this to be far from the author’s best work. In the past, scenes from a previous book of the author’s made me go physically cold, difficult to make me do as I don’t scare easily. This one carried a slight creepiness but didn’t scare. I liked the plot and these less than average ghosts impressed. A lot of info gets repeated in the narrative, particularly in conversations and within a short timeframe, reminding me of several shows that have unnecessary exchanges to remind the audience of what they already know. In style, this made me wonder if the book’s intended as YA horror, though some scene content seems a little too gory for that. I wanted to like this more than I did, though there were elements I appreciated.… (more)

The old saying, "don't judge a book by its cover" is proven right once again with this story of mental patients using druid rituals to escape by literally absorbing themselves into the walls. It jumped right off the used bookstore shelf into my basket because horror cover art doesn't get much better than this.

The story was compelling enough to keep me reading - lots of inventively gruesome deaths at a remarkable pace, once it gets going - but ugh I was not at all surprised when I read the author's bio. It 100% reads like the weirdly adolescent sexual fantasy that can be found in vintage skin mags like Penthouse and Playboy. If he'd left that out and focused on just the horror, it might have made it to 3 stars for me. As it is, half my rating is for the cover art, which is also the only reason I'm going to keep it on my shelf instead of tossing it in the donation bin.… (more)

This 1970s horror novel, in common with a lot of books of the period, is short so at least the story is not drawn out. The basic idea is that the Arabian Nights tale of Ali Baba and the 40 thieves is a sanitised version of a horrific reality in which Ali Baba was a powerful practitioner of black magic who would stop at nothing for political advantage and who engaged the most powerful djinn (spirit) to achieve his goal. The djinn itself is the Forty Thieves which were really forty forms into which it could transform itself to deliver ghastly forms of death to Baba's enemies. To obtain the djinn he agreed to an appalling bargain where he turned over a young girl to an evil sect.

In contemporary (70s) America, the protagonist, Harry, attends the funeral of his godfather and soon realises all is not well with his godfather, Max. He learns that Max, a keen student of Arabian artefacts, myths and magic, became obsessed with a tall jar decorated with poppies and eyeless horses, to the point where he secured it in a tower room and removed all portrayals of faces from the house including pictures in the paper and even a carving on his favourite pipe. This obsession led to the tragedy of his death, a rather nasty one.

At the funeral, Harry meets Anna and they 'hit it off' and begin a joint investigation. Anna knows a lot about Arabic culture and even obscure dialects, and later the reason for that is revealed - which I found implausible.

The story starts off nicely creepy and builds. However, the prologue and also the later development of the story consist of truly horrifying forms of sexual assault on women so I would red flag that as a content warning. For that reason, my initial assessment of between 3 to 4 stars dropped drastically and I can now only rate this as 2 stars.… (more)