Festival of Fear

April 23, 2012
This 12-story collection, Masterton’s fifth (after Flights of Fear), offers little festivity, but features vibrant dialogue and distinctively eerie plot twists. Prominent horror writer Masterton provides such wide-ranging delights as voracious mirrors in “Camelot” and truly joined young lovers in “Sepsis,” and even foreshadows today’s “pink slime” scare in “The Burgers of Calais.” Some characters, such as Grace in “Anka,” prevail over malevolent forces but rarely win an unambiguous victory. Sexual encounters provide a provocation for catastrophe, a lure to self-destruction, or a means both of confronting and perpetuating evil. Descriptive passages, as in “The Burgers of Calais,” vividly set the tone while advancing the narrative: “That folksiness hides some real grisly secrets that would turn your blood to iced gazpacho.” Though the characters are generally unremarkable, Masterton excels at conjuring up unusual horrific situations with action that gallops along.

July 1, 2012
A collection of a dozen new horror stories ranging from the clever to the tired, all with an undercurrent of graphic violence, some steeped in gore. The very best of the batch may be the first. "The Press" is a fast-paced anecdote about an author who deals just revenge to savage reviewers. Other tales that borrow from childhood fables, like "Anka," which owes a debt to the folklore villain Baba Yaga, add too little to their sources to be wholly successful. "The Burgers of Calais" is a predictable story that's been told before; in fact, its title may give away its surprise about the secret behind the mystery meat in a local restaurant. Others, like "Camelot" and "Reflection of Evil," seem to be incompletely separated twins circling around the same theme. "Sepsis" may please true gross-out fans, although readers less attuned to the physically macabre may wonder what motivates the lead character, and who's likely to enjoy the lovingly described details of deviance. Still others depend more on their nonhorrifying details for whatever interest they generate, like the strange emotional quirks of characters in "Dog Days" and "The Scrawler." With the final tale, "Sarcophagus," and a fair number of others, readers will either get the point or not. Given its uneven mix of offerings, this latest collection from Masterton (Petrified, 2011, etc.) ultimately confirms a hallowed rule of storytelling: the shorter, the better.

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April 15, 2012
This collection of 12 short stories should be considered required reading for fans of horror master Masterton, as they show off his skills at building both character and suspense, not to mention his rather impish sense of humor. In The Burgers of Calais, with a deliberate pun in the title, a restaurant cook discovers the unpleasant truth about one of its most popular dishes; in The Press, whose title is also a delicious pun, a much-maligned author gets revenge on his critics; Dog Days tells the story of a man who takes his love for his girlfriend and his dog to disturbing lengths; in The Scrawler, a man keeps seeing mysterious messages that seem to be addressed to him and winds up being controlled by them. Many of these stories could have been fleshed out into full-length novels, but it's testament to Masterton's storytelling sense that he knows when it's time to stop. Unlike a lot of horror collections, which feature a few really good stories and a lot of just-barely-adequate ones, this one is full of winners, each of them as good the others.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)