Community

August 12, 2013
Marred by clumsy dialogue, implausible characters, and repetitive, morbid sex, Masterton’s derivative tale of a snowbound town and its insular inhabitants promises little and delivers less. Horror fans will immediately recognize the ever-cheerful Stepford cutouts and slightly demented children who form the “sleepy” community of Trinity, where Michael Spencer is recuperating from a devastating automobile accident that took his memories and killed his fiancée, Tasha. Released from the hospital, Michael moves in with Isobel Weston, a beautiful widow who provides him with tasty dinners and sexual favors. He is befuddled when he realizes that none of the townspeople leave tracks in the snow, and that the identity given to him by the hospital staff doesn’t ring true. As winter and the novel drag laboriously on, Michael continually fails to see what is painfully obvious, requiring a parade of supporting characters to spell it out repeatedly. Masterton (Garden of Evil) has written some unquestionably chilling tales, but here he jettisons plausible suspension of disbelief to stretch an interesting idea into a circuitous novel fatally undermined by the blandness of its cast.

September 24, 2012
Masterton’s third Sissy Sawyer supernatural mystery (after The Painted Man) shifts the action from New England to Baton Rouge, La. When Sissy’s nephew’s girlfriend, T-Yon, comes to her with questions about a series of horrific nightmares, the psychic and aging hippie uses her rare fortune-telling cards to deduce that T-Yon and her brother, Everett, are in grave danger. Everett’s restoration of a luxury hotel in Louisiana has caught the attention of a malevolent spirit from the building’s past. Faced with an entity powerful enough to disrupt her cards and fill the hotel with killers who can vanish at will, Sissy must recruit the aid of a local vodunista with a dark secret to set things right. Masterton delivers plenty of shocking tableaus of butchered corpses in bathtubs and people literally spilling their guts, but many of the plot developments feel arbitrary, and the final series of twists is underdeveloped.

October 1, 2012
A historic hotel appears to be possessed by the ghost of its former owner and her creepy son. Described as an "unredeemed hippy," Sissy Sawyer believes that she can see into the future with the help of her DeVane deck, beautifully illustrated cards that help her interpret what will come to pass. When her stepnephew, Billy, stops by with his new girlfriend on a rainy Connecticut day, Sissy immediately senses that the beautiful girl has questions for both her and her cards and sends Billy out so that the two may talk alone. T-Yon, Cajun-speak for Petite Lilian, was raised in Louisiana with her brother, Everett. Now she's had a disturbing and embarrassing nightmare about herself, her brother and her brother's latest project, The Red Hotel in Baton Rouge. Sissy wishes she had better news to share, but T-Yon's cards suggest that Everett is in grave danger. So Sissy and T-Yon catch a southbound flight to see if they can help in person. Everett, meanwhile, is determined to make the opening of his latest project a success and is more annoyed than afraid when deputy hotel manager Luther finds a blood-soaked rug in one of the hotel rooms. Although he doesn't believe the rumors giving the other guests freesons (goose bumps), Everett knows he needs to put a stop to local chatter about the hotel being possessed by the ghost of former owner Mrs. Slider with the assistance of her son, Shem. T-Yon hopes that she can make a believer out of Everett before her dream becomes a reality. Though the tropes invoked by Masterton (Festival of Fear, 2012, etc.) may be more tired than tried and true, his imaginative details and storyline more than compensate for any lack of originality.

COPYRIGHT(2012) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

September 1, 2012
Sissy Sawyer, the fortune-telling, crime-solving heroine of Touchy and Feely (2007) and The Painted Man (2008), has a very bad feeling about her brother, who's working on the renovation of a Baton Rouge, Louisiana, hotel where residents and staff have recently begun noticing some eerie things happening, like weird noises and unexplained blood stains. Is it possible that the hotel's former manager, the (presumably deceased) killer Vanessa Slider, has returned to her old haunt? Or is there a more prosaic explanation for the mysterious goings-on? Like the previous Sawyer novels, this one's a deft mixture of horror and (light) humor. Fans of the author's harder-edged, more unsettling horror stories might find this one a bit tame, but readers who enjoy their terror leavened with a little levity will have a good time. Sissy is an entertaining and resourceful protagonist, one who could anchor a long-running series.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)

Starred review from August 1, 2013
Veteran horror novelist Masterton turns in another top-notch performance with this unusual ghost story. Michael and his girlfriend, Tasha, are in a terrible automobile accident. Michael risks his life to pull Tasha from the vehicle; then, an unknown period of time later, he wakes up, an amnesiac, in a clinic located high up California's Mount Shasta. Very early in the story, the reader twigs to the fact that something's not normal here (the clinic staff tell Michael his name, since he can't remember it, but we know they're giving him false information), and there are other things, too, like residents of this small community who seem a little off, and Michael's new girlfriend, who suddenly goes missing. Soon Michael makes a startling discovery (we've sort of seen it coming, but we were supposed to), but this is followed later by an even more startling discovery (which, this time, the author has hidden from us, too). This is an excellent horror story, and the author's clever positioning of the reader as an observer who knows just a bit more about Michael's situation than Michael does himself gives the book an added dimension, an extra layer of suspense.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)