We start off with what seems to simply be a haunted house, on a sloping San Francisco side street, in a tall Gothic-styled home. The elderly owner, Seymour Willis, can hear it breathing, you see, and he's enlisted the aid of San Fran sanitation worker John Hyatt to find out if the breathing is, you know, normal. It's not, of course, so Hyatt calls up some colleagues and pals and an ex-hippie/occult/Age of Aquarius girlfriend to help piece together the mystery of a respirating house. This all ends badly, ends so badly that the artist for the cover of Tor's 1988 edition was able to choose one of those bad moments for illustrating. Accurately. I mean, woah.
"He was wily and cunning and vicious, and his chief enjoyments were causing hatred and confusion, and satisfying his lust on women. The reason we call him the First One to Use Words for Force is because his tricks and his savagery created in the hearts of men their first feelings of fury and revenge... and when he was asked in ancient days to help place the stars, he tossed his own handful of stars up into the night sky at random and created the Milky Way."
At first I thought the novel might be a crude ripoff of Matheson's Hell House, but it's not at all, just more of the Masterton same. Which is cool with me. Despite the one-dimensional storyline, generic characterization, the leaden humor, cliched attempts at atmosphere and mood, and American characters who speak only in British English while drinking copious amounts of booze, Masterton successfully piles horror upon horror, leading to an action-packed climax at - you guessed it - the Golden Gate Bridge. And I was just there myself, so I had no problem imagining the precise location. Good stuff.
But perhaps the best part of Charnel House are its paperback covers! In fact, I bought the original Pinnacle edition at Powell's Books off a display labeled "Judge a Book By Its Cover!" See more covers here.
6 comments:
Very nice post and review. I have not yet read any of Masterton's work, but have a number of his novels on my TBR pile.
They are some great covers too. Thanks for sharing them.
I love Masterton. Crazy, creative, and usually featuring some twisted form of torture. He was splatterpunk before the term was coined.
He really knew how to crank it up to 11 that's for sure.
Many years later, Masterton wrote another book about the same bad guys (Coyote and Changing Bear Maiden) called "Tooth and Claw."
I know I liked it, but I can't remember either book well enough to say whether there's continuity between them so they could exist in the same universe, or they're mutually exclusive.
I love Masterton. I've read several of his books. I loved The Djinn and I'm currently reading Night Warriors.
Graham Masterton is one of my favorite horror writers. My favorites of his are Mirror and The Burning.
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