If only Graham Masterton was as popular as Stephen King. This book would be the equivalent value of a Richard Bachman copy of Rage. Sadly, he’s not and this isn’t. But check out that glorious cover.
Thomas Luke is a pen name for the aforementioned Mr Masterton and this is his novelisation of an almost forgotten film in the very early 80s.
Graham Masterton is not an author you read if you’re looking for subtlety, depth of meaning and high literature. He does however produce some rather entertaining low budget horror based on assorted demons of world mythologies. He can be very formulaic, but some of his ideas are good and he can be depended on for some well thought out shreddie goodness (see my post on the noble art of the shreddie here)
In this case his hands would have been somewhat tied in that the plot was handed to him with all the twists and turns and character deaths already written by the screenwriters. So any failings I found story wise are not his fault. And there are some serious story failings.
The ending is particularly bad, I’ll detail the reason for that at the end so spoiler alert if you read the final paragraph of this review.
Basic story- Dr Ross is apparently a brilliant psychotherapist with a radical new treatment to help people overcome their phobias. He’s working with a group of five convicts who each committed crimes because of their phobias. One by one, his test subjects start dying in ways related to their phobias. That’s what the back cover says. I’d argue that the first death is not connected to that character’s fear, or death number 3 for that matter. But, as previously mentioned, that’s the fault of one of the 5 people listed as being responsible for the story/screenplay rather than the novelist.
It’s written in Masterton’s usual no nonsense style. There’s no attempts at high literature, and he does well to obfuscate the truth of events and not making it all too obvious.
The characters struggle to gain more than one dimension. They’re literally defined by either their fear, their job, or if they’re attracted to Dr Ross. The cops are particularly cartoonish (although Masterton does call their behaviour out and makes the point that the rest of the cops in the station don’t behave that way any more).
Ross's alleged expertise is one of the less credible parts of the story. There is no way that Ross's techniques would gain any traction, let alone millions in grant funding. It makes the therapy scenes particularly silly.
The deaths are suitably nasty but tame by Masterton’s standards. Again, not really his fault. It’s a quick fun read despite the flaws in the story.
SLIGHT SPOILER- In the last two pages, we have to wonder how someone can swim strongly while holding a gun in their left hand out of the water to keep it dry. That’s an image that seriously does not compute in my brain. And is particularly egregious as it’s one of the final scenes and supposed to be deadly serious.
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