Masques of Satan - Reggie Oliver

[jonathan122]

Masques of Satan - Reggie Oliver (Ash-Tree Press 2007)

The Man in the Grey Bedroom
Grab a Granny Night
The Children of Monte Rosa
Mr. Poo-Poo
The Silver Cord
The Road from Damascus
Mmm-Delicious
Puss-Cat
The Old Silence
Music by Moonlight
Blind Man's Box
Shades of the Prison House, a novella
The End of History

[andydecker]

I bought this for the Kindle this week and read the first handfull of stories. Now I take a breather. Frankly, if this and the other Collections would be avaiable for a decent price I would have ordered the whole batch. This truly is a relevation. What a great writer! I try to keep this as spoiler-free as I can.

Introduction:
A very good introduction with some musings about the ghost story I thought very interesting.

The Man in the Grey Bedroom:
Maggie, her slightly obnoxious husband Peter and the boys really shouldn´t have visited Blakiston Hall. A modern begining with a very good traditional ending. So well told.

Grab a Granny Night:
One of those actors doing the seaside-circuit tales. Owen, a coming star in a little pond, just want to help collegue Tim to lose his virginity. Why not acquaint him with one of those elder woman haunting the bars of the city? Nice title and a chilling classic ending.

The Children of Monte Rosa:
On holiday in 1964 the narrator, a young boy, and his parents meet english couple the de Walters, expatriates and proud owners of a villa. But behind the tranquil facade lurks terror which he has to learn at his own peril. Again an old scenario with some truly warped ideas. I am not so sure about the ending, but marvelous told.

Mr. Poo-Poo:
The narrator, an actor, really shouldn´t have used obnoxious extra and children´s entertainer Nicky for the birthday party of his daughter. Here Nicky, who calls himself Mr. Poo-Poo, meets Magda, the Romanian au pair. And Nicky is a member of a particulary unpleasant church, and boy, does he want to marry.

The Silver Cord:
1891. Lancelot Jones is a starving writer. Too bad his family is starving too. His nemesis is Slade, who sells his stories effortless and takes the literary world by storm. So Jones really has no choice but to do those icky translations for the enigmatic Mr. Honeyburn. Or everything which follows.
A period piece which ending didn´t work for me. But the first half is nice.

The Road from Damascus:
In a classical set-up the narrator MP Marcus Waterbury tells a tale of his youth when he was in his militant socialist phase and an actor. This is a creepy ghost-tale. For me the two parts didn´t work well together, the tale of Waterburys´s radical youth and his group of wannabe revolutionaries and the ghost part, which is a shame as both are wonderfully written. And the ghost part is truly creepy.

7 stories to go. Why this man isn´t selling thousends of copies is beyond me.

[jamesdoig]

Mar 14, 2012 20:03:04 GMT andydecker said:

Why this man isn´t selling thousends of copies is beyond me.

What's even stranger is that the hard copy of Masques of Satan still seems to be in print after all these years, whereas his other original collections are out of print.

[Craig Herbertson]

Reggie's a really good writer.

[noose]

And his latest story, What Shall We Do About Barker? that's going to be in my upcoming antho Screaming Book of Horror is going to blow his fans away - totally different side to the man!

[andydecker]

And it is still fun.

Mmm-Delicious:
This time our heroine is in advertising. Their new star to sell breakfast cereal is the enigmatic Tony White. A rather unpleasant person. Or is he a person? Things get ugly when our heroine has to figure out his secrets because her job is on the line.

Like most of the stories this also has some background in acting, but the descriptions of the ad-agency ring very true, and the intrusion of the ghost is again very creepy.

Puss-Cat:
Actor Godfrey tells the interviewer (and the reader)the real reason acting legend Sir Roderick Bentley died. Bentley hated cats but kept calling his lovers Puss-Cat. Till his last discarded lover died of a suicide and this mangy cat began haunting the theatre where he did Shakespeare.
Another actor-story, but again from another perspective. It is remarkable how many actor-stories you can tell without repeating yourself. Elegantly told the plot is a bit mundane, but it is fun to read.

The Old Silence
First person narrator, a professor of philosophy, loves his aunt Dora, the crime novelist. Dora is an old widow with a circle of needy friends, which she calls in private her lame dogs, but things go downhill when she meets famous medium Mr.Fand who lends his ectoplasmic voice to the dead.
This is a story which maybe had needed a few pages more; I am not convinced it worked. Too many scenes reminded me of the movie Casting the Runes, and their is an odd angle about silent movies which I didn´t understood. And too many interesting characters for this short tale. It is a bit crowded. Nevertheless it is a suspenseful story.

4 stories to go. For someone who isn´t at heart a fan of the short story I am enjoying this tremendously.

[andydecker]

Here is the rest.

Music by Moonlight:
Fresh widower Max, who located to tranquil Winterswick, participates on a Midnight Walk in honor of dead Judy. On the way he is told Judy´s story and he may see her ghost in the chapel window or not.

Lots of atmosphere and nicely told, a bit lightweight on the plot.

Blind Man´s Box:
Among the papers of dead Dr. Vilier, a lecturer in Theatre Studies, are found the following notes with clippings and statements which tell the eerie story of the Grand Pavillon Theatre in Seabourne, Kent, which is said to be haunted. Dr. Vilier was found dead on the rocks beyond Beachy Head.

An exercise in classic form. Again it is a theatre story, culminating in a murder and a possible later haunting. Marvelously told it evokes exactly the right atmosphere.

Shades of the Prison House:
Sternfield, the rambling narrator, awakens after 50 years seemingly from a coma and tells the story how he in 1957 spend the holiday with his schoolmate Sarson in the company of Sarsons uncle Rex Raymond who is a famous crooner, has an summer engagment at a theatre in Seabourne und is driving around in his Rolls. Not the best environment for a young and impressionable boy, who mets all kinds of shady and broken entertainers behind the stage. Who is begining to have visions. And there is Roxanne, the dancer who has an affair with Rex, begins an affair with Sarson and becomes the love-interest of Sternfield. And ends up strangled on the beach.

This is a novella, and while I find the framing sequence not always successful, especially the double-ending it provides, this is again remarkably written. It combines a lost era of entertainment with a haunting coming-of-age-story. For once there is no direct supernatural angle, still it has some truly unsettling scenes.

The End of History:
Sometimes in the future Dr. Loring presents his newest invention to some high academics of the college. His machine can look back into the past. Realtime satellite pictures of historic events. Who cares that the machine needs corpses to function. The academics are scandalized - not because of the corpses but because the implications of the invention. The resolution of the story is that the invention is actually worthless.

This is a story like you used to find in Analog SF back in 40s, only told with todays sensibillities. As a pastiche it is well done. The story itself is mildly amusing, but it has not much plot, the ending isn´t particulary convincing. For my taste the weakest entry here.

A wonderful collection. Even the stories I didn´t enjoy plotwise were very well told, Mr Oliver finds the right tone in a enviable way. Great stuff!