Graham Masterton - Black Angel

[andydecker]

Graham Masterton – Black Angel (Mandarin 1991, 312 p.)

A ritual killer stalks the city … a killer so cruel and so sadistically inventive that the police nickname him 'Satan'. His hideous murders appear to have no purpose and no pattern … until Lieutenant Larry Foggia is assigned to hunt him down.

With the aid of a spiritualist medium, Foggia discovers that the killings do have a purpose … a purpose so terrible and strange that he cannot bring his superiors to believe him.

So he must stand alone against a black and shattering menace that has been concealed in the city for decades. A menace that threatens his friends, his family, and literally thousands of other lives … as well as the only thing that can save him … his sanity.

[dem bones]

Have accumulate several Masterton novels down the years, but far as I can recall, only ever got around to Flesh and Blood and this, Black Angel which begins with one of the most horrible chapters in horror fiction - the torture murder of an entire family - and ... that's all I remember about it. Really should get stuck into Family Portrait or something, as I invariably enjoy his short horror fiction.


Graham Masterton - Revenge Of The Manitou (Sphere, 1980, 1985)

Blurb:

THE MANITOU RETURNS . . .
No one believed little Toby Fenner when he described the man in his wardrobe. A man whose face seemed to grow from the very wood. People smiled when Toby insisted he heard voices begging him for help.
UNTIL ONE DAY TOBY WOKE UP .... SOMEONE ELSE ...
And by then things had gone too far to stop the return of a timeless, malignant force with a burning mission of vengeance for events centuries in the past. The Manitou had been vanquished once before. This time he would not fail. This time evil reborn returned triumphant.

Graham Masterton's THE MANITOU marked a milestone in leading occult bestsellers. Now the acclaimed master of horror takes over where Edgar Allan Poe stopped and offers us a new dimension of blood-chilling terror

Graham Masterton - Family Portrait (Arrow, 1985: 1988)

Danny Flynn

Blurb:

They found the first body in Europe . . . She had once been a pretty, fresh-faced girl - but with exquisite skill someone had carefully teased the skin entirely away from her body.
The second blood-raw corpse turned up in New England . . .And then another — this time uncut, but convulsed with writhing maggots.
Then two frightened men combine to fight the demonic power which gathers around a fading Victorian painting . . .
FAMILY PORTRAIT
For generations it was guarded in secret - but as its surface flakes and crumbles a terrible force is reawakened.
And the fate of those who come in contact will be the worst thing in the world . . .
Graham Masterton - Tengu (Sphere 1984)

Blurb:

Immune to pain, invincible in combat... all America would one day fear the masked warriors of the TENGU...
In Japanese mythology, the TENGU is the most terrible of all demons: a living force of evil that infects its followers with the mad strength of the beserk and the capacity to survive attack from any weapon...
At the close of World War II, the TENGU was Japan's most terrifying secret weapon. Now the demon is unleashed again – this time in a diabolical plot to wreak vengeance on America for the mega-destruction of Hiroshima...
Steeped in the sinister magic of ancient Japan and rich in exotic sensuality, TENGU is a terrifying novel of nuclear revenge – and Graham Masterton's most stunningly horrific thriller to date.

Graham Masterton - Famine (Sphere, 1981, 1988)

Blurb:
FAMINE
When the grain crop failed in Kansas it seemed like an isolated incident and no one took much notice. Except Ed Hardesty. Then the blight spread to California’s fruit harvest, and from there, like wildfire, throughout the nation.
FAMINE
A tidal wave of terror
FAMINE
Suddenly America woke up to the fact that her food supplies were almost wiped out. Her grain reserves lethally polluted. And Botulism was multiplying at a horrifying rate…
Graham Masterton - Prey (Mandarin, 1992)

Blurb:
There's something in the attic of Fortyfoot House. Something that rustles. Something that scampers. Something with fur, that scratches and gibbers. But it isn't a rat.
It's something far, far more terrifying than a rat.
David Williams, recently divorced, takes a job restoring a dilapidated Victorian orphanage on the Isle of Wight, with his young son Danny. But why is Fortyfoot House so shunned and feared by the Islanders? What is the strange mystery about which no one dares speak? Too late David learns of the hideous secret spawned in the vermin-infested warrens of Dr. Barnardo's London – one that threatens his child, his life, his very sanity ...

Graham Masterton - Spirit (Mandarin 1995)

Blurb:

When little Peggy Buchanan drowns in the icy waters of the family swimming pool, her sisters, Elizabeth and Laura, find their lives changed for ever.
Peggy may be dead — but she hasn't left them.
As the sisters grow up, a string of inexplicable deaths baffle police and medics alike. No matter how warm the weather, each corpse suffers severe frostbite. And each victim's dying moments are tortured by a merciless small girl in a white dress, whose icy kiss is colder than death.
The deeper Elizabeth delves, the more she fears that the girl is Peggy, hideously re-created through their childhood story, The Snow Queen. And unless the nightmare can he halted, Peggy will destroy everyone close to them.

Graham Masterton - The Hymn (Warner 2000, originally MacDonald, 1991)

Blurb:

Celia Williams was happy, healthy and newly engaged: so why did she take her own life in the most horrific way imaginable - by burning herself to death?

Her Fiancé, Lloyd Denman, ls completely unable to come to terms with her death — mainly because she is still with him. Day and night, relentlessly, Celia is haunting him...

And in the nearby Californian desert a tragedy of wider proportions has happened: a whole bus-load of people has burned to death in what the police think is a gruesome suicide pact. Lloyd thinks otherwise, for he has already begun an investigation that will take him back in the past; into an age when a terrible plan was born - and supposedly died. Back to someone who helped create the horrors of Nazi Germany and who is now redefining the meaning of terror...

Graham Masterton – The Wells Of Hell (Sphere, 1981)

An Evocation Of Total Evil

Blurb:

LEGIONS FROM HELL…
New Milford was a peaceful old town where nothing ever happened. Until overnight the water turned a hideously sinister colour. Then Alison and Jimmy Bodine disappeared and the body of a young woman was discovered — the gory remains of an inhuman feast. Rumours of the scaly crab creatures on the outskirts of town had already thrown the citizens into a state of total terror but nothing had prepared them for the unimaginable horror of the evil that had worked its way with young Oliver Bodine’s body:

SOMETHING HAD CHANGED AN INNOCENT CHILD INTO A LOATHSOME, SOULLESS MONSTER, A NIGHTMARE VISION FROM THE BOWELS OF HELL …

Far beneath the town a legacy as old and as evil as Satan, a legacy of supernatural force and destruction, had returned to claim fresh victims to swell the ranks of a race that sprang straight from the WELLS OF HELL

Graham Masterton - Night Plague (Warner 1994; Severn House 1991)

Luis Rey

Blurb:

For generations the Night Warriors have used their awesome powers to defend humanity from evil, entering dreams to change the shape of waking reality Now, five modern Night Warriors face their most terrifying enemy.
She is Isobel Gowdie, witch and mistress of Satan. Her evil influence seeps through the earth, carrying the seeds of the Night Plague, a disease which twists men's souls into madness.
The Night Warriors can stop it if they can find Isobel Gowdie's hidden prison. But time is short. With each night's sleep more and more of humankind falls to the Plague, and two of the Night Warriors are already victims ...

[Johnlprobert]

Ah Family Portrait - I have the edition with that very foil-stamped die-cut cover you've posted up there, bought at John Menzies (remember that?) back in the 1980s. And I remember it being a very fun read - the very first chapter has what would technically become known in as a 'shreddie' getting skinned alive if I remember correctly!