Graham Masterton - Family Portrait

[andydecker]

Graham Masterton - Family Portrait (Arrow Books, 1985, 427 pages)





Danny Flynn

Young and beautiful American tourist Alison is hitchhiking in France. Rich American Maurice Gray gives her a lift – and skins her from head to toe alive at home. He needs her skin intact.

December, a month later. New York. Vincent Pearson is the owner of a Fine Art Gallery. His assistant Edward meets the beautiful Cordelia Gray who is interested in a family portrait by obscure long dead painter Waldegrave. But as this painting is a private heirloom of Vincent's he won't sell. In snowed-in Nepaug, Connecticut, a skinned corpse is found. Sheriff Smith is on the case.

Edward has dinner with Cordelia. She really wants to have the picture. A trip to Connecticut where he has a country home, Victor Pearson is also visiting his restorer Aaron in Bantam Lake who is working on the Waldegrave. Also he helps his housekeeper Mrs. Miller whose crippled son Ben has taken a turn for the worse. He is violently hallucinating, talks about "them who are back" and skin.

In the meantime Edward fucks Cordelia. She leaves some maggots as a gift which crawl into Edwards penis and virtually eat him inside out. Cordelia kidnaps his ex-girlfriend Laura and brings her to the house of the Gray's in Darien, Connecticut. They need skin.

Suddenly Vincent is involved in a murder case because he has discovered the remains of his assistant. His restorers Aaron's beloved cat is found hanging skinned from a tree while it is suddenly on the Waldengrave painting. Ben is so frightened of them that he mutilates his face with a shard, while Sheriff Smith stumbles upon the Gray's.

TBC with the other half …

I often have problem with Masterton's technicolour and SWAT team approach to horror and think that a lot of the novels I read over the years - I took a long hiatus in the early 2000s and skipped his YA and crime novels - fall apart at the end. But I have to say that Family Portrait is a nice read. Sure, it is another variation of Oscar Wilde, but who cares? It is entertaining.

Gruesome murders, a bit of gruesome sex, a large cast, convincing locales and written in a thriller mode. Of course this means some things have to go, and gallery owner and unlikely hero Vincent remains a bit of a cardboard character. But this doesn't matter much in this case. Let's see how this ends.