SOUL MASQUE By Terry Grimwood – Reviewed
Printed with the kind permissions of Morpheus Tales Publishing.
Confused. Having read this it’s clear this is an ambitious story, but I learnt almost as much about what was happening from the back cover description as I did from the contents of this limited-edition chapbook. That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy it; Grimwood writes in a way that makes you want to read more, he makes you want to know more, about the characters and the strange world he creates. But I think he needs more space to work, a story double the length may have made a lot more sense.
Soul Masque is about the battle of good against evil, that age- old tale, but looked at through a brief period in the lives of four flawed and failing characters, when things all come to a head: a woman with cancer held in check by her allegiance to religion, a preacher addicted to drugs, a dominatrix with an angel as a client, a man who must kill to survive…
The more I think about the story the more layers I think I find. The struggle for faith, the struggle to live, dealing with death in its many forms, the very concept of good and evil; there’s a hell of a lot going on here in these 30 pages.
This is a very different book from the Spectral Chapbooks published before this, and yet it sits right at home within them as well. It’s challenging, intelligent, and wholly original. Although it’s not as creepy as Gary McMahon’s effort, or as gory and bloodthirsty as Paul Finch’s, this is horror at its most morally ambiguous.
It is a sad tale of brutality, of abuse, of disease, slaughter, madness, and faith. It is as frustrating as it is enjoyable, leaving the readers with a slightly bitter taste in their mouths like they’ve just had arsenic. A lingering sense of unease and discomfort remains after putting the story down. Grimwood achieves his desired effect of making us think far beyond the story he’s put down on paper. This is a very very clever little book.
Spectral Press again shows why they are at the top of the UK’s small presses.
This entry was posted on September 12, 2013 at 10:14 and is filed under Morpheus Tales Magazine, Reviews with tags abuse, book, books, brutality, characters, Clive Barker, death, disease, download, entertaining, exciting, faith, fantasy, fiction, horror, horror novel, literature, madness, magazine, morpheus tales, novel, novels, pages, plot, read, reading, review, reviewed, reviewer, reviews, sad tale, series, SF, Simon Marshall-Jones, slaughter, soul masque, spectral press, story, supplement, terry grimwood, write, writer, writers, writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Stanleyriiks' Blog 
September 13, 2013 at 08:58
[…] Masque by Terry Grimwood, the first of which can be found on Stanley Riik’s blog here. And finally, here’s one from Matthew Fryer posted to his Welcome to the Hellforge blog […]