FFB - BLACK ANGEL

Graham Masterton is one of those prolific authors who can’t be pigeonholed. Primarily known as a horror writer, he has written outside this genre successfully – Rich, Solitaire and Empress, for example.

 

Black Angel is heart-stopping page-turning horror. It begins with an appalling killing – not for the squeamish, but if you’re squeamish you’ll probably not read horror novels anyway! An entire family is done to death in a kind of ritual, for no apparent reason.

Thereafter, as Lieutenant Larry Foggia of the SFPD tries to make sense of a series of such ritual killings, he is sucked into the dark scary world of séances and the Black Brotherhood.

All the way you feel for the lives of his loved ones, so compelling is the story-telling, so realistic are the characters.

 

Even the most ridiculous manifestations leave you looking over your shoulder: a ghost who can suck out your life and soul and leave you a shrunken husk, still kind-of-living? A drowned girl who manifests in front of Foggia during lovemaking with his wife? San Francisco fog… and an all-seeing evil entity waiting, waiting to eat his fill of the entire city? Leavened with some humour. Very good.