Masterton’s South Rises Again, But His Supernatural Civil War Falls Flat

 

by June Pulliam

 

Masterton, Graham. The Devil in Gray. New York: Leisure, 2004. 355 p.

 

12/20/2004

 

Usually, I am a huge fan of Graham Masterton’s works, as they’re always well written and original, as are the two most recent notable works reviewed earlier in this e-zine, A Terrible Beauty and The Doorkeepers. Alas, The Devil in Gray is not Masterton at his best.  True, it’s much better written than a good deal of horror fiction, but it fails to meet the very high standards that I have come to expect of this author.

 

This is not to say that the plot itself did not hold promise:  A string of grisly murders in Richmond, Virginia has police detective Decker baffled, and at first, the crimes seem to be completely unrelated except in their brutality.  Invariably, the knowledge that Decker has access to as a police officer is not sufficient to crack the case, and so he must use supernatural means to discover what is behind the murders, including speaking with his deceased girlfriend and consulting a Voodoo priestess. So far, so good, and in fact, the plot is beginning to resemble that of A Terrible Beauty, a novel that also includes a police detective uses the supernatural to unlock the secret to a series of grisly murders. At any rate, the structure of the plot itself was one that a writer of Masterton’s considerable talent could do a great deal with.

 

Nonetheless, this novel just plodded along. I found it difficult to care about the characters, perhaps because they and their story were never completely fleshed out.  Without giving away too much, I can reveal the following: Lt. Decker discovers that the murders are linked to the Devil’s Brigade of the Civil War (not to be confused with the Devil’s Brigade in World War II).  This Devil’s Brigade was a band of special troops commanded by General Longstreet, which was supposed to go out in advance of Confederate troops on the eve of the Battle of the Wilderness and commit atrocities calculated to demoralize the Federal soldiers. Masterton’s Devil’s Brigade, however, is no ordinary group of cut-throats.  Instead, its members use Voodoo to sneak behind enemy lines.  Here the plot is reminiscent of Dennis Wheatley’s novel They Used Dark Forces, where the Allies use Satanism to destroy Hitler, ultimately imperiling their own immortal souls.

 

Generally, I enjoy novels that use the fantastic to link the past and the present. One of my favorite Civil War novels is Harry Turtledove’s The Guns of the South, which posits a world where a 21st century South African white separatist group, America Will Break, invents a time machine and transports its members back to a time just before Gettysburg, just in time to give the Confederate troops AK-47s and C-rations, ensuring that the South is victorious over the north. What is particularly interesting about Turtledove’s novel is what does not change in history due to a Confederate victory.  Turtledove’s novel is ultimately so thought provoking because he is completely knowledgeable about American history, particularly Civil War history. On the other hand, Masterton is not. Knowing the names of a few generals and battles and inserting the supernatural is not enough to create a satisfying fictional universe.  True, most of the novel is set in the present, but still, if that present is founded upon the past, then the past needs to be equally developed. 

 

And the characters too suffer from an annoying lack of dimension. Masterton, a Brit, doesn’t seem to understand the delicate balance of racial and class tensions unique to the modern American South. I’ve seen British authors do this sort of thing over and over again when they set their stories in the United States.  Simon Clark, for example, has a particular problem with keeping British phrases out of the mouths of his American characters.  I’m sure that American authors setting their characters in other lands also have this problem, but since I too am an American, particularly one who has lived her entire adult life in the Deep South, I am understandably more sensitive to how my own region is misrepresented.

 

Another detail that Masterton got wrong was his representation of Voodon (or Voodoo), which he frequently confuses with Santeria.  The two religions are similar, but they are not the same exactly.  While both are syncretic religions combining African gods and Catholic saints, Santeria’s African roots are from the Yoruban and Bantu peoples, while Voodon’s African roots are from the West African Yoruba people.  These are subtle distinctions, to be sure, but important distinctions all the same.

 

I had trouble getting through this novel, in part because I have come to expect a great deal more of Graham Masterton. Anyone wishing to read his best works is advised to pick up A Terrible Beauty, The Doorkeepers, The Manitou or Spirit, but to stay away from the mediocrity of The Devil in Gray.  Perhaps it is indeed time to let some Civil War ghosts rest in peace.