Two By Graham Masterton
By June Pulliam
The Doorkeepers. New York: Leisure, 2003. 371 p.
A Terrible Beauty. New York: Pocket Books, 2003. 369 p.
Not one, but two Graham Masterton books were released at the end of this year. While both are quite compelling reading, The Doorkeepers is a much better crafted book. In The Doorkeepers, Josh Winward's sister Julia is found brutally murdered, her eviscerated body thrown in the Thames. But logical police work gives Scotland Yard no substantial leads. Thus Josh, an alternative veterinarian with an extraordinary empathy with animals, and psychic girlfriend, investigate how Julia was able to live in London for 10 months without leaving a trace of herself. If it seems as if she ceased to exist in this world nearly a year before her disappearance, it's because she has been living in another one. With the help of a cryptic old nursery rhyme, Josh discovers the doors into an alternative universe, another more sinister London where the Puritans continued to rule after Oliver Cromwell's death, the United States is still just a colony of Great Britain, slavery is legal, computers and the internet haven't been developed, people have absolutely no legal rights and summary execution is not uncommon. Order is enforced in this world by an army of hooded undead who ferret out dissenters and punish them violently.
Julia's murder was just the tip of the iceberg, leading Josh to uncover what strange and bloody magic must be employed to keep the Doors open.
One might be tempted to compare this novel to Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, but Masterton's parallel universe is more complex that Gaiman's steam punk subterranean world that reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland. The Cromwellian dystopia of the novel is a particularly clever commentary on the evils of capitalism unfettered by any niceties of government control such as laws protecting the environment or human rights. It is precisely this lack of controls that has prevented this world from developing technologies such as a cure for tuberculosis, modern air travel and microchips. After all, economic development depends on the ability of researchers to be able to investigate different ideas without the fear of being branded a heretic and executed. This world's disenfranchisement of non-whites and women is another factor that has fettered its development, as only a small minority of people have the opportunity to get and education and participate in actively shaping their civilization. Even the lack of environmental controls impedes development, as the air in this universe is similar to the air of England immediately following World War II, chocked so thickly with soot that a great many of its inhabitants suffer from chronic lung ailments. In fact, the economic development that this world does enjoy is done through keeping open secret doors between the two universes, allowing a select few to steal some important technologies and pursue economic opportunities in this other world. These doors also provide a convenient way to dispose of the bodies of those murdered on the other side.
However, there is more than one parallel universe in this novel--there are thousands. In another universe, England not only wasn't able to continue colonizing India, but the Indians learned from enough from their occupiers to chase them back to their own land and conquer the British Isles. Still another parallel universe represents England during the blitz, where Britain is at war with the United States, which is attempting to take its freedom from the mother country. The parallel universes are by far the most intriguing plot devices in this novel, and I found them ultimately more compelling than the search for Julia's killers.
Masterton's second novel of the year, A Terrible Beauty, is another murder mystery, this one set in Cork, Ireland. When a farmer unearths 11 skeletons in his field, Detective Sergeant Katie Maguire is called out to discover who ritually murdered these women nearly a century ago at the beginning of World War I. But before she can get to the heart of the matter, the grisly and recently deposited remains of an American tourist are found near the site. Obstacles to Katie's finding the murderer include sexism within her own department--many of her male colleagues resent her promotion in spite of her prowess--and her ne'r do well husband's dangerous brush with mobsters in yet another of his schemes to get his construction business back on its feet.
Masterton's novels are generally such a pleasure to read because he is able to conjure a richly detailed world for the reader to lose herself in, and this novel is no exception. Cork is at times an uneasy combination of the modern world and traditional values. Police officers speak Gaelic into cell phones. And just as in the United States, people here drive around in their gas guzzling SUVs, and members of minority cultures often find themselves on the wrong end of the law, although the minorities here are Gypsies (or Travellers, as they're called in Ireland), rather than African-Americans or Hispanics. And women here have the same difficulties breaking free of limiting, traditional gender roles that they have in the United States. Det. Macguire must negotiate various levels of sexism in order to do her job. Many of her mostly male colleagues are predisposed to see her as less than competent by virtue of her sex, regardless of how hard she works. She is given a great deal of grief by one of the Travellers she must interrogate, not so much because she's a police officer as because she's female, as the Gypsies are highly patriarchal. But perhaps the biggest difference between the Irish women of this novel and their American counterparts is their willingness to tolerate severe failings on the part of their mates. During the course of the story, Det. Macguire discovers that her husband Paul has been stealing from a rival competitor who has no problem using violence to recover his property. This puts their lives and Katie's career in danger, as it makes it appear that she is using her authority as a policy officer to assist her husband's illegal activities. Worse still, Paul has also been unfaithful with said mobster's girlfriend, and has the temerity to blame his adultery on his wife's drive to pursue her career. At this point, most American women would change the locks and find a good divorce attorney. However, while Katie acknowledges that she'll never love Paul as she used to, she also spends a great deal of time trying to do damage control for the mess he's made. But then again, Katie has very little choice since divorce is illegal in Ireland.
While I enjoyed both novels, The Doorkeepers to be better written than A Terrible Beauty. While the characters of A Terrible Beauty are intriguing and memorable, the denouement seemed rather contrived. Not to give away the ending, but the plot eventually relied on entirely too many lucky coincidences, and things just feel too neatly into place. I guess I would be more willing to forgive this failing if the novel depended more on the supernatural, as does The Doorkeepers. After all, there I've already suspended belief regarding parallel universes so too much serendipity doesn't grate on my nerves the way it does when the plot is firmly entrenched in the real world. That failing aside, both novels are worth reading.