Fire Mask

by Charles L. Grant

Cliff's premonitions and dreams about a mysterious fire lead him and his friends into a fatal confrontation with perpetrators of a terrifying evil

Genres: Horror

Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1991

About the author

Charles Lewis Grant was a novelist and short story writer specializing in what he called "dark fantasy" and "quiet horror." He also wrote under the pseudonyms of Geoffrey Marsh, Lionel Fenn, Simon Lake, Felicia Andrews, and Deborah Lewis.

Grant won a World Fantasy Award for his novella collection Nightmare Seasons, a Nebula Award in 1976 for his short story "A Crowd of Shadows", and another Nebula Award in 1978 for his novella "A Glow of Candles, a Unicorn's Eye," the latter telling of an actor's dilemma in a post-literate future. Grant also edited the award winning Shadows anthology, running eleven volumes from 1978-1991. Contributors include Stephen King, Ramsey Campbell, R.A. Lafferty, Avram Davidson, and Steve Rasnic and Melanie Tem. Grant was a former Executive Secretary and Eastern Regional Director of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America and president of the Horror Writers Association.

Reviews

[Thomas · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is an odd book, partly because the most interesting part of the book -- a family with a psychic dad, a sensitive son, a mother who can foretell the future, and a parrot who has the intelligence and abilities of any human, all of whom keep a mummy in their basement -- isn't the point of the story. Instead, the plot is about a mysterious fire and the man who owns the hotel that burned down. Was this book intended to be the first in a series of mysteries this family solved?

Also, the book feels dated in places, especially when there's an exchange of dialogue that goes, "Sager must have had a son."; "He never married.", which is REALLY unusual, when you consider how much of a lech Grant was. Not only do you know that if you delve at all into what he was like as a person, but you also get a sense of that through the way he presents the female characters in this book.

One of the things I've always liked about Grant's fiction is his atmosphere, and it's lacking in the book. Maybe it's due to the intended audience; maybe the publishers wanted something that wouldn't get bogged down with all that description, but the story still goes out of its way to describe the town and what makes it unusual. It's just lacking whatever Grant usually puts in his stories to make them creep and moan. It also suffers from the usual vague and unclear endings, but that's typical of his books. They're not ambiguous, they just never make very clear what happens in the end. Fire Mask is no exception.