Fiction Reviews
Basilisk
(2009 / 2024) Graham Masterton, Head of Zeus, £9.99, pbk, 311pp, ISBN 978-1-035-90966-7
Basilisk is billed as horror, but it’s the Hammer Horror variety, all wobbly sets and straightforward monsters. There’s a mad scientist, a large dollop of arcane magic, a sulky teenager an emotionally wrecked protagonist and a perky journalist. In short: horror lite.
Nathan is a stem cell researcher trying to recreate mythical creatures to help cure disease, but he’s not doing very well. He’s almost there – but his new born Gryphon (Griffin) is deformed and putrefying. The missing link, perplexingly, seems to be human life energy. A rival – Doctor Zauber – is using magic to achieve the same ends – but his missing link is Nathan’s stem cell science. One of Nathan’s assistants is sharing some intel though and before long, old ladies are being killed by a shuffling monstrosity in the nursing home Zauber runs (it’s not clear why Zauber would be running a nursing home, but just roll with it). Nathan and his wife Grace break in to find answers but the basilisk strikes and Nathan’s wife Grace ends up in a coma as the mythical monster causes mayhem. But Zauber’s basilisk is also flawed and he needs Nathan’s help to perfect it. Zauber’s price in restoring Grace to full health is for Nathan to work with him. But is the price – the energy of people near their end of their lives – worth paying to potentially save millions from potentially curable disease? Set in the US but with a scenic excursion to Poland, this is a Dan Brown style vaguely supernatural thriller.
It’s an easy read, though it was pretty obvious what was going to happen most of the time and I couldn’t really engage with the characters or their surreal situation. Nothing new here, and it’s BBC rather than Netflix in feel and approach, but it’s undemanding and keeps you hanging on for a twist. You have to be pretty credulous to go with the plot basics (magic is pretty much accepted without scepticism by scientists, sulky school kids and journalists alike, despite this being a here and now story) but if you’re looking for familiar tropes, an old-fashioned feel and an easy style this novel delivers.
I can’t really recommend it as I like my fiction (particularly my horror fiction) to have a little more bite and complexity, but Graham Masterson certainly has an audience who will enjoy this book. Masterson has well over 100 published novels to his name (he’s 79) mainly in the crime and horror genres plus some seΧ instruction books (he’s a former editor of Mayfair and Penthouse). But Basilisk was first published in 2009 - does it still feel fresh?
Mark BIlsborough
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