Horror Review: Night Mask by William W. Johnstone (1994, Zebra Publishing)

William W. Johnstone is a genius. I don't mean the man had a colossal intellect (he's been dead since 2004, so I can't ask him), but rather he had a passion for telling stories and, just like Tommy Wiseau and Neil Breen do for cinema, he does for Z-grade horror novels with more WTF-factor per chapter than any other ten writers you can name.

This here's a man who toiled for nine years to become a professional writer, got a manuscript published, realized he could get paid to vomit forth his prose while clothing it in the most hardcore right-wing and gun-fetishistic propaganda imaginable, and never fucking stopped. Dude churned out over 400 works of fiction in his lifetime, all of them written for the mid-list paperback market which has all but disappeared in the 21st century--James Patterson may have more money and more best-sellers to his credit, but holy dog shit, Johnstone puts even his prolific output to shame and he's been dead for fifteen years! I've mentioned before in my reviews that Johnstone and I create the most perfectly non-overlapping Venn diagram ever when it comes to political philosophies, but poorly-written propaganda is indistinguishable from satire, and I believe I've also mentioned how much of his stuff reads like someone from the opposite side of the spectrum attempting to write the most outlandish, strawman-laden nonsense imaginable to make Conservatives look like idiots. That this isn't the case is, in my mind, the greatest comedy perpetrated on the literary world since Dante penned that epic poem about people going to hell. Regardless, Johnstone's so dead serious in his politics in the middle of the most outlandish plots imaginable that anybody, Left, Right, or Center, can read it and find something to laugh about.

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What's the plot of Night Mask? Well, in Bats, we got homicidal, rabid, Satan-spawned flapping furry terror in Louisiana. In Toy Cemetery, we got incest-bred mutants and Devil-possessed townsfolk fighting against a small group of holdouts in Missouri. But in Night Mask, we get:

• the single largest body count ever recorded in a work of published fiction
• subliminal messages broadcast across FM radio
• satanic sadomasochistic torture cults
• teenagers who turn evil from listening to heavy metal music
• immortal hell-spawn
• a magically-enchanted house which cannot be destroyed
• incest (a Johnstone staple, don't leave home without it)
• rape (of men, women, and children, because Johnstone's an equal-opportunity sort of dude like that)
• werewolves

I'm sure I've left out a few other plot points, but not one of those things I listed is a lie. Night Mask positions itself as a serial killer novel, but it's 350 pages of child slaughter, torture, and body parts submerged in formaldehyde-filled jars. Every lead character in a Johnstone book turns into the author's mouthpiece at some point to rail against the first amendment (journalists are always the enemy), political correctness (at one point in the book, a character suffers a nervous breakdown because the FCC is so politically correct they won't let you say the N-word over a live radio broadcast, gets tossed in prison, sodomized by individuals he refers to via the N-word, then decides he has a literal raging hate-boner for the local ultra-lib newspaper columnist,), liberals, hippies, drug users, homosexuals, transvestites, people who've undergone gender reassignment surgery, people who enjoy hard rock, and minorities who just can't figure out their place in society (which is, apparently, right underneath the white, Christian, god-fearing, gun-toting, conservative-voting Vietnam veteran and his well-to-do family who would never think of smoking, out-of-wedlock sex, or turning up the stereo).

Did I mention the story's set in California?

You need either a strong sense of humor or a complete lack of one to make it through Night Mask. If you find yourself laughing out loud at Johnstone's feeble attempt to ape Lenny Bruce and offend everybody, or find yourself nodding quietly with your jaw set because every word of the book is God's honest truth as you live and breathe, you are the target audience. If you're a member of neither camp, and I honestly couldn't blame you because it's hard to be that crazy in either direction, give this one a pass.

If you want to see a story where plot lines are set up and abandoned with glee, if you cannot possibly understand how a guy could pack so much disparate nonsense into a single paperback, if you want to read about the sorts of serial killers who make Jack the Ripper look like Edna St. Vincent Milay (seriously, the murders in this book cross the country, span decades, and number in the multiple hundreds, yet nobody has managed to put two and two together?) and happen to reside in a fictional California town with a name that translates to "The Boat", then I cannot recommend Night Mask quickly enough or strongly enough. If patriotism beats in your breast, the soul of a warrior stirs within your loins, and the only tri-lettered alphabet organization you trust is spelled N-R-A, you cannot call yourself a Real Man(tm) until you have this book on your shelf. Night Mask is William W. Johnstone at his William-W.-Johnstone-yist yet.

I may not agree with his politics, but holy hell, do I have mad respect for a dude who could churn out stuff like this year after year and never get tired of it. Night Mask is the stuff that dreams are made of--not good dreams, not sane dreams, but one person's dream is another person's nightmare, and I'll be damned if I wrap up my time on this earth without experiencing every last damn one of Johnstone's Z-grade political rants disguised as horror novels.

You can pry them from my cold, dead hands, you damn dirty apes.

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Note: This review is an edited/revised version of one which originally appeared on Goodreads. I am the author of both versions.