In the grisly aftermath of a botched bank heist, career criminal Anne Heller has no choice but to return to her family’s cabin – a secluded shack in Colorado’s San Luis Valley, and the site of her mother’s untimely death.
Along for the ride are Jessup, Anne’s badly wounded partner, and Dutch, the police officer she’s taken hostage. As they wait for help, Anne discovers strange relics from her mother’s past and begins to unfold the mystery of her childhood at the cabin.
Then Jessup goes missing, only to turn up dead. Anne and Dutch bury her friend, but that night, he comes back and knocks at the cabin door.
Not a dream, not a hallucination, but not exactly Jessup, either. Something else. Something wearing her friend’s face. Something hungry…
Crime & horror. Horror & crime.
Two great tastes that taste great together.
I always feel a little weird telling people that The Silence of the Lambs and Seven are two of my favorite comfort movies, but there it is. There’s just something about horror-adjacent crime stories that will always capture my imagination.
Everything about Matthew Lyons’s A MASK OF FLIES was speaking to me. The synopsis sounded wild & the cover illustration by Sam Wolfe Connelly is one of the best covers from Nightfire, ever! I couldn’t wait to get started & this one was really special.
I think there are some pacing issues in this book, and I definitely felt like it could have been a bit shorter. But I honestly loved this, and real talk, the first 100 pages of A MASK OF FLIES are some of the most intense, propulsive, and electrifying pages I’ve read all year. Lyons does eventually (slightly) take his foot off the gas, but yeah, the first quarter (or thereabouts) of this book will have you staying up way past bedtime.
The book opens with a botched bank robbery worthy of the most chaotic moments in Reservoir Dogs.
Really, everything has gone to total shit & you are thrust right in the middle of the action as Anne Heller, a member of this bank-robbing crew, attempts to flee. She’s got a car, the cash, her grievously wounded friend, and a cop tied up in the trunk.
I mean, fucking hell.
They take refuge in an abandoned cabin in the Colorado wilderness. Only catch is, it’s the cabin where Anne lived as a little girl. The cabin she fled in the middle of the night with her mother, chased by something terrible, indescribable. A horrifying monster that claimed Anne’s mother’s life.
Also in the cabin: some decades-old clues left, impossibly, for Anne to find.
The timeline of the story bounces around a little bit, as we get glimpses of Anne’s troubling childhood & of the relentlessly evil entity that’s been stalking her ever since. There’s quite a lot of cult horror to this one, too! So you’ve really got this huge melting pot of different elements: action-packed crime/thriller, mystery, cult horror, supernatural horror, and while I wouldn’t go so far as to call this a slasher in any real sense, there’s this absolutely unkillable quality to the monster that put me in the mindset of some classic slasher movies, for sure.
I cannot say enough about the utter chaos & ferocity of the first big chunk of this book. Like I was astonished & frequently shocked at just how violent & intense it was. And actually, the level of violence in the book overall is quite high. But inevitably, there’s a lull & there are some sections of the book that did drag a little for me.
Anne is a tricky protagonist to root for. I did find myself feeling sympathetic towards her & pulling for her to come through one fucked-up situation after another. She’s desperate, running from the police, running from a past that refuses to stay buried. But too, she looks out for her people. She bonds with Dutch (the cop she fled the scene with) against her better judgement at first, but the way things play out make them into unlikely allies.
She also looks out for her cat! It definitely humanizes some of Anne’s more hair-trigger tendencies, the way she is doing everything in her power to keep her cat, Murph, safe during all this epic violence & travel. Definitely a couple moments where I was like “Wait where the fuck is Murph?!” but he makes it out ok!
If it’s not clear from what I’ve written, this is not for the squeamish. Even if you took away the supernatural horror elements (which are extremely gnarly), the amount of detail given to all the various injuries that are sustained over the course of this book…it’s a lot. It’s so fucking much. So much blood and bones and brains. So fair warning on that front.
Yeah this one was so completely up my street. There’s a lot of heart to this book, too…it gets pretty raw & emotional, which serves as a great counterpoint to all the violence & gore. Just an awesome book & definitely one to add to your Halloween TBR!
Huge thanks to Nightfire for sending this one my way!
Grimdark Dad 
Wow! This review persuaded me to read this. I’m adding it to my TBR now. Also, the cover. 😍
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