Night Mask

by William W. Johnstone

Homicide detectives Leo Franks and Lani Prejean race against time to stop a killer who is luring young women to grisly, horrifying deaths and discover that the murderer may be a part of a terrible conspiracy spanning decades and hundreds of victims. Original.

Genres: Horror

352 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 1994

About the author

William W. Johnstone is the #1 bestselling Western writer in America and the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of hundreds of books, with over 50 million copies sold. Born in southern Missouri, he was raised with strong moral and family values by his minister father, and tutored by his schoolteacher mother. He left school at fifteen to work in a carnival and then as a deputy sheriff before serving in the army. He went on to become known as "the Greatest Western writer of the 21st Century." Visit him online at WilliamJohnstone.net.

Reviews

[Phil · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another totally batshit crazy, gonzo novel by Johnstone, and one that must have the highest body count on record outside of an apocalypse. This features Leo and Lani, two cops in a medium size California town who work for the sheriff. After some seriously gruesome murders in town, including the daughter of the guy who basically owns the county, Leo and Lani head out east to chase a lead, and boy do they find something. While it takes some time for everything to gel, it seems the two 'terrible' twins of a rich family in Albany have been on a murder spree for a few decades, starting when they were not yet 10 years old. Further, that spree headed west in fits and starts and now seems to have found a new home in the Leo and Lani's city.

So, on the one hand, we have something like a police procedural here, laced with some paranormal stuff (the terrible twins plus other), with a sky high, gruesome body count. On the other, we have Johnstone's repeated critiques of modern America as voiced by the dialogue of the characters and their actions. Johnstone is not a fan of 'liberals' let us say :-)

What makes Johnstone's novels fun, however, is not his complex plotting, or his acerbic social commentary, but the non-stop, gonzo action that moves the stories at a lightening pace. Leo and Lani just go from one bad scene to another! And yes, bullets fly, bodies are skinned and mutilated, massive 'body pits' are found all over the nation until the denouement. If you like your horror trashy and bloody, Johnstone is your man. Besides, who else starts a novel with the following opening line:

"If God created anything better than pussy," Windjammer said, "He damn sure kept it for Himself."

4 trashy, pulpy stars!

[Luvtoread (Trying to catch up) · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Must Must Read!.

Quite a shocker! Not for the squeamish in any way, if you like horror, this is a must read and I am so glad I found his book. Now I will check out other books by this author. I Highly Recommend people to buy this book. Shocking ending, nonstop excitement and great characters. I would give this book ten stars if allowed, hoping I feel this way again on my next horror read, very very unique and I love the way this author weaves this story. Thank you for this great book!!!!

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

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. In Night Mask, we got the single largest serial murder body count ever recorded in a work of published fiction, subliminal messages broadcast across FM radio, satanic sadomasochistic torture cults, teenagers who turned to evil from listening to heavy metal music, immortal hell-spawn, a magically-enchanted house which cannot be destroyed, incest, rape, werewolves, and I'm sure I've left out a few other plot points, but not one of those things I just wrote 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, among other reasons,), liberals, hippies, drug users, homosexuals, people who enjoy hard rock, and minorities who just can't figure out their place in society (which is, apparently, right under 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)...even if the story is set in 1994 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're 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 material 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 guy'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.

[Jim Glover · Rating 5 out of 5]

So good

I've said it before I really wish he still wrote novels like this. This book had mystery horror gore and paranormal stuff. I loved it from start to finish could not put it down. Just can't say enough about it.

[Mikepottz · Rating 3 out of 5]

A heart cut out of a chest and nailed over a fence. The face skinned now in a jar of preservatives, such a lovely face, he had quite a collection and kissed the jars. An evil house couldn't be burnt down, carpets saturated with gasoline and not burning, drape cords turning into snakes, secret basements. Twins who were evil fucks from the age of 6. Body parts being mailed to detectives. Bodies after bodies, skinned all over the states. Subliminal messages being sent through the airwaves making people commit acts of violence. More good vs evil from Johnstone, not as bonkers as some other books but fits nicely in the zebra horror collection I have.

[Annette Vecellio · Rating 5 out of 5]

I def enjoyed this story. Full of action and gore. I finished this book in one day because I couldn’t put it down.

[Zai Zai · Rating 1 out of 5]

A parody of a novel.

[Dale · Rating 2 out of 5]

A California radio station is sending out subliminal messages while the DJs complain about their annoying boss. Meanwhile, the admittedly unimaginatively named serial killer The Ripper is killing women, removing their faces, and storing them in jars.

Two local sheriff detectives, funded by the wealthy father of one of the victims, go cross country researching the killings, using methods of questionable legality.

They don't find much, except that there are a pair of evil twins that everybody hates. They come back home to another killing, a high priced call girl that counted the station owner as a client.

The owner is arrested based on planted evidence and is gang raped by black prisoners his first day in lockup. One would think to blame the sheriff for failing to have a secure jail, or for failing to prosecute the offenders.

But, no, it's the fault of the FCC and the liberal media because you can't say the N word on the radio. At this point the douchebag station owner is written as a sympathetic character and Johnstone's mouthpiece for all kinds of irrelevant right-wing babbling about the IRS and such.

Not sure the reasoning behind this train of thought. Maybe that liberals are too PC to arrest black people, which runs counter to reality, as well as beg the question as to how the rapists were in jail in the first place. I'll be charitable and say Johnstone wasn't so much being racist as complaining about political correctness, which was still a new thing at the time. You know, that horrible liberal agenda, that if you act like a bigot people will treat you like a jerk.

One would think the incident would teach the value of due process to the detectives. That the police can make mistakes, and those mistakes can have life altering consequences. Taking that lesson to heart, the detectives decide to just forget about evidence and just murder whatever Ripper suspect looks good. Because the Bill of Rights is for pansies.

Johnstone awkwardly gets back on track by having a civil rights protester get raped by the Ripper, instant karma I suppose.

Meanwhile, the detectives hit the gay bars. While some of the cops are intolerant, our leads are relatively accepting, just as long as they are properly shameful and don't expect to be treated like normal people.

The gang rape has sent the station manager around the bend, and he goes postal in a gay bar while our heroes don't particularly try to stop him. The scene is played for laughs, because some of them dress like ladies and they touch each others butts, so their mass slaughter is hilarious.

The next development has the station manager's promiscuous daughter and gay son be the masterminds behind recruiting pretty much the whole town's teenage population into a murderous satanic cult. The police bust them up, but liberalism rears it ugly head again and prevents the police from summarily executing everyone under the age of 18, while Johnstone jumps back on his soapbox complaining how parents don't know how evil their spawn are.

There are some threads that go nowhere regarding subliminal messages being broadcast, but our detectives main strategy is to make up random stuff which sometimes ends up being true. Those twins that they suspect? Maybe they were triplets, or had half-siblings, or one got a sex change. That one DJ is a lesbian, maybe she's related to them for some reason.

While Johnstone fills pages, he presents a parable against liberalism in the form of an obnoxious reporter who shows up every few pages screaming "fascist" at everybody. She becomes the target of our station manager, now a teen murdering vigilante, and learns the error of her ways when she needs to use a gun to protect herself.

I don't like to criticize the politics of a book, but Johnstone pretty much breaks the fourth wall in places to jump on his soapbox, so he's asking for it. As far as I can manage to figure out, rich people deserve better access to public services than poor people, and people that complain about this natural order deserve bad things to happen to them. One should never complain about the police, you should be able to drop N bombs on a pop radio station without social consequences, and everyone should have a gun. Except for poor people, they're just dumb hillbillies. And all children should be preemptively smothered in their crib. If you think your children haven't murdered dozens of people you're living in a fools paradise.

As much of a failure as a mystery as Night Mask is, it fails even worse at preaching to the converted. Johnstone's able to stack the deck and make anything happen he wants to in his book, yet the events make a horrible case for the private ownership of firearms, which protect exactly nobody (even the reporter misses), and several people die from overzealous neighborhood watches and vigilantes.

Our heroes, the police, are corrupt bullies and don't manage to prevent a single killing until the conclusion, and spend more time attacking their critics than getting evidence. And by attacking, I mean tear gassing reporters and making a swing at a doctor in a hospital. Classy. Did I mention they brag about covering up murders, even down to the classic "drop piece"?

The mystery doesn't so much resolve as much as Johnstone reaches his page count goal and wraps things up. The cops receive a hot tip that three people walked into a warehouse. Yes, that's enough to call the police and enough for them to investigate.

The detectives find the evil twins who proceed to mince around and throw jars of faces and genitals at them with their mind. Bullets don't kill them, but the cops just kind of know that they're vulnerable to steel, so they kill them with metal spikes. But not before the twins reveal the secret: one of them is a triplet or octuplet or something, and the other has a werewolf for a grandfather.

At this point Johnstone is typing one handed, the other giving his reader a one-fingered salute. Right back at ya, buddy.

I can deal with morally bankrupt worldviews and incomprehensible plots, but only if it's a fun ride. Someone should have let Johnstone know what the word "explicit" means, as the book implies almost all of the violence and gore. Most is off page, and even the aftermath pulls the whole "too horrible to describe" cop out. By the end, when faces and privates are flopping around, it's too much, too late, too silly.

In short, probably the worst novel by America's biggest hack of the last three decades.

More reviews at Trash Menace.

[Horror Guy · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book might have been more enjoyable if it stuck to the format of Johnstone's other books and had a more supernatural bend, but as it is, Night Mask is mostly filled with annoying characters stumbling around before they eventually get killed off-page.

Most of the rest of the book is filled up with political gibbering about how you can't "say the N-word on the radio" and whatever disjointed political takes Johnstone had while writing this.

Worth reading for the final part where the two twin villains float around laughing at the main characters making puns and supernaturally chuck preserved body parts at them before revealing their grandfather was secretly a werewolf.

[Dana Ann · Rating 3 out of 5]

Trashiest horror novel I've ever read! Wow!! Kinda dug it though.

[Ryan · Rating 1 out of 5]

I have never actually finished a book that I disliked this much. There are so many things wrong with it on so many levels. This is what I can tell about the about the author: 1.) gun rights are important to him 2.) he hates the press 3.) he tolerates gay people as long as they don't flaunt their "gayness" in front of him 4.) he can't stand any hard rock or heavy metal and believes that it may cause adolescents to turn to violence 5.) he does not know how to write a horror story by building tension or using descriptive language 6.) he has no idea how plots work and will sometimes jump from point A to point B with no explanation as to how he got there.

Want to know how I know these things about William Johnstone? Because he underlines them for the reader, repeatedly, throughout this book. Every time I tried to ignore the stupid dialogue and makes sense of the plot his characters would tell the reader how they feel about politics or the NRA. And here's a spoiler and the biggest letdown: this is not a horror story. It is a poorly written thriller where the adult characters act like they are twelve years old and not a single one of them (much like the author) understands grammar.

[Paris Chávez · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not a bad story, for a trashy horror paperback. Pretty enjoyable actually. Involved 2 evil people travelling the country starting murder cults. The back of the book proclaims that it may just be "The most violent and explicit book you will ever read!" and while that isn't quite true (*cough* Edward Lee *cough*), it doesn't really disappoint.

What IS either hilarious or sad is the crazy right wing propaganda that runs through this book. It is constantly and ironically talking about "The liberal media", praises the NRA, gets upset about due process and the fact that the police cannot brutalize the people they arrest. It is almost like Rush Limbaugh wrote this book.

[Cathy Gudger · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you like horror, this is the one for you! I thought it was very good. I liked the characters and all the surprises. Very well done!!

[Kevin Macak · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was my first book I read from William W. Johnstone and I really didn't know what to expect. The story centers itself between 2 cops, who are hired to apprehend a serial killer. This killer likes to skin and keep the faces and body parts of its victims in jars of preservatives. Leo and Lani are the main cops involved in a investigation that takes them back and forth, after finding numerous death beds along the way. The body count is high in this story. The whole book is really engaging and keeps you reading, but the ending really falls apart in my opinion. The book was still a fun read, but sometimes we don't always like the endings. This was the only gripe, that I had with the book.

[Shrike · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's bizarre, gory, and over-the-top just as expected from this author.

The reason for the lower rating is the...interesting... political and social rambles throughout. Some are masked as a character's opinions, but many are just part of the narrative. Just know Johnstone goes out of his way to "offend the libs" with this one. It ranges from amusing to genuinely distasteful.

Bonus drinking game: take a shot whenever a character vomits.

[Laura Brown]

I thought it was a little slow but the characters were very vived and everything picked up by the end

[mary · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great book! The gore, the horror, the ending Awesome! Loved this book!