A Mask of Flies by Matthew Lyons

 

There is some real overlap between crime fiction and horror fiction, certainly crimes--especially some gone wrong--can be pretty horrific; but I wouldn't have expected someone to try to bolt supernatural horror bordering on the Lovecraftian (as that's understood, this isn't literally Yog-Sotthothery) onto a heist-gone-bad/no-honor-among-thieves crime story. After reading this, I'm not sure it entirely worked: The incessant recurrences of the other criminals reminded me of some of Koontz's novels, where he has supernatural badness happening and conscienceless or deranged or sociopathic human killers as a way to at least imply that humans are the worst monsters possible. In the case of this novel, the humans are patently not the worst monsters, even if the supernatural badness is arguably present because of human actions (there's an actual cult ...). I'm pretty sure the authorial intent here is something like instigation and increasing tension. Also, I'm not sure I buy the ability of the supernatural badness to faultlessly track the Main, here, given it should have been important at some point in the intervening couple twenty-plus years. Probably not horrible, but really not all that great. Probably better than the last couple of horror novels I've read, but that's setting the bar kinda low.