Trauma

This little novella, all 218 pages of it, read by me in less than an hour was a perfect morsel of horror and brilliance. Masterton has a way with words, and setting the scene in your minds eye. I actually started to wonder how much money I could make cleaning up houses after bloody events!! Bonnie, our whiz at cleaning and dinner (love the included recipes by the way) has such an opposing life, by day she is doing what she loves by night she is feeding an ungrateful miserable husband and her 17 year old racist teenager. You immediately feel her pain, and her accomplishments. I wont give the books plot away, I will just say that I am again well fed by Graham Masterton and his delicious imagination.

This book had an exceptionally good ending. The main character, whose occupation involves cleaning up after death scenes, is real and captivating. I became very drawn into her life and the choices she had to make. Masterson makes the reader wonder and then shows the answers. It was easy to tell that this book was well plotted.

I really enjoyed this book. In fact, I was totally surprised by just how much I enjoyed it. It's got a completely different feel and atmosphere than his usual adventurous romps. It's moody, subtle, and very satisfying. Caution - by subtle, I mean it is not overtly scary or shocking. It is, however, pretty gross. Just FYI.

This is the best book of its type I've ever read. Only two books ever made me scream by their end, and this is one of them.Thirty-four year old Bonnie Winter is undergoing too many life crises, of late - her husband has been out of work for a year, her seventeen year old son is discovering violence to prove himself as a man, she's working two jobs to make ends meet and wrestling with the idea of embarking on an affair - and her second job doesn't make things any easier. Bonnie is a "sanitizer," one of those people who cleans up messy suicides and crime scenes, and the endless wash of blood and violence across the decaying fabric of her life's seams is taking its toll. On top of everything else, she's discovered something unusual at the scene of three messy family suicide-homicides: a rare species of caterpillar that doesn't exist in our part of the world, and is legendarily attached to insanity and familial murder...This book is the most superior example of minimalist horror you could hope to find. It succeeds as a crime novel, as a supernatural horror story and as a tale of descent into psychological and spiritual madness. However one ultimately chooses to interpret it, Trauma is a horror story par excellence. Graham Masterton has written many fine novels of the type, but this is by far not only his best, but one of the best to be found in any of the aforementioned genres.If someone doesn't make a movie out of this clammy nightmare of a book, it'll be a crime. But don't wait for Hollywood to discover it. Beat them to it, and treat yourself to one of the shudderiest suspensers in the English language.

This slim volume contains Graham Masterton's most subtle and effective horror story in years. The main character, Bonnie Winter, is trapped between a lout of a husband and a business she runs cleaning up crime scenes. From the beginning she is a quirky, take it as it comes, female heroine, but we sense that she is bottling things up. Oh, boy! This book is filled with details on the after effects of violent crime, both physical and psychological, and also finds room for an Aztec demon. A must read for fans of Stephen King and Richard Laymon.