Customer Reviews

Masters in Hell

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Masters in Hell leaves no ox un-gored. This volume of the award-winning and best-selling Heroes in Hell series deals with villains. It explores prejudice and venality with a cynical humor and savage characterizations. The authors take no prisoners. If you can't tell when the writers are exposing the reasons their characters ended up in Hell -- and very good reasons the are, in most case -- you won't like this book. Stories deal with greed, prejudice, cruelty and lust: all good reasons that the protagonists were damned.

Particularly cutting and insightful are the first two stories: 'The Ransom of Hellcat,' by Chris Morris, and 'Take Two,' by Bill Kerby, best known for his screenplays. Racial prejudice is laid bare, along with greed and self-aggrandizement and the exaltation of ignorance and lust. Terrific stories if you have a taste for social commentary and unvarnished truth; in some places, this volume is Kafkaesque. Some of the writers are, in fact, literary writers on their first foray into fantasy, so the volume has a different flavor than those written by authors more familiar with the conventions of commercial fantasy. And I say Hallelujah!

If you're brave enough, read this one. If not, the other volumes of Heroes in Hell are less ambitious, less challenging...or less successful, depending on your point of view. Given the premise, that everyone who became famous and memorable broke one of the Commandments and ended up here, this volume pays off more clearly than any of the others.

Fun for the discriminating; probably too tough-minded for the impressionable, the easily offended, or the unsophisticated.

I am very fond of this series, particularly the books with a strong Cherryh influence. This is an anthology of short stories set in the Hell universe.

Among the elements of Cherryh's writing I enjoy is her mastery of the classical history and her understanding of the Roman and Greek characters she brings to the mix. This, to me, is the series' greatest strength.

Though this volume did contain a story by Cherryh and one by solid writer George Foy, it also contained a story--the first one, by Chris Morris--which offended me so utterly that rather than sell this book to the used book store, I will be tossing it in the recycling bin. Morris has chosen to represent historical characters by substituting insulting, juvenile, false, repulsive slander for actual research. It speaks badly for this anthology that the story was accepted at all. This writer had better get his mind out of the gutter and into some historical scholarship if he wants to continue to write historically based fiction.

Just a little obscure...but this book in the series was actually readable! Still pretty incoherent, but i think thats mainly due to the setting.