Customer Reviews

Servants of Chaos (Leisure Horror)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

This appears to be the average 'amateur put in crisis in town full of monsters and changelings' thriller. If it were well-written then it might get a three star rating. If you write a monster horror novel, you have to get control of the reader and his suspension of disbelief.

However, Servants of Chaos has too many examples of Deux Ex Machina assists to the hero to make the story credible. The Greek theatre used a mechanical 'god' (deus Ex Machina) to swoop down from the back of the set to resolve issues and make things right.

In modern literature parlance, the term has come to mean an unlikely event,skill, or intervention that the author uses to move the story along. Imagine the author has led the hero up to a 30' wide chasm with the bad guys close on his heels at the end of a chapter. The next chapter begins, "Having completed a magnificent 31' broadjump, surpassing the Olympic record, he eluded his pursuers." Deus Ex Machina. You get the idea.

Time after time, the author has the hero find a conveniently located hiding place, or gun, or whatever is desperately needed at the moment. The absolute worst example was: "The door was locked, as I had expected, but I was prepared for that. Growing up the son of a locksmith has its advantages. I had my own set of tools and the skills to use them..."

Unfortunately, that was the first time the locksmith tools were mentioned, much less the locksmith heritage.

Once you get past these giggles, the descriptions of the various monsters and their minions border on the comic, a fatal flaw in a monster/horror tale.

Subtlety is not the forte of this author. Read it if you are stranded in a dentist's office, waiting for a root canal.

150 pages into this I realized I had started skimming and looking at page numbers. Along the way, I snuck a peek at the author's bio on the last page and was surprised to find that this wasn't his first novel. The writing is elementary ("see Jane run"), the plot is one we've seen a million times on cable at 2am, and I knew the editor was asleep at the wheel when I read the word "trifle" three times in three pages. If you're looking for good horror fiction, save yourself the time and money on this one and invest in a Richard Laymon book instead.

As a huge fan of lovecraft i figured that no matter how bad this was it would be midly entertaining. i was so horribly wrong. It reminded of a book that should be on Mystery Science Theatre 3000. The plot is obvious, and awkward. The characters are dreadful and under developed, the villians should have had snidley whiplash mustaches. this book was so bad i called my sister and read her lines like "the Lettuce had not aged like fine wine". I can imagine this book being written by a computer, or someone who owed a bookie. however if you want to read a Hilariously bad book this is the closest ive found to recreating the "Plan 9 from Outer Space" effect. i would have stopped reading it but i was 200mi away from another book store and i kept thinking that something this bad couldnt have actually gotten printed. It did. the best way to read this book would be to cut out your eyes and stuff the pages in the gaping wounds. awful

I think I lapsed into a coma 14 times reading this book. I'll admit, it had a decent beginning, then SNORE....

I had hoped for a novel length "Shadow Over Innsmouth", but this isn't it. The writing is below the worst of the pulps, it totally lacks the atmosphere Lovecraft excelled at, and the characters were closer to tissue paper than cardboard. The idea itself, though not overly original, was pretty good, it's just that the author failed to develop it at all. There are also a few "politically correst" speeches by the main character that have absolutely nothing to do with anything in the book.

The first third of this book was amazing. Great atmosphere with a very clever scenario. However, once the action gets started, the villians are just your basic cardboard cutouts. Yeah, you still get the creatures and thrill of entering the enemy lair, but the story definitely did not hold up the entire way. The last third was your basic chase-the-bad-guy-and-save-the-girl routine. I also had a problem with the protagonist always getting caught, seemingly at random, by the bad guys. But don't get me wrong, I still enjoyed this quick read, and if you're into Lovecraft, you will want to give yourself a treat and buy this book. I look forward to another outing by Don D'Ammassa.

Servants of Chaos by Don D'Ammassa was copyrighted in 2002. Apparently everyone and his brother knew about it but I didn't until I got the recent Rainfall Books chapbook checklisting a bunch of mythos books. List price was $5.99 for a Leisure Books mass market paperback and cheap copies are available from used bookstores. The cover picture shows a harbor full of fishing boats but I can't for the life of me figure out who did it from the book. Don D'Ammassa has written numerous stories and a few novels but the only other flat out mythos story I know of by him was "Dominion" in 1999's New Mythos Legends, a very nice short story. Page count was 338; editing was tight with only a few typos I noticed.

There are not many full length mythos novels. Some are absolute dogs like HP Lovecraft Institute, Nightmare's Disciple, A Darkness Inbred or Other Nations. Some are fair, like Delta Green: Denied to the Enemy, Hive or The Colour Out of Darkness (more a novella...more a long short story, really). Some are very good like The Atrocity Archive, The Jennifer Morgue, Ravenous Dusk, Balak, The Gardens of Lucullus, Where Goeth Nyarlathotep and Delta Green: The Rules of Engagement. One is a flat out masterpiece: Radiant Dawn. Some I still haven't read, like Mr. X and Blue Devil Island. In this company I think Servants of Chaos is probably best rated as fair, worth a read at least. Unlike some other reviewers I don't find too much similarity to The Shadow Over Innsmouth except for the Massachusetts shore locations of the town.

******************spoilers follow********************************

Steven Canfort, a research institute employee, comes to the shabby, run down, xenophobic town of Crayport on the Massachusetss coast, with hopes of buying some property to set up a research station. Some of the inhabitants look weird, most of them are just about hostile and he doesn't have much luck. His erstwhile girlfriend Alyson Branford joins him. He meets the charismatic and more normal looking town patriarchs, the Crawleys. Just as he seems to make a contact who would be willing to sell him some land, that family vanishes under very suspicious circumstances. A local boy, Sean, tries to get him and Alyson to help Jennifer, the daughter of the murdered family. Now the action picks up as the Crawleys lead some of the stange inhabitants of the town in caturing the main characters. We find out that the Crawleys are using rituals drawn from the Necronomicon to allow transdimensional creatures to enter our world. The call themselves Those Who Serve. The weird zombie like townspeople are called Those Who Serve the Servants. It turns out they are possessed and used as puppets by bizarrely hostile creatures called Passengers. The Crawleys and their followers serve a monstrous thing, one of the Great Old Ones no doubt (perhaps resembling Shub Niggurath but not named), that is also implanting other sacrificial victims with Children, obscene creatures of great power. It turns out the Crawleys plan to accumuate enough of these Children to take over the world and bring these ancient god like beings back to primacy on Earth. The plot and creatures are mythos enough! The book bogs down a bit in execution. Most of it is devoted to action sequences, hairs breadth escapes, furious fights, explosions, kidnappings and general mayhem. This was OK enough; maybe there were a few too many such events. Car chases are more exciting on the big screen than on the little page. A few characters get killed off, so Mr. D'Ammassa is not too sentimental. The characterizations were paper thin, again OK enough in a book like this. I didn't really end up liking or caring about the main characters. The descriptions of monsters was done with flair but the plotting and behavior of the villians was pretty stereotypically mythosian, as well as not particularly clever for an evil overlord. The hero had just about super human resourcefullness, luck and endurance. The epilogue ending was telegraphed a mile away; not only was it not really convincing in context, but I also could not persuade myself to care about it. Oh well, it's a Leisure Book! What do you expect? At one point Steve's internal dialogue says about some strange occurrence something to the effect that this would only happen in a bad horror novel....

Servants of Chaos, being a mass market paperback, is a bargain compared to most mythos novels, especially if you score a used copy. It was a diverting read over a few days. I liked it well enough and didn't punt on it (like I did A Darkness Inbread and Nightmare's Disciple). I hope this is not the end of Don D'Amassa's interest in the mythos.

Reads like a Lovecraftian role-playing game plays - fast, action-packed, clever and often rather funny.

But one of the author's own paragraphs should pretty well enable you to determine whether this book will be your cup of tea:

"Well, doctor, you see this bizarre cult was worshipping some superhuman creature from another dimension, and when I destroyed their temple two giant squids from another world destroyed the town. I managed to escape, but naturally I had to kill a man in the process, and now I need to rescue my friend from a man who is preparing to destroy the entire world...Sure. Not only would they believe me and let me go, they'd award me the Congressional Medal of Honor."

If that little speech entertains you as much as it does me, this is the book for you.

pulp novels are hard to come by. that in itself is of course no reason to read them. a guy wants to buy property in a secluded town full of strange inhabitants, happenings and rumors. he ends up having to fight a cult and some unspeakable creatures with a plan. sounds very cliche and B, huh? reading this i was all the time thinking: now D will destroy the story, become B or turning to cliches. but he never did. a lot of standard stuff here. the chase. the cult. etc. one has to admire D for writing seemingly hundreds of scenes that could soooo easily turn into cliches. truly amazing. it is a good book, but don't expect any more.

I love this book because it's written in the first person, so you constantly are at the focus of the action and everything has an immediate feel to it. The setting is so creepy it's comfortable and fun to visit, if you know what I mean. You can curl up with the book and enjoy every page, the story is that riveting. Now I'm a big H.P. Lovecraft fan, but few writers can match him for spookiness, and reading Lovecraft today, you have to admit that his writing has a kind of dated feel to it (not that it's not great--it is--but it just feels a bit dated language-wise, like Poe, you could say). Well along comes Don D'Ammassa and he goes Lovecraft one step better: first of all the story is topnotch, and second he is a master of creating an entire new fictional weird world for your imagination to play around in, yet he does it with modern syntax and vocabulary. This book is a winner. Plus it is scary. What more could you ask for in a horror story?