I genuinely fell in love with this novel. I adored the old Hollywood glamour, the movie sets and the cosmic horror: it was spectacular behind compare. Everything about it was a delight and I know I'd read anything else in this series in a heartbeat.

I have been provided with an advance copy of the new Arkham Horror book Mask of Silver by Rosemary Jones, published by Aconyte Books, so here is the honest review I promised in exchange for the book.

So here is an important disclaimer which is always important to put out there first. I have a casual work contact with Asmodee to demonstrate board games for them in stores and at conventions. Asmodee being the parent company of Aconyte the publisher.

I am going to try my best to not let that cloud my judgement in this review, but I accept that subconsciously it might.

What is Arkham Horror

Anyway that put to one side, let’s look at this book, by first looking at the game Arkham Horror which is a cooperative game, originally designed by Richard Launius, and is now in its third edition which was released in 2019.

It’s published by Fantasy Flight Games, a subsidiary of Asmodee, and is set in 1926 in the town of Arkham, Massachusetts. Each player takes on the role of an investigator, who are working to stop the Ancient Ones, eldritch horrors which lurk in the void beyond space and time.

It’s a 1-6 player game and you work together to gather clues and defeat the evil of the Ancient Ones and save the world.

As I said I haven’t actually played Arkham Horror but I do own its spin off Elder Signthe cooperative dice game.

The Story

Like the rest of the Arkham Horror novels, its set in the 1920s specifically 1923 and sees a silent movie being produced in the town of Arkham by horror director Sydney Fitzmaurice (who in my head is Nathan Lane, not sure why, just is).

His costume designer Jeany Lin is the protagonist, and her sister Renee Love is Sydney’s muse and star. Sydney has relocated his company to his home town of Arkham where he is going to film a movie filled with thrills and the occult that will make a fortune for the studio and perhaps a lot more.

The story is a very slow burner, with the majority of the book being character development and just sight hints at the horror to come.

There is a lot of background on the production of silent movies, which in itself is fascinating, you can really tell that Jones has done her research and the book is grounded in realty, which makes it all the more creepy.

As things go wrong and the behaviour of Sydney just isn’t right Jeany investigates his past to discover what is going on in the mansion, why people are being hurt during the production and why does the silver mask haunt her dreams.

Conclusion

This is a slow paced book, but it’s deliberate and thoughtful, a very clever plot that is woven together so very well.

The main characters are well rounded, and extremely believable, the background players less so, but there is enough there that they aren’t just window dressing.

Arkham itself doesn’t my really feature too much as the story is set mostly in the Fitzmaurice mansion on French Hill, with the occasional trip to a nearby diner.

But there is a truly creepy atmosphere in the story, and it makes your skin crawl just a little bit.

Jeany is a wonderful protagonist and she offers a real insight into the contribution of Chinese-Americans to early cinema, a contribution that Jones suggests you read up in the notes after the story.

The end in a way felt rushed, but in many ways was not at all, it’s quite old fashioned in that the book builds up the story and characters so that you care about them, and then concludes quite explosively!

This was a book that I really really enjoyed and it’s a shame it took me so long to read it, but I really do highly recommend it.

A solid 5 stars from me!

The eBook and paperback are out now!

I think I may have a new favourite Arkham story: Mask of Silver by Rosemary Jones.


Any creation set in the world of Arkham and Cthulhu has to deal in some way with the extensive baggage that comes with the name of HP Lovecraft: by all accounts a racist, sexist, and generally intolerant individual. Fantasy Flight Games have done a great job in this, particularly in recent years expanding the cast of investigators to make them racially and ethnically diverse, as well as providing a growing element of LGBT representation. What you don’t get, however, in the board games, is this diverse group running into people like Lovecraft himself, and facing the backward attitudes and prejudices that so many still held.

Then along comes Mask of Silver, with its heroine Jeany Lin. Jeany is a half-Chinese, half-Swedish woman, the child of a trafficked immigrant, born out of wedlock because it was illegal for a white man to marry a Chinese woman in California at the turn of the 20th century (I was shocked to find out whilst researching for this review that it wasn’t until 1948 that this law was overturned). Jeany has a good behind-the-scenes job in Hollywood, but she also gets funny looks when walking down the street, and ill-considered comments about Chop Suey in diners. Jeany is just the tip of the iceberg here, Mask of Silver has plenty of diverse representation, but it never forgets its historical setting: the female doctor comments on how few places want a female doctor, the lesbian couple are (unwillingly) outed by the tabloid press, and the female professor whose interests stray into the occult has to share a mop-filled ‘office’ with the janitor. The diversity that a 21st century audience wants is right here, but it always comes with an acknowledgement of the battles that people had to face for their right to be accepted.

Beyond the social pressures of the 1920s, Mask of Silver also gives us a really deep dive into the world of Black-and-White, Silent Cinema. All the major characters are Hollywood workers: Jeany herself is a costume and make-up designer, but this is also the story of her sister, star actress Rene, and of the enigmatic, mercurial director Sydney, who insists that his latest horror film must be shot in his ancestral family home in Arkham. Add in the other cast members, plus the backstage crew – the cameraman who is constantly tinkering for the next new invention, the studio executive always jotting down numbers and tutting about costs – and you have the sense of a complete film-set experience, one which feels really well-researched and authentic.

A small but priceless moment for me came when a character notes how ridiculous talk of “ancient” New England towns sounds to a Parisian (this very nearly evoked a cheer from this jaded Englishman who has never lived more than 20 minutes’ walk from a building at least 300 years old, and has always found the Lovecraftian trope of ‘ancient’ Massachusetts a bit comical) and what you end up with is a depiction of 1920s America that never feels anything less than 100% real. This is absolutely crucial to this kind of insidious horror: rather than being able to dismiss this tale as something fantastical set in a place clearly of the imagination, instead you have something that feels like real history, a carefully restored picture of 1920s America – as such, when the creepy stuff starts to happen, you can almost start to wonder whether your mirror is reflecting things at an angle that should not be possible? whether the crows outside your window are giving you funny looks, as you get further and further into this slow-burn work of unsettling horror.


Inevitably, the Horror will creep in from the edges to take centre stage in Mask of Silver. The book makes clear from the outset that it is a look back at a disaster, but still allows things to build gradually, just a simple story of a crew going on location to film, albeit with buckets of foreshadowing. Jones does a great job in building the tension gradually: hinting more-and-more strongly at the dark forces that are converging. There are plenty of hints at exactly who is the villain of the piece, but an air of mystery remains, leaving uncertain until the very last moments just exactly who is pulling whose strings. Whilst we know from the outset that Jeany and at least one character will make it out of this summer more-or-less intact, there are enough twists or even deliberate false trails to keep you guessing: who is friend or foe? Will your favourite character make it to the end?

If you are an Arkham files veteran, then part way through, you will hear a pair of names that will confirm that suspicions that you’ve probably had for a while, and in that moment of confirmation of exactly what is unfolding on the pages in front of you, you might find yourselves screaming at the characters to run for the exits, but there’s no need for any prior knowledge of this world to enjoy the story.

Regular readers of my Arkham reviews will know that I take a particular interest in the established Arkham Horror investigators, a cast of (at the time of writing) 58 individuals who appear as playable characters throughout these stories, and who have their own well-established back-stories. Apart from a name-check in the epilogue (and a possible Easter-Egg in the intro…), there are 2 who make significant appearances in Mask of Silver: the first disappointed me a little bit at first, feeling almost like the character’s name and job-description had been dropped in to the story without any real consideration for how that character might really behave, but without wanting to spoil too much, I was glad to find out later that there was more going on in that scene than meets the eye, and by the end I definitely felt that Jones had retrieved this character’s place in the setting. A bigger, although still fairly minor, role is given to “Ashcan” Pete and his dog Duke, and they felt brilliantly captured: a superficial impression of a friendly drifter just passing through, but with careful undertones to let you know that Pete sees much of the strangeness that others are blind to, and that his fortuitous ‘chance’ encounters are the result of careful effort on his part to put himself rather than others in harm’s way.

There are no happy endings in Arkham, and Mask of Silver is no exception here: there are still the dead and the disappeared, the deranged and the disfigured. For all of this though, Jones has managed to provide an ending that feels satisfying, and which offers a glimmer of hope for many of the characters that the reader has come to care about. Like all Arkham fiction, that hope is tinged with a warning: people were foolish enough to mess with these forces before and it can only be a matter of time before they come again.

As much as I loved the character of Jeany, I’m not sure that I want to see her getting drawn back in to the tentacles of the Mythos again, but I very-much hope that this is not the last Arkham story we get from Jones’ pen.

After enjoying Aconyte's previous adventure in the Arkham universe, I was keen to see what would come next. This series really does seem to be going from strength to strength, and – I'm very pleased to say – takes the work of HP Lovecraft and expands on it in ways that would probably make him retreat to his room with smelling salts.

This tale is one of 1920s-era Hollywood and our narrator is Jeany Lin, a sought-after costume designer and makeup artist for a troupe of horror movie makers. Oh, and she's half-Oriental. And the female script-writer for their latest movie has a girlfriend. Who is – gasp! - a successful actress! Out of the way, Mr Lovecraft, the twentieth century has arrived!

Right away, Jeany is endearing to her readers. Despite the horrors that she's seen, she is clever, exceptionally pragmatic and aware of the 'otherworldliness' of Hollywood compared to the realities of post-War life. She loves what she does, and the almost Repertory-theatre-like group that she works with make a close-knit family that we're rooting for from the start.

Famous horror director Sydney Fitzmaurice is taking the group to his ancestral home just outside Arkham to work on a passion project that promises to be the scariest film of his career. Is this just studio hokum or something darker? Of course it's the latter, but the book takes time establishing the characters and their history together, as well as the unique mood of Arkham itself and its residents. By the time doors start slamming and the cast's nightmares affect their reality, we can no more leave than they can.

The issues of discrimination are touched upon realistically rather than heavy-handedly, and the general theme of 'other-ness' winds through the narrative as the uncanny events begin to ramp up. Jeany has to create the titular Mask, but most of the cast seem to wear their own just to survive anyway. The insidious magic of their location easily works its way into the monstrous movie, and we're genuinely not sure who'll make it out alive.

'Mask of Silver' is absolutely gripping, and although it's considerably longer than any Lovecraft tale, it takes its time as needed and I was sorry to see it end. I had my favourite characters, suspicions on who was behind the devious activities, and wish to see more of the Arkham natives – who may well appear in other books in this series (I hope).

I absolutely do recommend this, for the mood of Golden Age silent movies combined with ancient unknowable evils. Magic of all kinds, and regular folks trying to survive in many ways.

I loved 'Mask of Silver', and am very much looking forward to the next title in this excellent series.

'Mask of Silver' is out now in paperback and ebook editions.

Director Sydney Fitzmaurice, the man behind “nightmare movies” fit to rival or even surpass the likes of Lon Chaney, pulls his entire crew to Arkham to film the greatest movie of his career. The movie that he could only make in Arkham. The movie that leaves costumer and make-up artist Jeany Lin increasingly worried for her fellow crew members as well as the star, Renee Love, her own sister and Sydney’s favorite collaborator. As filming starts so do the strange happenings, the nightmares and accidents. In a house full of mirrors that reflect impossibilities, in a city where the past never properly dies, Jeany will have to find a way to break script if she wants to prevent the mask of silver reflecting doom out onto the world.

Rosemary Jones’ Mask of Silver is, in many ways, a book that I was not sure what to expect going into it. I was sure that I would enjoy it, the idea of a director’s obsession with this one movie being a threat to his crew is a solid horror concept even if we take the eldritch elements out of it. Add in the sense of the crew as comrades who rely on and enjoy working with each other and the idea that these are people who trust the director even as they know that he is a bit out there, it makes for a nice looming sense of coming betrayal.

It was the characters that sold me on the horror of Mask of Silver. While the reader knows that Jeany will make it out of the story alive and more or less well, because she is narrating the story from a point somewhere in the future, there is this lovely sense of ongoing dread to the narration. A lot of that dread and the tension that comes with it is down to the rest of the cast. Jeany will be safe, but what about the rest of the film crew, Fred or Renee or Betsy? The characters are enjoyable and their interactions feel nicely organic. I wanted more time with these characters. Mask of Silver had a lot of quiet low points, places where the danger was distant and it was just Jeany thinking about previous movies the crew had made or talking about Fred’s favorite camera and how he’s the only one who can make it run that smooth. I found myself settling into these moments and wishing they would keep going. The details about what parts certain characters were usually used for and how they would make effects work drew me in, in part because I knew that it was all leading to something terrifying, but also just because the details felt good and I wanted to know more about these people.

The horror here was often subtle. Jeany finding herself drawing the same thing over and over, only catching herself after she’s gone through several pages of sketches. The mirrors show things they should not be able to, with Jeany not quite realizing it or only realizing it afterward. There are moments where things go wrong in more obvious, impossible to explain ways. Those instances are sparse though which means they tend to land harder, though I admit the first of them did make me laugh.

Mask of Silver, is a book that I absolutely plan to purchase once the opportunity presents itself. Jones did a fantastic job with the mood and tension of it and her character work was greatly enjoyable. She made a point of referencing actors and directors and movies from the time, which did an excellent job of grounding the story in the 1920’s as well as adding to the reality of the characters as movie professionals, because of course they would be aware of what was going on in their field. I definitely look forward to reading her work again and hope that Aconyte taps her for another Arkham Horror novel. All this to say, Mask of Silver definitely earned a five out of five from me, it is definitely worth giving a shot if you get the chance.

Interesting book. I really lime the storyline and characters but I was left wanting more, it feels like something is missing...i just don't know what.

Can the hubris of one man cause pain down through generations? Yes. Yes it can. And the book opens with just such a man who, even as his house is burning down around him, asks the maid to save his portrait rather than his children. It is a stunning opening to a book I had mixed thoughts about. During my reading, I was rather thrown off by abrupt changes in pacing. But It may be that Jones was using that to create an ambiance of reading.

Three stars
This book comes out January 5th
ARC kindly provided by Aconyte Books and NetGalley
Opinions are my own

This book was so good. I love a good horror novel, especially when it's set a couple of years back - and a story about a guy who makes horror movies for a living and ends up haunted himself? I am in!
This was an amazing read. The story was interesting; it had all the necessary elements of a horror story, the characters felt real, they were exciting and from the very beginning, this book had the potential of being perfect. So, why do I end up giving it four stars? Simply put: I did not like the solution of the book. I had been hoping for a bit less "magic". I just don't think it fit well into the story. This whole book was working with so many ways of human created horror effects, I think it'd have been great - especially if the culprit had been one from the crew itself.
I loved the characters; they gave off such amazing timely well adjusted character treats - I think I read this book purely for insight of how horror movies were made some 40/50 years ago, which was amazingly described and well written.
Until this book, I only knew Arkham from the DC Universe, so I was a bit irritated at first, thinking it might somehow be connected to that. It isn't, though that would have been funny as well.
I enjoyed reading this book a great deal and I am going to take a look at the previously published editions of Arkham Horror, while hoping there will be another one.

I received a free ARC by Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

The Mask of Silver (releasing January 5, 2021) is the third novel from Aconyte Books set in the Arkham Horror Files universe, the Lovecraftian 1920s about investigators of cosmic horror. The Mask of Silver travels to Prohibition-era New England via sunny California, as the protagonist of Rosemary Jones's tale - Jeany - works as a designer in the silent film industry. The cast and crew travel to Arkham to create the latest horror masterpiece, pushed by the imaginings of a 'visionary' director. However, an ominous sense of foreboding hangs over the production, and Jeany comes to wonder if there is something more sinister afoot than Hollywood profits trumping all.

Out of the prior set of Arkham Horror novels (published directly by Fantasy Flight Games) the clearly least appealing to me also involved the making of a film. So I experienced a bit of trepidation when I started reading The Mask of Silver. Here, however, the backdrop of 1920s moviemaking was pretty interesting. Not only did Jones deliver what seemed to be a well-researched look into the shoestring behind-the-scenes workings of the industry, but she also took the opportunity to shine a light on way race and sexuality were thought of at the time. For example, Jeany and her sister have a mother of Chinese extraction and a father of Swedish. But sister Renee can pass, while Jeany cannot - making Renee eligible to play the leading lady, but only so long as their sisterhood is kept secret. Acknowledging this sort of reality is especially appropriate given H.P. Lovecraft's well-known views on race.

Unfortunately, the development of the filmmaking side of the tale comes at the expense of the investigation side of the story. Jeany specifically tells the reader on more than one occasion that the film is going to come to a bad end. It's the sort of thing that, as the reader of a cosmic horror fiction novel, you probably knew was going to happen from the moment you knew there was a film. It seems like the opening of the book required laying so much groundwork that Jones felt the need to remind the reader that the bad stuff will be coming, lest the reader forget what sort of novel this was.

Alas, the wait does not pay off as much I had hoped. There's a slow opening introducing the movie industry, an ensemble cast of characters, and how the former fit into the latter. Things start to pick up in the middle as nightmares and accidents plague the set, and Jeany receives hints of some evil afoot. Rather than building to a crescendo, however, the action continues at a sedate pace. Partially, this is because Jeany's "investigation" doesn't really involve much investigation. She's the one member of the cast/crew who mostly realizes that there's something wrong, but she spends most of the book fretting about it instead of doing something about it. By the time she tries to take action, there's little action left to take and little time left for drama.

I appreciated Jones's shout-outs to the existing characters from the Arkham Horror world. While the main characters are original, the book includes appearances by or references to "Ashcan" Pete, Agnes Baker, and Darrell Simmons. These references are a bit shallow but broader Cthulhu Mythos fans will enjoy the deeper use of elements of The King in Yellow (just check out the cover).

Taken together, The Mask of Silver will be best enjoyed by sometime who appreciates the way that Jones has done her research and worked in real-world and existing setting elements, from film production to game characters to genre writings, and who is looking for a slow burn, low key tale of cosmic horror. Personally, I really liked the former, but wished for a protagonist who was more proactive and participated in a more involved investigation that could push a more aggressive tale.

Yet another awesome Arkham Horror novel!! I’m so glad I found this universe/series because it’s been such a blast returning to this setting and my favorite Mythos monsties.

Silent movies aren’t something I’m super familiar with, but it was a blast reading about the culture around them and the ‘behind-the-scenes’ so to speak. The escapades of the director’s crew were a delight to read. Which is another thing: the author did a wonderful job with the characters’ personalities and made me, the reader, get close to them. Characters that would initially seem like unpleasant people turn around and before you know it you start growing fond of them too. Which makes you anxious for everything to turn out alright for them in the end when you know inevitably things start going eldritch.
Most of this book takes place in a wonderfully described old New England mansion that’s almost as much of a character as the humans in the book. You sympathize with the heroine as her suspicions and dread begin to escalate as things just start to feel more and more wrong.

It might be obvious which Mythos entity makes an appearance in this one based on the cover (which I also love, by the way), one of my favorites!! There are references to the original stories this creature was featured in without it being necessary reading - just something nice for the devoted fans who like picking out references (something akin to the Marvel movies).

Overall, another delightful Arkham Horror novel and I’m so grateful to Aconyte Books for publishing this new series! My thanks to them for my review copy.