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Ten Masks of Evil, reviewed by John Glass
Ten Masks of Evil
Ten Masks of Evil, Martin Cid’s last book is classic and experimental. Ten short stories to build a novel or, maybe, a novel born of ten evil minds, including the reader mind (everyone has a dark side).
Martin Cid, author of ‘Ariza’ (Alcala publishers, 2008), ‘A Century of Ashes’ (Akron publishers, 2009), ‘Eminescu’s 7 Sins’ (Yareah books, 2010), and ‘Propaganda’ (Akron, 2011) has been playing with time, an abstract subject that scare everybody since it’s beyond rational explanations.
Ten Masks of Evil is past, present and future. Ten Masks of Evil is time because evil (as an opposite of goodness) has been present from the beginning, from that moment when skies fertilized grounds and life started.
The characters change in every short story, they live in different times and places…, all but one: Milton Mills, an enigmatic figure, smart and filthy, always clever to accord and lie with everyone. A game of cards, a game of blood, played for the pleasure of playing but for ambition too.
However, this experimental structure, this new way of describing characters, has a classic background: the Hell of Dante Alighieri, the mythic Faustus or, even, the Holly Books.
Every short story can be catalogued in a different genre:
Chapter 1: ‘The Mask of the Player’ is Mystery. Five gamblers in Sad Bride, cheating and trying to solve a mystery, which just beginning.
Chapter 2: ‘You cannot smoke this Opium without a Mask’ is nearly a movie script, film noir, developed between the two World Wars in New York.
Chapter 3: ‘The Mask of the Masks: Milton Mills’ is classic narrative and a peak, since we will know the origin of M.M., or at least one of his origins, his Russian origin at the end of the 19th century.
Chapter 4: ‘A Mask into a Tragedy’ is a thriller, with corrupt policemen and bad handsome women, with killers and a murder to solve. Only a murder? Maybe something more. Again in Sad Bride, again in its dreadful legend, around 1960.
Chapter 5: ‘A Mask into a Comedy’ is funny. They are in Madrid and maybe not living but playing a performance in a theatre.
Chapter 6: ‘One Mask, One Drama’ is in a plastic time of a pop New York. It could be realistic fiction by his description of that busy society but the mystery keeps on and M.M. guards still the answer.
Chapter 7: ‘Same Mask, Two Sisters’ is a legend, a beautiful romantic story, dreadful and suggestive at the same time. Old times, legendary women.
Chapter 8: ‘The Green Mask’. The legend keeps on near the sea and death, and M.M. reappears in all his glory.
Chapter 9: ‘The Mask of Creation’. Written with biblical language, told about different myths, Babylonian or Jews myths, the origins of mankind.
Last Chapter: ‘White Masked Nights’ is a biography of Edgar Allan Poe, or maybe a biography of Martin Cid or maybe a biography of the reader darkness feelings. A marvelous end.
Definitely, a different book of a different author. Fresh and different, trying to introduce the reader in the narration and trying to entertain him with quick changes of style and atmosphere. Sometimes is humor and sometimes is fear what we feel, but in general mystery and the search of a solution forces us to continue reading, unable to stop this beautiful powerful narration.
More: http://www.martincid.com/?p=207
On Kindle: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B007Q08CZW