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“If you can dream it, you can do it.”

Author: Graham Masterton

When you are born, you know everything. The meaning of the universe. How it was made. Your place and purpose in it. But then, in your first infant dream, you slowly forget, and spend the rest of your life looking for that which was once revealed.

And that’s why evil forces are seeking to invade the dreams of infants, to garner the meaning of life and to unravel the universe from within the mind of an innocent child. They keep trying, and they keep missing. They get into the dreams too late, leaving the babies wailing, unable to sleep, dying.

Only an unlikely band of five strangers (a sarcastic, food addicted cabbie, a journalist who makes up stories, two teenage brothers, and a doctor) can save the world. And they can only do this by taking the fight to where it’s at: the world of dreams.

Enter the Night Warriors. By day, they are unassuming. At night, they wear mechanized suits, wield guns with the power of a nuclear blast, and kick some serious ass. Which is what the world needs right now.

The problem? They’re going to suffer a lot of casualties and go right up to the very brink of extinction before the final decision between good and evil, life and death, is made.

This book is plain weird. There isn’t any other way to describe it. Apparently, it’s the fourth in a series about dream battles, but Night Wars can be read on its own. Which is what I did, because I had it and have long thought “ooo, that sounds very Nightmare on Elmstreet.” It isn’t. It’s more like a cross between a B-action movie and a fantasy someone wrote while taking A LOT of drugs. But it’s Masterton, so even though it doesn’t entirely work, it’s hard not to be drawn in, to enjoy the experience, and to keep reading. The man has some undeniable magic.

First, let’s talk about the weird and ugly. We suffer some of the very typical fantasy tropes here. The women of this group chose to fight either naked (said journalist, who does wear some bitchin’ boots, but nothing else) or in skin-tight latex suits with phallic spikes in, uh, phallic places. The men, however, get cool futuristic armor and guns, because of course they do.

Both the men and the women all know how to use their dream abilities with no training. The walking armor of the group, Dom Magator, has a bunch of guns (no one knows from where) and knows exactly what they do and what they should be used to fight. Another character, the teenage Zaggaline, can create other warriors from imagination to fight on their behalf, and his brother has all the knowledge in the world. One of the women, Xanthys, knows how to move time backwards and forwards. The other woman can climb anything.

Image by Vicki Hamilton from Pixabay

It seems like with these seemingly limitless powers, which require no training, that the characters must win against the big baddies. This potential plot destroying point isn’t addressed until the second half of the book, where randomly the characters only have a certain amount of energy during a set time, and if their antics use more energy than they have, they’re dead in the water. This seems conveniently thrown in after they use a time loop to resurrect one of their group. You can almost see the author thinking “crap, I made them too powerful and now there are no consequences.” But it comes off like an afterthought and doesn’t entirely make sense. How does this energy thing work again? We never really know.

The villains are equally problematic. We have the High Horse, which is an entity that rides three horses, each stacked on top of the next, and a cloak of tortured animals that scream. He’s an ok villain and doesn’t have much screen time. As a matter of fact, his destruction is a little too easy.

The other villain, the Winterwent, is an entity with the face of a handsome man, a spider-like body with claws, and, oh yeah, a two-foot erection made of ice . . . which he uses to kill people. When he rapes them, they freeze to death from the inside. Plus, all that organ damage . . . because as I said . . . two feet. He even malevolently stokes said phallus at the final showdown scene, reminding everyone just HOW he can freeze them. Just . . . WHAT? WHAT THE ACTUAL HELL? WHAT? I know it’s the world of dreams, but WHAT?

In case you don’t believe me, here’s a little quote:

“The danger was that the Winterwent might circle around them and pick them off one by one with his Kattalak (his axe-like weapon) or even worse, he could penetrate them with his ice cold erection and freeze them to death where they stood.”

Imagine putting THAT on your tombstone!

This is a world of dreams, so the logic is also dicey, as I’m sure you’re starting to see. At one point, we are told that a child will die because he has remained in the dream. And he does. A few pages later, a group of women who also remain in the dream, and were following the crazed warriors to the portal, were told to stay in the dream – that they’d just wake up and be fine. So, which is it? Why does the kid die, but the women do not?

There are, however, some good things about Night Wars that make it readable and even fun while reading. Masterton can describe the shifting world of dreams in a gorgeous, surreal way, and it’s fun to see how the scenes morph and the characters interact with the sometimes beautiful, sometimes horrifying worlds around them, and what these dreams reveal about normal sleepers.

The characterization here is also prime Masterton. You care about all these people and are deeply invested in them, which is what I think allows us to put aside a lot of our questions – like why they get stupid fantasy names as dream warriors and can’t just retain the names we can pronounce.

In the end, I don’t think I’ll read any further in the Night Warrior series, but I enjoyed the experience of reading this one and am ready to return to Masterton’s classic horror books.

– Frances Carden

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Frances Carden
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