As anyone who's attended my film festival knows, I'm a huge fan of creators who ignore the typical boundaries between genres and create hybrids of this and that. This novel is a perfect example of that, because the prologue is horror but chapter one is crime and 'A Mask of Flies' shifts between those two genres continually throughout.

Our lead is Anne Heller and we meet her at two crucial points of her life, but she's running in both of them. In fact, she's running in much of this book. In the prologue, she's a young girl running from a monster with her mother. She makes it but her mum doesn't. In chapter one, she's a bank robber, running from a disastrous heist at the First Durango Savings & Loan. Someone screws up, shoots a guard's head off in a firefight and chaos ensues. She gets out but the van is gone. She finds a way to escape anyway, with a wounded Jessup Lees plus a cop in the trunk as security.

For a while, the crime aspect remains primary. Anne and Jessup are part of a six-man team and it's obvious that someone ratted them out even before Travis Cade confirms it. He's somewhere safe with Joanie and Iris, making this a story of two sides, each of which wants the money that's sitting in Anne's car. With seven dead, there's a major manhunt in effect so Anne heads back to the cabin in remote Colorado where she grew up. Unfortunately, it's also the cabin she was escaping during the prologue when the monster took her mother.

In other words, she's heading from Crime City right back to Horror County and, sure enough, that monster is still there waiting for her. It takes Jessup in memorable fashion. They bury the bits and soon afterwards he knocks on the door anyway. It's a weird and effective monster and it ignores a barrage of bullets but seems to succumb to being set on fire. So off go Anne and her new partner, the hostage cop called Dutch who clearly can't go back to his job after this. Fortunately they have new information to take with them, courtesy of a cryptic note at the cabin from Aunt Lisa—"The Passage is everywhere"—and a VHS tape under the floorboards that they can't watch yet.

And so we go. This is a very quick read for a substantial four-hundred-page novel, but it may help a great deal that it feels like four linked novellas that run almost exactly a hundred pages each. The beats are ruthless and Lyons must have done that deliberately. I've talked you through the first of them and I'll mostly let you discover the rest yourselves, because it's smoothly written stuff that keeps us guessing because it doesn't become predictable until very close to the end. Eventually, of course, the various mysteries clear up and we know exactly what we're facing, so the final chapters have a sense of inevitability to them, but not for the longest time.

Notably, the horror and crime elements are both prominent throughout. Anne is a bank robber, a professional criminal even if she's also a sympathetic lead for having ethics that other members of the gang don't, but she's also been caught up in a horror story since she was a little girl. What we saw in the prologue is part of it but that isn't the beginning and we eventually go beyond what her trauma allows her to remember to discover where that monster came from and why. How all this unfolds is often highly cinematic and Lyons is as much a choreographer here as a writer.

For instance, Part II ends with a mass shootout in a diner that feels as carefully mapped out as any Tarantino movie, but the earlier section with the monster coming for Anne and Dutch in a small town police station jail feels rather like the similar scene in 'The Terminator'. After all, it's going to find them wherever they go: it's what it does, it's all it does. The inclusion of Anne's cat Murphy as an unusual supporting character, mostly confined to a cat carrier, brings 'Alien' to mind too but the sexual component of the xenomorph is absent.

I'd firmly suggest that the monster is more terminator than alien, even if it isn't mechanical, but that's an odd note to make given what's about to be revealed in Part III. However, what Lyons sets up here and later refuses to make crystal clear what it truly is and where it truly comes from. Is it an alien? Is it a demon? Is it fae? Is it something else entirely? I couldn't say, though characters we haven't met yet obviously have their own personal takes on that question, but in the end it really doesn't matter. It's there and it keeps on coming. That's what matters.

I liked this novel a lot and, while I have to wonder how much OCD Lyons has to structure it the way he did so carefully and so precisely, I also have to appreciate how poetic he gets. He isn't just that choreographer I mentioned, though he clearly takes that job seriously; he's a writer who wants to play with words to conjure up imagery. Only twenty or so pages in, with Anne away from the heist but not yet at the cabin, he spends a page describing the San Luis Valley in vivid prose. Part of the reason that this novel sprawls to four-hundred pages is that he refuses to let the setpieces own it. For all the frenetic scenes where time almost stands still, he's patient enough to never forget the poetry and this horror crime hybrid is all the better for that. I've never read Lyons before but I will now, that's for sure. ~~ Hal C F Astell