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A gruesome artifact was found at the bottom of a drained pond. Itıs a seven foot tall rectangle, made of a rough crystal-like substance. The whole thing is framed in petrified wood, carved in totems with the images of terrifying faces. Anyone looking at the glass feels a dread radiating from their soul. When the crystal is exposed to bright light, a whole new world appears. Itıs a place where no person wants to go and a location whose inhabitants, large-fanged, flying creatures, are such that no human wants them to enter our world. The artifact was sent to a museum where Joyce Robbins is the assistant curator. Joyce is 48 years of age and incredibly beautiful. Every man who sees her wants her for himself but Joyce says that she will never be in another relationship. She warns them that they mustnıt fall in love with her, for she will break their hearts. When Joyce was in college she lived with two male students and they formed a very tight friendship. One roommate she cared for as a good friend, and the other she hoped to someday marry. When the one she loved was reported killed in Vietnam, Joyce and the other roommate parted ways, knowing that they could never live together without their dead friend. Now, some twenty-odd years later, thoughts of her old roommates are filling Joyceıs days and nights. She doesnıt realize that the artifact is the reason for it. She also doesnıt realize that the relic is responsible for some people missing in her town or for the pieces of bloodied bodies and animal parts that the police have been finding. DEVIL GLASS has a great premise. I was thoroughly interested in the world that the crystal opened into and was looking forward to reading about it. Unfortunately, that never happened. Author, C. Robert Cales spends most of this book talking about Joyce and her male conquests. From the opening chapters weıre told that Joyce doesnıt want to get serious about any man and that any man she sleeps with which seems to be just about every male she meets has to understand that. Weıre told this frequently throughout the book. Joyce tells the men, and then we have to read how the men keep repeating this to themselves. But of course they all fall in love in with her. I couldnıt venture to calculate how many times I had to read about Joyceıs overwhelming beauty and her ³rules.² What does this have to do with the artifact, you might ask? Not a thing! The book is filled with flashbacks. Things that happened over the previous years are revealed in flashbacks, which might not be so terrible, but unfortunately thereıs a flashback in almost every chapter. After a while youıre not sure what year the story is in. DEVIL GLASS takes us from Lima, Ohio, to the artifactıs strange land; it takes us from the present day to thousands of years ago, when man was still young. It even takes us to a spiritual place that is very Shangri-La like, hidden deep in the mountains. Regrettably, rarely do we get to see where the artifact leads or to learn about the creatures who live there. When, for the umpteenth time I had to read about how beautiful Joyce is, I started to scan the book. I understood that, I got it. Sheıs beautiful. There was no reason to repeat that fact on every other page. I forced myself to continue reading and finally, the last thirty pages started to show some action that included more of the Devil Glass. But it was far too little, and way too late to save the story. Mr. Cales should have cut some of Joyce out of the book and added in more of the horror aspect. I was interested in the artifact, but as I read the book I was getting increasingly tired of hearing about Joyceıs beauty. I canıt recommend DEVIL GLASS. It had a strong beginning and I thought it would be a first-rate horror story. But it went downhill from there, only to include small, very undersized spurts of interesting fragments. If you want a good horror novel there are better books out there than DEVIL GLASS. Read one of those instead.
Reviewed by Sharon Katz, July 2003
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