ADVENTURES FROM HISTORY

Horatio Nelson loses his eye, arm and life, respectively. He did his duty, as expected.

MASKS

WHAT NEXT, ALAN?

We have just found out that prolific writer, producer, director, documentary maker  and pseudoscientific genius Alan Landsburg died on August 13^th. We are desolate.  

Landsburg worked for Time Life and National Geographic; he worked with Jacques Cousteau; he worked with Leonard Nimoy. He wrote a dozen books and gave us over 2,000 hours of edutainment, including around fifty television films including ‘Tarantula: Deadly Cargo’, ‘The Savage Bees’, ‘Burned At The Stake’ and ‘Mysterious Island of Beautiful Women’.

He was a hero to us because he KNEW that the Earth is an even weirder place than it already appears: place where the ancient past and the distant future are inextricably linked, where ghosts are real, where mysterious animals roam the uncharted wildernesses of the world, where aliens pop by whenever they feel like it, where the human mind can kill or cure or set something on fire, where nature is always one step away from utterly engulfing civilisation -  and because Landsburg KNEW this, his greatest work starts with the premise that the weirdest answer is always right then works backwards, pouncing on every scrap of evidence as justification for his faith.

His most famous show, ‘In Search Of…’ might as well have been called ‘Ipso fucking Facto’, so eager is it to present theory as reality - and reality as something that is infinitely complex and utterly bizarre. As you might expect, that had an enormous influence on our world view.

Rest in peace, dear Alan. You’ll have all the answers by now, we hope you’re not disappointed.

ADVENTURES FROM HISTORY

King Harold gets an eyeful. 

SLIPPING AWAY

These are Slipper Coffins. They are what Ancient Egyptians on a medium sized budget used to bury their loved ones - it is believed the poor ones just used a ditch. Basically a human being sized pot with a hole at the top, the corpse was simply 'slipped' into the receptacle which was then plugged by a lid featuring an often crude likeness of the deceased.

Our favourite is the bottom one, which is the post mortem equivalent of a really shit passport photo - and this one has been embarrassing this poor spirit for about 3,500 years so far.

CAMPING IT UP

THE CAMP (1989)

‘The Camp’ poses the question ‘what would happen if the British government used a domestic resort complex to conduct secret mind control drug tests on unsuspecting holiday makers?’ The answer, as you might expect, is that it all gets a bit messy.  

In a series of experiments, randomly selected people are slipped hallucinogens in order to be programmed into thinking a new Ice Age has come, for instance, or that they are kidnappers, or prostitutes. Most of the time they are simply kept in a state of permanent befuddlement, all the while being observed and recorded, their every mind controlled move monitored by unpleasant scientists. 

Far fetched? Well, yeah, until you remember that the British invented both the holiday camp and the concentration camp. Then there's Porton Down where, in the fifties, National Service Men were fed LSD and sprayed with nerve gas so that someone in a white coat could note down the results. At least one man died, with more suffering health and emotional problems for the rest of their lives. Jot that down, Professor Twattenstein.

In Smith's fictional camp, the experiment goes wrong, and the antidote doesn't work, so a brutal government assassin is sent to silence any witnesses and suspicious third parties. This fellow likes his job, so zealously goes around arranging car crashes and garrotting people and feeding them to the pigs in the Petting Zoo. 

There is a sequence in which a dozen people are killed after he sabotages a cable car, giving us several pages of terror, screaming, falling, squelching and a massive amount of trademark vomiting. It's a tour de force. In the end, the hitman starts a riot which burns the camp to the ground and kills almost everybody, including himself.

At the end, two survivors speculate that there will be a cover up and the riot will simply go down in history as 'another Heysel Stadium'. The thing that worries them most of all is:

'It's not so much what happened at The Camp. 

We know all about that. It is what is happening elsewhere, 
all around us even now, that we don't know about' 

Christ, that's got us worried now.  

It’s a hell of a ride and, in many respects, is unlike any other book you'll ever read (that isn't by Guy N. Smith). J.G Ballard could have easily written a book about a foreign holiday resort where the thin veneer of civilisation is torn away, but only Smith could set it in the Home Counties and make the resort a hellish cross between Auschwitz and Butlins, a kind of psycho 'Hi De Hi' with more laughs and much stronger drugs. 

And that's Smith all over - no matter how fantastic or supernatural the story, he never loses the feel of the everyday, the mundane that underpins life on this small, silly island – so, yes, in 'The Camp', The Powers That Be are overseeing a massive conspiracy and feeding people psychotropic mind benders, but they are British, so how are they administering it? It’s in the mince!    

POSTSCRIPT:

The pictures accompanying this post are of Summerland, a massive leisure complex that was once a flagship tourist destination in the Isle Of Man. 

Built in 1971, the idea was that up to 10,000 holidaymakers could swim, dance, play, drink, eat and generally make merry at a constant temperature of eighty degrees, all under a bronze coloured plastic roof specially designed to turn even the weakest sunbeam into a golden ray. There was even a solarium so, like Club Tropicana, you could sun tan. 

In August 1973, some kids set alight a kiosk which then collapsed against a not particularly fire resistant external wall, setting the complex ablaze. The fire spread to the highly flammable roof, which immediately melted and fell into the building. Fifty people were killed, and eighty were injured.   

THE 'N' STANDS FOR GENIUS

Guy N. Smith has written over a hundred books since 1974, most of them in the horror genre. He also writes about hunting and pipes and country life, as well as being an editor and book seller. He'd be called a polymath if he was working in a more respectable area, but I doubt Guy cares what people call him. Several times a year he sits down and creates a new novel. He's a professional, he doesn't sit on his pink panniers waiting for inspiration. He has an obsession with screaming death, cringing horror, cruelty, torture, vomit and nasty things invading orifices. He is our hero.

ABOMINATION (1986)

'Abomination’ is about what happens when big business and bad people combine to cause (un)holy havoc. A chemical plant in Wales has been experimenting with the ‘perfect pesticide’, a deadly chemical compound supposed to accelerate insect life cycles to hasten their early death - except, mercenary, corner cutting arseholes that they are, it leads to everything they spray it with turning big and nasty and massive termites start crawling up peoples bottoms and huge killer frogs form violent gangs. It’s a bloody bloodbath.

A keen ecologist, Smith gives full rein to the idea of nature fighting back, with an enormous number of human fatalities from biting, nipping, sucking, stinging, sliming and internal nibbling. It's not possible to accurately measure the exact volume of puking that goes on, but it's probably enough to fill a tanker lorry. As above, Smith also seems unhealthily preoccupied with the idea of the creatures targeting private areas, and so throwing up and insect sexual battery become an integral part of a recurring pattern of violent, humiliating death. 

For example --

'Martha struck at the earwigs blindly. She sent two tumbling back, but there were five or six already beneath the hem of her skirt and travelling upwards, fast. Swiftly she closed her thighs and pressed them tightly together. 'No, not there! Oh, my God!' 

...

'He could feel them on his thighs and knew only too well that they were seeking out his genitals. Soft tender flesh, sweetbreads for the taking'.

...

'The ants were everywhere; not an inch of her body was spared. It was obscene. She cried out, a strangled shriek of anguish. The dirty bastards are raping me!'

...

'She was laughing and spitting mangled ants all down her tits. And she had a suspicion that she had messed her pants, too. Or it could just have been the ants running out of her'.

(this poor soul has an ant induced orgasm at the point of death).

...

'He thought his genitals were gone, but he didn't mind that'.

...

'Randolph winced, knowing now what it felt like to be circumcised and castrated at the same time'

This list is not exhaustive. 

Sometimes Smith writes his equivalent of a happy ending - i.e. the evil is temporarily vanquished - but more often he takes the microcosm of horror he has created and then insinuates that it will spread across the world and wipe out all we know. This is one of those stories - everybody is going to have ants in their pants by midnight. 

When you think of Smith sitting down to write these books, don’t think of a man who labours over the prose or sits around ruminating, think of him pounding the keys in a white hot blur of activity, the sound echoing around for miles like a series of shots. Not everything is perfect*, but it’s immediate, energised; it’s not crafted in the sense of a load of phonetic curlicues and a well planned narrative, but this is not literature, it’s story telling.

We imagine him typing the last full stop, pulling out the paper and thinking ‘right, there you go, one book’ - no fiddling, no agonizing about semi colon use, no poncing about - then onto the next. His sheer stamina and fecundity are the things we admire about him the most. 

He'll be back.

We can't stop him.

* How else can you explain lines like 'Les had the same pair of briefs on - perhaps he slept in them'?