A TERRIBLE PLAGUE

There’s nothing Guy N. Smith loves more than a disaster; man-made or ecological, he’s really not bothered. Thirst begins with a tanker full of deadly weed killer crashing into a reservoir, sinking to the bottom and contaminating millions of gallons of water destined for the taps of Birmingham. The lucky Brummies get a form of rabies then, within a few hours, die desperately dehydrated and covered in popping boils and pustulent ulcers. The unlucky ones, more or less abandoned by the authorities, are left to fight for survival in Britain’s second city, a place torn apart by death and disease, looting, lawlessness, rape, murder and madness. Apart from the Cliff Richard film ‘Take Me High’, it’s the worst thing that has ever happened there. 

The beauty of anarchy in Guy N Smith’s fictional world is that it allows the author to pad out the story with endless vignettes about nasty people meeting nasty ends. In fact, almost three quarters of the book is dedicated to a non-stop orgy of random violence, and you sense that Smith is really enjoying himself, letting his imagination run riot along with his characters. The typical pattern is to introduce a character, then let us share his or her thoughts and feelings for a while and wonder where they fit in with the overall narrative. The character will then be pushed off a roof, set fire to, castrated or torn apart by a big dog or a big mob. We are then introduced to another character and the cycle begins again.

Halfway through this bloody insanity, Smith becomes suddenly fixated upon the restorative powers of shandy, with a few tins of the stuff taking on a talismanic quality. It’s a typical Smith detail: a fantastic mundanity. It’s a very British trait, and one of the reasons we always enjoy his work so much.   

There is a sequel to this book (‘Thirst II: The Plague’), but we’re going to have a nice rest before we tackle it. Now, where's that shandy?

RAZOR TOOTHED FRENZY

ALLIGATORS (1987)

‘Alligators’ is great. It follows one of the classic Guy N. Smith formulas: wild animal runs riot, many people die horribly, screaming for their lives. As you might expect, the wild animals in this book are Alligators, specifically Caimans, including a female who has a memory of eating children before she was captured and fondly recalls the taste of human flesh.

The alligators are released from a local zoo by a gang of animal activists, two of which are immediately torn apart and eaten. Alligators are not known for their gratitude, although they clearly have a highly developed sense of irony. From here on in, it’s textbook Smith: guts fly, faces are shredded, severed heads roll, legs and arms are chomped down like twiglets. It’s a blood bath.

Our continuity is provided by a thoughtful vet and his new girlfriend, a former animal activist turned receptionist / sex toy. Their relationship is interesting, not least because he is permanently distracted by his job, leaving their trysts saying that a sick goat needs him, or basking in the afterglow of their lovemaking by thinking about delousing a donkey.

Every now and again, we are privileged to get inside the alligators heads, and it’s a revelation. As befitting a species that is around 37 million years old, Smith gives the alligator an archaic sounding, rather formal turn of thought, as in the wonderful scene where the female tells the male to sling his hook:

‘The mating season is gone. I have no 

further need of you. Be gone!’

I’d have liked to have heard Johnny Morris narrate that in one of his funny voices.

Smith saves most of his ire for animal activists, here presented as an ugly, dirty lunatic fringe led by a scarred and psychotic sadist called Maurice Jones. Jones once contaminated some cottage cheese with urine, so you know he means business. After much unpleasantness, including rape, murder and multiple threats of castration, Jones' beloved alligator stands on him, squishing his guts out in a long, spurty thread of ‘ow’-ness. It’s no less than he deserves, he's behaved like a right shithouse.  

Unusually, Smith resists the temptation to finish the book with a paragraph setting up a sequel, a crying shame as he has already established that the female is fertile and that there is a nuclear power station in the area. It’s not like Guy to pass up the opportunity for a book about radiation fuelled monster gators, so perhaps he thought the idea had run its course. Shame, as ‘Alligators’ is ace.

FANATICS

We sometimes appear to be a bit hard on Guy N. Smith - but know that it comes from a good place: we love the man and his work, and derive endless enjoyment from it. We wouldn't join a fanatic's club, though, even though, according to our research, membership includes an annual meet with Mr. Smith - at his house. 

HOTEL HELL

MANIA (1989)

The best Guy N. Smith novels are the ones with a simple premise, the sort of thing that can be summarised in a few words – big, nasty crabs, for example, or deadly locusts, killer Mummy, evil Punch and Judy Show, etc. This list is not exhaustive. It’s difficult to sum up ‘Mania’ so succinctly, but it’s something along the lines of ‘snow storm forces normal people to take refuge in a guest house in Donnington run by sadists and populated by lunatics and perverts. Oh, and Satan has made one of the residents pregnant’.  

The hellish hotel / asylum is only sketchily realised, a kind of ‘Fawlty Towers’ where Basil is a religious maniac and flasher, Sybil a torturer, Manuel an occult book collector, Polly a compulsive masturbator and Terry the chef a lascivious alcoholic tramp. The heating doesn’t work, the toilets won't flush, the Devil lives in the basement and there’s always stodgy pie and cold chips for tea. 

‘Mania’ is rambling and muddled but, rather in the style of a good shaggy dog story, it does keep your attention as it is being told, even though you know it’s ultimately going to end with the realisation that you’ve been wasting your time. Its main issue is that it is rather subdued, as if Smith didn’t necessarily have enough confidence in the story and characters to do what he does best: put his foot down and go fucking mental.    

Naturally, that doesn't stop Guy from hyping his own work from the very beginning, over egging this particular souffle with the following startling, completely untrue pre-prologue statement: 

You are about to embark upon a journey into the darkest recesses of the human mind, an exploration of the unknown. Travel at your peril for your safety, your sanity cannot be guaranteed. For some there may be no return. 

It's like putting a 'Danger of Drowning' sign on a foot spa. 

One non-rhyming couplet from this somewhat tame offering has entered our Guy N. Smith Hall of Fame, however, and we are happy to reproduce it here, for you, and for the ages. 

Book early to avoid disappointment.

SABAT BLOODY SABAT

'His enemy is the eternal principle

 of evil made flesh'

Amongst many other things, Guy N. Smith^* spent the early nineteen eighties writing about Mark Sabat, an occult action man who specialises in combating the supernatural, a sort of psychic James Bond. Sabat appeared in four books, all of which are mirror images of each other. Whether Sabat is bringing down a European cannibal cult, a load of vampires or interceding in a planning dispute between ruthless developers and the spirits of Ancient Druids, the story always follows a fairly basic pattern, with only the types of violence, hideous death and sexual depravity changed to keep it interesting. Actually, the books are fascinating – in a crazed, out of control, often offensive way – not least because the central character is so fuck off fucking preposterous. 

Mark Sabat is in his mid-thirties, tall, lean, with ‘jet black’ hair and a big scar running down his left cheek. He has a moustache. He always wears black, and I imagine him sporting a leather blouson jacket, but this may just be wish fulfilment. He drives a Daimler, is a weapons expert, knows Kung Fu and can astrally project, turning himself into a bat or a hawk while he’s out of his magnificently muscular body. Sabat’s early life was fairly straightforward until he entered in a sexual liaison with one of his male teachers (he often recalls the latters ‘tousled hair’). He enjoyed it, but, filled with guilt, chose to enter the Priesthood in order to escape the temptation of illicit sex. Yes, that is ironic, isn’t it? 

The Church couldn’t contain a loose cannon like Sabat for long but, while in service, he discovered that he had a talent for exorcism, so he began to study arcane manuscripts to better understand the Devil and his disciples in order that he might vanquish them from this realm when called upon to do so. After the church, Sabat took the well-trodden ex-Priest route and joined the SAS, who taught him to kill, an activity that he greatly enjoyed. 

After being caught sleeping with his superior officer’s wife, however, he was dishonourably discharged - so he set up on his own as a dark detective, a trouble shooter against the black arts, an exorcist for hire. His evil brother, Quentin, was one of his first assignments, but Sabat only succeeded in killing his body (he shot him in the head with his trusty .38) and didn’t perform the necessary rituals to vanquish his brother’s satanically naughty soul. It was a bad move, as Quentin’s spirit is now a lodger in Sabat’s body and, quite frankly, is a bloody liability. 

Hardbitten, yet still strangely idealistic, Sabat is a cruel and ruthless enemy and, once miffed, sort of unstoppable, by which we mean that he is actually eminently stoppable, but his opponents always fail because they are marginally more rubbish than he is, just like in real life.

A curious thing about his character is that he is also a sex maniac - a habitual user of prostitutes and a serial abuser and rapist of women. Sabat is almost always in a state of arousal, and nobody is safe from his predatory erection. Quite often he decides that, once a particular shitstorm is over, he will shag an attractive heroine, villainess, acolyte, victim or passer-by as his ‘reward’ for getting rid of the bad stuff. They have no say in it whatsoever. If they object he either hypnotises them or forces the issue. 

Naturally, being raped by a man like Sabat is actually a pleasurable experience – no matter how aggressive and unwanted his attentions are, a few seconds into it the women realise that this bastard is taking them to the heights of ecstasy. It’s pathetic, dangerous stuff. Mostly, however, Sabat is, quite appropriately, a wanker, forever cracking one out to ‘purge’ the evil within him. If anyone dares suggest he put it away, he usually blames his brother's baleful influence, or says that he was possessed by evil which made him toss himself off. It's all rather odd.

Brilliantly, in his invaluable tome ‘How To Write Horror Fiction’, writer Guy N. Smith says that he based Sabat’s CV on his own. I wouldn't want to be trapped in a loft space with him. 

* No apparent relation to Mark E. Smith. But that would be awesome.

THICK SNOW

‘Satan’s Snowdrop’ is a difficult book to read, as it positively revels in an appalling supernatural world of death and degradation, torture and abuse. It’s also hard going because this nightmarish vision is occasionally leavened by flashes of supreme daftness, such as a possessed space hopper that hastens the death of a young boy*. 

The main premise is that a house in the Swiss Alps (by the Reichenbach Falls, in fact) is possessed by the violent spirit of a monstrous, seemingly immortal serial killer and sadist. Everyone who enters the house is in the most dreadful danger, the whole place reeks of decomposing flesh, and the ground it sits on is so steeped in murder that even the flowers bleed. 

Bizarrely, despite the awful reputation of the house, its baleful atmosphere, its terrible smell and the horrible hallucinations it offers to anyone who crosses the threshold, the house is seen as a sought after commodity, and is bought by a crass American and shipped over to the States and reconstructed, one blood sodden timber at a time. 

It’s clearly a bad idea as, within a few weeks his wife is mad and his son is dead (space hopper related, see above and below) and, horribly, the poor boy’s spirit is trapped in the house with hundreds of other ghosts. It’s pretty grim. Ridiculously, even though he knows all about the horrible happenings associated with the property, an Englishman buys the house and, once again, has it dismantled and, this time, rebuilt in the UK, and all the bad shit begins again, but worse. 

It's worth quoting a few of the lines around the awful final moments of the young boy, Tod, simply to illustrate the amount of invention Smith brings to the bog standard literary convention of death by space hopper --

'He had never really studied its face before. Just a few meaningless black daubs, millions like it, mass produced. Now it was an individual. It saw him. It understood'

...

'He glanced around jurkily, furtively. Nobody. Only that...toy. a heavy-duty rubber balloon. A bag of air. Harmless. But those eyes...'

...

'A noise behind him, a hollow sound like a big beach ball being bounced. Oh, God, it could move after all. It was alive!'  
...

'He was travelling upstairs instead of down. And that egg-shaped fiend was following him'
...

'There was no way of knowing why the dead did not die and a rubber toy became a fearful creature. Perhaps it was better that way'
...

There’s a passage towards the rather frenzied ending which suggests that the malevolent spirit responsible for all the violence and mayhem was maybe a druid (and, later, a Nazi) but this is clearly an attempt at trying to rationalise the sick nightmarish fantasy Smith has cooked up. It doesn’t matter, really, as anyone looking for cheap thrills and sick violence will already be perfectly satisfied with the book without a hasty, well-that-doesn’t-make-much-sense explanation: it’s a nasty piece of work, but then it's supposed to be.

* Perhaps the most chilling use of a childhood toy since the Satanically possessed slinky in Mario Bava's 1977 film 'Shock'. 

MR. SMITH'S APOCALYPSE

Like most people living in the western world in the nineteen eighties, Guy N. Smith spent much of the decade with his eye on the apocalypse, mentally and physically preparing himself for a nuclear weapon assisted end of the world. Whereas others went on marches, bought Frankie Goes To Hollywood tee shirts or turned the cupboard under the stairs into a makeshift bunker, Guy did what Guy does best: he sat down at his typewriter and wrote books about the whole bloody mess. I also expect he stockpiled weapons and tinned peaches, but that’s a different issue. 

‘Warhead’ and ‘Throwback’ are from 1981 and 1985, respectively. They both deal with the total destruction of our way of life, but each have a slightly demented twist. In some of these reviews, we occasionally point out Smith’s foibles – his obsession with vomit, for instance, or the way he sometimes clumsily juxtaposes the supernatural and the mundane – but we never call him on his imagination, which is limitless and boundless and utterly bonkers. 

In ‘Warhead’, for instance, a war wipes mankind from the earth, but it is a war facilitated not by men but by ancient Gods, a pantheon of voodoo deities, vengeful Native American spirits and a red hot African lady who appears in men’s dreams and shags them senseless. 

The action centres on a US missile base in Wales, and takes in several gruesome deaths, ritual murder, supernatural sex and liberal use of the ‘n’ word (in context, of course, nasty Americans are using it). 

It’s a confusing, slightly muddled ride with simply far too many characters for the scant characterisation Smith provides (it is mainly populated with interchangeable male characters who are issued with a surname and little else. They all sound the same and, when they die, as die they must, you’re never quite sure which one has just copped it). 

Without a focal point, the narrative wanders all over the place, only really communicating a sense of deadly urgency in the last few pages; even then, Smith follows a gruesome execution and crucifixion with an incongruous potted history of a new character, a Country and Western enthusiast who has given up on his own music but has decided to see in Armageddon with a fin de everything mobile disco at the local church hall. He plays an Engelbert Humperdinck record and the villagers cling together and get off with each other as the mushroom clouds gather. 

It’s an odd coda that, nevertheless, sits well with the book’s weird ending, where Smith conjures up a post blast nightmare vision of, well, what? Hell? Purgatory? Shrewsbury? … 

‘Throwback’ takes a very different approach. Here, the UK is hit not by several megatons of nuclear hardware, but by a nerve gas which, astoundingly and very scientifically, takes everything which sniffs it back a few stages of evolution. Chickens can fly, dogs become ravening wolves and humans become savage, squat, hairy Neanderthals with a penchant for violence and rough sex (only the first half of that description sounds like a massive change). 

There are at least a few people who, having hidden in bunkers, have escaped the effects of the gas, and the story tells of their struggle to survive in a world full of angry, randy ape men. Needless to say, there is murder and sexual burglary, and quite a lot of throwing up, some of it tinged with blood. 

The author takes his time with this one, introducing the characters one at a time and providing a taut story with proper people in it, many of whom are now covered in coarse, matted hair. Smith gets inside the ridged skull of a throwback most effectively, and positively revels in the morality free anarchy that these basic bastards bring to the backwards new world unknown foreign aggressors have created (we never quite get to the bottom of who did it, and why). 

Smith dutifully ticks off the tropes of the post-apocalyptic world, including a ruthless approach from those in power, who conduct Nazi like experiments on captured throwbacks and herd the remainder northwards and hope they die out over the Winter. In the end, however, the best laid genocidal plans are blown apart by a very nasty plague which kills more or less everyone. Hurrah! 

Did we mention that you can become a throwback by having sex with a throwback? Well, you can. Did we mention that a throwback, if frightened, will emit a 'rush of liquid anal wind'? Well, it will. Did we mention that it’s set in Shrewsbury? Well, it is. 

We’ve never been, but we now associate the place with rape, murder, vomit and hirsute inhabitants who haven’t evolved since before the Stone Age. Are we far off, do you think?

SLIMY BASTARD

In ‘The Slime Beast’ (1974), archaeologists visit The Wash looking for King John’s lost treasure but instead find a mucus covered outer space creature with few social skills and an insatiable appetite for human guts, brains and breasts. The monster is impervious to bullets, but hates being set on fire (who doesn’t?). A flame thrower based solution has to wait as it is half-day closing, so all of the shops are closed. Seriously. 

There are gruesome killings, gruesome sex scenes (“Don’t draw out. I want all of you, even if it means I have a baby”) and all of this takes a mere 110 pages to relate, hence the 110 word review.

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.   

HOLY RELICS - PROBABLY

This is Guy N. Smith's old Amstrad Computer Word Processor, which sold on e-bay recently for the princely sum of 99p. It could have perhaps achieved more if the seller had been less honest, as stating that it was only 'probably used by Guy to write a number of his well known novels and reference books' might have put off people with two pounds to spend. 

There is an easy authentication test, of course: simply see if the keys v-o-m-i and t are more worn than the rest - if the answer is yes, then congratulations, you have yourself a relic.

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'?