I don't believe I've read 'Entombed' since my first time through back in the eighties, probably only a couple of years after it was first released. However, I remember it fondly, probably mostly due to its unusual location, a slate mine in Wales. Unlike Deathbell, it can't quite hold up to my memory's standards, but it's a good one that feels transitional on a revisit through this runthrough.

It's one of his books for Hamlyn, the last of them before the final two that never appeared on any of the 'also by' lists inside, but it's less of a Hamlyn read and more of a New English Library read, a strange note given that, thinking about it in this context, his previous novel, 'Warhead', from NEL, was more in accordance with his Hamlyn style. They ought to have switched. This one's a short book that takes the dark worship of the ancient Druids from 'Doomflight' and morphs into a much more modern form, rural Satanists, with our hero a Jesuit priest and exorcist. Guess what came next for Guy? The first two in his series about Mark Sabat! This often feels like a warm-up.

This priest is Simon Rankin, who, like Sabat, is ex- a lot of things. In his case, he's been released by the Jesuits but still considers himself a priest who believes in God and has a personal calling. He's an ex-husband, because his wife Julie left him for a richer man, one who doesn't battle the forces of evil on a daily basis, and she took their kids with her. And he's an ex-exorcist, because he fails in the prologue to cast out an evil spirit from Dower Mansion, a failure that promptly claims the life of the estate agent who had brought him in to cater to his client's whims. He falls down the stairs the very next day. Accident? Not likely, but the coroner wouldn't prove otherwise.

Rankin wants to run from all these things, to put them behind him as best he can, but his choice of location shift doesn't work out from that perspective. The good news is that he meets someone as he's readying himself to leave, Andrea, a divorcee who backs her car into his. They hit it off and, as she wants to get out of suburbia, they go together and rent a holiday cottage in Cwmgilla, a Welsh mining town that looks great on paper. In reality, it's a taciturn place, as depressing as the piles of grey slate chippings suggest. Under William Matheson a century and more ago, the Cwmgilla Slate Caverns provided roofing material for the whole country, but times changed.

Now, his great-great grandson Arthur Matheson presides over a tourist attraction, providing tours of how it used to be. There are thirty miles of tunnels and ten layers to the mine, though the lower six are all flooded nowadays and most of those tunnels are cordoned off from the public. The tours are relatively focused to keep things safe. Of course, with nothing much else to do in town except a smoky pub, Simon and Andrea take one of the tours, even though he has a secret fear of spending time underground, and he can't fail to notice that there's evil down there in the mine. And the evil reacts to his presence.

The main thrust of the novel is exactly what you expect, one exorcist who feels a duty to tackle the evil in the Cwmgilla mine, but is challenged by his failure at Dower Mansion and the fact that he's accompanied by a girlfriend, meaning that he's living in sin. What's more, this is a notably strong evil, so he fears for his young children, Felicity and Adrian, even at such a distance, given that they live with their mother and their new rich daddy, Gerald. He's also hindered by a growing death toll because he knows that the evil is taking lives as a sort of consolation prize for not stopping him.

As Guy tended to do, he fleshes out the area by introducing a host of characters, each of whom is a good candidate for death at the hands of this unknown evil but not necessarily right now. Some do return later in the book to meet their inevitable end, but serve a different purpose early on. So we meet Ralph Reece in chapter three, who appears to have Down Syndrome but is high functioning, a boy who wanders the village at his leisure, unable to be schooled. He therefore becomes our guide to a different entrance to the mine, where he has visions of a little girl, and an introduction to the Satanists in town, because he stumbles on a ritual in a stone circle, a dozen rutting bodies before a robed figure whom he recognises.

The first death is David Wombourn, a fifteen year old who looks older but is on a caravan holiday to Cwmgilla with his parents. They take the tour, but he drifts away and explores, getting lost in miles of tunnels with only a fading torch to help him. And, when it gives, out he hears voices. Something climbs out of a pit 200' below him, so he runs through the darkness and falls off a cliff. He's quickly reported as missing, of course, and the four tour guides on duty that day duly mount a search, but the roof collapses on them, leaving two dead, one seriously injured and the fourth guided out by a vision of David who takes him instead to the others, pushing him off another cliff.

The deaths do mount, on an agreeable exponential scale, but few of them quickly. This isn't about a dangerous former mine where people can get hurt if they don't follow the rules. This is about a dangerous former mine that contains an old evil, one that needs to be understood to be exorcised, one that takes its time working on its victims for a historical reason that Rankin has to figure out. It's called Entombed, so it shouldn't surprise that people would find themselves stuck in the mine, trapped behind rockfalls or stranded at the bottom of a mini-funicular railway that's suddenly lost all its power. These victims don't die just like that; they're stuck without an obvious escape route, to be picked off by the manifest forces of evil, whenever it deems appropriate.

Of course, while this is going on, we're primarily focused on Simon Rankin and his attempts to find enough confidence and prepare well enough, both spiritually and through local research, to tackle this subterranean evil. Oddly, none of the three standout scenes involve him directly, though he's certainly aware of two of them, one through his power as an exorcist and the other through cruel vision. Howard Hawks described a great movie as one with three great scenes and no bad ones. In that sense, this is a great book because there are definitely three great scenes and no bad ones. I wouldn't go quite that far, but they do elevate it.

The first features his girlfriend Andrea, whom he's left behind at the cottage while he goes down with Matheson the mine owner, after getting his grudging permission to attempt an exorcism. He finds himself stranded while the forces of evil psychically attack Andrea and, while he can't see it happen, he feels it. He's left her inside a chalked pentagram with the lights on and curtains open for maximum light. However she finds the urge to masturbate, so crosses the chalk to turn off the lights, at which point she's visited by a dark figure who appears mysteriously naked in front of her as she's writhing in pleasure on the floor. One demonic rape later, she's possessed.

The second is a vision, visited on both Simon and Andrea as they attend a funeral at the sparingly attended Cwmgilla church. They're taken into a different service performed by a different priest of a different religion, which culminates in human sacrifices, throats ritually slit to drain blood for an eager congregation to gorge themselves on. The third is another human sacrifice ritual, one in a stone circle in an attempt to summon the Master with a hanging. It succeeds but not at all with a result that the coven expect. It's brutal and bloody and makes for a glorious discovery for the cops later.

Much of this is told impressionistically, especially when we're focused on Simon. This isn't physical evil the way that, say, King Crab might represent in his signature Crabs books. This is invisible evil, except when it deigns to manifest in a particular form to serve a particular purpose. It isn't going to take a physical solution but a mental one. The exorcist has to be ready and believe in God and a God-given ability to serve his will. And, just as his weapons are faith and will, the weapons wielded by evil are also mental, visions and psychic attacks. These characters can't trust what they see and they suffer for doing so. As long as we go in understanding that, this is powerful stuff.

At the end of the day, those three standout scenes aside, the heart of this book is its location. I'm not sure where we begin, but Simon and Andrea live in the city, at either end of what sounds like a council estate. We quickly shift to the countryside, to a small Welsh village that's long past a boom era, and that's typical for Guy's books. We even meet a character who's deliberately moved out to the sticks to escape the rat race in the Midlands. At another time, Malcolm Bellman would be the lead character. He may not have a smallholding but he's a typical Smith lead. Here, however, he's a supporting character, a potholer willing to talk to Simon at the right time.

And, once we're in Cwmgilla, we're focused primarily on the mine. We spend time in cottages, the one that Simon and Andrea rent, as well as ancient Joe Lewis's and briefly Bellman's former hotel. We spend a little time at the local pub, of course, Caractacus' Camp, because pubs are the heart of village life. Mostly, we're at the mine and, when we're at the mine, we're mostly deep inside it, in a series of pivotal caverns and tunnels. The claustrophobia is palpable, especially when we're with characters who are, as the title suggests, entombed, both living ones in the present time and dead ones manifested once more by a century old evil to serve its bidding.

After this, Guy would continue with its themes. Mark Sabat is an exorcist too and his first couple of adventures are next, battling Satanists and psychic attacks in the British countryside. Then it's the final pair of books Guy wrote for Hamlyn, 'The Pluto Pact' and 'The Lurkers', and more Mark Sabat, with an uncharacteristic thriller sandwiched between his final two adventures in the eighties. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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