If Guy N. Smith had a common theme in 1982, it was to combine all the ideas that he had been exploring in his books into each novel, at least as far as he could. Of course, there was the clash between country people and the townies who don't understand their ways. There was a religious angle, usually tied into Satanism or devil worship. There was some sort of tie to the past, with characters in the present having visions of an ancient evil or even being transported back to face it. 'The Pluto Pact' trawled in still more that we remembered from earlier books, spinning them all into a new story.

'The Lurkers', on the other hand, has no intention of doing any of this beyond that time-honoured clash between country folk and a family of interlopers who don't fit. In this case, they're Peter Fogg, his wife Janie and their nine-year-old son Gavin, who all used to live on a generic housing estate in the Midlands when Peter worked a regular day job. However, he wrote a book which became an unexpected bestseller and so they've moved to Hodre, a dilapidated Welsh country cottage outside the village of Woodside so that he can concentrate on writing the follow-up. Needless to say, the locals aren't happy about it.

It's not difficult to imagine that Smith was remembering being in a similar situation. He knocked out an unexpected bestseller with 'Night of the Crabs' in 1976, which allowed him to ditch his day job at a bank, move from the Midlands to a new house on the Welsh borders and become a full time writer. Of course, he was already a country person at heart and had been renting the shooting rights on the Black Hill for some time, so he wasn't entirely an outsider. To underline the connection, his wife's name was Jean and one of his four children was named Gavin. I hope they didn't go through what the Foggs do here.

And rather than trawl in those other themes Smith had been working with, even when we start to think that he might, he stays ruthlessly focused on the Foggs' experience in Woodside. Chapter one is Janie's concerns and fears about that change, not least because Snowy the cat has oddly disappeared and her son is apparently not happy at school. We don't leave the cottage and we don't meet anyone else, even though we learn about a few of them.

Hodre is owned by Clive Blackstone, who's rich enough to live on the south coast and ignore any offers. The nearest neighbours are the Ruskins, with whom they don't get on, who live on the other side of the forest. The Wilsons are school bullies who blacked Kevin Arnold's eye and aim to beat up Gavin for being an English bastard. Mr. Hughes is the headmaster who doesn't want to do anything about it. Everyone's at a remove at this point and while they won't stay there throughout, they mostly will.

The first people to show up other than the Foggs are the Wilson bullies' elder brothers, who scare Gavin by riding their motorcycles down the hill towards him. Peter knocks one of them off his bike to shout at him. It's clear already that jumpy Janie is scared of pretty much everyone and everything so wants out of there as soon as is humanly possible, while stubborn Peter simply refuses to be scared of anyone and anything and gets right in its way to dismiss it with scorn, quite literally in the case of the Wilsons in the second chapter.

Chapter three is the Foggs visiting the Cat pub in Woodside to a chill response from the landlord and an array of horror stories about Hodre and the stone circle from a couple of poachers called Don and Mick. Chapter four is more fear. Chapter five is Peter pressing Malcolm Hughes, the headmaster, into keeping the kids under his care safe and discovering that Snowy has been ruthlessly sacrificed on an altar in the stone circle. Chapter six is Gavin getting what the younger Wilsons promised and Janie threatening to leave. Peter talks to PC George Calvert, who's not far off retirement, and gets some background on the village and its troublemakers. Deer show up in chapter seven and Janie receives a silent phone call. The wood goes up in flames in chapter eight and the Foggs just avoid a collision with a Land Rover.

And we're halfway through the book. We've spent almost every moment with the Foggs and only eight other characters have been named, not all of whom received dialogue. The only death thus far is Snowy the cat. None of these facts are remotely typical for Smith's novels at the time, but then this refuses to be typical, even with a typical front cover blurb, "New terror in a place of ancient dread." Smith fans at the time would have seen that on shelves in W. H. Smith's and known exactly what they were picking up, but they'd all have been wrong because this is really a thriller in horror clothing.

The first half is all about a townie family moving to the countryside and being rejected. Sure, some of it is a little brutal, like the call that sends Peter chasing off to a hospital in Rhayader to see how badly hurt his wife was in a car accident, only to find that it was all fake news. She's back at the cottage, healthy if still scared out of her wits by everything around her. But it's all that basic clash of country vs. town and Welsh vs. English. Sure, Snowy was apparently sacrificed in the stone circle but nobody's died, nobody's gone missing and nobody's had a vision of ancient druids threatening modern evil.

I won't spoil where Smith takes us, because there are a whole slew of possibilities. Maybe Tim Ruskin is trying to scare them away so that Clive Blackstone will sell Hodre to him. Maybe the poachers are doing what they can to keep them away from their business. Maybe the Wilsons are being vindictive. Ancient druids returning to sacrifice them in the stone circle is way down the list of possibilities. What I will say is that Janie and Gavin promptly leave the field of play after the second death, this time of a rabbit, so Peter's left to fend off whoever it is on his own, as the snow arrives and buries the countryside, and the absence of the usual ensemble cast makes this all the more claustrophobic.

I'll also add that three further characters are named during the second half, but we don't actually meet any of them. There are two deaths, which is surely the lowest for a Guy N. Smith horror novel thus far, a body behind his debut novel, 'Werewolf by Moonlight', and we only see one of those actually happen. It just isn't that sort of novel and we have to revisit that cover blurb, because it's not actually lying to us. We may have read a lot into those eight words, almost all of which was completely wrong, but it's fair to say that this is all about terror and dread. Whatever else is going on, it's about a family being so scared by unknown external factors that they become utterly helpless, whether they're a young boy like Gavin, an easy target like Janie or a stubborn fighter like Peter. They all get there in the end.

So where does that leave this book in the big picture of Smith's ever-expanding bibliography? Well, it's a weak and underwhelming way to end a run of eight excellent books for Hamlyn, which included some of his best and most original horror novels. That said, whatever themes run through them, they each did a different job and this continued that trend. Between them, they're an impressive portfolio. However, it would be fair to say that this is probably the least of them, with as much in common with the 'Truckers' novels as anything from his horror career. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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