It could be fairly argued that this is a horror novel based on a plumbing disaster, but Terry Oakes's thoroughly gruesome cover art does a much better job at highlighting what's to be found within. It's really about an ancient plague that thrives on water so survives in the soil for centuries, until Mike and Holly Mannion, more townsfolk moving out of the rat race to the country cottage she's been dreaming about, decide to have a borehole sunk to provide them with a more reliable source of fresh water. That turns out to be a bad call for them and the neighbourhood.

It isn't the first time it's struck the village of Garth, of course, because Smith kicks off with one of his historical prologues. In olden days, Tabor, a forestry worker ironically named for the publisher Guy wrote a swathe of porn for during the seventies, returns to Garth pus-ridden and dying. He's afflicted with some sort of plague that the villagers perhaps cynically attribute to his frequenting whores in London. The Witchfinder, who arrives in town shortly afterwards, has him hanged, then buried extraordinarily deep and perhaps that did the job. Then, at least. The firm drilling a bore for the Mannions go a hundred-and-thirty feet down.

In an echo of the modern trend of extreme horror to focus on what's icky and disgusting, the bore does reach water but generates a terrible stink as it does so, one that floats and pervades until finally dissipating. Tommy Eaton, the driller's mate, is the first to feel awful and his symptoms get quickly worse. On one page he notices a rash, two later he's developed a thirst and he's "weeping thick revolting pus". One more and his flesh is putrefying and then he's coughing up blood. That's enough for him to lose it entirely, get on top of his girlfriend and strangle her to death.

And so it goes. Perhaps its side effects at a distance include reduced inhibitions or maybe it's just that the Mannions aren't as happy as they think they are. After the main driller, Jim Fitzpatrick, starts to succumb to what his mate had and oozes salacious crudities at poor Holly, she's saved by the plumber, Nick Caton, and they promptly descend into sex on the settee. Holly's so horny that, when the water to the bath fails, she heads right over to Nick's for more. Meanwhile, Jim's gone for a while, picking up a cheque in London and sharing his portfolio as a landscape painter. That's surely an echo of Tabor and, to confirm it, he buys a contact mag and calls Joanna.

It's been decades since I've read this one, so I'd forgotten how horny 'The Festering' was. It's not like there's sex on every other page, but, once the titular plague is loose, it seems to hang about in the minds of those in its proximity. I don't remember it being any sort of trend at this point in Smith's bibliography, though 'The Resurrected' is only five books away and I absolutely recall the abundant sex in that one. However, the two books around it were thrillers with John Mayo and a handful further were pseudonymous works in other genres, animal novels for children written as Jonathan Guy and a thriller as Gavin Newman.

It fits more with older trends, not least the Mannions being only the latest in a long line of other townsfolk leaving the rat race for a hopefully idyllic life in the countryside. However, there isn't a particular clash between them and the traditional locals, even when the borehole proves to be an awful lot more trouble than it should be. The farmer who guaranteed them a water supply isn't a good guy and Frank Bennion, who runs the company digging the borehole, is unusually grounded. He stands by his guarantee that they'll get fresh water or their money back, even after three of his workers die horribly and the other two quit. He just puts on his hard hat and comes to handle the job himself. There's really not a lot of conflict here and that seems odd.

There's not even much in the way of discovery, though the local doctor, Gerald Williamson, follows up on his suspicions with an old friend, Prof. Don Shaw, who rather conveniently has already done precisely the right research needed for this incredibly niche case and, what's more, remembers it in detail as if it was yesterday. It was, he says, "a scroll of parchment, barely legible, scrawled by an apothecary who himself feared that he had this plague and wished to warn others. He called it the Festering Death". And there's the title explained for us, just in case we needed that.

It is an outrageous convenience but Smith's far more interested in developing his characters and then delivering gruesome deaths to them. Jim Fitzpatrick murders his wife and kids then heads to Holly's to slit his wrists in guilt in front of her. Bill Cole, another worker, wants out of there so runs to his car and peels out into the country road by Garth Cottage, crashes and loses his head. That's not the first decapitation in a car Smith has written either. Dr. Gerald Williamson's receptionist is perhaps the most touching death because her killer is clearly not remotely in his head at the time but she's just as dead nonetheless. And there are others for you to discover yourself.

I liked this one. It's delightfully icky, Smith conjuring up a loose connection between sex and death but then milking it for all it's worth, as it were. There's a heck of a lot of pus wept in this book but that may not be the most frequently used bodily fluid and I'm not talking about blood for once. It feels like a transitional novel, looking back at some of Smith's older themes but exploring them in a newer way, one that turns up the ick factor.

And I wonder about the timing, because this would be the final book that Smith published during the eighties, in December 1989. He was never a splatterpunk writer, that loose movement in the late eighties and early nineties that ramped up violence in horror, and this is much closer to what we know today as extreme horror, which certainly built on splatterpunk but often concerns itself more with icking out the reader than terrifying them. However, extreme horror didn't arise until much later, being far more of a 21st century movement, and Smith didn't continue down this road, instead diversifying his output in the nineties considerably. He just wrote in this vein before they did, which makes him all the more ripe for rediscovery. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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