Oh, I've been waiting for this one. 'Fiend' was one of my favourites from Guy N. Smith back when I was still putting my initial collection together and could buy books like this one new from W. H. Smith's, my source for a many a new Smith, Lumley, Masterton and others in the days when the horror aisle of a high street newsagent had a more impressive selection than actual bookshops that I visit nowadays. It was right up there for me back then with 'Deathbell', and I'm incredibly happy to say that, like that other book, it stands up to a fresh read in a new millennium.

The biggest surprise for me is that it feels frustratingly prescient in 2025, given that I live in the United States nowadays, but I'll get to that as I go.  For now, I'll mention other surprises.

'Fiend' was Smith's first original novel for Sphere, a new regular publisher for him in 1988, after an isolated movie novelisation, 'The Ghoul', a decade earlier in 1976. I remember these books as being slightly larger, probably because they look that way on the shelf, but, while they're far more substantial than the skimpier paperbacks he churned out for New English Library, they're hardly beyond precedent. 'Fiend' at three-hundred pages is no longer than 'The Neophyte', for a start, while the two-hundred and fifty pages that followed it at Sphere are on a par with the length of 'Throwback' and 'Warhead'.

What really stands out from the norm is how deeply researched it seems and how far it is from any of Smith's usual themes, the former likely a necessary consequence to the latter. I'm over fifty books into this runthrough and it's been a rare book thus far that's spent any time outside the UK. Of course, the majority of them unfold mostly, if not entirely, in the countryside, Smith riffing on a whole slew of country concerns, from an influx of city folk who don't understand the ways of the countryside to urban encroachment pricing country folk out of their homes.

The most overt departure was 'Bamboo Guerillas', Guy's only war novel, which was set entirely in the Malayan jungle, still technically part of the British Empire. 'Satan's Snowdrop' begins in Switzerland and moves relatively quickly to the United States, only returning to the UK late on. 'Blood Circuit' did that the other way around, starting in the UK but later shifting to the States. Other than that, some of the 'Sabat' books wandered onto the continent, some tentatively and others like 'Cannibal Cult' more obviously.

'Fiend', on the other hand, unfolds entirely within the Soviet Union (well, there is one scene in England, but it's a flashback). We only leave Moscow on a single occasion, to go boar hunting at the premier's dacha, but soon return to the capital. That's also the only moment spent in the countryside and we're indoors for almost the whole book, much of that time inside the Kremlin itself. Needless to say, there's nothing here that speaks to country living on the Welsh borders. Presumably because Guy couldn't lean on personal knowledge, he did plenty of research and it shows. The book feels detailed and authentic from the very outset.

Crucially, we don't need to know anything going in, beyond one detail that I'll explain for those who weren't alive at the time. Not being a democracy, the Soviet Union had long-term leaders. Stalin almost reached thirty years in charge, Kruschev got to eleven, Brezhnev eighteen. Then that trend changed. Andropov died a year into his leadership, as did Chernenko. When this was released in 1988, Gorbachev had been in charge for three years, but in the book he's gone too, so when his fictional replacement, Andre Keschev, has a stroke on a boar hunt, falls into a coma and dies on the way back to his apartment, that's four leaders come and gone in only six years.

No wonder his colleagues in the Kremlin want him back! In particular, they need him to receive the salute at the upcoming May Day parade and to attend peace talks in Geneva in a couple of months time. Bottom line, his death is highly inconvenient. Enter Anton Yefromov, a Satanist, who's given the Occult Division of the Eighth Directorate and then summoned by Yuri Denanko, the Soviet deputy leader, to resurrect Keschev from the dead, at least for long enough for him to do all the things they need. After that, he can die again for all they care, as they can put yet another replacement in place over time.

The good news and the bad news is that Yafremov succeeds. He brings Keschev back but an evil comes with him. As we soon learn, he isn't technically returned to life. He doesn't breathe anymore and his blood doesn't flow, leaving him freakishly pale. He's been reanimated and a soul has entered his body with enough power to keep it going. The catch is that it isn't Keschev. Who it is isn't hinted at by name until the two-hundred-page mark, though there are other subtler hints. Before long, he gains the whispered nickname of the Kremlin Beast, which was an early title for this book in draught form.

And here's where that bizarre prescience comes in. Keschev, who's been relatively moderate as a leader in the past, suddenly shifts to far more extreme hardline policies. He threatens other countries, including allies, escalating the likelihood of an invasion of Pakistan. He doesn't care about the peasants, so increases their hardships while blaming certain demographics and also disappearing the latter into camps. He consolidates his power by eliminating competition and purges government of anyone disloyal to him. And, just in case that sounds eerily familiar, one certain line on page 285 underlines it.

Whoever's occuping the late body of Andre Keschev boasts to the woman who figures it out, "I made Russia great," he says, "gave the people a country to be proud of, a land of the rich." The unwritten suggestion, that inevitably follows, is that having already made Russia great once in the past, now he plans to make Russia great again. Suddenly, I understand why those hats are red instead of red, white and blue. Clearly, Smith's only mistake as a soothsayer was to pick the wrong primary player in the Cold War. Presumably, current affairs can be explained by pointing out that our glorious leader must have succumbed backstage to that campaign trail bullet and was resurrected from the dead by an occultist, only for an earlier glorious leader to occupy his body instead. It's all clear now.

Other than seeming eerily familiar, I adored this as much in 2025 as I did in 1988. The major shift in setting may mean that Smith couldn't explore any of his usual themes but it's told very much in his recognisable style, unlike 'Satan's Snowdrop', which felt like a conscious attempt to break into the American market. It feels tighter, more detailed and more thoroughly researched, but it still zips along with urgency. The pace never lets up and there are a set of showcase scenes to power notable deaths. It delivers on the gore, with a crucifixion scene, a wild boar attack and an outrageous torture scene with a spiked dildo.

There are also lots of failed assassination attempts, including one within a biological warfare laboratory and another performed through use of the occult, the perpetrator taking over the body of a dog so he can leap at Keschev with claws and teeth. The cover art is a gloriously gory depiction of another attempt on Keschev's life, in which he fails to be much affected even by a shotgun blast to the belly. The fundamental problem is that he's dead and it's no easy feat to kill someone who's not actually alive. That detail isn't lost on the senior Kremlin officials who are trying to destroy Keschev, but they do what they can amidst escalating panic, all of which leads to an admirable tension more reminiscent of thrillers than horror novels.

And that's entirely appropriate, because this is also a Cold War thriller, albeit set late into the eighties because it's a return to the Cold War rather than its original heyday. Of course, there's plenty of intrigue within the Kremlin, as there likely would be even had this whole resurrection scenario come about, but there are also prominent characters who are actual spies, like Sergey Prokop, a KGB man sent to England to spy on the British but was turned into a double agent in that flashback scene after being framed for murder. Now he works for the British in Moscow, in collaboration with a Jewish singer at the Bolshoi, Ursula Ramanninov.

Prokop grows in importance with the book. Initially, he's a character who's outside the Kremlin, because he's officially just a clerk nowadays, and thus represents the everyday working man in Russia. The characters we follow inside the Kremlin know what's going on. Prokop has to rely on gossip and hearsay, to which he pays a lot of attention as a double agent. Eventually, with irony abundant, he's hired by both sides. He's tasked by the KGB with protecting Andreevich Gmyrya, the new Soviet deputy, from Keschev during a hunting trip to the leader's dacha, but he's also tasked by Keschev with identifying those trying to assassinate him, i.e. his masters. It's all in a day's work for a double agent!

Guy N. Smith may not have made the Soviet Union great again, but he made it memorable in a highly anomalous horror novel for him. Now, I'm even more eager to dive into his other books for Sphere. While the horror boom of the seventies and eighties was starting to fade, a set of new publishers kept Smith's horror output alive. Sphere count as the first, because Arrow was continuing his Hamlyn output, but Grafton and Zebra were waiting in the wings too and, by the time we get to those, Smith was diversifying into other genres as well. It's an exciting time for this runthrough! ~~ Hal C F Astell

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