Guy N. Smith wrote a bunch of eighties horror novels that were set in the present day but were intrinsically connected to a dark past. He would then introduce a particular plot device and the two times would blur together with devastating results. He opened an airport in 'Doomflight' and the ancient druids who sacrificed on that land took it down. He moved a house in 'Satan's Snowdrop' and the souls of the victims of the Nazi torturer who lived in it sought their deadly revenge. He built a nuclear waste processing plant and it fulfilled an ancient curse.

However, most of those books were in the early eighties, making it surprising that the epitome of that approach would show up as late as 1988 with 'The Island'. The entire book is told through alternating chapters, one in the past and the other in the present. Taken at face value, the two remain separate but the parallels are so obvious that we have to interpret them as intrinsically connected. How and why is down to us to decide, but this time the evil act is in the past and it's more than happy to bleed into the present.

The chapters in the past start in 1746, because we're in Scotland and the people are waiting for the imminent Battle of Culloden to tell them if the Jacobite army will win out over the British and restore the King over the Water, James Francis Edward Stuart, to the throne. Spoiler: they don't, because this isn't an alternative history novel. History unfolds as it does in the textbooks but the news that the Jacobites lose prompts the Laird of Ulver to fear for his position and his lands and he sends his wife and daughters into hiding on Ulver Island.

Well, not really. You see, we begin with his wife Marie giving birth to a fifth daughter, this one stillborn, and he's livid because he wants a male heir. He even has his men throw the corpse to the dogs, that's how sensitive he is to his wife's suffering. No wonder we soon hear rumours of his involvement in Satanic worship on Walpurgis Night. He's a wrong 'un, as they say, and he is not being helpful when he sends the women to Ulver Island. He was simply getting rid of them under a convenient pretext.

However, Marie isn't stupid and her girls aren't babies. Mary is eighteen, Elizabeth seventeen and Margaret sixteen, old enough to be married back in the 18th century. Only Edith is younger at eleven and at much greater risk on this remote island where nobody else lives. They planned to flee south to England but the Laird interrupted those dreams and they had to make the best of what they were given. Marie does that by cutting the mooring rope so their stereotypically villainous boatman, the disfigured and allegedly sorcerous Zoke, is stuck there with them and can serve their needs. They have a bothy. They have firewood. They have Zoke.

The chapters in the present are initially even more bleak. Frank Ingram is mourning his Gillian, killed by a speeding motorist. Even a year on, he isn't dealing well with his loss so he decides to sell Guilden Farm and, hey, there's an ad in the paper selling a Scottish island. Three thousand grazing acres off the west coast, with a three-bedroom cottage included. Some work is needed but it's all in his budget, even before an insurance claim. So he visits and isn't put off by any of the chatter. Nobody ever stays on Ulver, says the mail boat captain. Nobody's lived there since 1948. The Greenwoods died there. And, if you buy it, Frank Ingram, so will you.

He does the place up, his sheep arrive and he has Jake the sheepdog for company. He's on his own without everything around him reminding of Gillian and the hard work needed to make a go of Ulver Island is enough to keep him constantly busy. Of course, there's a catch, and in this instance, it comes knocking on his door in the form of five lost women. No, it's not Marie with her four daughters, it's Samantha the girl guide leader with the four guides she had taken on an adventure course. And, if you believe that, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.

These girls are Debbie, Janet, Ruth and Ellen rather than Mary, Elizabeth, Margaret and Edith, but they're of similar ages and, as we learn as the book runs on, similar demeanour, right down to the little one being sadistic and evil. You can probably imagine much of what's still to come, in both timelines, but if you can then you have a twisted imagination that Guy would be proud of. Needless to say, there's plenty of torment and manipulation and eventually death and it all escalates gloriously until a particularly gruesome pair of finales. Die-hard Smith fans may find this more of a psychological build but it certainly delivers on the gore before it's done.

This could have been a very different novel in a very different genre and it makes me wonder why Smith didn't write more science fiction or historical fiction.

His short stories in the vein of the former were generally very early and very primitive, sci-fi rather than science fiction, and the only novel that fits is 'Dreamtime', which hasn't yet seen publication in book form, only a partial serialisation in the fanzine 'Nexus'. The closest he got really was to monster movies in prose like 'The Slime Beast' and 'Night of the Crabs'. Instead, he applied his manipulations of time to horrific ends and they work well here, even if this isn't as delirious as 'The Wood', perhaps because a tie to a curse like in ''The Undead' or 'The Pluto Pact' restricted it from that broad a palette.

He wrote historical short stories too, but they were often mysteries, as was his only novel that truly counts, 'An Unholy Way to Die', published as by Gavin Newman. Instead, he applied it to a string of horror novels in which the historical angles often played much more vividly than the present day novels built around them. I guess 'The Pony Riders' counts as historical too, but it's a western first and foremost and we know that westerns were Smith's first love, whatever sold and made him famous. Somehow, I guess, his diversification in the nineties happened to be in different directions: into a bunch of children's books and thrillers, along with that western and that historical mystery. Maybe that's just what the publishers were buying at the time.

Of course, this was a horror novel because that's what publishers were buying in the eighties and he had a proven track record. I should ask the other hardcore fans what they think of this one because it's more unusual in his output than merely alternating past and present. It has very little sex, for a start, one seduction through illusion and another that's more blatant. It's also largely free of gore, once we get past the initial chapter, until the later parts of the book, Smith perhaps realising by that point that he really ought to ratchet that up.

And, of course, he does. The slow drift to cannibalism, surely something we pondered on early, becomes a gorefest, with a flashback scene of the Laird carving a baby out of a human sacrifice and gleefully cooking it for his followers. The balance may seem off, but it's so quintessentially Smith throughout, from Ingram working hard on his farm to Edith channelling her inner Ozzy Osbourne and biting the head off a duck, that I really don't have a problem with it. Frankly, if you forced me to throw out a negative, it would be that the ending, when it arrives, does so in far fewer pages than it should. I wanted to turn more and suddenly they were done.

It's been fun reacquainting myself with 'The Island', but I'm all about next month right now, as it's one of my favourites that I haven't re-read in far too long. My other favourite, 'Deathbell', stood up wonderfully to a fresh read, so I'm eager to see if 'Fiend' does likewise. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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