At its heart, this is a haunted house story, but it doesn't follow any of the tropes of the subgenre. No doors fly open mysteriously, the kitchen drawers remain stubbornly shut and there aren't any ghosts floating around causing mischief. However, 13 Schooner St seems off from the moment the Strikes move in and it's only the fact that Guy N. Smith chooses to spend much of this novel inside their heads that we forget to even ask questions as to why. Smith loved to build his characters by telling us what they really thought about things, however aberrant, and that approach is perfect for this story. There's no real backdrop to the horror but the experience is quintessential Smith.

Leah Strike is a housewife and feeling the drudgery of it. John is newly promoted at the bank, so prompting the move from Chiswick. They have three children together. Sarah's thirteen and she's starting to mature from a girl into a young lady, though not so far as to do anything about it. Sam is nine. Ben is younger still, only three. They got the place cheap because the Grafton's moved out in a hurry and that's a telling name. This was Smith's first original novel written for Grafton after they reprinted four of his earlier books. Then again, these Graftons were slobs, its seems. Was the nod a compliment or an insult?

Because we focus so much on the Strikes rather than the house itself, we never really learn who's most responsible for the horrors that follow. Was the house always this bad, making the Strikes a fresh set of victims in a long line? Or did they bring enough dysfunction with them to give it power over them? While the house is certainly making things worse, it doesn't seem like they functioned as a happy family even before they moved in.

Much of that can probably be hung at John's door, because he's rather obsessed with sex, as long as it isn't with his wife. Usually in Smith novels, it's a female character who's the nymphomaniac, even if male characters will often happily indulge whenever it's available. I don't know that John quite counts as a nymphomaniac, but he's not far away and it doesn't take long for him to obsess over Ruth Ford's legs at work, the number three cashier with the split skirt.

Smith had written an array of female characters horrified of sex before, but they were generally sex-free stories. Here, John seems to be having it away with Ruth at her place every time we blink, even if it's really only three nights a week, making him so late home that everyone else is asleep. Leah isn't averse to sex per se, but is still riddled with guilt after getting pregnant fourteen years earlier. It probably doesn't help that when she does get it on with her husband, their three-year-old, Ben, promptly interrupts them by sleepwalking in with a nightmare.

It's easy to see the escape aspect of it all though. There's a memorable scene with John and Ruth having a grand old time cheating on their respective spouses, followed by John arriving home to a scream. That's happening increasingly often at number thirteen. John's been having a recurrent nightmare about crashing a red jeep into another car, leaving its driver decapitated. In a creepy scene, we learn that Ben had exactly the same dream but from the opposite point of view: he got run over by the jeep. Things only escalate when that actually happens, perhaps not coincidentally in chapter thirteen. It's not John's jeep and he isn't driving, but Ben's still dead.

It seems like the house plays on phobias. John dreams of that car wreck but also of having a heart attack. Leah feels like someone is watching her all the time and she fears losing a child, which, of course, she eventually does. Sam has nightmares about alligators, which allows Smith to build an entire horror suspense scene out of a newt. That might sound utterly ridiculous, and it is from one perspective, but it's no small task to generate as much emotional impact as he does here out of so little. Even Sam's friend Jeremy used to have nightmares there when he hung out with  Timothy Grafton.

New phobias seem to manifest too. Ben's suddenly afraid of heights. As she readies to chaperone a trip to Hampton Court with the kids and the neighbours, Leah suddenly acquires agoraphobia. It passes later that day but it's strong in the meantime. And Leah manages to slice herself open with a kitchen knife in the aftermath of a deadly traffic accident. It's a local tramp but she hallucinates that it's Ben, whose hand she was holding at the time, so rushes over to help him.

One scene comes quickly on the heels of the other and Smith has fun with his descriptions. Leah's on her knees sobbing in the street while "trying to piece the pulped human jigsaw together". The cops rightly want to take her in for observation but she goes home and then we reach that scene in the kitchen with a glorious turn of phrase: "Turning one way, then the other, she tried to plug the gash in her wrist with her thumb but only served to spray the blood in three directions at the same time; a human lawn-sprinkler that left a fine crimson film on everything it touched."

Yes, indeed, we go from pulped human jigsaw to human lawn-sprinkler within the same chapter of this book. The gap between these scenes is merely six pages. Most of the darker scenes come late in the novel though, as we shift from Summer to Autumn as Part I gives way to Part II. Autumn is a brutal beast here, kicking off with Mrs. Johnson coming over to find a burglar impaled and hung from the bannisters. There are rapes and murders; characters die, including primary ones; and a natural death in the house is surely nothing but.

Eventually it all escalates in two ways. Hurricane Harry shows up to wreak havoc on all of London and John finally figures out what's behind all the mind games going on in number thirteen. That revelation would surely count as a spoiler and I certainly won't tell you anything about it, but it's really not that important. With most haunted house novels, the hapless victims who moved in are supposedly sympathetic enough that we're behind them when they try to cleanse their home. It's sometimes putting a ghost to rest, sometimes exorcising a demon, maybe even dealing somehow with the fact that it was built on an ancient Indian burial ground, but there's usually a solution.

Here, there isn't. The Strikes aren't particularly sympathetic, though the kids are innocent in all of this. John's a serial cheat who's putting social standing above his relationship with his family, not just Leah but all of them. Leah's a put-upon wife who doesn't do anything about the situation she's found herself in because she's too riddled with guilt to muster up any courage. Characters in later scenes who aren't Strikes but interact with the house are even less sympathetic, especially Mike Gilson, who's an outright villain doing horrible things on the doorstop.

And there's no real effort to understand what's happening until almost the end of the book. This is about the experience of being haunted translated into internal mindgames. Whoever's behind the fears and phobias doesn't care for cheap parlour games, it wants inside your head so that it's able to torment you most effectively. And it'll do exactly the same to anyone else unwisely close enough for it to reach. Any attempt at a solution is nihilistic. It's not a targetted exorcism, it's an attempt to burn everything down.

I maybe appreciated 'Phobia' more than I liked it, but I've always appreciated Smith's abilities to make characters speak through their inner voices. It's an approach I was especially keen to follow when I wrote the first couple of chapters of a previously unwritten Guy N. Smith horror novel that he'd pitched to a publisher in synopsis form. I built the main character through his thoughts as he went through the wringer. To me, that approach was Guy's true voice, combined with his natural take on the countryside settings he loved so much but stayed away from here.

Next up, something ostensibly similar: a bank employee deals with the horrors in his head in 'The Unseen', his second of three books for 1990, with 'Carnivore' following in January, another return to the countryside with hunters and animal rights activists and creatures on the rampage. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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