Life is good for Ed Cain, who's become the youngest bank manager in England at only thirty-two. He's driving his Volvo home to his family in a prestigious cathedral close—wife Judy, son Richard and daughter Becky—when the concrete mixer in front of him loses its load, crushing his car. Now he's "human meat in an upholstered sandwich" and as close to death as it comes without actually getting there. His heart stopped and he looked down at his body in a near death experience, but they carve him out of the wreck unconscious and transport him to hospital, where Judy finds him "a kind of embalmed mummified shape with blue eyes staring vacantly out of the face bandages".

Three months later, after numerous surgeries, he returns home, but he's changed. Judy sees that immediately and so does their labrador Cling. Now he's angry and violent. He punches his son out of anger, even tries to strangle his wife to death during animalistic sex. Cling saves her that time. Next time, he finds a prostitute and rapes and murders her apparently just because he can. Now, this isn't Ed at all and even he knows that in his more lucid moments, but his gradually realises in dream that, when his soul returned to his body in the operating room, it wasn't alone.

'The Unseen' therefore soon becomes a cross between 'Fiend' and 'Wolfcurse'. In the former, the Soviet premier, Andre Keschev, dies of natural causes at an inconvenient time, so his colleagues employ a Satanist to resurrect him from the dead. He succeeds in a fashion, but the soul brought into Keschev's body isn't his own, it's that of Ivan the Terrible. Here, there are no third parties to interfere with the natural way of things, but Ed's leaves his body and another moves in before he manages to return to it himself. As in 'Fiend', we don't learn who this is for the longest time, but that doesn't matter. What matters is that there are two souls battling for supremacy, one good and one very much not so.

Without the identity of the intruder, Smith can't explore his back story, so he focuses on Ed as he struggles to stay dominant within his own body. For a while Ed succeeds, but never for long and on every occasion that he loses control, his unwelcome guest does something outrageously awful. As Cling can always sense the evil in him, he has to dispose of him, so yes, the dog dies again. Suzy the prostitute does too and so does John Cutler, a local businessman trying to persuade his local bank manager to approve a larger overdraft. Ed takes him out with a golf ball to the face. That's quite the way to go!

While the obvious comparison would be to the 'Sabat' books, in which Mark Sabat shares his body with his evil brother Quentin and constantly battling him for control, this approach feels far more like 'Wolfcurse', in that an otherwise decent man agonises over the latest atrocity he's committed while literally not himself. As he does so, the evil inside him reacts to a heady mix of annoyances, frustrations, guilts and fears, usually violently. Even when he regains control, that evil laughs so vehemently inside his head that he starts to suffer vicious migraines.

And, behind all this is a cynical glimpse of life in a cathedral close. Smith spent seven years living in the cathedral close in Lichfield as a boy, so presumably picked up on hierarchies and hypocrisies then. However, when he wrote non fiction articles like 'Life in a Cathedral Close', they were more about old anecdotes he heard from an old school friend who grew up in the similar cathedral close in Norwich. I don't know if these were ever published, but Smith wrote a number of them under a varied set of titles, so I'd guess he kept plugging away at markets.

Some of the characters we meet in the close seem so well drawn that I wonder if Smith based the worst of them on real people. Canon Holland is a hypocrite, a churchman of long standing who's a pervert on the side. It isn't just that he was one of Suzy's regulars, that prostitute that Ed killed a number of chapters earlier; it's that he lusts after Judy and tries to force the Cains to lower their hedge so that he can spy on her sunbathing naked. The worst piece of work in the close, though, is Norma Pringle, the bitter widow of a priest who sees the concrete mixer hit Ed's car and is gleeful at his obvious demise because his labrador once chased her cat, Pretty. She gets worse with every scene and I was aching for her to be taken down gruesomely.

Unlike 'Fiend', where there was always a knowing opposition working to undo the mess that they had unwittingly created, there's nobody at all trying to fix Ed. His wife and kids, and especially his dog, know that he's not the Ed they remember, at least not all the time, but they have no power to do anything about it. They just quietly suffer through his worst moments in hope that more of the good times will return. Instead, it falls to Ed himself to try to figure out what happened and, even when he figures it out, he's too busy killing off the doctors who just might be able to help to benefit from anything they might be able to do.

Because of that, there's a real inevitability about how it's going to end, which makes this a rather pessimistic novel, albeit with a bittersweet hope riddled through it and a dark sense of humour. My favourite scene may well be the one in which Ed attends the prestigious ticket-only Festival opening service at the Cathedral. He sees the carving of an angel high up above the stained glass windows and hallucinates that it's Suzy the murdered prostitute pleading at him to strip naked and worship her. He gets partway before he's stopped and removed unceremoniously from the cathedral.

This wouldn't be the last time Smith played in this ballpark, but next month he returns to animals on the rampage with a whole slew of species lumped together as the titular 'Carnivore'. ~~ Hal C F Astell

For more titles by Guy N Smith click here