After I emigrated to the U.S. in 2004 and my stuff was finally delivered, I made extra sure to keep my Guy N. Smith collection in boxes in the front room to make sure that they'd be safe. Needless to say, that didn't work but it's sheer irony that it's 'Water Rites' that suffered the most from the water damage caused by an accidental spillage. Oh well, I could always buy another copy on eBay, right? Sure, the cheapest on offer right now is sixty bucks and that's not signed, but hey.

This horror novel is a completely separate book to the children's novel that I reviewed this month as a bonus, but it's set in the same location, the central point being the underground reservoir in Hopwas Wood. It's on the map at the front of 'Hawkwood' and the goshawks flew over it. Here, it's Phil Quiles's responsibility as water works manager. He lives in a nearby house that came with the job with his wife, Kate, and six-year-old son, Peter. However, changes are coming. He expects that the Hopwas pumping station will be closed, sold and converted into flats or some such. It wouldn't be a Smith novel without change coming to the countryside.

For now, it's still business as usual and that means that Quiles has to do periodic inspections, like checking the water levels and making sure that everything's shipshape. It's routine stuff, but the tone of the place has changed. Smith milks the atmosphere like it's a haunted house and it might well be. Quiles certainly thinks that there's something down there in the water and I'm not going to tell him that he's wrong. He also has to put up with Dalgety, the area inspector, who's right out of the standard Guy N. Smith asshole boss playbook.

While Quiles wonders about what's in his pump house, especially after a hole appears in one wall with naked footprints appearing next to it, bodies have started turning up in the vicinity. There's a local prostitute who's found naked in a field and old Maddox, a mute and partially deaf hermit, who's run over on the road. However, both died from drowning, which doesn't seem to make a lot of sense. Neither does the ring that Quiles finds in the pump house with a mermaid on it.

Some basic research identifies that mermaid as a symbol of Mukasa, a water god of Lake Victoria that's worshipped by the Baganda ethnic group. What Quiles doesn't know but we do is that Ben Shannon took a dip in the sea some years before when he was an eight-year-old on holiday with his parents and came up to find a mermaid, boobies and all. One day, she tells him, the sea will return and so will the People of the Sea. He grows up, changes his name to Royston and starts up a cult in the Hopwas area, based at his home, Packington Hall.

You can connect those dots, I'm sure, but, while this is grounded in folklore with an unusual choice of monster, it's a story that lives or dies on its characters. Many of them are routine within Smith novels but would be unusual for anyone else. Maddox isn't dissimilar from a variety of tramps and eccentrics and he's only the latest of a line of characters with partial hearing. However, he has no special attributes, other than being a decent shot and that's not unusual either. Quiles isn't that far from a string of other Smith characters, good at his countryside job but likely to see imminent change and having to deal with an asshole boss. There are dozens of Dalgetys in his bibliography.

However, other characters are unusual for Smith as well as anyone else. I had a blast with Jocelyn Jackson, for example. She's a sassy old woman who sets up her chair and easel inside the fence at the pump house to paint it on canvas, happily chatting away with Quiles when he shows up for an inspection regardless of how inappropriate her location is. Her daughter Barbara rather eagerly signs up with Shannon's mermaid cult, but then it gets her away from her mother. That's worth an awful lot.

The most surreal scene in this horror novel about a mermaid/African water god has nothing to do with the folklore or indeed the horror. Jocelyn is so worried about the possibility of her fifty-year-old daughter having pre-marital sex that she, honest to goodness, lets the air out of her car tyres and hides the foot pump! She may be able to paint pretty well but that's an outrageously broken relationship that Barbara should have got out of years ago instead of waiting for the right public school educated millionaire to come along.

Another surreal scene for most of us but probably one that Smith encountered somewhere on the Black Hill is due to Dick Bowman. In fact, the neighbours who struggle to put up with him are the Smythes, hardly a stretch for an avatar. However, these Smythes are ineffective at anything they try so they're having to resort to calling the police when Bowman does something outrageous, as they do when he sets fire to a gigantic pile of cow dung right next to their house. Of course, it's a good thing that the police showed up because, once the flames are out, they find the corpses of cult members Janice and her baby in the mess. Royston's doing human sacrifice now.

I enjoyed this novel, albeit less on its own merits and more for how it takes many of Smith's go to tropes and mixes them up in a new way before tossing something as different as African folklore into the resulting story. That story isn't particularly deep, pun not intended, especially as we are kept in the dark about how this water god got into the Hopwas reservoir to begin with. In fact, we don't even know where young Ben encountered her, other than at the seaside. There's some cult nudity and sex, not to forget mermaid boobies, but it's not that salacious a novel. The death toll could have been more substantial too.

That said, I wouldn't have minded a sequel to this one. The mindset is that the sea will return one day and the People of the Sea will come with it. While the ending involves floods, they're not that widespread but there's a coda that promises something much more substantial. To me, it brought to mind a novel Smith didn't write called 'Night of the Floods', which revolved around widespread flooding. He was asked to write it by New English Library after the success of 'Night of the Crabs' and he wrote a synopsis but they moved on to someone else and that synopsis morphed into a set of other synopses for other novels that were never written. However, elements from them crept into a string of Smith novels over the years and this coda feels like another one.

Next month, something different again. After four months of reading and reviewing one horror novel and one children's novel as a bonus, I'll be reading and reviewing one western. It's the only such that Smith saw published and that made it a special book for him, though he probably wrote at least one earlier in his career (that's sadly lost) and perhaps eight. It's 'The Pony Riders', from Pinnacle in 1997, and I'm looking forward to it because I don't believe I've ever read it. ~~ Hal C F Astell

For more titles by Guy N Smith click here