As I mentioned in my runthrough review of 'Night of the Crabs' over three years ago, this book was the big one in Guy N. Smith's career. In fact, to a large degree, it enabled his career.

At the time this was originally released in July 1976, he had a couple of horror novels and four Disney film novelisations out with New English Library and he was churning out porn at a rate of knots, not only eight digests from Tabor but hundreds of thousands of words of stories and "readers' letters", all credited to members of the public such as Mrs. E. Jones from Kettering. In short, he was writing whatever he could sell and he was doing pretty well out of it.

When he hit the bestseller list with 'Night of the Crabs', however, he could leave the job at the bank that he absolutely hated and become a full-time professional writer; he could move to the Black Hill on the Welsh borders, where, like Gordon Hall, his avatar in 'Werewolf by Moonlight', he'd been renting the shooting rights; and he could focus a little more on material that meant something to him. He would move away from the Disney novelisations and the porn and write a lot more novels and articles on field sports.

He followed this with a second unrelated werewolf book, 'Night of the Werewolf', even if it was only published in German at the time, and a novelisation of the Tyburn horror film, 'The Ghoul', then shifted genre in 1977, turning out the two thrillers in 'The Truckers' series, one set mostly in the countryside away from trucks, and a war novel, 'Bamboo Guerrillas', along with the first sequel to 'Werewolf by Moonlight', 'Return of the Werewolf'. As we know, the market forced a shift back to horror that he couldn't escape for the longest time, but all this newfound freedom was due to the success of 'Night of the Crabs'.

It remains his most successful novel today and the one that potential new fans tend to want to start with. The catch, as with most of Guy's substantial back catalogue, is that fans don't often get rid of their collections so the demand outstrips the supply of used books, meaning in turn a hefty price tag on pretty much any of them. The release of 'Paperbacks from Hell' that sparked a fresh boom in used horror novels merely exacerbated that. So it was natural that, when Tara, Guy's daughter, took control of his estate with the goal of bringing those books back into print, this was always going to be the first title chosen.

As with all these books, she's putting some real effort into making them quality releases. They all have new cover art, with series artists remaining consistent, and new internal layout design. They're all trade paperbacks, marking the first time most of these novels have been published outside of the regular mass market size. Many, of course, have never been reprinted, though it has to be said here that this one has been reprinted the most over the years. They all feature a brand new introduction from someone appropriate, mostly other authors.

So, as with my review of the new edition of 'Werewolf by Moonlight', I'll focus less on revisiting the story, which I've already covered in my previous review and more on those new aspects, in case easy availability in nice new and clean editions that don't cost a fortune from all expected places isn't enough to guarantee a purchase from you.

Suffice it to say that this one's about the Battle of Barmouth, which is a suitably bloody affair. On one side is the British army, personified more by Commander Grisedale from the Ministry of Defense than the idiot officer they send to help, Col. Goode. The real voice of reason is Prof. Cliff Davenport, whose nephew was an early victim, and once he connects with Pat Benson, she becomes a strong and inseparable companion. There's also the War Department airbase next door near Shell Island and the entire populatoin of Barmouth, a small coastal tourist town on the west coast of Wales.

Or, if you wish, there's plenty of sex, even more outrageous gore and showcase scenes to make any monster movie fan happy, including a memorable scene when an army tank discovers that the crabs are bulletproof and quite able of lifting them, carrying them over to the water then  tipping them into the ocean. Oh, and there's no shortage of glorious lines of dialogue, though it's hard to top Pat Benson playing Captain Obvious: "What a beautiful night. If only we didn't have to worry about giant crabs."

So, the cover art, which was painted by Neale Thomas, a Liverpool artist currently resident in Sweden, as indeed is Tara. I checked out his website and tend to like his style. He seems to paint a lot of people and a lot of race cars, often together. He likes broad swathes of colour and he's not a stranger to beaches.

I'm not quite as sold on his crabs, which he doesn't tend to capture in the sort of poses, if that's an appropriate word to use for giant mutated crabs, that I'd expect. This one looks like it's just parachuted out of an aeroplane and is coming in for a landing. Some fans hate these new Crabs covers and others like them. I'm not particularly fond of them but I do like their use of colour and the fact that they look completely different to all other editions and, indeed, to the other books reprinted already in the 'Werewolf' trilogy. I'm appreciating that variety.

I'm much more fond of the interior design. This wasn't a long book to begin with but it feels to be more substantial here. The trade paperback size is part of that but it's also how it's laid out, the fonts chosen and their size and the line spacing. It all feels really clean and that allows us to dive into the story rather than wonder about why it looks like this. Great design isn't always recognised because one of its primary goals is to be unobtrusive. This is great design.

That leaves the foreword, which was written by legendary horror novelist Brian Keene, who's penned some books of his own that feature giant crustaceans. I'm talking here about a trio of sequels to 'Clickers', which I believe are a giant prehistoric common ancestor of crabs, lobsters and scorpions. It's a J. F. Gonzalez series, but while he wrote the first book with Mark Williams, he teamed up with Keene for the other three. He calls out Smith's obvious influence here on 'Clickers'—I believe he's mentioned by name in both the introduction and the text to the first book—and calls this "a seminal, important part of the history of horror fiction".

What's notable to me here is that Keene is an American author. Smith was British and his books even more so; most of them never saw print in the United States. The 'Crabs' books did, but not until the late eighties in editions from Dell with impeccable cover art from the late fantasy art legend Rowena Morrill. Well, OK, Signet also issued the second book, 'Killer Crabs' in 1979, but none of the others and that never made sense to me. The fourteen-year-old Keene, however, on a regular Sunday trip to his local fleamarket for comics and paperbacks, found a British edition of 'Killer Crabs' there and knew Smith's work already, having found 'The Sucking Pit' there the year before, again in a British edition.

I've often wondered why Smith never hit it big in the States, given that his novels are far more universal in appeal than those of many authors, thus explaining his success in Poland after the Berlin Wall fell and they could read horror again. It just never happened for him, even with an important if frustratingly small set of his books finding American editions. What Keene says in his foreword is that the American readers who became American authors did read him, just by luck or maybe by word of mouth.

And what surprises me the most is how broadly spread those authors are in style. Keene writes a brand of horror that's entirely compatible with Smith's approach, as do many others he cites who have been directly influenced by his work. However he also mentions quiet horror authors citing this as a pivotal influence and bizarro authors wanting to write transgressive takes on 'Night of the Crabs'. The modern day pulp authors make sense, of course, wherever they're from. This reminds me of Brian Eno's quote about 'The Velvet Underground & Nico' album that only sold about thirty thousand copies in five years: "Everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band." Maybe everyone in the States who bought this became a novelist. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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