Tara at Black Hill Books is going great guns with her attempts to bring Guy N. Smith's bibliography back into print. As I write, all three of the 'Werewolf Trilogy' are available in nice new editions and she's five books into his infamous 'Crabs' series. This is the third and it follows the same approach as the others, with a clean new layout, new cover art by Neale Thomas—I'm not remotely as fond of this cover as the one for its predecessor, 'Killer Crabs'—and consistent supplementary details at the back. The most important new material though is the foreword, this time by Mark Morris,

 I've actually met Mark before, albeit long ago and we certainly wouldn't know each other from a hole in the wall, should we suddenly find ourselves in the same place at the same time. Ironically, I believe we will do precisely that a week  before this review goes live in September, at the Guy N. Smith annual convention in Knighton, Wales. I met Mark soon after his first horror novel, 'Toady', was released in paperback by Corgi. It was 1990 and I was still at sixth form college in Huddersfield when Mark came in to give a talk, because he had gone there a few years earlier. I think he was surprised to find someone who already owned a copy.

In his foreword, he owns up to being something of a horror snob back then, dismissing authors like Guy back in the day without having read his books. He explains how he came to his work later in life and has become enough of a fan to write a foreword for a Guy N. Smith novel and attend a Guy N. Smith convention. I remember those days well and Mark's position was far from unusual, because the times were a-changin' in the world of British literary horror and they were moving away from writers like Guy to writers like Mark.

You see, the horror genre exploded in literature in 1974, both in the UK and the US but because of different authors and different books and so it expanded in very different directions.

In the US, Stephen King published 'Carrie' and suddenly publishers wanted horror novelists. There were certainly antecedents in books like 'Rosemary's Baby' and 'The Exorcist', both of which saw a successful feature film adaptation, but they weren't written by horror novelists. Blatty and Levin wrote in all sorts of genres and merely happened to catch lightning in a bottle with horror novels. Shirley Jackson and Robert Bloch didn't spearhead movements. On the other hand, King was new and young and huge and overjoyed to be a horror novelist. What followed were endless attempts to mimic his success, especially through psychic kids, paranormal terror and psychological horror/thrillers.

Only a few months later in the UK, James Herbert published 'The Rats' and exactly the same thing happened. Again, there were antecedents, not just through most of the foundations of the genre being British but through Dennis Wheatley's black magic novels being bestsellers. However, that was all seen as old-fashioned at that point. There was social upheaval in 1974, a year that saw two general elections, and Herbert was raw and visceral and working class and horror was suddenly an urgent thing. What followed were endless attempts to mimic his success, especially through short sharp shocks featuring animals on the rampage, environmental impact and social commentary.

And that continued for over a decade. I can't find an absolute publication date for 'The Rats' but I think it may have been released in November, two months after the same publisher, New English Library, put out Guy's 'Werewolf by Moonlight'. It can't be said that Guy didn't start at exactly the right time! He rode that horror wave through the seventies and eighties, expanding to be part of the Hamlyn nasty novel range too. However, by the late eighties, Clive Barker had come along to change everything again and suddenly, horror was literary again, full of poetry and dark fantasy.

The next generation of writers, like Mark Morris, followed his lead, looking less at the schlockier end of the genre for inspiration, writers like Guy, Shaun Hutson and even Graham Masterton, and more at Americans like Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson and Stephen King. If they read British, it was the classics or someone more literary like Ramsey Campbell. I'll happily pick Mark's brain on his personal influences in September and I'll be interested to see what names he throws out.

Back to this foreword, what he found in Guy's work later was fun, first and foremost, 'Night of the Crabs' not remotely taking itself that seriously but delivering nonetheless, "slick, fast-moving and packed with terrific set-pieces". He's not wrong. However, he also highlights a very different sort of poetry to what Barker was mining and it makes me think that he's going to have a blast working through a lot more of Guy's back catalogue.

What I'm talking about here is Guy's love of the countryside. He quotes a whole paragraph from 'Origin of the Crabs' that could only be written by someone who lived way out in the countryside, outside as much as in. The drift of dusk into night, the advent of autumn mist and the sounds and migration of birds all have real meaning to someone like Guy. He didn't drive down to Sainsbury's for a Sunday roast; he walked into his fields and shot game for the table. You can't fake the sort of deep knowledge that had seeped into Guy's bones over a lifetime outdoors and it's everywhere in his fiction.

It's why Mark prefers this third book in the series to the first two. It's set entirely in the Scottish countryside, the biggest urban conglomeration being the hamlet of Cranlarich. This isn't about an army of giant mutated crabs attacking a thriving beach town full of tourists with an airbase right next door. The Battle of Barmouth was busy enough to warrant two novels, not only 'Night of the Crabs' but its direct sequel, 'Crabs' Moon' too, which unfolds at exactly the same time in the Blue Ocean Holiday Camp. This is about an army of giant mutated crabs attacking whatever they find when they emerge from Loch Merse on the Laird of Cranlarich's country estate.

Everything is smaller scale, which was a requisite given that this is a prequel. Nobody in Barmouth in 'Night of the Crabs' had heard about what happens here. The dead are generally gamekeepers working for the Laird of Cranlarich, staff and guests at the hotel from which he runs his shoot and poachers plying their trade on his loch. It's all exquisitely focused on a tiny rural ecosystem and it gave Guy a huge amount of opportunity to use his countryside knowledge to make everything feel utterly authentic.

Mark even talks up a couple of comparisons that I'll have to go back to, because they were horror stories set in similarly rural settings to this novel and his other favourite Guy N. Smith's thus far, 'Cannibals' and 'Thirst II: The Plague'. One is a 'Doctor Who' serial, 'Terror of the Zygons', and the other a BBC science fiction serial called 'The Nightmare Man'. I haven't seen either of them since the eighties but I do own the books of both. 'Terror of the Zygons' was novelised along with every 'Doctor Who' serial—I see that Mark Morris has now written five of these himself—and ironically, 'The Nightmare Man' was novelised in the same Hamlyn horror range that published a number of Guy N. Smith novels, the sort of output that Mark was looking down on back in 1990.

Mark is enjoying his late-in-life discovery of Smith's work. He correctly points out that reading old books of his is hard because they're out of print and typically prohibitively expensive to pick up on the second hand market. These reprints are going to be absolutely invaluable to people like Mark who see only discovery in Guy's immense back catalogue of books. While I'm mostly happy that I'd collected the original editions when they were still affordable, part of me wants to skip forward a few years to see how many new fans these reprints are reaching. They're a godsend. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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