Given that I'm writing this a few days after publishing an Apocalypse Later Zine that collates the first half of my reviews of Guy N. Smith's novel output for adults, it seems appropriate that I take a look at the new Black Hill Books edition of 'Son of the Werewolf', because the foreword is by the other writer of Guy N. Smith zines, Chris Elphick. I was actually planning to contribute to his most recent example, 'GNS²' but lost track of it when Elphick took a break from Facebook. I'll make sure to contribute to the third one.

Before I comment on his foreword, I have to wonder why this third book in a trilogy suddenly went to a sans-serif font. I mean, it's neatly laid out, like all these new Black Hill Books editions, but it's still sans-serif, making it conspiciously inconsistent with its two predecessors, which used a regular serif font. Oh, except when there are words or phrases in italics, because they're in the serif font, which looks frustratingly smaller in comparison. Do I have some sort of test printing? I'll ask Black Hill Books and report back.

Otherwise, I know the story and and reviewed 'The Son of the Werewolf' a few years ago, so don't need to read it again. For anyone who didn't see that review and doesn't want to shift from this to that, the first two books in this 'Werewolf Trilogy' followed the traditional hunt-down-and-kill-the-werewolf that's popped up in the countryside plot, but this one is more of a coming of age story, if that's being done by a werewolf. Hugh Gunn isn't afflicted with lycanthropy because of a bite; he's literally the son of a werewolf, born with the disease and so much more accepting of it as he grows up.

Elphick talks up that angle in his foreword. After confirming the 'Crabs' series as the favourite of a slew of Guy N. Smith fans, he focuses in on this trilogy because he prefers Guy's supernatural tales. And, of the three, this is the one that does it for him because it's honest and accepting. There's no self-loathing this time, our new werewolf seeing his condition not as a curse but a bonus! Certainly he embraces it the way that neither of his predecessors in the earlier books ever did. It's who he is and he has no interest in fighting it, just in exploring what it means to him.

I do like that choice of word, by the way, which was Elphick's not mine. It's absolutely a bonus for a young Hugh Gunn and it's a bonus for us, the readers, too; because Smith embraces it just as much as his character. In my review, I mentioned that it's a gratuitous book, unlike its predecessors, and it's gleeful about it, which makes it the most fun of the three. Elphick emphatically agrees and has fun doing so.

It's not a particularly deep foreword, with no great insights into either Smith or Elphick, but it's a heartfelt one and it's appropriately rather like the book itself, a short, sharp shock willing to get straight down to business and rip out the heart of the matter with "raw, unfiltered savagery", to quote a line that's so nice that he uses it twice.

I should also add that he gives thanks for this set of new editions of Guy's novels that are making an increasing number of titles accessible again at regular prices. I've watched a lot of fans build their collections recently at crazy prices, Chris included, and Black Hill Books are making that task so much easier. As he ably points out in this foreword, "finally, you can enter the Great Scribbler's lycanthropic world of horror and bloodshed without losing an arm or a leg." ~~ Hal C F Astell

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