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The eagle-eyed among you will realise that this isn't the next in my ongoing runthrough of Guy N. Smith's novels, because this month that's 'The Island'. This is a long overdue new edition of his very first novel, brought back into print by Black Hill Books, led by Guy's daughter Tara, who are gradually making his bibliography available once more in a market where the originals that are often long out-of-print are selling used for crazy amounts of money.
Therefore I've reviewed the book at the Nameless Zine already. I won't run through everything all over again, but I will cover a little of it in relation to this new edition.
The first difference is there's new cover art, courtesy of Mike McGee, and it's excellent. It's an example of wraparound art, albeit less obvious on the back cover than the original, but it's the werewolf itself that stands out for praise. Lucinda Cowell's cover art for the original edition is fine, but the werewolf is a little too continental and a lot too peaceful for my tastes. This take is a little paler and a lot more tormented, with not only his teeth out but also his nails already extending into claws. As a bonus, the figure also looks a lot more like Guy himself.
That's an appropriate homage and I feel safe in believing that Guy himself would have enjoyed that, even though he wrote himself into the book far more obviously as the hero, Gordon Hall.
The book is set on the Black Hill, a rural area of Shropshire close to the Welsh border, which the title of the Dutch translation makes very clear: 'Varulven fra Black Hill'. Many Smith fans know the Black Hill well, because it's where Guy moved in 1976 following the success of 'Night of the Crabs'. At this point, he was a visitor who owned the shooting rights there, just like Hall, whose appearance is eerily familiar. The final page even tells us that he smokes a pipe, a lifelong habit for Smith who even won the British Pipe Smoking Championship in 2003.
Needless to say, Hall is a clear wish fulfilment take on Smith himself. "Gordon Hall was as tough as they come," we're told, "ruthless, a hunter by nature, both of game and women, the only two quarries worth pursuing" What's more, "His occupation as a free-lance journalist gave him ample opportunity to pursue his two hobbies." Smith was a regular contributor of articles to a variety of the sporting magazines at the time, even though at this point he still had a day job at a bank.
We meet Hall first, out shooting mallard on the Black Hill with his dog Remus, and these scenes in the countryside are knowledgeably and evocatively written, as any fan would expect. There are a slew of common themes that spread across Smith's fiction, whether the genre is horror, thriller or animal stories for children, and the most obvious is that so many of them are set at the intersection between traditional country living in the British Isles and something coming in from outside to mess with that.
Often, it's a family moving out from the city without understanding country ways. Sometimes it has a more sinister form, like a housing development or a nuclear weapons installation. Here, of course, it's a werewolf, because when 'Werewolf by Moonlight' was published, werewolves were an entirely continental affair. Smith changed that by having a family import a dog called Loup from the Black Forest, that telling name earned when it chased off a wolf that was after a herd of sheep. Of course, it promptly bites their son and turns him into a werewolf.
He's Philip Owen and this happens in chapter one, so we're never in doubt about the identity of the monster to come. Smith writes Owen with some level of sympathy. He's not evil, for a start, though the influence of the beast inside him does lead to evil acts, such as the attempted rape of a neighbour, a lady called Margaret Gunn. This werewolf also follows the traditional rules of continental werewolves, unable to cross moving water, though we never get to the point where a silver bullet might be needed to save the day.
Mickey Lewis raises another angle in his enjoyable foreword, namely that Smith keeps things a little sleazy. Well, a lot sleazy. When Philip's animal instincts are heightened, he breaks into his neighbour's house, finds Margaret in the bath, carries her to the bedroom and... well, Gordon Hall shows up to save his mistress in the nick of time. However, not content with merely saving the day, he promptly decides to take advantage.
As I wrote in my original review:
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Smith promptly highlights how he chose to ground this in pulp logic instead of reality: "He looked at the naked girl on the bed, and seeing that she had almost recovered from her assault, he began taking off his clothes." Yeah, no. This did get a little outrageous about its wish fulfilment at points.
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Lewis focuses on the same thing:
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After Owen has beaten a resentful retreat, Gordon eyes the attractive naked lady before him and decides to have a go himself—this time with the assumed permission of Margaret! I take it this book will never be handed out to survivors of rape and sexual trauma at counselling sessions!
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Lewis covers a lot of ground in his foreword, talking up the same points I did in my review, from the real life setting to the gratuitous gore. I like his description of the book as "the epitome of lean and mean" sprinkled with "occasional poetic descriptions of the countryside, which add a skin-like layer of beauty over the taut muscles of the story".
However, it's especially valuable to fans like me for talking about a personal connection to Guy and his work, namely his attempts to adapt them to feature film. He starts out his foreword by recounting the response from a filmmaker to the screenplay Lewis wrote to adapt 'Night of the Crabs', i.e. "Why does it have to be so sleazy?" Later he talks about how he got a screenplay for 'Werewolf by Moonlight' into the hands of British film director Ben Wheatley, who was born in the same small town as me, only for 'Kill List' to propel him into a higher league and render the project non-viable.
Lewis and I completely agree on how easy it ought to be to adapt Guy's work into British horror films. I'd argue that the reasons are exactly the same as why he did so well in Poland when the Berlin Wall fell and they were allowed to read horror again. They're universal stories, with the countryside far more understandable to everyone than the brand name-peppered stories of a certain American bestseller. They're lean and mean, as Lewis said, so simple at heart but with depths to be found if you want to look. They wouldn't even need to cost much and the gore they have so much fun with is far more mainstream now than back in 1974 when this was published.
The growing list of Black Hill Books reprints are available from all the usual places. They're all decorated by brand-new commissioned art, laid out generously with the text intact but errors corrected, and with forewords contributed by an admirable variety of names. If your interest has been piqued by my Guy N. Smith runthrough but you don't want to cough up thirty or even a hundred bucks for a rare out-of print-title, Black Hill Books is where you'll want to start. This is the logical first step, being Guy's first published novel. 'Night of the Crabs' was his bestseller that allowed him to become a full-time writer, and that's back in print too.
Keep up the great work, Tara! ~~ Hal C F Astell
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