Guy N. Smith only wrote two novels for Grafton but 'Phobia' and 'The Resurrected' are both good ones and I remembered this particularly for its heightened sexual content, which is more deviant than it might initially seem given its context. At heart, it's an unusual love story, which makes the cover tagline of "a marriage made in Hell" seem a little misplaced, but for much of the book, that isn't a bad description at all. Let me explain.

Merryn Bartram turned twenty-eight last week and got engaged. There's only a month left to go before her wedding to Bernard Oldroyd. However, her headaches started two weeks ago and the scans say brain tumour. It's inoperable. She doesn't have long. The treatments help and she gets through the wedding. They honeymoon in Torquay; she walks up the Wrekin, a Shropshire hill; and continues to work. However, the end is nigh and Bernie finds himself driven to save his wife, even if it means going to a clairvoyant and witch, Natalie Newman.

Now, Natalie can't help, because she only performs white magic, but Bernie soon gets a call from Richie Howe, who claims to be a friend of hers and he swears he can help. He comes to see her, has sex with her and tells Bernie that "she'll live but first she has to die". And that's how it goes. She dies on page thirty-one, her hand in Bernie's, and he calls Richie, who somehow already knows. He performs a ritual for a hundred pounds and suddenly Merryn is alive again. It's a miracle.

In fact, it's such a miracle that Dr. Markham pops round, expecting to offer his condolences, only to find Merryn not just alive but walking, naked and coming on to him. He escapes but Bernie has to live with her and he knows she's changed too. It's not just the smell of death and her cold touch but a newfound sexual obsession. "This wasn't the Merryn he had known and loved," he thinks, "it was some foul, lusting monster that had taken her body for its own."

And so it goes, through a fresh twist on the time honoured theme of resurrection that Smith had previously explored in 'Fiend' and 'The Unseen'. This plays out more like the former, but, smell of death aside, Merryn doesn't rot like Andre Koschev did and she isn't possessed by someone else. That's really her in there, but the ritual that brought her back has somehow tied her to the man who performed it, Richie Howe, who's apparently a powerful black magician, even though he's a grubby sort who rides a pushbike, so hardly the charismatic Aleister Crowley type.

Presumably, that's why we suddenly find ourselves in what could be argued to be nymphomaniac zombie territory. Whatever Merryn does gains a sexual connotation. She visits her parents, only to orgasm into exhaustion and wakes up to find them dead, apparently due to a gas leak. When a sacrifice is needed by the Master, she pushes a drunk deadbeat into a river, getting home at two-thirty in the morning to strip off and seduce Bernie. When he's had enough of it and takes her on holiday to push her off a cliff, he wakes up to her masturbating him, seaweed in her hair. There's even a point where she goes on the game to get laid and, after a five-minute quickie, stabs him in the eye with her nail scissors and gets off on the corpse. Is it necrophilia when both partners are dead?

And, of course, there's what goes on in Richie's coven. It's not a particularly large one, to go with the rest of his discount appeal, but they do manage to conjure up the Dark One in a naked ritual ceremony. He takes Merryn first, then Richie, Rob, John, Pete and Anthea follow suit in a Satanic orgy that's oddly over in three lines. For a novel that dives into deviant sex every other breath, it unexpectedly holds back at points like this and another scene when one character is eaten by an unseen monstrosity. It's rather surprising restraint, given that Smith was more than happy to go full bore in detailing Merryn's act of skinning her alive right before that.

Behind all the deviant sex and occasional bouts of uncharacteristic shyness, Smith has a theme to explore and he takes Bernie through all five stages of grief. It's arguable that Bernie and Merryn getting married, knowing that she'll be dead soon afterwards, is denial. The least explored stage is anger, because Bernie moves quickly to bargaining, only to be presented with changed Merryn, which leads him quickly into depression. This isn't what he wanted, he thinks, and he struggles for most of the book to deal with that. Best addressed of all the stages is the last one, because Smith conjures up a neat twist around acceptance that I'd completely forgotten.

The thrust of the story, if you'll forgive the unintentional pun, is Bernie, Merryn and Richie, with the latter bringing Merryn back to Bernie, as he promised, but in such a way that he can use her for his own purposes. However, there are other characters who play their part, their plot strands either finding their way to Merryn or away from her. I've mentioned most of them: the coven, the doctor, the parents. However, there's also Ann Lomer, an old friend of Merryn's who emigrated to Australia to marry a local but comes back on holiday with her son and wants to see her. There are many more faceless victims too.

However, while the story holds together and reaches that neat twist via a few setpiece moments, it's the tone of the book that stands out. Smith's audience is incredibly diverse, but horror hounds at the time were assumed to be young men and it's hard—there I go again—to imagine them not responding to a novel this sexually obsessed, even though Smith throws in a circumcision scene at one point with a sacrificial knife; hey, it's better than human sacrifice! It's so obsessed that there comes a point when Bernie attempts suicide by quicksand, only for the cold of the Solway Firth to arouse him when he's half in.

However, it's not that the book has a lot of sex in it, it's that the book has so much sex that it goes beyond wish fulfilment to horror. We might dream of gorgeous nymphos because we all want sex to be constantly available, but, unless we're nymphos too, we don't actually want sex all the time. That quickly becomes a burden, when whatever we want to do—eat food, sleep, watch the game— is interrupted by more sex. It probably doesn't help for your partner to be someone you love who suddenly smells of death. Especially when she's clearly having it away with others too. So the sex becomes claustrophobic and smothering. This is a horror novel, after all.

Next month, Guy's first venture into hardcover, with a book shifted from Sphere to Piatkus when Robert Maxwell fell off his boat. See you then for 'The Knighton Vampires'. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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