Black Hill Books continue to publish new editions of Guy N. Smith's pulp classics and they naturally prioritised his 'Crabs' series. 'Crabs' Moon' was the fifth and it serves as a companion piece to the first, 'Night of the Crabs', not a sequel or prequel but a parallel story, unfolding at the same time and in almost the same location as that initial volume. We're in Barmouth, the small town on the Welsh coast where the giant crabs came ashore to battle humanity, eventually being defeated by Prof. Cliff Davenport. However, we're not in the same part of Barmouth, instead spending most of our time in the Blue Ocean Holiday Camp, as it fights its own battle with the giant crabs.

As inevitable as it was always going to seem, given that almost everyone reading this had already read 'Night of the Crabs', it's a strong novel, better written and more substantial than the first in the series, with more memorable characters and some spectacular setpieces. Scenes like the one in which mentally handicapped fifteen year old western fan Benjie Thompson faces off against an immense crab using only finger guns as weapons will forever live in my memory. That's one of my favourite scenes from anywhere in Guy's prodigious output.

I've already reviewed 'Crabs' Moon' in my monthly Guy N. Smith runthrough, so I don't need to go too deep into it again, but, as with all the Black Hill Books reissues, this comes complete with new cover art and a new foreword, along with Smith's biography and bibliography, which have become tradition. The art is by Neale Thomas, as it is for each of these new 'Crabs' editions, and it's much akin to his earlier covers. As I've mentioned in other reviews, I'm not particularly fond of his crabs paintings, much preferring the 'Werewolf' covers by Mike McGee. However, his use of colour isn't bad at all and the green and red over blue is rather effective.

The foreword this time is written by the well regarded horror novelist Simon Clark, who digs into the origins of the nature's revenge genre in which Smith worked so often, not only with his 'Crabs' series. He goes much higher brow than earlier foreword writers, citing Arthur Machen and Nigel Kneale as other pioneering writers in this genre, with Alfred Hitchcock in film and, of course, with James Herbert, whose novel 'The Rats' kickstarted the British horror boom of the seventies and eighties, just as Stephen King did in the U.S. with 'Carrie'.

He also calls out Smith's pace, highlighting how quickly he gets down to business in 'Crabs' Moon' and how much action and suspense he generates in between the more erotic scenes. I do like how Black Hill Books continues to find new voices to speak to Smith's career, because they're finding a variety of reasons why his work had and continues to have meaning within the genre. Clark brings Smith's vibrancy to the table, praising how no nonsense he was and explaining why he gets more into a two hundred and sixty page novel (a hundred and ninety in its original paperback edition) than many authors manage in double that space.

Like many, he also brings a personal touch to proceedings, explaining how, only a few miles north of Barmouth, which is a real town, he saw a real life invasion of a Welsh beach by crabs. Sure, they weren't the size of cows, like Smith's, and they didn't even move while he watched them, but that doesn't minimise the impact of countless crabs on a beach. In this instance, they were spider crabs that had come ashore to moult, so Clark wasn't looking at crabs per se but the shells they had left behind them. Here he cites Dylan Thomas and William Hope Hodgson as other authors who used the Welsh countryside as inspiration for their works.

The 'Crabs' books are often the first that fans tend to find in the wild, especially the first one that saw many reprints over the years. However, the longer the series ran on, the harder those books are to find. This is the last of the easier ones, not that any are particularly easy to find in the wild any more. It was followed by 'Crabs: The Human Sacrifice', a much sought after collector's item on account of its lower print run, and then, much later, three self published titles, 'Killer Crabs: The Return', 'Crabs Omnibus' and 'The Charnel Caves', which are almost impossible to find, every copy going to a die hard fan who won't part with it without a very good reason.

These reissue editions, easy and cheap to find, are therefore putting titles into the hands of fans who had despaired of ever finding their original editions. Long live Black Hill Books and long live a constant flow of old material to reach new eyeballs. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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