Tara at Black Hill Books is on a tear right now with her reissues of her father's work. Since my look at the new edition of 'Cannibals' in March, she's brought another five volumes to keep fans happy. I'm not going to review 'Killer Crabs: The Return', the seventh book in the 'Crabs' series, quite yet because I haven't read it before and I won't reach it in my regular runthrough until August 2027. I may review 'The Slime Beast' next month but I'll have to be careful, because I wrote the foreword, meaning that I'd mostly be commenting on the excellent new cover art. 'Spawn of the Slime Beast' is another later book reprinted early because it's a sequel and 'Night of the Crabs' is a bonus that brings that classic into hardback. I've reviewed it twice already.

That leaves 'Bamboo Guerillas', "a 1970s War Sleaze Classic" according to the accurate tagline on the front cover, and I'm very happy to take a look at this for a couple of reasons. One is that it's a particularly hard book to find, previously only available in a pair of paperback editions that New English Library published in September 1977. I've never found out why there were two covers, but they're both rare and expensive to buy second hand. Part of that is because it's a war novel so did not tend to be shelved alongside Smith's horror novels either in bookstores or on market stalls. I would guess that in the days before the internet, a lot of fans didn't know it even existed.

The other reason is more personal, namely that I was happy to recommend the cover artist and I couldn't be happier with the result. He's Simon Pritchard and I'd been watching him posting a lot of covers he'd painted for the long running British war comic 'Commando' on Facebook. I thought his style might be a good fit for a few of Guy's titles and Tara made the pristine choice to hire him for this one. I presume he took the second NEL cover as a starting point but shifted the action far deeper into the jungle, the bamboo of the title very much in evidence.

I didn't recommend the cover designer, but I'd happily do so to everyone else because it's joyous. He's Bryan Henderson, who I was able to praise to his virtual face this morning as both of us were connected into this year's Guy N. Smith convention in Knighton, Wales through the YouTube feed. What he did was to apply a retro approach to the cover, playing up the green of the jungle in the perfectly scrawled title with a splash of blood for good measure. It's also subtly distressed, in the fashion so many neo-grindhouse movies use, to make it seem like it's a dogeared copy of an older book. As much as I like Mike McGee's art on four werewolf books and the two 'Slime Beast' novels, this is my favourite overall cover from all the reprints thus far.

There's also a third artist in play, though he's not represented on the cover. He's Chris Hall and he drew the black and white line image that appears in miniature form over every chapter heading. It's a delightful drawing, suitably dark, with a rifle, machete and grenade framing a human skull, all backed by vegetation. It's a busy piece for something so small but that's entirely appropriate. The original was up for grabs at the convention, I believe. I don't know who took it home but they should consider themselves very lucky indeed and I'm acutely jealous. By the way, Chris is another critic who's reviewed a whole swathe of Guy N. Smith material at his own site, DLS Reviews, which I'd highly recommend.

So to the foreword, the other new addition to this edition, which was written by Jon Bruford, who I've not bumped into before. He's a writer, editor and podcaster whose background seems to be in the gambling industry, as the managing editor of 'Casino International' magazine, founder of the British Casino Awards and the broadcaster behind 'The Gambling Files' podcast. Precisely none of that has any tie to 'Bamboo Guerillas' but he's also a horror fan who, like the rest of us, gives us a look at his origin story within the genre.

What struck me in his foreword is how he talks up how horror fans tend to be progressive in what they're willing to accept in fiction, but are also perhaps a little more wary about the boundaries the genre might have. Yes, there's a lot of gatekeeping going on in the genre and there has been for decades. In his foreword to the Black Hill Books reprint edition of 'Origin of the Crabs', Mark Morris, explained how he was a horror snob back in the day and that he dismissed Smith's work at the point he was becoming a horror author himself. I remember those days and, while boundaries have changed, those arguments are still ongoing with extreme horror today.

As Bruford points out, 'Bamboo Guerillas' isn't a horror novel. It's a war novel, commissioned as a war novel and published as a war novel. However, as Bruford also points out, it's also absolutely a horror novel. What happens in the jungles of Malaya, details of which you'll have to go to my prior review of 'Bamboo Guerillas' to discover, is, quite frankly, even more horrific than what happens in a good swathe of Smith's actual horror novels. That it happens in a war context or, increasingly, in a sexual sadism context, really doesn't matter. It's maybe not even horror adjacent. It's horror, pure and simple, whatever the label says.

Everyone hit it out of the park on this edition, which is a welcome addition to my Smith collection. To those who didn't track down the originals when they were rare but cheap and now have to face them being rare but crazily expensive, this is a godsend. Seize the opportunity to grab this novel in this glorious new edition and dive headlong into the depravity. For once, the warning label that so proudly seems to be stuck on the cover, is an understatement. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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