It sometimes seems surprising that Guy N. Smith only wrote eight books for Hamlyn over a quick four years, because they stand proud and strong and seem to represent a greater proportion of his output than they actually do. Perhaps that's in part because every GNS fan remembers at least one of these among their favourites. Perhaps it's partly because each of them do something very different, so they stand together as a strong sampling of his horror work.

'Manitou Doll' is the fifth of these eight and it's a very focused novel, almost every page dedicated to a simple family enduring a disastrous holiday in what has to be Eastbourne, even though it isn't named. They're the Catlins, Roy and Liz with their daughter Rowena, who has only partial hearing. It's easy to see them as a sort of distorted reflection of the Smiths, appropriate given the setting in a sleazy rundown fairground. Maybe Guy visited such a place, saw himself in the Hall of Mirrors and wondered what his skewed alter ego might be like in other terms than just the physical.

Roy is average in every way and hates that about himself. He's stuck in a dead end job as a solicitor's cashier, his marriage is on the rocks and his daughter has to lip read because she can't hear enough of what people say. Even when he manages to get them off to the seaside, the rain won't quit and his car breaks down. It has to be said that Roy and Liz are pretty awful parents, because eight-year-old Rowena vanishes off on her own every time they so much as blink and it takes them far too long to notice.

By comparison, average is one of the few words that can't be used to describe Smith, who wrote over a hundred books, adopted donkeys, played Subbuteo for charity, dowsed, ran a smallholding and a shoot, sold secondhand books, collected everything and was even the British Pipe Smoking Champion. He was stuck in a dead end job too, in banking, until 1976 when the runaway success of 'Night of the Crabs' allowed him to escape that rut. Also, his eldest daughter, Rowan, was born with partial hearing.

I loved this new approach to crafting his lead character, because Guy had already written enough characters that were wish fulfilment versions of himself, most obviously Gordon Hall in 'Werewolf by Moonlight'. Why not create his polar opposite in Roy Catlin? And, as Hall saved the day in his stories, why not have Catlin fail miserably to do likewise, leaving it to his eightyear-old daughter to make the difference instead?

I also loved how he allowed this novel to slowly find its way into horror through a slew of other genres. Smith had often said that he really wanted to write westerns, though there was unsurprisingly not much of a market for them in England in the seventies. He wrote horror because it sold and sold well. Well, this starts out as a western, with bloodthirsty American soldiers hunting down the Plains Indians in Kansas. When it jumps forward to a present-day Eastbourne, it becomes a biker novel, like so many of the novels Guy's main publisher, New English Library, issued in the seventies.

Of course, there's horror in both the western and biker sections and traditional horror in a number of ways. For one, evil manifests physically here. There aren't too many good guys in the American soldiers hunting Native Americans, but Levine is the one we focus on, the muscled sadist with fetid breath, ragged fingernails and grimy flesh pimpled with blackheads. He rapes Mistai, the virgin daughter of the Cheyenne chief, and murders Young Bear, who is tasked with getting her to safety. The leader of the Hell's Angels is Fat Fry, a grossly overweight youth whose first act is to punch a woman in the face and boot her son into a booth, so an unfortunately placed nail can paralyse him, if not kills him. He rapes Jane, the Red Indian Fortune Teller. We haven't even got to Salin yet, a lecherous deformed dwarf with wasted legs and mismatched eyes.

For another, the entire novel depicts history repeating itself, though Smith relies on us to figure that out rather than alternating chapters. We get the prologue in 1868 then a few flashback visions here and there to nail the point home. It shouldn't surprise that Jane is Mistai's granddaughter and they both respond to their respective rapes in the same way: by cursing not just the rapist but all of his kind, down to their children and their children's children. Needless to say, that doesn't work out too well for the tourists visiting a funfair in Eastbourne on their holidays, whether they deserve retribution or not.

The way they curse is to pray to their god for revenge, who happens to be the demon god Okeepa, the torture symbol of the Plains Indians. He's in everything that Mistai and Jane carve and they both carve a lot of figurines in wood. In Jane's case, the fairground owner Jacob Schaeffer has her carve everything from the figureheads on the rides to the Punch and Judy characters. Once the curse is in place, all of these become a sort of evil army of murderous dolls and they have godlike powers to act upon their generation-born hate.

While 'Manitou Doll' is longer than 'Doomflight', let alone all of his NEL novels, and not a lot shorter than 'Satan's Snowdrop', it's far more tightly focused than any of them. While there may be twenty-six named characters who appear, and a few more who don't, only a few really get anything to do. There's a long drop after the three Catlins and Jane to the local chief inspector, Landenning, and Jacob Schaefer. Almost everyone else is there to be set up for a gruesome death and a few are only mentioned as they pass through a scene. Most of the characters aren't even given names, because they'd be distractions.

A couple of historical visions or nightmares aside, it's also ruthlessly chronological. Even the chapters are given a scope in time, dedicated to a part of a day: Wednesday morning, Wednesday afternoon, late Wednesday afternoon, etc. Historical prologue excepted, the whole book unfolds between Bank Holiday Monday and early Saturday morning, with one brief epilogue on Saturday afternoon when it's all over, the sun emerges, the birds come back and everyone left alive after the carnage of the previous night can go home, to talk no more about their holiday in Eastbourne.

While it's fair to say that the death count doesn't approach the crazy numbers of novels depicting Britain falling apart under an overwhelming threat, like 'Thirst' and 'Bats Out of Hell', the deaths do happen frequently and mostly in small numbers. Most arrive one or two at a time, so we're personal witnesses. Billy Freeman and his girlfriend Sylvia are hurled to their death from the Big Dipper. PC Brian Andrews is bludgeoned to death by a hallucinatory clown in the Hall of Mirrors. Stewart Middleton is sucked into the sea by an evil spirit while swimming to Beachy Head.

Often, we stumble on bodies, many of whom are nameless. There's a dismembered body in the Ghost Train tunnel. There are a couple of corpses draped over the waltzer cars. An entire crew of a small fishing boat are crushed when a lifeboat rides right over them. An unborn foetus is terminated when Fat Fry puts the boot into his mother's abdomen after she accidentally stuck candyfloss in his face. Every now and again, we know who they are, like Paul Stott, his body discovered by Rowena, his head bashed to a pulp. One old man is ironically hit by an ambulance, skidding in the mud.

So there's plenty of death here and that could be extended to the Punch and Judy show, in which Punch goes berserk and bludgeons everyone with blood spurting out of each of the puppets in a hallucinogenic bloodbath. There's still more danger, because Smith has the tension continually ratchet up until everything comes to a head on Friday night and  Saturday morning. And through all of that stumble the woefully inept Roy and Liz, never realising that their innocent little eight-year-old daughter Rowena is far more able than either of them.

Next up, Guy returns to New English Library for his final werewolf novel, 'Wolfcurse' and then a return to his most successful series with its most outrageous title, the legendary 'Crabs on the Rampage'. See you then!  ~~ Hal C F Astell

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