It was going to be next to impossible for Guy N. Smith to top 'The Graveyard Vultures' in his second Mark Sabat book, but he does give it a good shot. There's plenty here that's deviant, whether it's the topical involvement of neo-Nazi organisations, the primary one led by Sabat's former colonel in the SAS who now believes himself to be the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler, or the deviant sex that he enjoys with that very same colonel's wife, now possessed by Lilith. The far more personal death count also includes three babies, one murdered by skinheads ahead of a riot and the other pair bled out in ritual sacrifices. It may not be 'The Graveyard Vultures' but it doesn't hold back.
Smith teases us though, because the first chapter opens up proceedings with a pair of rapes that aren't. A teenager called Shanda thinks she's about to be raped by a corpse-like punk she danced with at the disco, but he stabs her in the throat instead. He's a Disciple of Lilith and another has a similar experience with a prostitute called Stella Lowe. She takes him to an empty building where it's clear he's going to rape her, except he stabs her in the throat instead too. These are murders, nothing supernatural, but the press plays them up as vampire attacks, as DS McKay explains to his former SAS colleague, Mark Sabat, after his phone call interrupts a masturbation session.
There are four dead the previous night, we learn, each stabbed in the neck and their blood sucked out through a neat round hole. He wants Sabat's help with such an unusual case and that pays off because Sabat has connections the CID don't. He visits a brothel to elicit the help of its madam, an old lover called Ilona, who knows more about him than probably anybody else alive except the evil soul of his brother Quentin, still trapped inside his body and always waiting to get the upper hand. It actually works too; Sabat saving Ilona as she's attacked and gaining someone to question and an odd syringe gun at the same time, but he's not interested in handing them over to the cops.
Instead we get bloody. He takes the youth to Ilona's bondage dungeon and manacles him against a wall. He's a teenager, a proud member of the Disciples of Lilith and also an actual Nazi, a member of the Liberation Front, the organisation that Vince Lealan, Sabat's old colonel, was involved with that led him to be kicked out of the SAS. Sabat can't get this fanatic to talk so he kills him with his own weapon, an act that backfires horribly when Lealan shows up under a fake name and murders Ilona in the same way, then sets his followers on the other girls upstairs.
The Nazi angle played well with me back in the eighties because it was a topical thing back then. If America is struggling with its extreme right wing nowadays, we English went through the same at an earlier point in time. This book was published in May 1982, the same month as its predecessor, and anyone of my age in the UK will remember that as Thatcher's Britain. There were race riots, a plague of football hooligans and a broken urban landscape that led to the Specials's famous song 'Ghost Town'. It was a divided country, like the US is now and it took a while to remedy. Until it was, it played out like a less intense version of this novel. Fortunately it now feels like history.
It also feels very eighties in its approach. The origins of splatterpunk has come up a lot recently in circles I move in and that was an American movement whose name was coined by David J. Schow in 1986. However, while he was trying to bring the gore of the movies into fiction, the Brits had been doing that for a decade and change, ever since James Herbert's 'The Rats'. We just gave it names like "nasty novels", a term on the back of plenty of Hamlyn horror novels to inspire comparisons to the video nasties, which weren't far in the past at that point. And this is truly splatterpunk before that name existed. How else would you describe Mandy Wickham's baby Davey being stolen from a pram so his throat can be bitten out by the goddess Lilith so that her army of hypnotised neo-Nazi disciples can drink his blood?
The catch to this one is that it shifts between a lot of subgenres of horror, if not a broader field we might call exploitation fiction, and it ends up a little unsure of what it is. It's an occult novel, which we knew coming in, because of the eternal battle between Mark Sabat, ex-priest, ex-SAS man and exorcist, and the soul of his brother, Quentin the Evil One. That battle's definitely ongoing, with an interesting section after Sabat finds himself trapped and hypnotised by Lilith into becoming one of her disciples, Quentin taking the fore for a while. However, that's not all it is.
The Nazi angle is definitely horrific, but it delves into the skinhead genre that had been pioneered by New English Library in the seventies, the same publisher that put out the Mark Sabat books. It also moves this one into thriller territory at points, Sabat's SAS training proving very useful when Lilith sends three of her disciples into his house to kill him. Needless to say that doesn't work how she plans, but the brutality of the scene reminds of the ultra-violent kung fu novels the seventies threw out, like Marshall Macao's 'K'ing Kung-Fu' books. Let's just say Sabat leaves one to die of his wounds, including severely crushed testicles.
The vampire angle is played up by the press, headlines like 'The Legions of Dracula Came to Town' the sort of lurid eyecatchers the Sun might boast, but Smith doesn't. There's no suggestion of any sort of traditional vampire here to go along with the traditional werewolves he brought over from the continent to ravage the Welsh borders and rural Scotland in the seventies. The first chapter is clearly about youths stabbing women in the throat rather than tearing them out with teeth, and a chapter later we learn about the weapon they used.
It eventually gets mystical, as Smith's occult novels often did, with Sabat visiting the astral plane, changing form as needed and seeking gods on the eternal battlefield. That doesn't happen much here, even though I remembered it being so frequent. He doesn't spend a lot of time in a chalked pentagram. However, when he does later on, he sets himself up for a vision of the past, visiting the Paris of 1438 to figure out how wicked sorcerer Pierre Vallin plays into proceedings. It's odd to read about neo-Nazi murderers and skinhead rioters in the same book as an exorcist mystically visiting the fifteenth century in the vision form of a rat. But hey, I'm not complaining!
Smith would return to Mark Sabat soon enough, of course, because he published four of these in a little over a year, but there are two other books to come before 'Cannibal Cult', namely the last of his novels for Hamlyn, 'The Pluto Pact' and 'The Lurkers', the two that never appeared in the "also by" lists in the front of the others. I don't think I've read either since my first time through back in the eighties, so I'm especially looking forward to those. Join me next month for the first of them! ~~ Hal C F Astell
For more titles by Guy N Smith click here
|
|