1982 was a busy year for Guy N. Smith, but I vividly remember the moment when I discovered that it was a little busier than I initially thought. I'd found his work somewhere around 1984 or 1985, my first being the fourth Sabat book, 'The Druid Connection', which I picked up at a Welsh charity shop while we were on a holiday somewhere. I devoured it and quickly put together a bibliography of his work, cribbed from the "also by" list at the front of this book and whichever others I could locate in charity shops or on market stalls. This was before the internet, of course, so no Wikipedia to be an easy source of answers.
Most of Smith's books were published by New English Library, who had put out twenty-one of them by this point, most of them horror but also a war novel and four Disney novelisations. However, he had branched out in 1979 to write longer horror novels for Hamlyn, who also paid him more money for his work. His first book to be published in 1982 was one of theirs, 'Entombed', and that made six for them. At least so I thought. That assumption was shaken when I stumbled onto 'The Pluto Pact', sitting in a box halfway down the back aisle at a fleamarket in Huddersfield. This wasn't in my lists and finding it felt like I'd just caught sight of the Ark of the Covenant and it was within my budget.
Of course, I eventually discovered that there was a simple explanation. The first half dozen novels Smith wrote for Hamlyn had large print runs and went through multiple editions, five of them in a further Arrow edition after Hamlyn ceased their horror line. It was trivial to find them in the wild. 'The Pluto Pact', however, came after those. It and 'The Lurkers' were published late in 1982, at the end of Smith's time with Hamlyn, and they only saw one edition each, very possibly with a far lower print run. Neither was reprinted, not even by Arrow. They didn't turn up in the wild very often back in the eighties, let alone today. Without the internet, it would be easy to never find a copy.
And that's a shame because this is a decent novel, not one of Smith's standout titles but certainly a worthy one and one that combines so many of his standard approaches that it almost becomes a summation of what he was doing at the time. I haven't read it in decades, so was surprised to find how well it flowed. I'd mentally lumped it into a box with 'Warhead' as a grimmer look at the peril of nuclear power, but it really doesn't take that approach. 'Warhead' was surely as much a thriller as it was a horror novel, while this is pure horror throughout.
We're in Craiglowrie, a small Scottish town that's only grown beyond a village recently due to the placing of a revolutionary nuclear waste processing plant there. Naturally there's organised local opposition, the head of that effort being Bob Coyle, editor of the 'Craiglowrie Herald', but there's not as much as we might think, because what he dubs 'Holocaust' is bringing jobs and stability to a town that needs both. After all, it's not had the greatest history, going back to the time of legend, when a witchfinder burned a black magician at the stake there, only for Balzur to curse everybody in the town to death by fire. That's supposedly why so many die in Craiglowrie, a few survivors able to keep it barely alive.
And so we have a combination of ancient and modern, as we did in 'Doomflight' and so many of the horror novels Smith had published since then. The ancient is Balzur's curse, which Coyle resurrects for his anti-Holocaust articles, and the modern is the threat of deadly radiation. The sheer volume of nuclear waste that's coming into the Craiglowrie plant is unprecedented and the increased scale means increased risk, even if their safety measures are supposedly stricter than anywhere else in the world. The oxide processing techniques they're employing are new and cutting edge. What if a mistake was made and something goes wrong, you know, because a black magician has cursed the town and everyone in it?
So much of this book feels familiar, because it's quintessential Smith, but his traditional elements are combined in different ways to tell a new and topical story. It's set in the countryside, as almost all his books were, and it tackles the age-old conflict between locals, who understand the land and its history and traditions, and newcomers, who don't and often don't care. It has the tie back to an ancient evil that began in earnest with the druids in 'Doomflight' and was continuing on through a series of flashback scenes in the 'Sabat' novels. Of course, it has the fear of nuclear power that we saw in 'Warhead'.
It also has a fresh take on the unseen and inhuman killer that was so effective in 'Thirst'. Here, it's not weedkiller spilled into a city's water supply, it's the invisible danger of radiation, but the effect isn't much different. Coyle's own son, who like his sister works at the plant, is one of those affected by a leak and that turns him into a raging killer. His girlfriend, Linda Lakin, is a local who used to be a whore and he secretly fears might still be. When he discovers that he's burning up with Balzur's cursed fire, leaving him covered in ugly rashes, he takes it for a venereal disease that she's given him and so brutally murders her. He runs, long and far, when he realises what he's done, and that feels a little reminiscent of the constant moving around in 'The Son of the Werewolf'.
If the recurring themes in Smith's work make this feel so comfortable, it's a deep characterisation that makes it worthy. Bob Coyle is the most prominent and best-drawn character and he's given an array of conflicts to build on. He's a public figure with a powerful platform of his own, as the editor of the local paper, but the powers that be at the plant have crippled him through the unions; if he doesn't get his stories vetted, they'll walk, and that limits his voice. He's married to Jane but he's in love with his young secretary, Anne; Jane doesn't know about the ongoing affair but Sarah, his daughter, does and she ruthlessly holds a threat of revelation against him. He's the face of public opposition to the plant, but both his children work there. He has supporters but not everyone. It's a complex situation from moment one and it only gets more so as the book runs on.
Nobody else is as well-drawn as Bob Coyle, but Smith spends a lot of effort into ensuring that those other characters playing support aren't cardboard cutouts. If that's one of the biggest successes of the book, then perhaps it inherently means that there's less time for the more lurid horror scenes that Smith is so known for. There are some here, not least surrounding Richard Coyle, but there's a much greater threat of death in this one that there is an actual death toll. Even though it's clearly horror rather than thriller, Smith still builds some magnificent tension.
And so I liked this one a lot more and in different ways than I expected. It's not the depressing read it sounds like it ought to be, so it's no proto-grimdark novel like 'Warhead'. It's more traditional to Smith's usual horror novels, especially his more recent ones from the tail end of the seventies and into the eighties. It develops some of these themes a little further, as well as catering to the tastes of the day. It makes me look forward all the more to 'The Lurkers', up next, because I don't recall a lot about that one at all. I'm eager to rediscover it. ~~ Hal C F Astell
For more titles by Guy N Smith click here
|
|