This New English Library novel from 1981 might look exactly like what we might expect from Guy N. Smith but it turns out to be something else entirely. The back cover blurb is split into two and that proves key: the first section is about an urge to savage, to taste blood, but the second is about the anguish that comes afterwards with realisation. And, while there's certainly savagery, what holds this book together isn't gore but the despair at discovering what's been done. It's a psychological drama more than a horror novel.

Smith started his career as a novelist with 'Werewolf by Moonlight', the first in a trilogy about an entirely English werewolf, something that was previously seen as far more continental. 'Return of the Werewolf' continued that saga and 'The Son of the Werewolf' wrapped it up. In between book one and book two, Smith published 'Night of the Werewolf', albeit only in German at that time, a fresh but entirely unrelated werewolf novel, this time set in Scotland.

And here, he returned to the werewolf genre for a fifth time, with another standalone novel, but this time it has quite a twist. In short, we don't actually know that Ray Tyler, mild mannered bank clerk who lives a dull life in the English Midlands, is a werewolf or not. Now, he's convinced that he is, but we never see him change physically. Not once does he transform into a hairy beast, and his nails don't extend into claws and his teeth into fangs. To anyone watching during one of his rages, he's simply psychopathic. And this whole angle, kept deliberately ambiguous, is never cleared up. The beast on the cover only exists, as far as we can tell, in Tyler's imagination.

Tyler, like so many of Smith's characters in the seventies and eighties, worked in a bank, this time as a chief cashier, a respectable but dead end position with no possibilities for advancement. He's married to Lil, who nags him silly, and his only real interest is a new fascination for self-sufficiency, another common Smith topic. He's bought a chicken coop and some hens. He plans to grow stuff in his back garden on the Mildenhall Estate. He dreams about getting away from it all but never has a real plan to do so. Traditional Smith characters in that vein have usually bit the bullet and moved to the countryside before the first chapter opens, so Tyler is a departure.

Another way in which he differs from typical Smith characters is that he's given up smoking. Sure, he used to smoke cigarettes and still has cravings, but he's a week into not smoking any more and he already hates the smell of tobacco smoke. That even prompts Lil to give up too. Nobody in this book smokes a pipe or wields a shotgun and, while there are characters Smith would have fleshed out with details from his own background, there isn't an obvious avatar for him this time. It's all a step into something new.

There's violence in the very first chapter, but it's unexpected. Tyler is leaving the bank one evening when he catches three youths trying to break into his car. Something snaps in him and, though one is carrying an iron bar, he takes them all on and surprises them with his savagery. He breaks arms. He breaks noses. He ruptures testicles. He nearly drives over one of them as he leaves. After he's safely home, we discover that his wife doesn't believe a word of it, because he's a pushover. Timid is her go to word for him. She soon changes her tune, of course.

While we never learn what triggers Tyler into becoming whatever it is that he becomes, that incident is only one possibility. There's tragedy in his life, as their six-year-old son died three years earlier, his scooter running out of control down their driveway until he's hit by a passing car. He also has a book that he picked up recently on self-sufficiency, but it's a beat up 19^th-century volume that has chapters on herbal remedies from the middle ages and folklore of the period. That's how he finds out about werewolves, because there's a long section on the subject, which I actually recognise as an article that Smith wrote called 'The Werewolf Legend'. I guess you don't owe royalties if you're quoting yourself! Anyway, Tyler decides that the book is evil and thus has to get rid of it. Needless to say, that doesn't help.

He also becomes whatever he becomes relatively slowly. Sure, the scarlet curtain that he believes descends over his eyes does so in that first chapter, taking down the carjackers, but he can control it when it does. His wife nags him that night and he wants to hurt her, but he doesn't. Instead, he goes outside, runs around on all fours and howls at the moon. Henshaw, the bank manager where Tyler works unfairly calls him out about a transaction he made, and Tyler gets mad, but Henshaw slaps him first before he punches him back. Fred Walton next door reports his hens to the council, but he doesn't seriously throw a pitchfork at him. Not quite.

It gets serious in chapter three when he rapes his wife, taking her roughly. Two chapters later, he's raping another woman, who foolishly sees his troubles through the window and invites him over to seduce him. Suddenly Lil's going to see her mum and staying overnight because Ray is a dangerous man. And things gradually escalate, his rages coming more often, lost time more apparent, regret more acute in the morning when he wakes up and confronts what he's done.

However, Smith holds back until page 100 of 176 to give us an honest-to-goodness death scene and, even then, it's not at the hands of Ray Tyler. By comparison, Smith's previous novel, Manitou Doll, featured an Indian massacre in the prologue and multiple deaths in the first chapter, including an unborn baby that its mother didn't even know existed yet, a pair of beheadings caused by a curse and an outright biker gang war. This is uncharacteristic reticence on Smith's part to deliver death and destruction in copious quantities. He's clearly trying to do something different, during an era of his writing when he was trying all sorts of approaches to keep things fresh.

In one way, he succeeds. The psychological drama that torments Ray Tyler is fascinating and it's an impressive characterisation unlike anything Smith had written before. However, that's by far the best angle of the book. There isn't much of a plot beyond how the change in Tyler escalates as the chapters run on. It's literally all about him, even when it isn't. We discover late in the novel, as an aside, that he didn't actually kill someone he thought he had, because a youth has been arrested for the crime. We might wonder if the cops are inept or we're dealing with an unreliable witness, but the bottom line is that it doesn't matter. What matters is that Tyler thinks he did it and it's a perception that's tormenting him.

What you get out of this book is going to depend on whether you buy into that fundamental core characterisation. If you do, this is the deepest novel Smith had written up to this point and it'll be well worth your attention. If you don't, it's going to seem a little disappointing, especially if you'd already read at least some of the various other Smith books that came before it. It features less sex, less violence and fewer deaths than almost anything Smith had written before. Fortunately, if you're looking for that sort of thing, Smith's next novel would promise all of that, being a return to his most famous series with the gloriously named 'Crabs on the Rampage'. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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