Guy N. Smith's fortieth horror novel may well be his most personal. He's written himself into a few of his books but mostly in a wish fulfilment sort of way. Gordon Hall, the protagonist of 'Werewolf by Moonlight', his debut novel, is clearly Guy, but he's a bit more dashing, a bit more heroic and a bit more desirable to the ladies, as wish fulfilment characters tend to be. Here, his avatar is called Les Earnshaw and he's a townie come good as an organic smallholder in the country, living in Pen-y-Cwm, a small Welsh village. However, while he gives Earnshaw and his family scenes, they're not the protagonists because there really aren't any central characters at all.

The setup is this. Pen-y-Cwm is a quiet village, with a population of only 462, but it's suffering from the presence of Roeder Agrochemicals Ltd., who have a research center there. It's not the closed shop that the Midlands Biological Research Center was in 'Bats Out of Hell', whose story sparked from an accident. It's actively doing outdoors testing, releasing its sprays onto the local area, as a way to see what works in a live environment beyond their laboratories. As a result, Earnshaw, who has been in Pen-y-Cwm for five years, is fighting Roeder in the letters column of the local paper, a voice that everyone in the village knows, whether they agree with him or not.

The reason that 'Abomination' doesn't feel as preachy as it could is because Smith lets everybody in the story grouse. There are two sides in this David vs. Goliath battle. David is Earnshaw and the old timers tend to be on his side, acknowledging that he's talking sense, even if he isn't a local boy. Goliath isn't only Roeder, but also Len Wiseman, boss of the local farmer's union, who sees all the benefits that pesticides can bring to the modern farmer. Farmers who don't go in for the organic approach and like how much less work they have to do when sprays do it for them tend to take that side. And, while it's clear which side Smith is on, as an organic smallholder himself, he allows them all to bitch and moan and even things out somewhat.

'Abomination' came out in 1986, the first of his books to be brought into print by Arrow, and there was a clear reason for it, so clear that it constitutes the final word of the book. Two years earlier, forty-five tons of a gas called methyl isocyanate, was released from an insecticide plant in Bhopal, India, that was run by the local subsidiary of Union Carbide. It wasn't deliberate, the release due to substandard safety procedures, but it had a powerful effect. It killed between fifteen to twenty thousand people and left half a million others physically damaged. 'Abomination' is clearly Smith transplanting the Bhopal disaster into his own neck of the woods but also using it as a way to warn people of the dangers of using chemicals in the countryside.

While methyl isocyanate is mentioned and ends up playing a part in the final chapter as a sort of pessimistic coda to the story, it's not the pesticide that Roeder deliberately releases here. That's a chemical called DD7, which adapts the approach of certain weedkillers, namely to stimulate the growth of weeds until they outgrow themselves and die, to insects. Therefore, Roeder expects the local bugs to grow beyond typical size, which everyone living in Pen-y-Cwm can vouch is happening, whether they blame the agrochemical plant or the ongoing drought, but they also expect them to die, which they're stubbornly not doing.

And that brings this topical story into Smith's favourite subgenre of horror, namely animals on the rampage, albeit with one notable change to the formula. Usually, the horror is focused on a single species, whether it's giant crabs, locusts or bats, each of which Smith had already written about, a further couple in snakes and alligators due within a year, or the many other species covered by an array of other authors: rats, slugs, spiders, pigs, caterpillars, jellyfish, whatever. Here, Smith takes a very different approach, because DD7 affects a whole range of species and he's happy for them all to grow to three or four times their natural size and become aggressive in the process.

The first signs we see of this are when large frogs chase Earnshaw's daughter Emma in their back garden, a scene that references a space hopper, such a memorable horror in 'Satan's Snowdrop'. The first utterly outrageous scene features an old lady called Martha Vickers and a cabbage that erupts at her touch because it's full of giant earwigs, which promptly infiltrate her body and eat her from the inside. It's the most horrific scene in a long while from Smith but more are ready to join it soon enough.

Because there's no central protagonist, Les Earnshaw not riding up to save the day like, say, Cliff Davenport in many 'Crabs' novels, Smith is able to take the ensemble cast approach that he took in more pessimistic books like 'Bats Out of Hell' and queue up new victims for new giant bugs. The story does progress, this scene connected to that one, but it's really just a framework for a bunch of gruesome death scenes. And here, Smith doesn't remotely disappoint. Even having covered all thirty-nine of his horror novels to precede this one, I often found myself shocked at how far Smith went. 'Abomination' would stand tall among the splatterpunk or extreme horror titles of today if it were brand-new and it's almost forty years old.

It's hard to pick favourite icky scenes, not all of which result in icky death. When an army of flying ants attack the Pen-y-Cwm junior school, schoolmistress Sue Richards prevents it from going very wrong indeed. Earnshaw's accurate voice in the wilderness aside, she's easily the most endearing and sympathetic character in the book and as close as it gets to a hero, just as Franklin Roeder is the most overt villain, knowing full well the limitations of DD7 but releasing it anyway under the false reports he makes his employees write.

Certainly whoever owned my first edition paperback before me, which is an ex-library copy, had a favourite scene because he or she ripped it out of the novel. It's one in which shy schoolboy virgin Alan Marsden finds himself a girl at dance class who's willing to meet him on the riverbank to pop his cherry, but his orgasm to be spoiled by the realisation that they're both being eaten alive by giant ticks. Fortunately I have a pristine copy of the second edition and was able to read through this scene in that instead. It isn't the only scene to connect orgasm with being eaten alive either. Later on, we encounter what could be described as ant rape fan fiction. Oh yes, Smith goes there.

Surprisingly, the most disgusting scene isn't one in which animals eat humans, but the other way around. Little Andy Woodbridge is an ADHD nightmare for his parents but he outdoes himself at one point when he decides to eat a host of woodlice. He's completely honest about it too, though nobody believes him until he shows them and the results are precisely what you expect. So much for the lounge carpet. Just as inevitable is the following scene, when Andy stumbles onto a cache of extra-large woodlice and things go gloriously wrong for the little brat.

And so we go. All the little creatures in Pen-y-Cwm are growing to three or four times their usual size: aphids, ladybirds, moths, greenfly, caterpillars... There are stag beetles massing in the local church and there's a grave full of worms that writhe like snakes. Once the drought breaks and the village gets a good storm, the focus shifts to slugs, newts, frogs, toads, lizards... For anyone who's into the quintessentially British subgenre of horror that is animals on the rampage, this is truly a gift that keeps on giving.

There is one other detail that stands out in 2024, which once again puts Smith ahead of the curve. That was last obvious in 'Deathbell' and 'The Undead', from 1980 and 1983 respectively, where he gave deaf characters prominent parts. Here, he introduces us to John Holden, who feels topical in an era in which authors like Alison Rumfitt and Gretchen Felker-Martin write horror novels about trans characters. Back in 1986, I'd probably have read Holden as a transvestite, which he certainly thinks about himself, but it's clear that he goes far beyond that. He doesn't merely like wearing women's clothes; he actively wants to be a woman. He wishes that he has a vagina and fantasises about a muscular man filling it. In 2024, it's clear that he's not a transvestite; she's a pre-surgery trans woman.

And that's another way in which this feels notably ahead of its time. This is a visceral Smith novel that goes places even his books don't usually go and I wish it was still in print so that I could throw it at the modern extreme horror crowd. It does everything their books do, but with a message to boot. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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