Guy N. Smith's first of four books for 1987 feels like a response. Two titles earlier, on the other side of 'Cannibals', was 'Snakes', a thriller masquerading as a horror novel and ending up disappointing because it really didn't want to do what readers expected. 'Alligators' is so close to being precisely what those readers expected that it's hard to imagine it wasn't written for that specific reason.

Certainly, the parallels are frequent and biting. Both books start out in a reptile house, the home of a variety of dangerous creatures who will soon escape into the countryside. They promptly rack up a growing death toll as panicked locals, guided by an expert who isn't remotely in charge, try to track them down before more people die. What they need is a change in the weather to kill off the cold-blooded creatures but, before it happens, that expert saves the day by employing specialists  from the animal kingdom. In many ways, 'Alligators' is the same novel as 'Snakes'.

However, there are also notable differences. Most obviously, this is a horror novel unashamed to be a horror novel, so the bodies add up quicker, further and in more outrageous fashion. It's more brutal, more sleazy and more gratuitous. Chapter one is basically a sex scene, merely done with a pair of alligators. She's from the Amazon, she's eighteen-feet-long and she has a wild passion. He's been bred in captivity but he's up for whatever she has in mind. Characters like Maurice Young and Keith Prescott do things here far beyond the twisted dreams of anyone in 'Snakes'.

Young is the first pivotal human character, because he's an animal rights activist who's broken into Alex Kerris's reptile house with the goal of freeing the innocent beasts within from their prison. It isn't remotely a good idea and two of his three companions promptly pay the price, Kev and Ian an appetiser for what's still to come. The third, his lover Susie Lee, is so horrified that she hightails it out of there, both the reptile house and Young's life and confesses all to the local vet, Philip Grant, who's advising the authorities on the search. He promptly hires her and before we can blink, they fall into bed together.

Unintended consequences aside, Young does succeed in his goals, meaning that there are twelve animals now loose in the wilds of Staffordshire, eleven of them for the very first time, having been born in captivity. Only Annie, the Amazon caiman, remembers the wild and adapts quickly to being thrust back into it. The others are her mate, their six hatchlings and four Mississippi alligators. All are deadly, even the little ones, as five-year-old Daniel Stein quickly finds out when he sees them in his garden pond and tries to feed them bread.

There were only eight snakes on the loose in 'Snakes', so twelve alligators provide a fifty percent bonus. They make themselves immediately scarce while the authorities put steel mesh barriers on the bridges and station army sharpshooters at logical points. They get the first kill, but the second floats into view, a victim of cyanide poisoning at the hands of poachers. Water bailiff Elwyn Evans soon stumbles onto them as they're being devoured by Annie and her hatchlings. The death toll is mounting nicely on both sides and Smith is more than happy to keep the scoreboard busy.

That scoreboard isn't only keeping track of humans and alligators either, because Smith imposes a lot of collateral damage in this one. Keith Prescott, who I mentioned earlier, is a yob with a grudge against a local councillor, so he sacrifices his aunt's budgie and his neighbour's rabbit in pursuit of catching one of the alligators alive. He manages it, too, and slips inside the Boydell's house, where young Sarah's cat Tiger tragically fails to save her from being bitten. That's three more species of victim right there and we haven't got to the otter hounds yet. Not all the dogs die in this one but, if that's the line you won't cross, let's just say that this one isn't for you.

That said, Smith treats his "monsters" sympathetically in this book because they're merely doing what comes naturally, just like King in 'Caracal' and the snakes in 'Snakes'. Annie doesn't just have herself to feed, she has half a dozen little babies to feed too, none of whom have a conception of human beings having any function being meat. It's those humans who serve as the bad guys here, initially Maurice Young but later the poachers and Keith Prescott and a string of others. Most of the humans in this book aren't close to being as sympathetic as the alligators.

In fact, Smith even kills off another character clearly inspired by himself. When he started out, the Smith avatars were the heroes, like Gordon Hall in 'Werewolf by Moonlight', but they evolved into mere protagonists like Peter Fogg in 'The Lurkers' and eventually to lowlifes like Roger Stafford, a writer of the sort of smut Smith wrote for porn mags in the early seventies. He's on the barge that he uses for affairs with married women when a caiman chomps off his hand, followed promptly by the rest of him, his screaming nude mistress witness to "the grinding of the skull, the beast rolling it around its mouth as a child might try and bite on a gobstopper."

The only truly sympathetic human characters here are Philip and Susie, whatever part she played in kicking events into motion, even if it's hard not to feel for the former master of otter hounds as he weeps at the sight of his dogs, dead or mangled by the teeth of the caimans, an ironic fate that few might appreciate. Talking of Susie, this was Smith's forty-third novel for adults, the first in the second half of his output in that realm, yet this is the first time, if my memory serves, that animal rights activists have shown up to cause havoc. That's such a quintessential Smith storyline that its appearance here surprised me, not because it's there but because it's there for the first time.

That's one reason to seek this book out, as rare as it's becoming, but I appreciated it for far more than that. There's karma all over this one, whether it's a positively-drawn character like Susie Lee redeeming herself after an ill-advised beginning, paying a sort of price in the process, or negative ones like Maurice Young or Keith Prescott (even Roger Stafford) getting their just desserts in the most horrific of fashions. Animals serve as the good guys again, not just the alligators who are the true victims of the piece, but Tiger the cat and Brutus and his fellow otter hounds. And, more than anything else, it's the horror novel that 'Snakes' wasn't. ~~ Hal C F Astell

For more titles by Guy N Smith click here