As I mentioned in my review of 'Cannibal Cult', which I reviewed last November, that wasn't meant to be the third book. The extant synopses that Smith pitched to New English Library list this book, 'The Druid Connection', as the intended third in the series, but it was moved back for some reason to be the fifth, following a novel Smith that never wrote called 'The Soul-Stealers', then forward to become the fourth, which is where it was published.

It's also a particular important book for me, because this is where I discovered his work. It wasn't June 1983, when it was published, but it wasn't a long time afterward when I stumbled upon it in a Welsh charity shop. Even before I became a teenager, I was snapping up every horror novel I could find from charity shops and market stalls and had already devoured a bunch of James Herbert and Shaun Hutson titles. We used to pass those around the playground at junior school reading all the most salacious bits. Had one of us found Guy N. Smith at that point, he could have become our new favourite. For me, he soon did because of 'The Druid Connection'.

My guess is that New English Library suggested that it move back in the series for two reasons and, as I've only talked about that thus far in an article published in Polish in a Phantom Press collection of all the Sabat novels and stories, it's about time I talk about it here in English.

One reason is that the first two books took place primarily on home soil, gradually expanding Mark Sabat's world onto the continent, while the third expanded that further, spending most of its pages in Switzerland. This, however, brings everything back home again, which seems like a poor choice. A second reason is that it becomes rather reminiscent of 'The Graveyard Vultures', which also meant that the more distance in the series between the two books, the better.

All that meant that this read better to me as my first Guy N. Smith than my eightieth, or wherever I've reached in his bibliography thus far. And that's because it read better to me as my first Sabat rather than in hindsight after re-reading the first three. For instance, we know from the first book that this ex-priest, ex-SAS man and exorcist is not going to be welcome when he's called into a local village church to investigate blasphemous events. A young curate has been murdered, a young girl has had her throat slit and a vicar has been left mad after a botched exorcism, but there's another murder on his first night there, so all suspicion must fall onto Sabat, right?

That murder happens in the village church itself, reality fading away to be replaced by an ancient heathland, complete with a naked girl on a stone altar being sacrificed by hooded figures. Yes, it's clear even earlier in this book that it's going to be about the druids, but then that was right there in the title. Much of this is also reminiscent of 'Doomflight', the sale of the one remaining tract of land in the church's trust sold off inappropriately to an unscrupulous builder, prompting the ghost druids to wreak revenge. They've "lived with the new religion but they are not prepared to tolerate no religion at all." And so things get bloody.

I remember feeling that this was an outrageous, over-the-top read when I first encountered it, but as I mentioned, it was my first Guy N. Smith. There are certainly plenty of outrageous and over the top scenes, but this pales in comparison to 'The Graveyard Vultures' and even 'Cannibal Cult'.

Sure, it starts out with the death of the Revd. Philip Owen, a name last used as the werewolf in the very first Guy N. Smith novel, 'Werewolf by Moonlight'. He's ushered into a wicker man by ghostly druids and it's a much smaller structure than the one we remember from the film of that name, a mere eight feet in height, so he fills most of it. There's a scene in which Sabat rapes a woman who he had saved the night before, in front of her ghostly druid father, who can't enter the pentagram that he's chalked on the floor beneath them. He's never been the purest of heroes but he steps a little closer to his evil brother Quentin in this book.

The outrageous touch extends to characters, this one featuring the gloriously named Hirschlanden Warrior of L'Impernal, who serves the Cult of the Severed Head, so ancient a character that a stone sculpture of him standing five feet tall counts as the oldest life size anthropomorphic sculpture of the Iron Age north of the Alps. He indulges in a little psychic warfare with Sabat but ends up inviting him to a druid trial, under strict conditions of course, and our favourite anti-hero is even honoured as their Arch-Druid for the evening.

All this was a new world for me back in the mid-eighties. I ate it all up, every outrageous scene but also every scene in which Sabat chalks his pentagram for safety and heads onto the astral plane to investigate what's going on. Mark Sabat was a dynamic hero, always willing to do things, even if it carried huge danger, and the fact that some of those things really weren't positive didn't matter a heck of a lot back then. This was action horror and I adored it.

Now, of course, with a huge amount of Smith's work behind me, it doesn't play quite so well. It isn't the best Sabat novel of the original four, let alone the best Smith novel. It's a little too derivative of the first one, just supposedly bigger and better, given that we end up at Stonehenge. It doesn't feel bigger and better and it doesn't move the series forward like its predecessor did. It was great as an introduction for me back then but it's lesser in context.

Even so, I always felt that Sabat was a character who warranted more books, especially at a time when the Satanic panic was a real and present danger (not the people supposedly doing that crap, but the people hawking how awful those imaginary activities were, all to perpetuate their agenda of restricting freedoms). However, this was it, with the exception of the occasional short story here and there until 2018, thirty five years later, when Smith returned with 'Wistman's Wood'. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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