I remember liking 'The Wood' when I first read it almost four decades ago when it was new, but it resonated with me on a fresh read in 2024. No wonder some Guy N. Smith fans consider this their favourite of his horror novels. I'm not sure if it truly ranks up there with 'Deathbell' and 'Fiend' in my estimation, but it's got to be close. It's a very weird, hallucinatory read, in which Guy finesses some of his favourite go-to tropes into perhaps the most highly effective form: Nazis, rapists, Oke priests and, most notably, the blurring of time.

Given that I coincidentally read Alison Uttley's 'A Traveller in Time' this month and even wrote up my review of it right before this one, I know that what's going on here is termed "time slip". Guy had used this in a number of books, so that characters in their present day mysteriously slip back to a previous era without moving in space. Sometimes he phrased it as a vision, such as in multiple Mark Sabat novels, but often as an actual transportation, like in 'Doomflight' where characters in the modern day suddenly find themselves centuries earlier, where they're promptly sacrificed by bloodthirsty druids. Yes, that happens here too.

What's new here is that it isn't simply now and then. Time is a wild and woolly thing in this book, so that multiple eras apparently coexist in the same space, with characters bleeding across from one to another without any control over the process. Why Droy Wood is like this, we have no idea and Guy has no intention of filling us in. It just is and it's a particularly evocative location for time to malfunction, being six hundred acres of swampy woodland close to the British coast. The locals talk in the Dun Cow about how people often go missing in Droy Wood, especially when fog swirls in from the coast. Nobody gets out when the mist covers the wood.

It's a quintessential location for a horror movie. All Guy has to do is feed people into it so they can interact on its swampy ground. Of course, the people he feeds in have to be a heady combination of horror movie villains and their victims, with a few token upstanding types to keep the dynamics flowing. Rinse and repeat. Stir until ready. Out of all Guy's books that I've devoured thus far in my current runthrough, this is the one that screams most obviously for a sequel. Bizarrely, he never wrote one, instead extending his 'Werewolf', 'Crabs' and 'Truckers' series and writing a follow-up to 'The Sucking Pit', another quintessential story set in a wood.

The first character we see arrive in Droy Wood is Bertie Haas, Luftwaffe pilot and devout Nazi, as his plane is shot down during an air raid over England and he parachutes into the wood. He wishes that he'd listened to the clairvoyant in Stuttgart who told him not to go. Victor Amery, clerk by day and fire-watcher for the Home Guard by night, watches him descend. Of course, he doesn't get out the wood, perhaps not unexpectedly given that he's the prologue, but he gets plenty to do within the pages that follow.

For a start, he gets to chain Carol Embleton up in Droy House, the decaying mansion that's as lost to Droy Wood as any of the unwary souls who ventured into it when the fog was in, even though he arrived in the wood forty years before she did. She's breaking it off with her conservation officer boyfriend, Andy Dark, by having a good time at the disco and walking home on her own. Sadly, she gets picked up in the rain by a pervert killer called James Foster, prompting rape in his car and an ill-advised escape by running naked into Droy Wood.

She gets chapter one and Andy Dark gets chapter two, as he chases in to find her. Chapter three is PC Jock Houliston; who's part of the search team for both of them. Before long, Thelma Brown, an old friend of Carol's, gets a chapter two as she reenacts her friend's last night, re-living far more of it than she ever intended, due to the wood's sinister influence on the cop chaperoning her, Det. Const. Alan Lee. And so we go, with a few other characters joining the fray from stories told at the Dun Cow, like Vallum, a man who killed his wife and her lover in Droy Wood back in 1932. Of course, neither was ever seen again, except by us because they show up here in this mishmash of time.

Frankly, the whole idea of this book is a highlight but Guy doesn't skimp on the details either. He's happy to give us ghost smugglers battling Customs officers, Oke priests sacrificing rapists to their gods and Nazi pilots chaining up their victims in decaying mansions, but he's also happy to keep it happening because one of the benefits of time not behaving properly is that characters don't get to escape the wood as easily as by dying. Their nightmarish existences continue just as long as the wood desires. There are no ways out, making this a literal Hellscape, even if it doesn't look like an artwork by Hieronymous Bosch.

There are a couple of particularly gruesome moments that are worth calling out for extra-special mention. One lady, who isn't having the best day of her life when she runs into Droy Wood anyway, finds herself pushed into a chasm by a ten-year-girl, only to then be raped by the animated corpse of her father. Meanwhile, a gamekeeper who both represents Guy himself and doesn't, given that his spaniel, like one of Guy's, is named Muffin, finds himself chained up by Haas and eaten by rats until he drowns. Guy was layering the horrors on top of horrors in this one.

It's not entirely dark, because there is a happy ending of sorts, but there are oodles of depravity and horror to enjoy and endure before we get there. The worst thing about 'The Wood' is that it's over far too quickly. The structure of the book is so fluid that it could have been a short story or a doorstop of a novel, but Guy kept it relatively lean and mean at a hundred and seventy pages. It's fair to say that I wanted a hundred and seventy more. As I mentioned, I'd have settled for a sequel but Guy never wrote one. His next half dozen horror novels were all standalone originals, then he returned to 'Thirst' and 'Deathbell' for sequels instead of this one.

Oh, well! At least we'll always have 'The Wood', pun well and truly intended. You just wouldn't want to go there in real life. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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