If you've been following my Guy N. Smith run-through, you'll remember that this was the last of a trio of books that continued earlier series. 'Thirst II: The Plague' was a worthy sequel to, well, 'Thirst'. 'Demons' was a less worthy sequel to 'Deathbell', not least because it had didn't have any demons in it. Now, 'Crabs: The Human Sacrifice' delivers a sixth and final instalment in the 'Crabs' series for twenty-four years, by which time Guy had knocked out a further thirty-three books. As good as the Crabs had been to him, he was clearly done with them and this provided them with a last hurrah before the cancer that had been taking them down over the past few books finally finished the job.

It's a particularly legendary book in Smith's bibliography, albeit for none of the right reasons. It's proved to be a particularly tough title for collectors to find, copies not showing up in charity shops even at the time with the regularity of its predecessors. That will soon be resolved when Smith's daughter soon brings it back into print in a new trade paperback edition. The first four are already out, the fifth is on its way and this will follow soon thereafter. The other reason it's a notorious book is because of the cover art, which makes it look like it's the crabs performing human sacrifices, which, I'm very sad to say, is not the case. It's humans who perform a growing number of human sacrifices to the crabs. No crabs wield swords here. Sorry.

While it's not without its merits, it's another of Smith's books where he grabbed what he felt were appropriate pieces of other books and tacked them together in a new form, like a sort of Frankenstein's Monster. A lot of what we read here is reminiscent of earlier work, most overtly 'Alligators' but with lots of Mark Sabat too and a nod back to 'The Slime Beast', in addition to a bunch of logical references back to previous 'Crabs' books, especially 'Crabs on the Rampage'.

The first familiarity is the introduction of Pete Merrick as the villain of the piece because he's very much Maurice Young from 'Alligators' as a more present lead. He's another animal rights activist and another one who isn't reticent to kill for his cause. He injects strychnine into a set of Christmas turkeys in a Kings Lynn supermarket, causing eleven deaths, three of them kids. He strings wire between a couple of trees to decapitate Maj. Watterson, the master of a local hunt. And he takes down Wally Orme, a wildfowler on the Wash, beating him up, tying him up and leaving him to die. He even cuts off his legs with a sword and smashes his antique gun, the latter being the tougher scene for Guy to write, I'm sure.

So Merrick is serious. He's also highly capable. He's ex-SAS and a black belt in karate, reminding us of Mark Sabat as an outright villain rather than an anti-hero. He's been twice convicted for GBH and is working through a twelve-year suspended sentence. His girlfriend Christine takes a lot of abuse from him, but then she enjoys that. She's into bondage, humiliation and corporal punishment, so maybe she's a little bit Mark Sabat too, just not the dangerous part. She's very much a follower, doing whatever her boyfriend tells her to do, however outrageous.

You might be wondering where the crabs are, but the first one shows up on page 33. Brian and Louise are newly engaged and making love on the saltmarshes when a cancerous crab crawls up and rips them apart. It's not good news for them, of course, but Cliff Davenport is tracking the various sightings of the crabs and we're winning the war. The next one shows up on the Nene in the sights of a gunboat, which takes it down hard with three shells from the big gun and a bevy of rifle fire. Another one down. Surely not too many to go.

However, Merrick and Chrissie watch it happen and he calls it murder. Now the crabs are gods to him, gods of the ocean who deserve human sacrifices. They start with the spoiled eighteen-year-old daughter of Morland Delphore, who runs a successful fur business. They catch her in a trap, take her out on the Wash and strip her naked, then peg her out for the gods. It's another scene lifted straight out of 'Alligators' but with a setup and much earlier in the book. And, as parents bicker at each other, they call them, explain what they did to their daughter and officially claim responsibility. They're the Eastern Counties Animal Rights Group and they're now known.

In many ways, the crabs really don't have much to do here. In earlier books, they swarmed onto land and destroyed seaside towns, battled the armed forces and proved able tacticians. Here, they practically crawl into focus in isolation as best they can in their diseased state and mangle a few members of the public. By the end, they can't even eat them, just slice them apart with a slash of a pincer. The only real coup they manage to mount here comes in a burst of a couple of pages, sinking the gunboat and its crew in one and destroying a suspension bridge on the next. But that's pretty much it. They really kinda need someone like Merrick to peg naked eighteen-year-olds onto the flats so they don't run away.

And that makes Merrick the real monster here, rather than the crabs. They've become objects of pity and, rather like Smith might have been thinking as he wrote this, it's past time for them to just give up the fight and die already. And, if we hadn't realised this, then Merrick goes from outrage to outrage. If he wasn't batshit crazy to begin with, then he reaches that point when he exhumes Maj. Watterson's body, re-sever his head and split it open. If that didn't do it, setting up an altar with a dead crab on it and giving it their blood as an offering must be enough. This man isn't coming back from wherever he's taken himself.

There's more here, of course, but you should discover it for yourself. Some of it is horrific, some absolutely icky and some of it neatly perverted, all the things you want in a Guy N. Smith novel. I'm not sure if the cancerous crab communion is the worst of them, or whether it's a Sabat-style takedown of an inept minion by Susan Delphore's boyfriend, who's army and served during the Battle of Barmouth that was outlined in 'Night of the Crabs'. He chokes his assailant but takes too much air and leaves him a brain damaged child. So he takes him out on the flats and leaves him for the crabs. Nice guy.

What else we get, for the completists, are a few characters who may well be real. Certainly the house of Shep White on the Wash is real, the same landmark it was in 'The Slime Beast' and he was real too. Other wildfowlers mentioned include Tom Roade, Jack Fosdyke and the unwieldy name of Snowden Slights, which means that he's absolutely real, regarded as "The Last of the Yorkshire Wildfowlers". I need to check my eyes open for the others as I work through Smith's non-fiction on gamekeeping.

Next month, it's back to entirely original material with a book I've been looking forward to for a while, 'The Island', which I remember as a real gem. After that, it's one of my favourites from Smith's entire bibliography, namely 'Fiend'. It's going to a good couple of months! ~~ Hal C F Astell

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