Guy N. Smith's second novel for American publisher Zebra has some similarities to the first, 'Witch Spell', not least through the strikingly similar cover and the ability for the principal characters to hurt or even kill people through the power of their minds. However, it takes a very different look at the Satanic Panic, which serves as a constant backdrop until it bleeds into the foreground later in the novel. I haven't crosschecked the references to news stories but I remember the era and so believe they're all real. I should take a look at Guy's scrapbooks next time I'm back at my mum's.

What's odd to me is that it's an incredibly English book, not just because it's by an English author but because it doesn't translate particularly well to the American audience, who were, of course, the people who saw the book on their shelves. Any older fans back in the UK could only buy it from Guy himself or as an import. It's still never seen publication in its native country. This is partly due to English terminology—"C of E school", "orange squash", "poll tax"—but mostly through it being fundamentally a class struggle, with the middle class characters, used to having a sense of control, losing it steadily to a lower class lout from the local council estate.

The primary character is Marcel Hart, who's a troubled kid, in court next month on four charges of burglary that were presumably to feed his gambling problem. He's lower class, from the Sandpits council estate, and doesn't seem like the sort of kid that the middleclass Gorlays would take in as a favour for a week. However, it seems likely that Rankin and Carol Gorlay are wife swappers who have been slumming it with Tom and Judy Hart for some time. The latter are going on holiday, in large part to get away from their son, so it's the least they can do to take care of him for a week.

I don't believe we learn how old Marcel is, though the back cover blurb suggests twelve. That's a little too young, I think, but then it also explains he'll be only at the Gorlay's for three days, even though the very first paragraph of the novel states that it'll be for a week. I'm not convinced that whoever wrote the blurb actually read the novel. It seems to me that he ought to be somewhere between the two Gorlay children, Glenn being thirteen and Cathy almost seventeen. Of course, it doesn't matter particularly. It's just harder to buy into what happens if Marcel is only twelve.

And what happens is that, even though he doesn't want to stay with the Gorlays, he ends up doing just that and making their lives a misery. That seems like an easy position to sympathise with, the feeling of doing a good deed that gradually backfires on you until there's absolutely nothing you can do about it. Initially, of course, it's minor stuff. He smokes in the house. He steals ten pounds. He masturbates in Glenn's room while the latter is trying to sleep. The most blatant he gets early on is to make Carol cut her wrist in the kitchen through force of will, but how could she prove that it was him?

Of course, the bodies quickly pile up but always in similar fashion. Marcel prompts an elephant to stomp on the head of its keeper, but he's not even in the enclosure; anyone watching would know that he was on the other side of the safety barrier. Incidentally, I can only think of two deaths by elephant in horror novels, the other also being courtesy of Smith, in 'The Neophyte'. Marcel also causes the death of a baked potato salesman by transforming both him and his cart into a blazing inferno. Rankin sees Marcel who's yards away but grinning at this horrible death.

So this is 'Witch Spell' taken in a completely different direction. Marcel's parents aren't powerful witches and sorcerers. However, we do gradually learn that they're Satanists, their holiday likely a trip to a black mass in a different part of the country. While they're probably into it for similar thrills to those they get from wife swapping, they haven't managed to entirely keep it away from their son, who copies a cabalistic circle and puts it to powerful use, perhaps because of the special talent he has and they probably don't.

I found this fascinating, because the backdrop of Satanic Panic is very aware that it's all nonsense, well almost. Rankin Gorlay is a journalist who's written a piece on ritual abuse for the 'Advertiser', and it's all kids getting back at the parents, talking up what they saw in adult/horror films, hoaxes by teenagers, etc.. The real cases mentioned in passing all boiled down to a combination of those. However, Smith has fun with floating the idea in a horror novel that underneath all the nonsense is a dangerous reality that could be tapped into by kids exploiting their parents' carelessness. It's as if he's laughing at everyone buying into the Satanic Panic but also exploiting their fears for his fiction.

He escalates that really well in ways that seem familiar to me. Sure, teenagers test boundaries as a matter of course, but, being a metalhead and a horror fan in the UK in the eighties led me to an interest in the occult too. That was far from uncommon. Of course, we weren't robbing graves for human skulls we could keep in our bags; we were finding bleached skulls of sheep who had died on the moors. However, by the time this novel was released in 1995, the Norwegian black metal elite had taken what Venom were doing for effect to real life extremes with church burnings, murders and eventually Nazism.

Given how obviously I should connect with this story as someone who lived in that country through that era, it almost feels odd to me that I connected with it more on its loss of control angle. That's almost a suspense/thriller mindset, but rather than the scary villain being a stalker or an ex-lover, it's just a kid but one who has power. How do you deal with a bad house guest who watches human sacrifice videos on repeat; who may or may not have triggered your dog's fatal heart attack; who exposes your wife swapping secret in front of your kids, who you'd been careful to keep out of that side of your life? And no, you can't just kick him out, for legal reasons. Child services are watching. You can't have him arrested either, because there's no proof of anything illegal.

Smith would publish two further novels for Zebra before they cancelled their horror line. I haven't read any of them since they came out, but I'm looking forward to rekindling my acquaintance with the other two, 'Dead End' and 'Water Rites', which I'm remembering as unusual novels in Smith's bibliography. I'll get there over the next couple of months, along with his other two animal books as Jonathan Guy that saw a hardback release from Julia MacRae Books. ~~ Hal C F Astell

For more titles by Guy N Smith click here