When it comes to the honour of being Guy N Smith’s
most mucus splattered, puss ridden book, 1989’s The Festering must surely lift
the prize. Written in the aftershock of
the AIDS crisis, Smith’s pitch to his publishers here was presumably along the lines
of ‘what if a disease worse than AIDS came along...and what if it emanated from
a borehole in the Welsh countryside’.
Exit the AIDS crisis, enter ‘The Festering Death’.
Before tackling that contemporary topic though, The
Festering takes us back to ye olden days, where sad wench Rachel pines for the
return of her true love, handsome forester Tabor, who has gone to London to
seek his fortune. When Tabor returns
however, he comes, not baring riches, but oozing ulcers and weeping sores, all
but confirming Rachel’s father’s suspicion that “the fellow has gone to London
in search of whores”. Since love and
compassion for your fellow man were in short supply back then, the diseased,
barely human Tabor is ostracized by the village, and falls foul of the type of Witchfinder
who “never left a village without a hanging”.
Sure enough, Tabor is soon hung from the nearest tree, and having been
judged to be carrying ‘the festering death’ by the Witchfinder, his corpse is hastily
buried in a deep grave by the terrified villagers.
The Festering then fast forwards to 1989, and takes on
a semi-autobiographic tone as the focus shifts to Mike and Holly Mannion. A young couple who’ve been seduced away from
the bright lights of the Midlands in favour of moving to the sticks, and
renovating a small, semi- derelict stone cottage in the remote Welsh
countryside. All of which echoes Smith’s
own experiences leaving city living and the banking industry behind him in the
mid-1970s, and moving to a converted barn in the hills of the Shropshire/Wales
border. In a cheeky, self-referential touch,
Smith has Mike Mannion cite his influence for the move as a friend who “had
been a clerk with reasonable prospects but he had thrown them all overboard for
a five acre smallholding that was mostly Welsh mountain scrubland”. What follows is a relatively realistic ‘fish
out of water’ tale, as the naive couple struggle to adapt to the colossal
change of life they’ve taken on, the romantic notion of the ‘self-sufficiency’
lifestyle quickly giving way to a harsh reality. The Mannions are met with condescending
attitudes from the locals, who nevertheless see them as the source of rich
pickings, especially when a hydraulic ram fails the couple, requiring the
creation of a borehole in order to supply the cottage with running water. Soon the Mannion’s peace is shattered by
noisy drilling equipment, uncouth labourers Tommy and Jim, and the arrival of
Nick Paton, a sexually inexperienced plumber who can’t keep his mind on the
stopcocks when Holly is around “he found himself fascinated by the rear view of
her in those ragged cut-off denim shorts.
Suddenly he was glad he had answered the phone that morning and hadn’t
gone straight to fix Mrs King’s toilet”.
It all proves an unwanted distraction for Mike, who like Smith himself,
moved to the country to pursue his creative side. In Mike’s case, painting landscapes, and is
financially able to keep his head above water by knocking those out at a speedy
rate, much to his employer’s delight.
Given these close parallels to Smith’s life, you do
have to wonder if part of his motivation for writing The Festering was to
settle a few real-life scores. In his
1996 book ‘Writing Horror Fiction’ Smith does admit to basing certain
characters on real people, while advising budding horror authors to follow his
lead ...but make sure to cover your tracks slightly “change a few mannerisms
and give a different physical description from that of your acquaintance”. Frank Bennion, the head of the drilling firm
that the Mannions are paying to work on the cottage, is Smith’s main source of
hostility here. The dapper Bennion
arrives on their doorstep with pound signs in his eyes, having clearly gotten
rich from out of their depth townies in dire need of a borehole. Bennion notes that this is the 601st
borehole he was worked on. Anyone who
ever did labouring work at Guy N Smith’s place may also have been inclined to
take him off their Christmas card list after reading The Festering. Jim, the older of Bennion’s two man workforce,
is described as “a gorilla dressed in filthy human work clothes, dragging his
feet, head hung low, long arms swinging at his sides”. Coarse oaf as Jim might be, Smith still gifts
him the greatest, sleaziest, line of the entire book. After co-worker Tommy admits that his girlfriend
is no oil painting, Jim still encourages Tommy to screw her, on the reasoning
that “you don’t look at the mantelpiece when you’re poking the fire”. Classic Smith.
Any impatient punter questioning ‘where’s the horror,
Guy?’ is rewarded when the book splits from reality and the Festering truly hits
the fan towards the end of chapter six.
Drilling down to Tabor’s resting place results in the festering plague
becoming airborne and unleashed upon the modern world. The first to catch a dose of it is Tommy,
whose flesh is soon a mass of ulcers, sores and puss “the stuff came out in
never-ending syrupy streams”. Since the disease
attacks his loins first, Tommy mistakenly diagnoses himself with an STD, and
puts the blame for his condition on his “poxy whore” girlfriend. As his body falls apart, Tommy takes a
vengeful drive to visit his girlfriend, who is already naked, and having
started without him “she played with herself in a crude attempt to arouse him”,
finds herself being mounted by the incredible melting man.
As the Mannion’s workforce begins to literally
disintegrate, so does their relationship.
Mirroring Tabor before him, Mike Mannion takes off to London for a
time. There he fulfils a lifelong
ambition to have sex with a prostitute, whose services he seeks out thanks to a
pricey ‘Contacts’ magazine “Christ, it was eight quid. So it had to be the real thing”. While the cat’s away, the Festering works its
unholy mojo on Holly too. Rather than
reduce her to a sticky mess though, the disease gives her the opportunity to
cause several sticky messes of her own.
The Festering causing Holly to develop a high sex drive, that is turned
in the direction of Nick the Plumber “for a few seconds everything else was forgotten,
the borehole, the deaths, even the decorating”.
Thus allowing The Festering to follow in the footsteps of 1975’s The
Sucking Pit, and become another of Smith’s “Help! My bird has turned into a
raving nympho” books.
The spectre of AIDS casts its dark shadow over The
Festering. Doing his bit for AIDS
awareness, Smith has a character apply a condom at one point (not that it does
this individual much good in the long term). While Tommy suffers mental anguish
for having had unprotected sex with his girlfriend “she might just be
two-timing him, screwing with some dirty sod on the side. And there were worse things around these days
than VD”. A few of Smith’s sexual
concerns here do feel a little past their sell by date for the late 1980s though. The unfortunately placed rash that the
Festering initially inflicts on male victims evokes that 1970s bogeyman, the
clap, and as Tommy himself points out men of the 1980s have a whole lot more to
worry about than that. Whereas Tommy’s
fear that his girlfriend only wants to have unprotected sex with him in order
to get pregnant and tie him to a life of married drudgery and financial dependence
–a scenario Smith had previously tormented his male readership with in The
Slime Beast and The Walking Dead- harkens back to a 1960s kitchen sink drama.
The Festering is yet another book that sees Smith
indulge in his always entertaining trait of having his characters’ guilty conscience
interrupt their chain of thought. A
device that allows Smith to give his characters a firm slap on the wrist for
their transgressions, adopting the tone of a strict headmaster by referring to
them by their full names. “Get a bloody
grip on yourself, Nick Paton”, “How bloody stupid and childish can you get, Holly
Mannion”. Nothing gets Guy N Smith riled
up into fist shaking mode, quite like female nymphomania though “tit for tat,
Holly my girl, because whilst he’s been away you’ve been having your arse
shagged off”.
Smith is unsparing when it comes to describing the
effects of the Festering itself “a squelch of bursting ulcers, the poison
spraying in all directions, spotted the off-white walls with treacly grey and
crimson”. These disgusto body horror
elements eventually fusing with Smith’s usual appetite for sordid sex, with
predictably messy results “he pulled her to him and felt her body squash
against his protruding swollen navel- a moment of agony followed by a deluge of
something warm and sticky between their pressed bodies”.
Smith, of course, never wrote horror with the
sensitive in mind, but if you love books to gross you out, then Smith here is a
fearless tour guide leading us through an avalanche of puss, mucus, puke, blood
and other bodily fluids. In its quieter
moments, The Festering also serves as an insider account of the trials and
tribulations of a rural relocation to the middle of nowhere, written by one who
knew and mastered that terrain.
During the 1980s I daresay you could learn more about
country living from Guy N Smith books than you could do in school. You could also learn a great deal about pipe
smoking, nymphomania and giant crabs from them as well...although in fairness
they never teach you about things like that in the classroom.
