Thirst fits neatly between Bats Out of Hell (1978) and
The Festering (1989) in Guy N. Smith’s bibliography, inheriting the former’s
theme of societal breakdown, and anticipating the latter’s obsession for gore
and puss. Both Bats Out of Hell and
Thirst centre around man-made disasters....well, these being Guy N. Smith books
we’re actually talking woman-made disasters, with Smith keen to place the blame
for catastrophes at the feet of females.
In Bats, a woman’s furious reaction to her partner’s infidelity
causes contaminated bats to escape from a research lab and bring a virus to the
population of Birmingham. While in
Thirst, a domineering wife’s refusal to put out for her trucker husband, leads
him first to masturbation, then into the arms of a woman who comes from a place
with a very long name. To add to the
trucker’s woes, he is caught having it away with Maureen from Pontrhydfendigaid
by her husband, who vows to get even by reporting him to his superiors. Not only for the affair, but for breaking
company regulations by leaving a truck load of highly lethal weed killer
stationary at the long-of-name place. It
is all playing on the trucker’s mind when, back on the road, he swerves to
avoid a rabbit and instead crashes the truck into the lake that supplies
Birmingham with its water supply. A turn
of events that’s good news for that bunny, but not so much for Brummies, with
Birmingham’s now contaminated water supply turning anyone who drinks it into an
insane, puss oozing killer with an insatiable thirst for water. First up to suffer this fate is the
underwater diver who the police employee to search the sunken truck, closely followed
by some teenage tearaways who are up to no good by the side of the lake. Young thugs were a type that GNS was never
one to mince his words about (this particular bunch being “the scourge of the
hills, the scum of Rhayader”). A little bit
more perplexing is why underwater divers ended up so high on Smith’s hit list
during this period. Thirst marking the
beginning of open season being declared on underwater divers in GNS books, with
gristly fates not only awaiting a frogman here, but also in The Undead (1983)
and The Walking Dead (1984).
The creator of the weed killer, research chemist Ron
Blythe is the type of character who could only be a hero in a Guy N. Smith
book, and would likely be considered a heel, a villain or a ‘one chapter and
they’re dead’ character just about everywhere else. Blythe is a pipe smoking refugee from an
unhappy marriage to another domineering woman, who much like the scientist hero
of Bats Out of Hell spends much of the book dodging responsibly for his
actions. Blythe refuses to be guilt
tripped by his wife, when she presents him with a newspaper headline about an
eight year old boy who accidentally drank the weed killer that Blythe helped
create, and ended up turning a knife on himself “skewering himself like a
Sunday joint of rare beef”. Likewise
Blythe is unrepentant about resorting to animal testing during the creation of
the weed killer “horses from the knacker yard.
They would have died anyway”. GNS
always preferred his heroes to be of the horny, bed hopping variety, and Blythe
doesn’t let the team down there either, proudly boasting “my wife is the only
woman I get into bed with to go to sleep”.
Men in GNS books are rarely around women very long
before they are mentally undressing them and speculating what they’d be like in
bed. It is a characteristic likely to
lead any female reader to ask out loud ‘Do men really think like this?’ a
question that any man in the immediate vicinity is sure to remain tight lipped
about. Smith had of course supplemented
his income during the 1970s by writing erotic fiction, particularly for the
Gold Star stable of magazines (New Direction, Sexpert, Sexuality). Smith’s incorporation of pornographic
elements into his horror fiction was...let’s face it, among his most distinct
trademarks during this period. Factoring
heavily into his books’ popularity among young men, and the reason why
well-thumbed copies of Night of the Crabs were discretely passed around
schoolyards back then. While Smith’s relationship
with Gold Star had amicably ended a year before Thirst was published, Smith was
still happy to supply the pornographically minded read that his horror audience
expected of him. Blythe dispatching
himself to his brother’s house in Birmingham with the intension of both finding
a solution to the contaminated water problem, and to have sexual fantasies
about his sister-in-law. It is debatable
which of these Blythe regards as the higher priority. The red hot mind of Ron Blythe turns out to
be a perversely funny place to spend a chapter or so in. Blythe’s thoughts going from the obligatory
mental undressing of Cathy, his sister-in-law ‘small firm breasts, nipples
erect’, to speculating how many times a week Cathy and his brother have sex
“probably an average of once”, to catching sight of her on the stairs ‘from
where he stood he could see right up her skirt...pale blue undies’. In the court of Ron Blythe, Cathy is
eventually found to be ‘a little raver...she was wasted on his brother’, with
Blythe reaching the conclusion that a spot of wife swapping might be mutually beneficial
to both he and his brother. Had this
have been the type of fiction that Smith was used to mailing off to Gold Star,
that is presumably the direction the Ron Blythe story would have gone in (potential
titles ‘I Had My Brother’s Wife’ or ‘Wife Swapping: Birmingham Style’). However, as Thirst has a stronger alliance to
horror, fate cruelly conspired to shoot down Ron’s sex plans for his
sister-in-law, forcing him concentrate instead on the matter of saving the
population of Birmingham. GNS initially
focuses on the revolting effects the contaminated water has on the poor
schmucks who drink it. Men have to
endure red sores, white puss oozing from their bodies and decaying flesh. Women get a heightened sex drive and VD like symptoms,
clearly meant to inspire sexual disgust in male readers ‘a living multitude of
sores that breathed and grew, and were spreading upwards until they disappeared
beneath the bushy pubics’. Saying that, Thirst does eventually call time
on these body horror aspects in favour of death and destruction on a far
grander scale. As Birmingham descends
into anarchy, Thirst takes on the appearance of every 1970s disaster movie
rolled into one. Jumbo jets fall from
the skies, trains collide, there are mass pileups on the motorways and the
government bigwigs who are meant to solve the crisis find themselves trapped in
a burning building. It could be argued
that Smith was a little late to the party here, on the big screen the disaster
genre was pretty much played out by the time Thirst was published in 1980. Still GNS does manage to put his own personal
stamp on the genre here, by revelling in the type of ultra-violence and sleazy
sentiment that mainstream Hollywood wouldn’t have touched with a bargepole in
1980. It’s hard to imagine a character
in The Towering Inferno blurting out that their one regret in life is never
having visited a prostitute, yet that is what plays on someone’s mind while
they are trying to escape a burning building here “Jesus, if I had my time over
again, I’d squander a quid on one of those scrubbers”.
Thirst does carve a niche for itself by offering a
very British spin on the disaster genre, with the carnage played out amidst
some Birmingham specific locations like Hams Hall and Spaghetti Junction. Thirst was also written during a time when the
national front and football hooliganism were rarely out of the headlines, and
there are more than a few nods in those directions, with GNS giving his
audience the fear that 1980s Britain was on the verge of lawlessness. The later stages of the book being filled
with vicious skinhead yobbos running riot on the streets, and branching off
into tribalistic groups of football supporters ‘even with death and disease ravaging
the streets, soccer was still war. City and Villa fans found it impossible to
join forces’.
Just when you think GNS has no more tricks up his
sleeve, he tops himself with a twisted spin on the Frisbee craze. If I had to speculate here, I’d guess that GNS
overheard a killjoy heckling some kids who were playing Frisbee with ‘you’ll
have someone’s head off with that’. Then
decided to work that moment of inspiration into the book, putting a lethal variation
on the harmless Frisbee ‘the death disc’ into the hands of his yobbo baddies,
which they use to decapitate coppers and rival skins. For a book that is tied to the anxieties and
fads of 1980, Thirst isn’t without resonance in the 21st
century. While the COVID-19 similarities
aren’t as chillingly prophetic as in Bats Out of Hell, talk of an entire city
being placed into lockdown, the police and the army being drafted in to keep
the disgruntled populace at bay, and a Prime Minister being ousted in a vote of
no confidence, does send shivers down the spine. What must have seemed like far-fetched
fiction in 1980, isn’t so much when read in 2022.
Still even with a modern day holocaust raging there is
always time for Cupid to draw back his bow in a GNS book. The death and destruction bringing Blythe
together with Carol Evans, a young woman who instantly endears herself to him
by refuting Ron’s claim that that he should be held responsible for the
crisis. Carol insisting that it was all
the truck diver’s fault. She then goes along
with Ron’s thinking, when he reaches the conclusion that it wasn’t his or the
truck divers’ fault, rather it was the truck driver’s wife who is to blame.
“The driver was knocking off a bird out of his area so he used our truck as his
transport, if he’d found a mistress nearer, or his wife had satisfied him
enough at home so that he didn’t need to look elsewhere, we wouldn’t be in this
mess now”. At least no one tries to
shift blame onto the rabbit.
Carol Evans might well be Smith’s near-perfect woman,
she’s unperturbed by a man blowing a cloud of tobacco smoke in her direction,
believes in the re-introduction of the death penalty and is the proud owner of
‘small breasts with firm pink nipples’.
On the downside, Carol isn’t a virgin, and does come from Wigan...but I
suppose you can’t have everything.
Romances do tend to spring out of nowhere and quickly escalate in
Smith’s world. I will admit to having a
grin on my face long after reading the part of the book where Ron confesses the
most personal, intimate details of his life to Carol, in spite of the fact that
they only appear to have known each other for an hour or so. Carol has to play Agony Aunt and lend a
sympathetic ear as Ron complains about how the sex has gone out of his
marriage, how he dislikes the fact that his wife has put on weight and won’t do
anything to lose it, how he broke the law by having a vasectomy without getting
his wife’s consent, how he had the snip in order to cheat on his wife “it
kind’ve gives me license to commit adultery without risking any maintenance
orders against me”. Mental baggage cast
aside, the couples’ clothes soon follow, as Ron and Carol end up in bed
together, and Ron vows that if they ever get out of Birmingham alive he’ll have
his vasectomy reversed.
It is customary in GNS books to have at least one
character who was modelled on the author himself. In fact Thirst actually has two characters
which fit that criteria. First up being
Ron’s brother Simon, who is part of the banking industry, working at the
treasury in central Birmingham, as Smith himself had at one point. The fact that his brother has settled for
such an ordinary, 9 to 5 life, agitates Ron throughout Simon’s time in the
book. In Ron’s eyes his boring sibling
is nothing but ‘a slave to the system’ and has ‘a conditioned mind’. Indeed, when Simon’s wife becomes ill, not
only does he insist on leaving for work as usual but demands that Ron not call
him at work while he is down in the vault, for fear that this will cause trouble
with his superiors. Brother Simon also
comes under criticism for failing to live up to the physical perfection that
Smith demanded from his creations, becoming yet another GNS character to be chided
for carrying around excess weight ‘he had a band of fat around his
waist...regular exercise would have lessened it’.
For all the issues the book has with Brother Simon
over his lack of ambition, emotional detachment and extra pounds, the insights
we get into Simon’s life suggests he is fairly content in his role as Mr.
Ordinary. Simon even enjoys that rarity
in a GNS book, a harmonious marriage.
Something you can’t claim of Ron, what with his affairs and secret vasectomy.
Say what you will about Brother Simon, but he does appear happy with his lot in
life, in stark contrast to Benny Wilkes, the other character in the book whose
life mirrors Smith’s own in several troubling ways. Wilkes is the victim of a domineering, bank
manager father who forced his offspring into an industry that is a constant
source of misery and unfulfillment to his offspring. All of which leaves Benny feeling like an
automaton ‘a machine which carted monies, cashed cheques and refused to
converse with its fellows’. In his 2013
autobiography ‘Pipe Dreams’, Smith remains guarded around the subject of his
own bank manager father...I don’t even think he ever even refers to his father
by name (for the record it was Joseph Newman-Smith). The few insights to be gleaned there are
telling though, Smith recalls his father thwarting his chances at higher
education ‘he was a bank manager and nothing short of my following in his
footsteps was acceptable to him. My
mother went along with this, she did not have any other choice and neither did
I’. Once his father retired from the
banking world, Smith found himself working at the same branch his father had
ruled with an iron fist, leading the other employees to persecute the younger
Smith upon discovering his parentage.
Given the older Smith’s unwavering belief that his son should continue
in the family tradition, you do have to wonder what he made of GNS eventually
dropping out of banking altogether in order to write books about giant crabs. Joseph Newman-Smith died in early 1978, not
long before Thirst was written. Am I
reading too much into this? Or was Smith using this section of Thirst to work
through personal trauma? It’s easy to lose sight of where autobiographical
elements end and horror fiction begins here.
“His word was law in the home as it had been in the city branch of the
bank which he had managed since the war” claims Wilkes of his hated
father. The words Smith puts in the
mouth of the father cut deeper than the pincers of any giant crab “I refuse to
believe that I have produced a fool, banking is in your blood, Benjamin”. In the book, as in life, Wilkes is a fairly
insignificant figure who doesn’t even figure in the Ron Blythe/Carol Evans
storyline. His tentative connection to
the main plot being that he finally decides to kill his father by fixing the
brakes on the old man’s car. The large scale
death and disaster that besets Birmingham soon after conspiring to help Benny’s
crime go undetected. Secondary character
as Wilkes might be, Smith’s writing here is at its most angriest and intense,
these pages of the book threatening to burst into flames on account of the fury
that is printed on them. “Banking, that
was the cause of this cancer which was slowly eating away at his soul” screams
the tormented brain of Benny Wilkes.
Smith’s strict moral compass dictates that no wrongdoing should go
unpunished in his books, however he does at least allow Wilkes the satisfaction
of gloating at his father’s funeral with the kind of ghoulish relish that Tod
Slaughter would have been proud of “the undertakers were really pulling a con
trick. A plastic bucket would have been quite sufficient to hold all that was
left of Thomas Wilkes”. There is also a
confrontation between Wilkes and his mother, so vitriolic that is almost too
painful to read “you did as he wanted.
Helped him to persecute me. Sent me away to public school because it
looked good. Put me in the fucking
bank”.
Over the course of the GNS binge that I’ve been on
recently I have come to appreciate that Smith was a far more diverse writer
than he gets credit for. His
bibliography including Disney novelizations, pseudonymous erotica, children’s
books, a war novel, a Western and with Thirst alone spanning the horror, 70’s
suburban porn and disaster genres. Even
within horror, he was far from a one trick pony, with books like The Undead
(1983) and The Cadaver (2007) delivering old-fashioned chills and largely
abstaining from the excess he became famous for. On the other hand, if you do want to know
where Smith’s reputation as a sex and horror extremist came from, by all means
take a deep dive into the contaminated waters of Thirst. It stands as a testament to Smith’s talent
for packing in enough incident to fill at least three books, yet deliver it all
in a concise 224 page read. In his prime
GNS books adopted the characteristics of his preferred type of male heroes;
they’re tough, mean, fast and without an ounce of surplus flesh on them. Smith’s overall message here is that the
wives of truckers need to be more attentive to their sexual needs, and that
truckers themselves need to man up, put all that Watership Down sentimentally
aside, and be prepared to run over more bunnies. Otherwise women, rabbits and the banking
industry will be the death of us all.
