Snakes is yet another book that paints Guy N. Smith as the disreputable ol’ curmudgeon of British horror. Smith’s usual characteristics can be hunted down and ticked off in this 1986 tale of lethal snakes, who thanks to a motorway pile-up, escape from a truck whilst being transported from one rundown zoo to another. There is the typical Smith anxiety about the hero being fast tracked into marriage, due to an unplanned pregnancy... a character effectively signs her own death warrant by engaging in masturbation (self-abuse rarely ends well in Smith’s world)... and if there is a single mother with a child born out of wedlock in a GNS book, you can be certain something very nasty is going to happen to the illegitimate kiddo. While Smith wasn’t able to work explicit sex scenes into this one per se, there are the expected pornographic flourishes, including the death throes of a naked snakebite victim being the source of eroticism for a police onlooker “the shapely thighs parted, legs wide and kicking frantically as though she had just hit a climax”.
The tone of Snakes is one of fist shaking misanthropy,
if I didn’t already know that Newman was his middle name, I might be persuaded
into believing that the ‘N’ in Guy N. Smith stood for ‘No Filter’. GNS pisses over just about everybody in this
book. Children are annoying brats who
deserve to die in motorway accidents, one female character has value that
‘began and ended between her thighs’, and the working classes are mostly bone
idle and unemployed, save for the hero Keith Doyle, a jobbing gardener. Saying that Smith didn’t appear to have much
time for middle class snobbery either, with Doyle’s marriage opposed to by the
girl’s elitist father, a bank manager no less...and no horror author in the
entire history of literature had it in for bank managers quite like Guy N.
Smith, himself a former bank employee.
Smith’s bee in his bonnet about trade unionism also manifests itself
with one Thatcherite character being distracted from the threat of the snakes
by thoughts of a despised leftish nemesis, whose unionist and anti-hunting antics
are “part of a Marxist plot to bring about a revolution”.
Rich or poor, capitalist or socialist though, a shared
stupidity unites just about all of the characters in Snakes. I mean everyone is meant to be on high alert
for the escaped snakes, and yet two separate characters, a policeman and a
solider both lay their eyes on what they think to be a large hose, and it
doesn’t occur to either of them that this hose could in fact be –duh, duh, duh-
a bloody big snake. Elsewhere a woman
hears a rattling noise, and rather than be concerned that it could be the sound
of a rattler, instead thinks it must be coming from a child playing with a
rattle. Whilst a sexually frustrated widow mistakes the head of a boa
constrictor for....well you can fill in the blanks yourself there.
GNS could never be mistaken for an animal rights type
of person –heaven forbid- but I do detect a secret empathy, maybe even an
admiration for the snakes here. Long suffering
reptiles who have spent their entire lives imprisoned in tourist trap zoos (I
think we can add zoos to the list of things Smith hated) and on some level might
be justified in their revenge against man.
As the book is keen to point out, its two suspenseful set pieces- Doyle
being trapped in a garage by the snakes, and later trapped again in his van-
are role reversals of the zoo situation “you paid a quid or so to go into a
reptile house and gawp at snakes through glass” thinks Doyle “but this bugger
was getting a close-up of humans in a cage for free”.
One problem with Snakes in terms of a horror novel is
that the kills, mostly characters being momentarily bitten and then dying of
snake poison, don’t really carry the same visceral charge as people being
ripped apart by giant crabs. An issue
that Smith does in fairness attempt to rectify with the introduction of a
massive boa constrictor, which provides a few gore highlights towards the end
“a human intestinal explosion had taken place, whoever had been in this room
had been crushed with such force that they had burst”.
For the seasoned Smith reader, Snakes makes for a
cosily familiar experience. Even so it is
hard to ignore the feeling of no new ground being covered here, as if the book
was a contractual obligation, and Smith went into it without any fresh ideas to
hand. Snakes is akin to visiting an
elderly relative, knowing full well that they are going to regale you with same
tall tale that they tell you every time you come to visit. It’s a book that delivers what you’d expect
from Guy N. Smith without really being a standout in his busy bibliography.
No comments:
Post a Comment