The Neophyte (1986, Guy N. Smith)

 

Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, and you shouldn't get on the wrong side of a Charolais bull either, are but two of the life lessons to be learnt from this 1986 Guy N. Smith offering.

The Neophyte's main character, Joby Tarrat, is a misunderstood teen whose deceased parents' legacy of witchcraft, murder and adultery have made him something of a social outcast in his rural community. Joby's reputation as a pariah only increases when he accidentally decapitates a small child with a billhook. His only friend, schoolboy Ally Goode is convinced that Sally Ann Morris, the girl Joby loves from afar, possesses supernatural powers and is a bad influence on Joby. However, visitations from Sally Ann in Joby's horny dreams, accuse Ally of being the source of all of Joby's troubles. What's a boy to do?

While The Neophyte contains its fair share of supernatural carnage, the really disturbing aspects to this book tend to stem from Smith's portrayal of psychologically damaged young characters. Childhood abuse and a sense of alienation have left Joby Tarrat a paranoid head case who is convinced every person he meets, and a few farmyard animals, are all out to get him and harbor barely suppressed ill will towards him. Fortunately amidst all the teenage angst there is also plentiful evidence of Smith's jokey side in The Neophyte as well. Smith might play the horror elements in this book straight, but there are many moments when you can sense him mischievously sniggering away at what he was writing. Thinking especially here of the scene where the forces of darkness are used to make a dog urinate against a branch of Woolworths, the insights into the thoughts of a randy bull "let's get down to those cows", and a reference to the novelty hit 'The Birdie Song'.

For a man who was happily married to the same woman for decades until his death, Smith sure can write like a multiple times divorced cynic at times. The initial relationship in the book, between Joby's parents is riddled with infidelity, loathing and occult curses. While the bad relationship blues then get handed on down to Sally Ann's parents, her mother being an unfulfilled woman whose dullard husband has driven her into the arms of another man. Smith, the product of a controlling father and an elitist mother, had both father and mother issues that spill out into his books. However in The Neophyte, Smith is mainly concerned with taking bad mothers to task. Sally Ann's mother is a total snob who is aghast at her daughter mixing with the lower classes and Sally Ann's budding relationship with Joby, who until he accidentally hacked a kid's head off, was working as a labourer on the farm owned by Sally Ann's father. Joby's own mother, who held black masses and locked young Joby in a stair cupboard for hours on end, is hardly mother of the year material either.

There clearly is an autobiographical element to the majority of GNS' work. The Neophyte, like so many of his books, being set in a rural farming community, a world Smith knew well. I suspect that GNS may have also looked to his nearest and dearest for character inspiration too. The books Smith wrote when his own children were very young, like The Undead and Manitou Doll, imitate life by themselves featuring characters with young children. The autobiographical elements in those two books being particularly felt due to both concerning the parents of a young deaf child, one of Smith's daughters having been born deaf. Manitou Doll clearly arising from Smith's need to turn his deaf daughter into a character in one of his books, and have her kill someone with a giant axe! The GNS books that came along a few years later, like this one, tend to transfer the focus over to rebellious teenagers, with Smith likely drawing on his then status as the father of three teenagers. Sally Ann is going through a 'trendy, left-wing' phase, while Joby has picked up a guitar and has turned to music to ease his troubles. Suggesting that Joby might have been partly based on Smith's son Gavin, who has subsequently carved out a career for himself in the music industry and is currently part of a band called Bamboo Guerillas, named after one of his dad's most notorious books.

As you might expect from a GNS book, an air of horny, sexual frustration abounds in The Neophyte. Joby wanks off to the idea of a sexual encounter with Sally Ann only to then be consumed by masturbatory guilt, drilled into him by his deceased mother. Mum's influence having left Joby with a need to beat himself up over beating himself off. More unexpected is Ally's resentment of Joby's interest in Sally Ann, and Joby's interest in girls in general, leaving you in no doubt that Ally's feelings for Joby go beyond mere friendship. Not the kind of unrequited love that you'd expect a red blooded, straight writer like GNS to have even contemplated, let alone be writing about in the 1980s. If I didn't know better, I'd think that Smith was being intentionally subversive here. All of the relationships between men and women in The Neophyte lead to misery, bitterness and coercive behavior, while the forces of evil conspire to keep Joby and the closet gay schoolboy Ally apart.

The book's criticism of the upper classes' pursuit of fox hunting is another aspect of The Neophyte that took me aback, given that Smith was a well known advocate of hunting and very vocally went after animal rights activists in his books, most notably 'Crabs: The Human Sacrifice'. My guess is that while Smith approved of the killing of animals for food or for reasons of pest control, he was possibly less on board when it came to trophy hunting or hunting solely motivated by bloodlust. In 1978's Killer Crabs, Smith appeared to take great pleasure in exposing a rich man, with delusions of being a great white hunter, as being both inept as a huntsman and inadequate as a cocksman. The criticism of the hunting brigade in The Neophyte being that they are a bunch of Hooray Henries who arrogantly trample over private property, damage the livelihoods of honest, hardworking farmers and are an ineffective way of dealing with the problem at hand. As gamekeeper  Joe Rowell complains "they're not interested in killing foxes, all they want to do is get dressed up in their fancy clothes and go for a ride". Not that Smith doesn't have equally strong words for those on the other side of this issue. A scene set at an unethical circus, allows Smith the chance to attack members of the public who get 'irate about blood sports and vivisection, formed animal rights groups and raided silver fox farms, but they were quite happy to be entertained by wild animals kept in cruelty'. The impression you're left with is that Smith had little time for either the weekend huntsman or the weekend revolutionary.

The sympathetic portrayal of Joby, who spends a good deal of the book unemployed and living off state benefits, also goes against expectations from Smith, whose work was prone to blood boiling anger over those without work and relying on handouts. Smith even throws Joby some free benefits of the sexual variety in the form of Harriet Blake, who is every bit as vilified in the village as Joby, albeit for different reasons. A drunken, exhibitionist episode in the village having resulted in Harriet flashing her crotchless panties to all and sundry. Smith was always critical of characters who failed to live up to physical perfection, and Harriet becomes yet another Smith character to be slapped on the wrist by him for carrying around some extra weight. 'The fat on her bottom crinkled, there was a permanent elasticated mark where her pants attempted to hold her spare tyre in'. Still when you are an unemployed, serial masturbator who lives in a dilapidated farmhouse, I guess you have to take whatever is on offer, even if the spare tyre is included. Joby's awkward journey to manhood also sees him travelling to the rough area of a neighbouring town to seek out the services of a cheap prostitute. Infuriating Sally Ann whose supernatural abilities allow her to monitor his behaviour. A case of- to misquote Kenny Rogers- Joby don't take your love to town.

While the first half of The Neophyte (entitled Book One: The Spawn) concludes with the closest GNS ever came to writing a teenage coming of age drama, its second half (Book Two: The Evil) takes its foot off the brakes and veers into the fast lane when it comes to horror. As with many of his books from this period, like 'The Walking Dead', the narrative tends to get reduced to a connecting link between a series of outrageous set pieces whose offensiveness rarely fails to impress. Some if the depravity and madness Smith manages to crowbar into the second half of the book includes a raunchy encounter with a satanic cult, incest, auto erotic asphyxiation and death by rampaging elephant...but not necessarily in that order. In short, punters sure got their money's worth out of GNS with The Neophyte.

Such is the high sleaze and gore content of The Neophyte that it had the honour of being published in France in 1989 by the splatter loving publisher Fleuve Noir, as part of their 'Gore' series of extreme horror novels. The cover of the French edition of The Neophyte practically begs for a lawsuit from Sam Raimi, to this day I'm sure that actor Bruce Campbell is blissfully unaware that he's appeared on the cover of a Guy N. Smith book. The Fleuve Noir people always being especially bold when it came to ripping off Evil Dead 1 and 2 imagery.

Having read a large chunk of Smith's bibliography by now, I was beginning to get concerned that I'd consumed the best he had to offer, and that the remaining books would be a case of diminishing returns. However this and a recent read of 'The Knighton Vampires' have left me reassured that there are still a few gems to be found among the lesser known Smith books. Don't get me wrong, you'll encounter a few duds down the GNS rabbit hole, but The Neophyte has proven to be one of those much needed titles that reminds you of all the joy that can come from reading a Guy N. Smith book.