Bamboo Guerillas (1977, Guy N. Smith)

 

Bamboo Guerillas is notorious.  Guy N. Smith was riding high on the success of Night of the Crabs- which had been a big hit during the sweltering hot summer of 1976- but for a change of pace swaps crustaceans for castrations with Bamboo Guerillas, a book which captures all the fun and frivolity of a Japanese prisoner of war camp. 

 

Around the same time, Smith had been writing a series of relatively respectable action books centered around the trucking industry- ‘The Black Knights’ and ‘Hijack’- which were published by Mews, an arm of New English Library.  The company policy appears to a been that Mews was the imprint they'd use for sci-fi, action and war titles, while New English Library was the home of the nasty material. 

Seemingly on account of the truckers books they gave him a crack at penning a WW2 novel without any restrictions on what he could write about… and Bamboo Guerillas is what you get when you turn Guy N. Smith loose on the subject of World War 2 atrocities without restrictions.  The company were reportedly a little taken aback with what he delivered, asked Smith to tone it down for it to go as a Mews title, then when he refused released it as a N.E.L, which in fairness was exactly where Bamboo Guerillas belonged. 

 

Bamboo Guerillas takes us back to the war torn Malaysia of 1941 as Colonel Hugh Carter aka ‘Jungle Carter’ leads his men deep into the jungle in order to team up with Chinese bandit Li Chu.  Once Jungle Carter and his men meet Li Chu and his ragbag of Chinese and Malaysian mercenaries -the ‘bamboo guerillas’ of the title- they go about the business of liberating twenty nurses from a Japanese prisoner of war camp.  One that is lorded over by the dreaded Colonel Siki, a depraved despot, who is “more dangerous than any tiger that roamed the Malaysian jungles”.  On the outset Bamboo Guerillas resembles your standard World War 2 novel as Jungle Carter and fellow Brits Captain Cole and Sanders perilously hack their way through the jungle whilst smarting over the fall of Kuala Lumpur.  Looks can be deceptive though and only a few chapters in sees Bamboo Guerillas transform into something you definitely wouldn’t want your grandparents reading over your shoulder.  In 1977, when Bamboo Guerillas was released, I'm not sure Smith's name was as synonymous with extreme horror as it would become.  So, I suppose it was still possible that people who bypassed The Sucking Pit and Night of the Crabs wouldn't have been aware of what they signed up for here.  I'm curious at what point the penny would have dropped for them that with Bamboo Guerillas they were being sent up sleaze creek without a paddle.  Would it have been when Carter and Cole are woken up by the sound of Sanders grunting and shaking about in his ground sheets, then fearing he has the fever instead discover that Sanders is merely beating himself off.  Apparently a valuable way of keeping yourself warm in the outdoors “I learned it when I used to go mountaineering” Sanders tells the other two “and was forced to sleep out in the open, do me a favor though don't interrupt me again”.  Would the penny drop moment have been when they are discussing forming an allegiance with Li Chu, despite his reputation for cannibalizing his Japanese adversaries?  At which point Carter attempts to reassure the other two that “as long as he confines his liking for human flesh to the Japs, I'm not going to worry”.  Or is it when we meet the gregariously sadistic Li Chu, who brags about how he and his men tortured a Japanese soldier in order to see if a Japanese penis could be stretched to the same size as other nationalities. “They will not, gentlemen, take it from me”. 

 

Up to this point we've had masturbation, anecdotal cannibalism and anecdotal genital abuse, all before we have even met the villain of the piece.  World War 2 sex maniac to end all World War 2 sex maniacs, that is Colonel Sika, who prior to his introduction in the book has been masturbating for “virtually two whole days and nights”.  Sika immediately earns his reputation as a stone cold pervert by having male prisoners stripped, tied to a barbed wire fence, then forces them to get aroused in the company of one of the nurses, who has been similarly stripped bare for the occasion.  “This is the woman you are going to mate with… so get yourself erect” yells one of Sika’s flunkies.  Once the prisoners manage to get hard though, its curtains for them, as Japanese soldiers step in and cruelly bayonet them to death instead.  Erections, or ‘protrusions’ as Smith sometimes euphemistically refers to them as, was a recurring theme in his writing and something that has also opened his books up to sniggering and ridicule over the years.  Bamboo Guerillas captures him at arguably the height of his protrusion obsession.  Bamboo Guerrillas might well be the most priapic book of the 1970s, you're never far away from someone’s erection in this book.  It’s a characteristic that practically defines Sika who is introduced to us nursing a hard-on, caused by thinking about all the Chinese virgins he has deflowered.  Sika then turns his lustful gaze and protrusion in the direction of Sonia Barnes, a dark-haired nurse that Sika insist become his sex slave and “submit to almost every technique of sex known in the Japanese nation”.  A role Sonia reluctantly agrees to in the hope that it will keep herself and the other nurses alive.

 

Bamboo Guerrillas is riddled with below the belt insults aimed at Japanese men.  What with Li Chu’s claim that not even torture can extend the Japanese manhood to the size of other nationalities, as well as Sonia’s observation that Colonel Sika’s physique was “little more than that of the average European boy in his early teens”.  At times it feels like Smith was pushing the idea that Japan's involvement in World War 2 may have been motivated by penis size envy and feelings of sexual inadequacy.  A theory that Smith only contradicts due to his obsession with Colonel Sika’s apparently impressive erection, which “threatened to burst its way out his trousers”.  Elsewhere in the book, Sika “knew that the bulge in the front of his trousers was visible to all his men but he did not mind. It enhanced his reputation”.  Based on that evidence it doesn't sound like Sika is lacking too much in that department, even if his torture techniques are suspiciously hung up on cutting other nationalities down to size.  There are moments in Bamboo Guerillas when you can feel your brain trying to fight against its natural inclination to visualize what you are reading.  Never more so when Chan- one of Li Chu’s men- is captured by the Japanese and ends up in Sika’s torture chamber.  There Sika quite literally breaks Chan’s balls, before spending the rest of the night alternating between using Sonia as a sexual receptacle and working out more ways to destroy Chan’s genitals.

 

I think one of the reasons Bamboo Guerrillas can take people off guard is that with a horror, skinhead or biker paperback from that era you half-expect there to be some sexual content.  Whereas a World War 2 novel set in a Japanese prisoner of war camp doesn’t exactly sound like it is going to be a non-stop orgy.  When people talk about Smith’s books they tend to claim that part of their popularity was due to soft porn elements, this I would not challenge, but I don't know if that description does Smith’s books justice.  On film and in photographic form it is easy to draw a line between softcore and hardcore.  In print it is a little more difficult to call, but I would say that the sex in Bamboo Guerillas is closer to hardcore than softcore.  Bamboo Guerillas is a very sex driven book, with the expected action part of the narrative often taking a backseat to Sika forcing male and female prisoners into performing live sex shows in front of the Japanese “you have three minutes in which to begin copulating.  Any man who hasn't made it in that time will be bayoneted”.  Whilst tender moments arrive when Jungle Carter deliberately allows himself and several of Li Chu’s men to be captured by the Japanese and immediately develops romantic and sexual feelings for Jenny, one of the captured nurses.  I suppose you have to admire the lustful stamina of Jenny and Jungle Carter, despite the fact that she has been repeatedly raped by the Japanese, despite the fact that they are in the company of others, and despite the fact that they've been flung into a place that smells of shit and piss, they are still all over each other like a rash.  “He felt her vagina it was warm and ready and there was no evidence of Japanese maltreatment”.  You can always rely on Smith to put the Guy in gynecology.  Jungle Carter’s only reservation about having sex with Jenny is that he has to do so in the company of non British people “he did not want to lose the respect that the guerillas had for him.  If it had been an all British company it wouldn't have mattered.  But these bandits were savages”.

 

Even though Chinese and Malaysian characters in Bamboo Guerillas are allies, the book does still peel a suspicious eye in their direction and they are consistently portrayed as more barbaric, disposable and cowardly than the British.  After gunning down Japanese soldiers in the jungle, the bamboo guerillas begin gutting the bodies and impaling the heads of dead Japanese on sticks.  Sickening the British, who nevertheless decide that it's better to let them have their fun, rather than play killjoy and risk a mutiny.  Later on in the book, Jungle Carter encounters a hut full of Japanese soldiers raping a Chinese woman.  However rather than rescue her, as he has done with the Western nurses, Carter instead ops to throw a grenade into the hut, killing all inside, on the reasoning that “she’ll probably be glad to die after what they had done to her”. 

 

The bulk of Bamboo Guerillas’ hate though is aimed at the Japanese.  Bamboo Guerillas makes ‘Men Behind the Sun’ and ‘Fist of Fury’ look like fair and even handed portrayals of Japanese people.  Whenever the word ‘Japanese’ is mentioned in this book it's usually in close proximity to the word ‘bastards’.  Japanese characters exist in this book purely to sexually assault women and emasculate and murder men.  So despicable are the Japanese in this book that they seem to succeed in making actual Orientals feel racist towards Orientals, with even the Chinese Li Chu hurling around anti-Oriental slurs “Carter declined to remind Li Chu of his own colour”.

 

Indeed Smith seems to whipped himself up into such an anti Japanese state of mind whilst writing Bamboo Guerillas that it bled on over into his next book, Killer Crabs (1978).  The opening of that Crab sequel initially being focused on conflict between Australian and Japanese characters over fishing rights, with bullets and racial insults being exchanged between the two.  All of which bills up to a Bamboo Guerillas /Crabs crossover when the Japanese fishing ship comes under attack from the crabs.  Apparently Smith did write a sequel to Bamboo Guerillas that has never been published, and I do wonder if rather than completely scrap the sequel novel he instead he incorporated a few of its ideas into Killer Crabs.  Towards the end of Bamboo Guerillas the action is moving closer and closer to Australia, which is where Killer Crabs was set, so there are story connections there.  Due to the fact that the sequel has never seen the light of day, Bamboo Guerillas stands as Smith’s only published war novel.  Although a few of the Crabs books could, I suppose, be perceived as war novels.  This seems particularly true of ‘Crabs on the Rampage’ (1981) which comes across as Smith’s ‘imaginary Nazi invasion of Britain’ novel with the Crabs making strategic attacks on the shores of Britain, and the series’ hero Cliff Davenport mostly relegated to war room brainstorming of how to second guess the crabs’ plan of attack.  All of which I suppose makes King Crab, Hitler reincarnated in crustacean form. 

 

However, I don't think Bamboo Guerillas had the same legs, or pincers, as Smith’s horror material.  Two editions of Bamboo Guerillas were published, both in September 1977, and that was it.  Unlike Night of the Crabs, The Sucking Pit and The Slime Beast, this one never came back around in the 1980s.  As a child of the Eighties I vividly remember seeing those on bookshelves, especially at seaside resorts, but I don't ever recall seeing Bamboo Guerillas around.  Either it didn't sell well originally, or it was too extreme to be republished or maybe Smith had become so synonymous with horror by then that putting a non-horror title of his back out there would have confused the public.  Whatever the case Bamboo Guerillas has become one of his rarer books, these days second hand copies usually fetch in the region of £40 to £50.  I did ask around to see if his estate have plans to republish the book and apparently they do but getting the Crabs books back out there is their number one priority.  Towards the end of his life, Smith had actively embraced the internet, and through his website was selling second-hand copies of his books, putting out his older work in eBook form and writing new material.  Now I believe his family are in a process of building that business back up, although they’ve also had to cope with all the standard upheaval caused by a parent’s death as well as the unwanted distraction of a legal case against his former cleaner Nichola Whiffen.  From what I understand, Whiffen had been employed by him as a cleaner, then helped manage his internet affairs, but had been stealing from him on the sly.  A situation that caused much hurt, bad feelings and friction on account of her father having been a long time friend of Smith’s.  After Smith’s death, she was convicted of stealing £2,400 from him, and was ordered to do 130 hours of community service.  Which I get the impression his family consider an unsatisfactory, slap on the wrist, gesture.  It does sound like the last few years have been a very difficult period for the Smith family.

 

What I find astonishing about Bamboo Guerillas and its ilk is that they never triggered any censorious backlash, and I'm not been able to find any evidence of these books having been banned or having to be re-released in cut versions.  They were quite lucky in that respect, compared to what was happening in the British video industry around the same time.  It is mind-blowing to think that in a period where grown adults were having the right to watch films like The Evil Dead and I Spit on your Grave taken away from them, people of any age could still pick up a copy of Bamboo Guerillas or Night of the Crabs.  I can only speculate that what saved these books was that the censorious regarded the written word as a higher art form and were of a snob, elitist mindset that… ‘these sub-moron, working class grunts who watch video nasties all day probably don't know how to read, so we don't need to worry about banning books’.  While the late 1970s and early 80s gets remembered as a time when movies were pushing the envelope in terms of screen explicitness, that is nothing compared to what books were getting away with.  A good example of the divide between how far books could go then, in contrast to movies is the novelization of the Norman J. Warren film ‘Inseminoid’.  The book version contains all manner of ideas and scenes that Warren passed on bringing to the screen.  For example, in the book the Alien has not one, but two giant sized penises, which it uses to rape the main female character… something the film side steps around depicting with that ‘is it or isn't it a dream sequence’.  The book also includes lesbianism, necrophilia and a scene where the alien puts its fingers through someone's eye sockets, pulls their head off, then later uses the head as a kind of bowling ball.  While the Warren movie does have its fair share of unpleasant and gooey moments, I suspect you’d be a disappointed man if you saw it on the basis of having read the book, because the grossest aspects to the book did not survive the transition to film.  I’m in no doubt that had Bamboo Guerillas been done on film rather than in print, copies would have been seized in every video shop from Lands End to John O'Groats during the video nasties furore.  Even the most irresponsible and reckless of pre-cert video distributors usually attempted to cover their backs by putting phony  X or 18 certificates on video covers or disclaimers along the lines of ‘for adults only’ or ‘not for minors’ yet there is not even anything like that on the covers of either edition of Bamboo Guerillas.  Had a kid brought home a copy of Bamboo Guerillas, I'm sure that going off the cover, parents probably thought this was no stronger than your average copy of Eagle, Commando or G.I. Joe.  Little did they know that their offspring were reading things like “she was not willing to drop the subject even though he has got all four fingers of his right hand inside her” and “he breathed a deep sigh of relief that all his men had attained full erections, but he knew that this was only the start”.

 

What appears to have happened with the book equivalent of the Video Nasties is that that market just got flooded with cheap, gratuitous, badly written books and the British public eventually got tired of them and moved along.  I suspect that had the video market been left alone, a similar thing would have happened there, but because there was a censorious intervention there, it resulted in the Video Nasties attaining legendary status.  To this day we are still seeing even the lesser Video Nasties brought back in deluxe, bells and whistles editions.  Whereas with their book equivalents, because they were never taken away from us, because they didn't become the forbidden fruit, they don't attract the same amount of reverence.  The irony doesn't appear lost on Guy N. Smith that during his lifetime everyone of his other passions ended up becoming demonized or banned… be it indoor smoking, gun ownership or hunting… but his books were left alone.

I'm curious what mental image of the author you’d get from reading Bamboo Guerillas in 1977, possibly of some grizzled old World War 2 veteran using the book as a backwards gazing trip down memory lane to when he was fighting and fucking his way through the jungle.  Whereas is in reality Smith was born in 1939 and was of a generation that lived through World War 2 but didn’t see active service.  Overall though he does a decent job of feigning first-hand knowledge of a hellish, sweaty, leach infested jungle environment here.  He does also indulge in his regular trait of offloading some of his own DNA onto the lead character.  Jungle Carter, like Smith, having a background in the banking industry, and becomes Smith’s mouth piece on the subject.  “Civilian life is just one long monotonous existence… I worked in a bank up until 1939.  No chance to think for yourself or make decisions.”  While Smith’s grievances with banking aren’t as loudly amplified here as they are in ‘Thirst’ (1980), the message of Bamboo Guerillas in that respect seems to be “better to die like a man, than live as a bank manager”.  The extreme violence in Smith’s books, coupled with their perverse elements and mean spiritedness, do conjure up negative ideas about what Guy N. Smith must have been like in real life.  Which, by all accounts, was very divorced from reality.  Jonathan Sothcott was optioning a movie adaptation of one of Smith’s books at one point and on account of that had met and had lunch with Smith, and Sothcott told me that he was amazed that such a charming and gentle man came up with these endless splatter-fests.  In his autobiography- ‘Pipe Dreams’- Smith does portray his younger self as a bit of a practical joker.  He even gamely includes a famous joke about himself… that Guy N. Smith is such a good farmer because he spreads his own books on his land… and if you're prepared to include a joke comparing your work to manure in your own autobiography you must have a sense of humour.  People who make fun of ‘bad’ movies and books, like to cling to the idea that the creators of the material were oblivious to how absurd and ridiculous their output was.  In Smith's case though I do suspect he would have been chuckling to himself when he wrote things like “she would become a nun and enter a convent, a sanctuary from lusting erections and male selfishness”. 

Bamboo Guerillas is so excessive, so over-the-top that after a while the only way to relate to it is as a black comedy.  Either that or a practical joke akin to the Rolling Stones’ song ‘Cocksucker Blues’… where the Stones deliberately recorded a song so raunchy and indecent that their label was unable to put it out.  Only in Smith’s case, New English Library took the bait and actually published Bamboo Guerillas uncensored.  It’s as if Smith was suffering from the writing equivalent of tourette's syndrome but rather than blurt out the most offensive and anti-social things he could think of, managed to get it all down on paper.  A strong stomach is required for Bamboo Guerillas, this book could even be used to test how shock able you really are, but you do learn much about World War 2 from it.  Such as the fact that not even torture can extend the size of a Japanese penis to the length of other nationalities, that slitting someone's throat produces a sound that “could have been made by a wild animal urinating” and that masturbation will keep you warm in the jungle.  Every day is a school day when you're reading a Guy N. Smith book.

Snakes (Guy N Smith, 1986)

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.    

 

 

 

Thirst (Guy N Smith, 1980)

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 21^st 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.               

The Festering (Guy N Smith, 1989)

 

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 601^st 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.    

Manitou Doll (Guy N Smith, 1981)

 

Back Cover Blurb:

"A seaside weekend .... violence breaks out ... a horrifying rape .... and the fury of hell is reborn

The fairground stood on waste-land near the promenade. It was a Jumble of. sideshows, amusement arcades, the ghost train, even a menagerie... Also there was a fortune-teller – the Red Indian girl called Jane who sat quietly carving grotesque wooden figures.

When Roy and Liz Catlin arrive on holiday with their daughter Rowena, they find non-stop rain and a disturbing undercurrent of menace. Rowena is strangely fascinated by the fairground – and particularly by the mysterious Jane. Continually she returns there against her parents' wishes.

But the place has now become the focus of evil forces. Ugly deaths, mutilations, mass killings erupt in a terrifying wave of destruction. For a demonic slaughter is unleashed that can only end when an age-old score is settled."

The multi-genred Manitou Doll begins as a particularly savage Western (complete with scalpings, racial epithets and the rape of a squaw), quickly transforms into an equally savage biker novel (complete with more rape and a preposterously violent gang battle at a funfair) before settling into a supernatural revenge tale taking place during a family's lousy, rain swept, holiday by the sea. Protagonist duties are shared between deaf, red haired girl Rowena Catlin- who is gifted a wooden doll by Native American fortune teller Jane- and her father Roy Catlin who sees an escape from his oppressive, loveless marriage in the form of the aforementioned fortune teller, the mere sight of her causing him "the early tremors of an erection". Will he make a go of the marriage for the sake of his daughter, or follow where his loins are leading him?

Taking precedence over this domestic drama is of course Manitou Doll's horror elements, which emanate from Jane being raped by two Hell's Angels. A case of history repeating itself, since back in the days of the Wild West Jane's ancestor Mistai was raped by a US cavalry man and sought vengeance by making wooden dolls, vessels for the spirit of Okeepa. Jane turns out to be a chip off the old block when it comes to carving killer dolls and as a result it's soon curtains for the Hell's Angels. However with Okeepa's vengeful spirit unleashed, Jane quickly loses control of the situation as the various puppets and wood carvings she made for the funfair she works at turn against British holidaymakers...who soon discover they have more than bad weather to worry about. Jane also angers Okeepa by copulating with a white man, a turn of events that Roy's wife Liz isn't best pleased about either.

There are usually bits of Guy N Smith's own DNA scattered about the characters in his books, and Manitou Doll is no exception. While Roy Catlin fails to live up to Smith's pipe smoking, lithe bodied, aquiline featured ideal of manhood, epitomized by the likes of Cliff Davenport and Mark Sabat, there are common bonds between character and creator. Both Smith and Catlin have daughters who are deaf, and neither are strangers when it comes to holding down tedious office jobs. Roy being a wage slave to a firm of solicitors where his snooty superiors regard him as a dogsbody...seemingly echoing Smith's days working at various branches of the Midland bank. The success of Night of the Crabs allowed Smith to leave the banking world behind and become a full time writer, Roy Catlin isn't so fortunate. As such it's tempting to wonder if Smith saw Roy as the type of disappointed, unfulfilled man that he could have become had Night of the Crabs not started to fly off the shelves during the hot summer of 76.

It is easy to see why Smith's books (click-click-clickety) clicked with the masses back in the 1970s and 1980s. If you want to know what a working class holiday gone badly wrong was like back then, Manitou Doll nails that piece of British history, perfecto. Rain stops play, cars break down, the AA have to be called out, couples bicker and fail to connect with the holiday cheer, and the only form of nearby entertainment is a clapped out fairground with tired animal attractions and rigged fruit machines. Anyone going through such a humdrum experience in real life could pick up a copy of Manitou Doll and be transported to a version of their own reality that's enlivened by wild outbursts of bloodshed, and the titillating fantasy of getting your end away with a Native American fortune teller while the missus isn't looking.

As you might expect from a 1980s Guy N Smith book, Manitou Doll proudly sits on the cultural naughty step these days. An evil dwarf, apparently the childhood victim of polio is described as a “mis-shapen monstrosity” who resembles “a gorilla in the way he moved”. While Jane confesses to Roy that she was raped by Hell's Angels...but it turns out it's okay because she secretly enjoyed it "although to all outward appearances I remained emotionless. I even orgasmed". At which point Roy becomes jealous of the Hell's Angels, and gets an erection thinking about it.

Manitou Doll arrived at a busy period in Smith's career (it's one of five titles he had published in 1981) and as such it does feel like it's pages were a dumping ground for whatever horrific idea or genre came into his overworked head. Manitou Doll encompasses Western and biker elements, even throwing in some 'animals on the rampage' carnage towards the end and falsely teasing a possible return of the killer crabs at one point “whatever it was that followed her was only yards away, slowing down now like some giant crab". Some of his ideas fail to land, a few don't make a great deal of sense, but overall Manitou Doll has more hits than misses when it comes to horror set pieces, and it's impossible to argue that the punters weren't getting their money's worth out of Smith here. A shrunken head in a jar, a macabre Punch and Judy show, even more male 'protrusions' (a Smith trademark), and a double decapitation are amongst the type of pulp horror excess that £1.25 bought you back in 1981. 

Line most likely to cause you to spit out whatever you are drinking at the time "her eyes were riveted on the size of that which she would be compelled to take inside her, it's length and thickness almost rivaling the handle of her father's tomahawk".