'Thirst' – Guy N. Smith (New English Library)

Mel Timberley, professional lorry driver, swerves to avoid a hare and crashes into Claerwen Reservoir, polluting the entire water supply of Birmingham with the most deadly weedkiller ever created. Ron Blythe was the chemist who helped to create the spray and now, with thousands of people suffering and dying, his conscience forces him to try to work to find an antidote.

Unfortunately, he gets stranded inside Birmingham, now sealed off, and full of anarchists, escaped criminals and weedkiller-poisoned sufferers from the Thirst, all of which turn the city into a hell inside England.

Here's an old one for you, published way back in 1980. A simpler time, a 'pulp' time for fiction; a time where you could fill up a book with buckets of gore (and a few naked females) and send it out into the world where it would do very well for itself thanks very much. 'Thirst' is one of those books, a book that hasn't aged particularly well but still manages to get by through a dark energy that bore me along and kept me reading. A book that you feel kind of guilty for enjoying but enjoy nevertheless.

'Thirst' isn't a horror novel per se, more of a disaster novel where horrifying things happen in the aftermath. And that's where its age and pulp stylings work against it. To be blunt, if you're a lady in 'Thirst' then you can pretty much forget having any kind of agency whatsoever and that doesn't do an awful lot for a story where women only exist to nag men who then go off to have sex with other women who then fall into peril that only their man can rescue them from. I get why some books are written to a formula and I totally get why 'Thirst' follows a very clear formula (although the ending is totally at odds with this which is a nice twist). You find an audience and then you set out to give them exactly what they want so you can make a living out of it. It was just a little too formulaic for me and when you can see events signposted so clearly in a book, part of the enjoyment goes. This kind of pulp horror isn't necessarily about the story though, I get it.

Having said all of that though, I couldn't help but enjoy Smith's gung-ho approach to telling the story. If there's a disaster to be found, Smith will chuck everything he can at it and the end result is a book that you can't help but keep reading, just so you can turn the page and find out just how he tops the scenes of carnage that he has already written. You get a real sense that he's also having a lot of fun writing about the death of a city, and just death in general really, and I couldn't help but read along because let's be honest, reading stuff like this is great fun because it's not actually happening to you. The reader can rubberneck as much as they want and not feel guilty at all.

'Thirst' is an incredibly dated read but is also a lot of fun to read at the same time. It's one thing to be formulaic but if you do it well then it really doesn't matter does it? I don't think so.

One for the shelf marked 'Guilty Pleasures'.