Did Not Finish... 'Cannibals' (Guy N. Smith)



Ah ‘Did Not Finish’, we meet again…

Life is way too short to stick with a book that either does nothing for you at all or you just find offensive for some reason or other. The challenge then is to say why…
It’s been a rough week, for reasons, and Matthew Ward’s ‘Legacy of Ash’ is far too big to take on the bus every day so I was looking for an easy read to help me unwind. As luck would have it, I had a copy of Guy N. Smith’s ‘Cannibals’ sitting unread so thought that would do the trick. Here’s some blurb…

Deep in the mountain caves of Blair Long lurks a band of monsters - half-human creatures hideously mutated after generations of inbreeding. This is the dark secret of a remote Highland village - a secret kept safe until a local fisherman builds some holiday chalets to attract tourists. Then the shameful conspiracy of silence is shattered at last - as the horrendous creatures shamble from their lair to mutilate and kill the unsuspecting visitors.

Sounds like just my kind of thing really so I took it to work with me, yesterday, and… did not finish it. In fact, I barely got started before putting ‘Cannibals’ down and it’s very likely that I won’t pick it up again. It’s funny how one sentence can colour a book, maybe unfairly but that’s how it is.

Trigger Warning: I’m going to be talking about rape, sorry.

The way I see it, if rape (or mention of it) has to be in your book then you make damn sure that you don’t treat it in an offhand way. It’s the absolute least you can do, acknowledging  that it’s a serious issue; especially for the victims of it. What you don’t do is have your male lead tell the younger female lead that if she hadn’t been willing, he would have had to rape her. Not even if he’s trying to pass it off as a joke because what kind of a joke was that anyway and there was no way that was a joke, not really.
Look, I get that if you’re reading a Guy N. Smith book then you’re probably here for a little more than just the horror but still, there’s no place for that talk. And I don’t believe that any ‘it’s of its time’ argument would hold up here either. Women don’t really fare well in pulp horror, of this particular time, but there’s still a lot of the good stuff where women aren’t passively threatened like this. No, this just reads like an attempt at titillation gone too far.

So, no ‘Cannibals’ for me then. I read Shaun Hutson’s ‘Assassin’ instead which funnily enough ended up treating the same kind of subject matter with the respect it deserves. I’ll tell you about that maybe another time.

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