'Abomination' – Guy N. Smith (Black Hill Books)

It feels like it's been a while but I'm still on the lookout for the kind of horror that you won't find on the shelves at your local Waterstones. Not that there's anything wrong with that kind of horror but... you know what it's going to be and you already know who wrote it. Nope, this reader is after something different and these days that means taking a chance on a second hand bookshop or, and this is more likely to work, getting your cash card out and taking a trip through Amazon with your Kindle. I've found some amazing horror by American writers that you just wouldn't see on the shelves over here (and more on those as and when I read them) and I've also been reintroduced to horror by British writers that you don't hear from so much these days. Writers like an old favourite of this blog, Guy N. Smith.

A Twitter conversation, a couple of days ago, reminded me that it had been a while since I tried 'Cannibals' and found that it wasn't abook for me. Was it time then to get back in the saddle and give Guy N. Smith another go? Of course it was. 'Abomination' had been sat on my wishlist for a while and it was the work of but a minute to get it on the Kindle and for me to start reading it. And wow... This one ended up being a real page turner...

Franklin Roeder, head of Roeder Agrochemicals Ltd., has developed a killer pesticide spray by applying the principle of weedkiller (that the weeds outgrow themselves and die) to insects. The first part is a huge success; everything from frogs to wood lice become bloated under its effects; but the second part is much more of a problem; most of the creatures stubbornly refuse to die. And this is even more of a problem than anyone realises... Overgrown animals and insects, victims of the initial pesticide tests, have developed a taste for human flesh and are out to eat their way through a small Welsh farming village. By the time anyone realises what is happening, will it already be too late...?

You won't get too far into 'Abomination' before you realise that this is a book where Guy N. Smith is more than willing to wear his heart on his sleeve about a couple of matters that are obviously dear to him, smoking and the gradual death of the English countryside. Smoking gets its stage very early on and we're left in no doubt that Guy N. Smith will only stop smoking when you pry that pipe from his cold dead fingers. Fair enough, it's his book and I'm not going to begrudge a chap his pleasures. It's when Smith gets on to the topic of how the countryside is being slowly killed by man-made pesticides that we start to get an idea of what this book is going to be about. 'Abomination' is an eco-warning book that takes it's own sweet time laying out what mankind is doing wrong and why this is bad, a move that leaves the book hovering dangerously on the edge of being preachy. Again, I don't have anything against the message; it's just that you only need to say it once, maybe twice if you absolutely have to.

Luckily for us though, we're reading a horror book by Guy N Smith...

The environmental message is a little heavy handed but what it also does is serve as a little distraction while Smith gets everything into place (while killing off a few stragglers) and then lets the main event commence, a steady massacre of the village folk by whatever feels right, whether it's earwigs, flying ants or some particularly evil frogs. Nature is pissed off and wants revenge for all the liberties that mankind is taking...

In typical horror fare, Guy N. Smith introduces us to a steady line of people who are not particularly nice and therefore totally deserving of having flying ants crawl down their throats and eat them from the inside. You can see their eventual demise coming a mile off (especially when they're first revealed as 'not all that nice', and they're introduced by name despite having not appeared in the book until that point) but every time, Smith draws it out until just as you're thinking that maybe you were wrong... BANG! It happens and it's just as gory as you feared but secretly wanted it to be. I wasn't too keen on the amount of attention paid to the fact that one of the victims (of death by earwig, I think) was a tranvestite. Given Smith's habit of focussing on qualities that suggest people deserve to die, what was probably an attempt at titilation comes across as a little bit vicious when it didn't need to be. On the whole though, this is Smith doing what he does very well. The more the bodycount goes up, the easier it is to keep turning the pages.

I'm getting to be quite a fan of the 'Guy N. Smith Twist In The Tale' where Mankind is not allowed to get away from the fact that it screwed up and therefore has to be punished. The twist here was a good one, I thought, and entirely in keeping with Smith's environmental message. There's always a consequence...

'Abomination' was never going to reinvent horror (it was never meant to) and, as is the case with Guy N. Smith books, is horribly dated in places. What it is though, is a great way to spend an hour or two while you wait for the government to say that it's ok to go back outside. It does, what it sets out to do, very well and has succeeded in putting me back in the driving seat to read more of Smith's horror. Some more 'Crabs' soon, I reckon.