‘Crabs Moon’ - Guy N. Smith (Black Hill Books)

Talking about ‘Crabs on the Rampage’, last week, I asked the question, when is the last book in a series not the last book in a series...? The answer is ‘when it’s the Crabs series’; the main storyline ended with ‘Crabs on the Rampage’ but there are more stories to come and I will be covering these here. There are only a few left which isn’t a bad thing as I’m starting to get ‘Crab Fatigue’ with this series, something that I think Smith himself was starting to suffer from in the last book. There’s only really one direction that you can take ‘Crabs’ books in and while constant crab-led destruction is fun, it’s no substitute for an actual story.

I’ll admit to a little trepidation then as I picked up ‘Crabs Moon’ for a read. Would the story actually progress at all or would it be more of the same? Turns out that it was a ‘little bit of A’ and ‘a little bit of B’ which wasn’t all bad but it’s really feeling like the series is starting to limp along now…

They lurched out of the water - moon-driven, coldly mad in their need to destroy, to kill, to eat. In their hundreds, huge and evil, they crawled, waving their claws of death, feeling their way towards their prey...

So, where do you go next once you’ve told the story you want to tell? If you’re Guy N. Smith, you go back to the beginning and fill in the gaps, namely the crabs going after a holiday camp and the seaside town of Barmouth (during the events of ‘Night of the Crabs’, which mainly took place on Shell Island). It’s a bit of an odd move as ‘Night of the Crabs’ has already told us what happens. The crabs eventually go back into the sea and that’s it. So, while there is an element of tension over events in the holiday camp, it’s lessened by the fact that all the reader is essentially doing is waiting for the events of the first book to play out in the background. Like I said, it’s an odd approach made all the odder by the fact that Smith comes up with some genuinely tense moments leading up to crab attacks. He’s had a lot of practice by now so moments like the crab in the boating lake and the scenes in the donkey field are quite nerve wracking, or they would be if we didn’t already know what was going to happen.

The bits of the book where Smith seeks to tie this book in to the events of the first book also come across as a little lazy with at least two chunks of text lifted directly out of ‘Night of the Crabs’ and dropped unceremoniously in this book. It smacks of ‘telling’, and not ‘showing’, and this reader in particular was left wondering if he’d basically paid for the same story to be told twice.  I mean, £2.99 isn’t a bad price for a book like this but there are limits.

Once you get past all this… Well, you’re back into the realms of ‘pulp horror’ and to be fair to Smith, he does it really well. It does verge on the problematic most of the time (and at one points dives full on into the problematic with the learning disabled boy being portrayed as sex mad which, according to Guy N. Smith, makes him bad and therefore a prime candidate for death by giant crab, not cool at all) but is generally a fun read with giant crabs tearing up everything and throwing tanks into Barmouth harbour. I can’t get enough of tanks being thrown into Barmouth Harbour, it never gets old.

Does any of that make up for ‘Crabs Moon’ basically being a slightly lazy rehash of ‘Night of the Crabs’ though? Not really but if you’ve got this far then it won’t stop you carrying on and finishing the series anyway. I’ve got this far but I’m starting to feel like I’m reading to complete the series now instead of actually wanting to keep reading. I’ve got all my fingers crossed for a better book in ‘Crabs: The Human Sacrifice’…