‘Crabs: The Human Sacrifice’ – Guy N. Smith (Black Hill Books)

My journey through Guy N. Smith’s ‘Crabs’ series is starting to draw to an end now and I’ve got to say that I won’t be entirely sorry to move on to another series readthrough when it does. Giant crabs will always be cool but you need a story to go with them and that is something that was sadly lacking in ‘Crabs on the Rampage’ and even more of an issue in ‘Crabs Moon’. I’m nothing if not a completist though, and a total glutton for punishment, and so I’ll keep reading, at least until the end of the next book. Oh, who am I kidding… I’ll keep reading until there are no more ‘Crabs’ books to read but I’ll be hoping for a return to the pulp storytelling, of the first few books in the series, instead of what is essentially a rehash of stuff that has already happened.

Oh well, rant over… ;o) Onto ‘Crabs: The Human Sacrifice’ and a ‘Crabs’ book that isn’t really about giant crabs at all…

As the crabs embark on their final attempt to invade the land, and kill everything in their path, human dramas play out and these will feed into the last crab attacks. In Long Sutton, the activities of a group of animal rights campaigners have moved from protests to outright murder and Pete Merrick, the leader of the group, is about to take things even further. In the grip of psychosis, Merrick sees the giant crabs as holy and seeks to appease nature by sacrificing those who go against it; people like Susan Delphore, the daughter of a seal skin importer.

Susan dies pretty much as you would expect but her boyfriend, David Knight, isn’t prepared to wait for the police to do their job, not when he’s ex-SAS and very capable of hunting Merrick down himself. As the sacrifices continue, will Knight reach Merrick in time to stop the body count becoming something truly unholy? And what are the crabs up to in all of this…?

Well, the answer to that last question is well, not a lot really. Previous books have already established that the crabs are dying out and as ‘The Human Sacrifice’ runs concurrently to those events (and we’re still getting lumps of copied text to remind us of what is happening while we’re reading this story, not an approach that I’m keen on if I’m being honest) there’s no real change or any surprises. The focus then is more on Merrick and Knight’s attempts to track him down. There are some awesome ‘crab moments’ but on the whole, ‘The Human Sacrifice’ is the unwanted answer to the question, ‘When is a Crabs book not a Crabs book…?’

What we’re left with then is a hundred and seventy six pages of mostly Merrick being a evil bastard and to be honest, I’m not sure we needed to be constantly reminded of what a bastard he is; not in a book that isn’t particularly long. It just reeks of cheap sensationalism and I know that’s the whole point of these books and I’m mostly onside as far as that goes with Guy N. Smith books. It’s just that once we’ve determined that Merrick is evil, the rest of it just feels like overkill that isn’t really needed unless you’re the kind of reader who likes to read about the abuse that Merrick’s ‘girlfriend’ has to live with. I’m not that kind of reader and it didn’t seem to add anything to the plot other than to make the reader cheer when Merrick finally got his at the end of the book.

When is a ‘Crabs’ book not a ‘Crabs’ book then? When that ‘Crabs’ book is ‘The Human Sacrifice’, a book that goes too easy on the crabs (possibly because it’s a victim of earlier books) and lays it on a little too thick with the human element (we know Merrick’s evil, there’s no need to keep telling us). It’s a odd book then that feels really out of place, in the series as a whole, and has me begging the book gods for an upturn in quality for the next book…