‘Snakes’ – Guy N. Smith (New English Library)


Just a few more hours to go and then it’s a long weekend for me. And probably a pizza too… Actually, make that ‘definitely a pizza’ 😉 Thanks for bearing with me this week. It hasn’t been a bad week but it has been an intense and stressful week so thanks for letting me offload a little (even if you just skipped those paragraphs and went straight to the book stuff, I’m cool with that) 😊 This week’s reading has kind of reflected that mood with a lot of comfort reading going on, which always sounds a little weird when that involves horror fiction but… you know what I mean, right? 😉 All of which leads me to my latest excursion into the horror fiction of Guy N. Smith. Let me tell you all about ‘Snakes’…

Motorway Madness, the papers called it once again. The piled, burning cars and trucks. The blood and wreckage. But this time there would be an added horror. Snakes. In transit and now escaping. Snakes that would coil and climb, creeping into garages, into houses, into bedrooms…

Whether it’s giant crabs, disease carrying bats or swarms of ravenous insects; I love it when Guy N. Smith decides that humanity has got a little too big for its boots and unleashes ‘angry nature’ upon us. There’s mayhem, of course, but it also makes for some surprisingly effective horror, the knowledge that it might just not be so far removed from real life… Okay, not the giant crabs but you know what I mean 😉 That’s what we are given in ‘Snakes’ and it all makes for a tense read, punctuated with manic bursts of ‘Snake Attack’, delivered in that typical Guy N. Smith style, all about the painful death. And that reminds me… A veil is drawn over the worst bits of a baby being attacked by a snake but it does happen and you do see the aftermath. Just something to be aware of if that is likely to distress you.

I’ve read enough Guy N. Smith now (and yet strangely, at the same time, not nearly enough) to know what I’d be getting and there were no surprises on that score. A good dose of pulp horror, just what this reader needed. What really struck me about ‘Snakes’ though was how Smith remains in control of the plot the whole time. ‘Snakes’ is only a hundred and seventy pages long and you’d forgive an author for just going in and doing what they could with such limited room. Not Guy N. Smith though. ‘Snakes’ is anything but straightforward with plenty of false alarms and ambushes to keep you on your toes. Nothing could be taken for granted and that really delicious sense of uncertainty was what ultimately kept me reading; that and seeing whether Keith and Kirsten were able to make it out of their van without being bitten. No, I’m not telling you, read ‘Snakes’ yourself and find out 😉

‘Snakes’ ended up being quite the vicious little horror/thriller hybrid and is a new favourite of mine (makes my top ten of Guy N. Smith reads easily, maybe even top five). Definitely grab a copy if you see one, it’s well worth a look.

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