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


My journey to read all of Guy N. Smith’s horror fiction continues and I’ve had to delve pretty deep into eBay to find a copy of ‘The Undead’. Actually, to be honest, I wasn’t even looking for a copy, I just saw it and had to jump on it before someone else did. After slogging my way through ‘The Book of Ptath’, I thought I’d treat myself and round off the week with a little dip into my ‘Guy N. Smith TBR Pile’, ‘The Undead’ was at the top of the pile so that’s what I went with (because sometimes it really is that simple)…

Ron Halestrom is a new author, one successful book behind him, who moves into a new home with his family, to write more. But naturally, Gabor House has a dark secret which is trying to drive them away. Two hundred years before, it was the old manor house: home to the Mainwarings, owners of much of the locality. Young children had been going missing, but it took their own daughter Isobel's disappearance for them to send out a search party. They find Bemorra, the local imbecile, throwing her into the Gabor Pool. Bemorra is hanged until he is dead, but he has enough time to curse the locals before he goes…

This is going to be a short post today (I keep saying that, don’t I…?) because to be blunt, ‘The Undead’ is only a hundred and seventy six pages long… That doesn’t make it a bad book, far from it (although another fifty pages could have done wonders for it, more on that later though), but it doesn’t leave you with much to say about it in the meantime…

 Basically, ‘The Undead’ is a book that knows it’s job and doesn’t hang around doing it. Like that tired old cliché about men shopping, ‘The Undead’ storms in, does what it needs to and gets the hell out once it’s done (and I don’t shop like that at all…) And that’s fine, it works well on that level with Gabor Village getting hit from all sides by Bemorra’s curse and the Gabor Pool working to its own agenda at the same time. This means plenty of horror that’s thrown at you in quick succession and I won’t lie, it’s fun watching certain people being built up only to suffer an excruciating end after a page or two. It’s Guy N. Smith doing what he does best.

I did say that another fifty pages could have worked wonders for the book though… Maybe not even that many. While I liked how the ending brought everything ‘full circle’, as it were, a little more about the relationship between Amanda and Beguildy would have given that ending a surer foundation rather than having it sprung on us and leaving us to just go with it. My feeling coming out of it was that poor Beguildy got rather a raw deal, I wasn’t sure why it had to be him who went through all that…

‘The Undead’ is another sharp dose of pulp horror that ultimately, I’m glad I read. If you were looking to pick up a Guy N. Smith book for the first time though, I’m not sure if this is the one that I’d recommend you read first. A fun read that perhaps needed just a little more meat on its bones…

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