'The Wood' – Guy N. Smith (New English Library)

My 'Guy N. Smith Readalong' continues, this time with the help of a glorious sunny afternoon and a large(ish) Long Island Ice Tea that ended up turning traitor and trying to stop me. You know what I mean... ;o) 'The Wood' should have found it's way into yesterday's 'TBR Pile' post but I ended up reading it instead as it's a book that I've been hunting for ages and when I finally grabbed a copy... I couldn't wait to get stuck in. And as it turned out... 'The Wood' is a bit bonkers but in a good way, I'm glad I got cracking with it when I did.

Cold as death, the sudden mist seeped and coiled through the wood. Naked and terror stricken, the girl floundered ever deeper through the undergrowth and the clinging black mud, desperate to escape her pursuer. But in front a worse horror waited. For with the mist came the figures from the past - from many pasts - lurching through the blinding whiteness, reaching out to clutch, choke and smother...

So, find a two hour horror film (any one you like, your choice), take out all the best bits and jam them into a ten minute Youtube clip. Then watch that clip... You may not have much of a clue why certain things happen but you can't deny that it's fun to watch in the meantime. And that is 'The Wood' in a nutshell. At only a hundred and seventy pages long, the book doesn't give itself much time for anything else other than throwing various characters into the Wood and seeing what happens next. There is a bit of rationale, about the history of Droy Wood and why these things happen under the trees, but that doesn't come until towards the end of the book. What you get in the meantime are people running from danger and headed into something far worse, waiting in these gloriously atmospheric woods. And it's fun to watch, creepy as hell every now and then but fun. I guess that one of the points of horror is that is doesn't have to make any sense, either to the reader or the character experiencing it. Shit really does happen and all you can do is either escape it or spend your last few moments experiencing it...

True to form, people check out here in any number of nasty ways although the line between survivor and dead is a little too obvious to aid tension. Is that part of the fun of it though, seeing the 'deserving' meet a fitting end? Of course it is, with these books anyway. That's one of the reasons why I love reading Guy N. Smith's books, morally ambiguous tales may be more challenging but there is nothing more satisfying than seeing a truly evil person get what they deserve (or even someone like the gamekeeper, here, who mistreated his dog). Some supporting characters die through no fault of their own but Smith is like some kind of vengeful god of the page, with no mercy for evil-doers and happy to smite with gleeful abandon. For a reader like me, it's a real treat :o)

'The Wood' is one of those books where the best advice I can give would be to just buckle up and let the book take you on it's journey through Droy Woods. It may not make a lot of sense, at least to begin with, but that's almost besides the point. You can tell that Smith was having a lot of fun in Droy Woods and I think you will too, I certainly did.