‘Alligators’ – Guy N. Smith (Arrow Books)

I’m not sure what happened here, most likely an amazing run of luck on eBay, but I used to be so good and keeping up with my Guy N. Smith reading and now I’m a good fifteen books behind at least… Like I said, an amazing run of luck on eBay, I’ve gone from not being able to find books to finding them faster than I can read them. Not a bad problem to have though 😉

I couldn’t leave a pile of Guy N. Smith books for that long though, not without reading them, so I thought I’d get started last night and read ‘Alligators’…

Freeing the alligators from the reptile zoo is the very last act of defiance by two Animal Rights activists. For, horrifyingly, the primeval monsters turn on their liberators with sudden savage fury.

Now they have tasted human flesh – they want more. Hiding in the river, they mutilate and devour their unwary victims. Poachers, campers, illicit lovers, straying children… the appalling daily toll of victims increases.

Now men and reptiles must match their strength and cunning in a bloody battle for survival – or death…

I had a lot of fun reading ‘Alligators’ last night. I’ll be honest, ‘Alligators’ is basically ‘Snakes’ with alligators instead of snakes but it was so much fun that I found it really easy to let that one slide and just keep reading. It was well worth it 😊

The concept is very simple and as such, the book is very straightforward in its approach, alternating between alligator attacks and attacks on alligators. As ever (and it seems to be a thing in horror books from a certain time…), grisly death is signposted by a lot of detail around the character who is walking into danger… or are they? Smith likes to mess with the trope, just a little bit. Most of the time, a person won’t make it but every so often they do and that adds just the right degree of uncertainty for me to keep reading. Smith still has his morals and if you’re the ‘wrong sort of person’ then you’ll end up facing down a Caiman. You have to wonder if Smith softened up here though, just a little bit, as all of a sudden he’s a believer in second chances. Some lucky people get them.

While this is all playing out, Smith proves once again that he’s bloody good at the set pieces. I’m not just talking about the gory deaths either although there’s plenty there to satisfy the likes of me 😉 I’m talking about moments like a baby Caiman trapping a family in their bedroom or a horse ride that ends in the worst possible way, moments like those. Smith is brilliant here at drawing out the tension, whether there’s an alligator in the vicinity or not, and moments like these became ‘must read’ pages as you can’t help but root for the humans in the piece, even when they’re not particularly pleasant people.

You can’t help but feel a little sorry for the alligators as well… Sure, they have a taste for human flesh but Smith does well to remind us that they are just animals reacting to danger and a whole new environment. There were certain humans where I was very glad to see them come off worst in an alligator encounter 😉

‘Alligators’ was a lot of fun to read then, Guy N. Smith did ‘animal horror’ (‘nature horror’?) very well and this book is no exception.