by Guy N Smith
Crabs 5
1984 New English Library
I wonder what happened to Guy N Smith in the eight years since the first installment of the Crabs series. The first had awkward British sex, but at least it was kind of sweet in a "shall we proceed with intercourse" kind of way. By book five, he's moved on to the kind of miserable misogyny that the British does so well at their worst.
There's precious little actual giant crab attacks in this one, and Smith completely skips his own finale. Mostly we get women cheating and getting raped and their interior monologues of how much they loathe themselves.
This installment is set at a British coastal holiday camp, which is miserable enough as it is. The army has the place sealed up, because it makes sense to keep hundreds of people mere feet from the shoreline when you could evacuate them inland, especially since the crabs mostly attack at night.
The story follows along a series of miserable people. A married woman ditches her kids to fool around with a guy that gets killed by crabs, then hits on another guy who has a girlfriend that breaks the barricades to sleep with another guy and gets molested buy soldiers and a dirty hippy
The violence is pretty tame, and the sex is less appealing than a VD scare film.
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