Dead Bait 2

Dead Bait 2
Severed Press 2011

A themed horror series that is both horror and stays on theme!  Be still be bleeding heart.  Not as good as the first installment, or maybe the novelty is wearing thin - I suspect these are leftover submissions from the first series.  I'm impressed that they've managed to spread out the topics and types of fish to avoid too much repetition.

Captain Fontaine and the Man Eater by Raleigh Dugal
A midlife crisis tale of shark fishing.  There's a brief hallucinatory scene with a mermaid or something, so you can take that for Magic Realism if you want, but not really horror.

The Mer-Monkey by Paul A. Freeman
An anthropologist goes looking for Fiji mermaids with a stupid twist that doesn't make sense.

Heavy Weather by Murphy Edwards
A sea Captain promises the biggest catch, for a price.

Lonely After Dark by Tim Curran
A vengeful ghost lurks beneath the ice on Spider Lake.  My favorite of the collection, but there's a lot of leftover potential in ice-fishing horror.

Ferry-Moans by J.M. Harris
A guy fishing in the Amazon kills a native girl who becomes bait.  Starts to play off the whole "women are good at fishing because of pheromones" thing before it just fizzles out.

Raised by the Moon by Ramsey Campbell
A college student's car breaks down in a desolate coastal town.  He finds shelter with an old, miserable couple who deliver him to a horde of sea people.  I've never had much luck with Campbell, and this one I had trouble following some of the prose.  We've come this far without a Dagon reference, and I'm genuinely surprised it didn't come up here.

A Summer on Quiet Island by Cody Goodfellow
Another small town with a dying fishing industry, this time on an inbred island with mostly deaf inhabitants and a lot of creepy juvenile sexuality.

Lost in Time by Steve Alten
Noirish double crosses unearthing a buried pirate treasure and prehistoric fish.

The Fish Thing by Guy N. Smith
Smith doesn't even bother phoning it in - the title is about as creative as this gets.  A man kills his unfaithful Romany lover and throws her in a lake.  He goes back to the lake and she turns into the Fish Thing, the end.

Shiners by Michael Hodges
Man fishes with son, man catches weird looking fish, man gets snatched into the sky by some kind of bat thing.

The Worst Thing Ever by Anthony Wedd
Shark attack, written from the viewpoint of an annoying British teenager.  Some decent gruesomeness.

"The Krang" by James Robert Smith
A mercenary shanghais a one-armed beggar to hunt the Krangin an old-timey fantasy.  Slight horror overtones, but I enjoyed it so I'll forgive going a little off-genre.

Available from Amazon for Kindle.

Click here for an excerpt.

Crabs' Moon by Guy N Smith (Crabs 5)

Crabs' Moon
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.

The Festering by Guy N Smith

The Festering
by Guy N Smith
1989 Arrow

Some people say "write what you know".  Guy Smith has evidently moved to the country and had a well installed.

In medieval times a man comes back from London to the country with the titular condition.  He's buried deep underground until this ancient evil is awakened centuries later.

But first, wells.  A good third of the book is nothing a city couple getting a well dug in their new country property.  From there, only most of the book is about wells, with occasional asides to people dying of puss-oozing boils.

Since this is Guy Smith, any fatal disease is accompanied by frantic prostitute killing, though he confines himself to "slags" and hallucinated prostitutes.

Nasty, sleazy, and gross, though not quite nasty, sleazy, and gross enough.  He really needed to go somewhere, other than repetitions of "Oh, yet another worker on the well has died a horrible festering death.  I guess I'll wait for the water tests to come back."

The Camp

The Camp
by Guy N Smith
1989 Sphere/Time Warner Paperback

The Camp refers to an all inclusive vacation resort on the coast of England, which is upsetting enough.  For some reason both the resort's management and the British government think that's the best place to test dangerous psychedelics on random vacationers.

The petty, dull holiday makers have complex delusions, such as a new ice age or illegal pregnancies.  There are some complications, so to keep things quiet a government assassin very nosily starts murdering the subjects and everyone around them.

Pretty tame stuff next to giant crabs and onanistic mystics, but that's what happens the further into the 80s we go.

Not much going on, and what there is doesn't make a ton of sense.  Smith wraps up loose ends

Water Rites

Water Rites
by Guy N. Smith
1997 Zebra Books

A cult worships a mermaid that will usher in a new, underwater world.  But don't worry if that sounds too exciting - mostly it's about a reservoir inspector not fixing a light bulb. 

"Kate shuddered, the woman was raving mad.  But, when half of your body was like a fish, there was no way you could be normal."

Dead End

Dead End
by Guy N. Smith
1996 Zebra Books

Guy N. Smith does Kafka.  Or Jacob's Ladder, or Dark City, or whatever.  There is a portal to hell in a closed city development, and dead souls live out a continuation of their miserable mortal lives.  The rich are corrupt, the poor shiftless, and the vagrant Downers are the lowest of the low, smoking crack and feeding on human flesh.

A driving instructor and his deaf (when Smith remembers it) student sneak into the Ghetto to rescue their departed loved ones.  There is an election in the Ghetto/Waste/Hell between equally corrupt factions, leading to a massacre of Downers and prisoners in the only horrific scenes of the book.  Smith goes for Kafkaesque frustration and befuddlement more than thrills.

Smith sometimes pretends that maybe something else is going on, like a government conspiracy, but no, it's just hell.  He has a bad habit of entertaining an atmosphere of mystery only to reveal that everything is pretty much what he said it was in the first place. 

Entombed

Entombed
by Guy N. Smith
1982 Dell Books

Had enough of exorcists yet?  Guy Smith hasn't, and this time we've got one as a main character.  A former Jesuit exorcist has a mid-life crisis after his wife leaves him, and he takes up with a codependent divorcee.  For a lark, they go on a tour of a closed slate mine, because that's what people do for fun in Wales.

Just so happens that the mine is haunted, and the exorcist prepares to drive the spirits out.  He spends some time talking to unfriendly townsfolk to discover the horrible secret of the mine, to learn what dreadful sins were committed that people generations later refuse to talk about.

The Dark One

The Dark One
Guy N. Smith
1995 Zebra Books

A middle class family watch the troubled child of their working class friends.  Grisly accidents seem to follow him, later revealed to be the result of satanic rituals.

Set against the backdrop of the Satanic Panic scare that hit England after America grew out of it, the real horrors seem to be the more mundane creepiness that lies implicit behind the page: wife swapping, sexual abuse, puberty.  Unfortunately, these elements weren't exploited.

For those keeping score, another failed exorcism, another adulterous newspaperman, and more looking down one's nose at the despicable poor.

Kindle ebook from Amazon

Satan's Snowdrop

Satan's Snowdrop
Guy N. Smith
1983 Pocket Books

An old stilted house belonging to the Reichenbach family, overlooking the cliffs where Sherlock Holmes met/faked his death, haunts the families of two different men that move the house, first to New York, then England.

There's quite a bit of nastiness in the visions of the tortures that haunt the house's past: piles of limbs, crotches lashed off with whips, etc.  In the "real" world, victims die of accidents or heart failure, including an exorcist and a boy killed by a possessed spacehopper.

As with too much supernatural horror, there is more page length dedicated to figuring out the rules than actual scary stuff.  Does transferring ownership of the house end the curse?  How about the mysterious snowdrop flower, will replanting it put the souls of the dead to rest?  How exactly should it be planted?  This kind of tedium bogs the whole business down.

Kindle ebook from Amazon

Pluto Pact

Pluto Pact
Guy N Smith
Littlehampton Book Services 1982

I'd say this was in the small occult nuclear accident genre, but the only other example I can think of off-hand is Holocaust 2000.

A plutonium processing plant in Scotland is in crisis after accepting too many deposits, and it threatens to blow up England and maybe the world - I'm not sure about the science here.

The plant is opposed by a small town newspaper publisher, and most of the page count is taken up by him cheating on his wife and being a general SOB.

For some reason the leak of nuclear materials causes a couple of men to kill prostitutes (casually referred to as whores by the narrator).  The area is quarantined, and the book's mild horrors come from the resulting rioting and suicides.

Did I mention the warlock's curse?  Well, neither did Smith, hardly, but the area is cursed by a warlock, which aside from a couple of dreams only manifests in the conclusion.