The Lurkers by Guy N Smith

I love Guy N Smith. His books are over-the-top British pulp horror. Monsters, killer animals, Satanic cults, plagues, chemical disasters and of course sex are just some of the content within his novels. Wonderful! Was he the greatest writer? Some would say perhaps not, but he knew his audience then and kept selling and writing. They are an absolute hoot to read. He wrote to entertain the masses and a lot of people read them

I heard an interview with Smiths daughter on the excellent Breakfast in the Ruins podcast where she said this was her favourite of her father’s novels.

I’m not too sure why The Lurkers is classed as a horror novel. It’s a crime novel and possibly

a thinly veiled autobiography. It’s a pretty mediocre thriller at best. It certainly has none of the over-the-top pulp gore and horror. It was a first for me as I can always find something to like in Smith’s novels. The writing is fine, but I just did not enjoy this at all. I was bored! It read like the daily trudge of a very annoyed man and his irritating family.

The story is about Peter Fogg, a writer, who moves to a country cottage in Wales to write his next book. But everything seems to be against him: the locals are hostile to outsiders (and to the English), their pets are sacrificed on the local stone circle, and malicious tricks are being played on him. His son is bullied at school. His wife and son soon leave and Fogg is left to his own devices. A snowstorm descends upon the Welsh mountain and he finds himself trapped in the house with some potential unknown terrors outside.

Don’t get me wrong, this is written in the usual Guy N Smith fashion, with great characters, and some wonderful descriptions of the Welsh landscape ( something that was close to Smith) but it just meanders towards a (spoilers sorry) Scooby Doo unmasking at the end. This one certainly was not for me. Left me as cold as the cats corpse featured in the novel.

Smith churned out so many novels in so many genres, that this felt like it had been written for something else, but published under the horror banner to cash in on his popularity in the genre.

Bloody great cover though!

Unless you are cursed with the Guy N Smith collector bug, I would honestly give this one a miss.

Cheers

Dan