Entombed

by Guy N. Smith

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Genres: Horror, Novels

189 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published March 1, 1981

About the author

I was born on November 21, 1939, in the small village of Hopwas, near Tamworth, Staffordshire, England. My mother was a pre-war historical novelist (E. M. Weale) and she always encouraged me to write.
I was first published at the age of 12 in The Tettenhall Observer, a local weekly newspaper. Between 1952-57 I wrote 56 stories for them, many serialized. In 1990 I collated these into a book entitled Fifty Tales from the Fifties.

My father was a dedicated bank manager and I was destined for banking from birth. I accepted it but never found it very interesting. During the early years when I was working in Birmingham, I spent most of my lunch hours in the Birmingham gun quarter. I would have loved to have served an apprenticeship in the gun trade but my father would not hear of it.

Shooting (hunting) was my first love, and all my spare time was spent in this way. In 1961 I designed and made a 12-bore shotgun, intending to follow it up with six more, but I did not have the money to do this. I still use the Guy N. Smith short-barrelled magnum. During 1960-67 I operated a small shotgun cartridge loading business but this finished when my components suppliers closed down and I could no longer obtain components at competitive prices.

My writing in those days only concerned shooting. I wrote regularly for most of the sporting magazines, interspersed with fiction for such magazines as the legendary London Mystery Selection, a quarterly anthology for which I contributed 18 stories between 1972-82.

In 1972 I launched my second hand bookselling business which eventually became Black Hill Books. Originally my intention was to concentrate on this and maybe build it up to a full-time business which would enable me to leave banking. Although we still have this business, writing came along and this proved to be the vehicle which gave me my freedom.

I wrote a horror novel for the New English Library in 1974 entitled Werewolf by Moonlight. This was followed by a couple more, but it was Night of the Crabs in 1976 which really launched me as a writer. It was a bestseller, spawning five sequels, and was followed by another 60 or so horror novels through to the mid-1990's. Amicus bought the film rights to Crabs in 1976 and this gave me the chance to leave banking and by my own place, including my shoot, on the Black Hill.

The Guy N. Smith Fan Club was formed in 1990 and still has an active membership. We hold a convention every year at my home which is always well attended.

Around this time I became Poland's best-selling author. Phantom Press published two GNS books each month, mostly with print runs of around 100,000.

I have written much, much more than just horror; crime and mystery (as Gavin Newman), and children's animal novels (as Jonathan Guy). I have written a dozen or so shooting and countryside books, a book on Writing Horror Fiction (A. & C. Black). In 1997 my first full length western novel, The Pony Riders was published by Pinnacle in the States.

With 100-plus books to my credit, I was looking for new challenges. In 1999 I formed my own publishing company and began to publish my own books. They did rather well and gave me a lot of satisfaction. We plan to publish one or two every year.

Still regretting that I had not served an apprenticeship in the gun trade, the best job of my life dropped into my lap in 1999 when I was offered the post of Gun Editor of The Countryman's Weekly, a weekly magazine which covers all field sports. This entails my writing five illustrated feature articles a week on guns, cartridges, deer stalking, big game hunting etc.

Alongside this we have expanded our mail order second hand crime fiction business, still publish a few books, and I find as much time as possible for shooting.

Jean, my wife, helps with the business. Our four children, Rowan, Tara, Gavin and Angus have all moved away from home but they visit on a regular basis.

I would not want to live anywhere other than m

Reviews

[Brendon Lowe · Rating 3 out of 5]

Entombed by Guy N Smith is definitely not going to win any awards. Its not even overly suspenseful or horrific but gosh it's still an enjoyable read.

He writes pulpy horror. Short, simple and often gory (not so much this book) novels that are easy to read and follow.

This book follows a Priest who conducts exorcisms. After a failed attempt at a house he leaves the church behind and heads to a small town with his girlfriend. The town has a large underground mine which is now a tourist attraction allowing people to go explore the inner workings and hardships the men faced working the mines in its past before its closure. The issue however is the mine is haunted by a satanic being hell bent on keeping the souls of those who enter trapped for eternity to work them day in day out. Tourists have been hearing strange noises, whispers and the like however it's been explained away by the staff as nothing of concern.

A young boy strays from the tour and goes missing and the priest can feel the evil lurking within the mines and the town itself. Its up to him to finally exorcise the demon and its hold on the town. It's a simple plot which progresses the way the way you expect it too. Predictable and sloppy in parts but also entertaining fodder.

If you are looking for an easy read and something to turn your mind off to and have some fun this is a good book for you. Its what Guy N Smith was known for and he did it well. Definitely not ground breaking writing or plot but sometimes we just want to read something like this and its perfect in that sense.

[Josh · Rating 3 out of 5]

Simon Rankin is a priest struggling with a wavering faith. After losing his wife to another man and having his children disown him, Rankin is at the crossroads. This is where we find him on his latest mission to rid the world of demons at a haunted (do demon’s haunt?) mansion.

The exorcism doesn’t go well and he’s soon questioning his belief in the higher power; is he strong enough to believe? Did he believe hard enough? Did he use holy water or tap water in the exorcism (that’s in jest but you can start to get a feel for the book from this…)?

Fast forward and Rankin is now deeply in love with a women who accidently drove her car into his. After knowing each other for a total sum of five minutes, Andrea is paying Rankin’s way, supplying food, accommodation and her womanly delights – anything to pave the priests way to enlightenment.

The madly in-love couple then find themselves embarking on a holy mission to exercise a demon who is terrorising the townsfolk in a long abandoned mine. From the depths of the darkness comes a maddening story sticky-taped together by a character who is just as strange as the plot pieces themselves.

Author Guy N Smith is one of my go-to authors for horror. His books are short, straight to the point, and generally entertaining. Entombed is no different, only that it’s chock block full of crazy; somewhere along the line, plot points were meshed together without a lot of rhyme or reason; satanic cults, creepy kids, ghosts, man-eating beasts, and Satan himself all intertwined without really coming together in a logical way – but that’s part of the fun I guess.

Entombed isn’t high end horror literature, rather a sugar-high of a fast food snack for the mind. Don’t take it too seriously and you’ll have a lot of fun with this one.

This review also appeared on my blog: https://justaguywholikes2read.blogspo...

[Thomas Stroemquist · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very effective horror from Guy N. Smith, an out-of-use haunted Welsh mine is of course a perfect setting for claustrophobic, chilling horror A quick, fun, old-style story. Highly recommended!

[Wayne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Another silly book by Guy. Like no other. Here he colors inside the lines about a failed priest who buggered an exorcism and moves to a dying Welsh mining village. There he goes down a closed mine and instantly hears cries of anguish. He puts it upon himself to exorcise the mine whether they like it or not.

Like all of Guys books, there is always something to take away from it. Low brow horror at its finest. Although I do have to say I read the word funicular more times than I have probably heard it spoken in all my life.

[Hal Astell · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't believe I've read 'Entombed' since my first time through back in the eighties, probably only a couple of years after it was first released. However, I remember it fondly, probably mostly due to its unusual location, a slate mine in Wales. Unlike Deathbell, it can't quite hold up to my memory's standards, but it's a good one that feels transitional on a revisit through this runthrough.

It's one of his books for Hamlyn, the last of them before the final two that never appeared on any of the 'also by' lists inside, but it's less of a Hamlyn read and more of a New English Library read, a strange note given that, thinking about it in this context, his previous novel, 'Warhead', from NEL, was more in accordance with his Hamlyn style. They ought to have switched. This one's a short book that takes the dark worship of the ancient Druids from 'Doomflight' and morphs into a much more modern form, rural Satanists, with our hero a Jesuit priest and exorcist. Guess what came next for Guy? The first two in his series about Mark Sabat! This often feels like a warm-up.

This priest is Simon Rankin, who, like Sabat, is ex- a lot of things. In his case, he's been released by the Jesuits but still considers himself a priest who believes in God and has a personal calling. He's an ex-husband, because his wife Julie left him for a richer man, one who doesn't battle the forces of evil on a daily basis, and she took their kids with her. And he's an ex-exorcist, because he fails in the prologue to cast out an evil spirit from Dower Mansion, a failure that promptly claims the life of the estate agent who had brought him in to cater to his client's whims. He falls down the stairs the very next day. Accident? Not likely, but the coroner wouldn't prove otherwise.

Rankin wants to run from all these things, to put them behind him as best he can, but his choice of location shift doesn't work out from that perspective. The good news is that he meets someone as he's readying himself to leave, Andrea, a divorcee who backs her car into his. They hit it off and, as she wants to get out of suburbia, they go together and rent a holiday cottage in Cwmgilla, a Welsh mining town that looks great on paper. In reality, it's a taciturn place, as depressing as the piles of grey slate chippings suggest. Under William Matheson a century and more ago, the Cwmgilla Slate Caverns provided roofing material for the whole country, but times changed.

Now, his great-great grandson Arthur Matheson presides over a tourist attraction, providing tours of how it used to be. There are thirty miles of tunnels and ten layers to the mine, though the lower six are all flooded nowadays and most of those tunnels are cordoned off from the public. The tours are relatively focused to keep things safe. Of course, with nothing much else to do in town except a smoky pub, Simon and Andrea take one of the tours, even though he has a secret fear of spending time underground, and he can't fail to notice that there's evil down there in the mine. And the evil reacts to his presence.

The main thrust of the novel is exactly what you expect, one exorcist who feels a duty to tackle the evil in the Cwmgilla mine, but is challenged by his failure at Dower Mansion and the fact that he's accompanied by a girlfriend, meaning that he's living in sin. What's more, this is a notably strong evil, so he fears for his young children, Felicity and Adrian, even at such a distance, given that they live with their mother and their new rich daddy, Gerald. He's also hindered by a growing death toll because he knows that the evil is taking lives as a sort of consolation prize for not stopping him.

As Guy tended to do, he fleshes out the area by introducing a host of characters, each of whom is a good candidate for death at the hands of this unknown evil but not necessarily right now. Some do return later in the book to meet their inevitable end, but serve a different purpose early on. So we meet Ralph Reece in chapter three, who appears to have Down Syndrome but is high functioning, a boy who wanders the village at his leisure, unable to be schooled. He therefore becomes our guide to a different entrance to the mine, where he has visions of a little girl, and an introduction to the Satanists in town, because he stumbles on a ritual in a stone circle, a dozen rutting bodies before a robed figure whom he recognises.

The first death is David Wombourn, a fifteen year old who looks older but is on a caravan holiday to Cwmgilla with his parents. They take the tour, but he drifts away and explores, getting lost in miles of tunnels with only a fading torch to help him. And, when it gives, out he hears voices. Something climbs out of a pit 200' below him, so he runs through the darkness and falls off a cliff. He's quickly reported as missing, of course, and the four tour guides on duty that day duly mount a search, but the roof collapses on them, leaving two dead, one seriously injured and the fourth guided out by a vision of David who takes him instead to the others, pushing him off another cliff.

The deaths do mount, on an agreeable exponential scale, but few of them quickly. This isn't about a dangerous former mine where people can get hurt if they don't follow the rules. This is about a dangerous former mine that contains an old evil, one that needs to be understood to be exorcised, one that takes its time working on its victims for a historical reason that Rankin has to figure out. It's called Entombed, so it shouldn't surprise that people would find themselves stuck in the mine, trapped behind rockfalls or stranded at the bottom of a mini-funicular railway that's suddenly lost all its power. These victims don't die just like that; they're stuck without an obvious escape route, to be picked off by the manifest forces of evil, whenever it deems appropriate.

Of course, while this is going on, we're primarily focused on Simon Rankin and his attempts to find enough confidence and prepare well enough, both spiritually and through local research, to tackle this subterranean evil. Oddly, none of the three standout scenes involve him directly, though he's certainly aware of two of them, one through his power as an exorcist and the other through cruel vision. Howard Hawks described a great movie as one with three great scenes and no bad ones. In that sense, this is a great book because there are definitely three great scenes and no bad ones. I wouldn't go quite that far, but they do elevate it.

The first features his girlfriend Andrea, whom he's left behind at the cottage while he goes down with Matheson the mine owner, after getting his grudging permission to attempt an exorcism. He finds himself stranded while the forces of evil psychically attack Andrea and, while he can't see it happen, he feels it. He's left her inside a chalked pentagram with the lights on and curtains open for maximum light. However she finds the urge to masturbate, so crosses the chalk to turn off the lights, at which point she's visited by a dark figure who appears mysteriously naked in front of her as she's writhing in pleasure on the floor. One demonic rape later, she's possessed.

The second is a vision, visited on both Simon and Andrea as they attend a funeral at the sparingly attended Cwmgilla church. They're taken into a different service performed by a different priest of a different religion, which culminates in human sacrifices, throats ritually slit to drain blood for an eager congregation to gorge themselves on. The third is another human sacrifice ritual, one in a stone circle in an attempt to summon the Master with a hanging. It succeeds but not at all with a result that the coven expect. It's brutal and bloody and makes for a glorious discovery for the cops later.

Much of this is told impressionistically, especially when we're focused on Simon. This isn't physical evil the way that, say, King Crab might represent in his signature Crabs books. This is invisible evil, except when it deigns to manifest in a particular form to serve a particular purpose. It isn't going to take a physical solution but a mental one. The exorcist has to be ready and believe in God and a God-given ability to serve his will. And, just as his weapons are faith and will, the weapons wielded by evil are also mental, visions and psychic attacks. These characters can't trust what they see and they suffer for doing so. As long as we go in understanding that, this is powerful stuff.

At the end of the day, those three standout scenes aside, the heart of this book is its location. I'm not sure where we begin, but Simon and Andrea live in the city, at either end of what sounds like a council estate. We quickly shift to the countryside, to a small Welsh village that's long past a boom era, and that's typical for Guy's books. We even meet a character who's deliberately moved out to the sticks to escape the rat race in the Midlands. At another time, Malcolm Bellman would be the lead character. He may not have a smallholding but he's a typical Smith lead. Here, however, he's a supporting character, a potholer willing to talk to Simon at the right time.

And, once we're in Cwmgilla, we're focused primarily on the mine. We spend time in cottages, the one that Simon and Andrea rent, as well as ancient Joe Lewis's and briefly Bellman's former hotel. We spend a little time at the local pub, of course, Caractacus' Camp, because pubs are the heart of village life. Mostly, we're at the mine and, when we're at the mine, we're mostly deep inside it, in a series of pivotal caverns and tunnels. The claustrophobia is palpable, especially when we're with characters who are, as the title suggests, entombed, both living ones in the present time and dead ones manifested once more by a century old evil to serve its bidding.

After this, Guy would continue with its themes. Mark Sabat is an exorcist too and his first couple of adventures are next, battling Satanists and psychic attacks in the British countryside. Then it's the final pair of books Guy wrote for Hamlyn, 'The Pluto Pact' and 'The Lurkers', and more Mark Sabat, with an uncharacteristic thriller sandwiched between his final two adventures in the eighties.

Originally posted at the Nameless Zine in May 2023:
https://www.thenamelesszine.org/Voice...

Index of all my Nameless Zine reviews:
https://books.apocalypselaterempire.com/

[Dale · Rating 2 out of 5]

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.

More reviews at Trash Menace.

[Mikepottz · Rating 3 out of 5]

Simon ex Jesuit priest, wife runs off with kids, hooks up with divorcee and takes a trip to small village with a mine that has an evil history. He will have sickening nightmares, his girlfriend will be penetrated by an entity, people will go missing in the mine, he will have to call upon God again to perform an exorcist. Lacks the gore that I expect from guy.

[Simmone Spring · Rating 3 out of 5]

After reading Blood Meridian and The Book Thief I needed something a little lighter.
This is an okay and pretty fast read. I got a bit confused in a few spots that didn't quite make sense and the story line was a bit weak.
If you like Guy N. Smith and pulp horror it is an okay read.

[Bougainvillea · Rating 2 out of 5]

The writing was pretty fun although the dialogue was pretty choppy at times. But what's up with the rampant sexism and unexpected racism? Also the ending was a bit rushed. Clearly this author excels at descriptions, it felt as if I was living through everything with the protagonists. Unfortunately the plot lacks.

[Mark Woods · Rating 1 out of 5]

Though I have enjoyed some of his other pulp novels (namely The Crabs series) this was an absolute car crash of a novel with a needlessly convoluted plot that seemed to go round in circles.
Felt like a complete mess and couldn’t even pass the halfway mark.

[Shea Chen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a so F crazy and blasphemous novel!

[NRH]

recording that fact that I read this book either in the late 70s or early 80s