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Abomination
Franklin Roeder, head of Roeder Agrochemicals Ltd., has developed a killer pesticide spray by applying the principle of weedkiller (that the weeds outgrow themselves and die) to insects. The first part is a huge success; everything from frogs to wood lice become bloated under its effects; but the second part is much more of a problem; most of the creatures stubbornly refuse to die. Roeder persuades his lab scientists to lie in their reports, so as to get an early release date for his pesticide. Meanwhile the effects of the spray are causing a plague of oversized and hungry insects.
208 pages, Hardcover
First published May 15, 1986
7 people are currently reading
117 people want to read
About the author
Guy N. Smith
175 books298 followersI 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
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
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
November 25, 2022
I don't usually read to deeply into horror fiction for a larger meaning to life's problems. This time though, Guy puts it on the line. Agrochemicals are man's down fall. He references Bhopal, the mass death by chemicals in India many times. Even the man who wrote books on hunting and killing defenseless wildlife takes the animals side this time out. Either way, if he really felt this way, or was just going through the motions, I think there was a little more than just tabacoo in his pipe on this occasion.
There is much more death and destruction than character building in these pages. So if you're looking for earwigs and worms to go crazy on people. This will do ya. Battalions of hungry ants that sprout wings. A transvestite who is in sheer pleasure with themselves only to be inturupted by carnivorous aphids. There is a bigger message here, but like a lot of Guy's books, he takes the piss out of the situation and leaves you giggling.
There is much more death and destruction than character building in these pages. So if you're looking for earwigs and worms to go crazy on people. This will do ya. Battalions of hungry ants that sprout wings. A transvestite who is in sheer pleasure with themselves only to be inturupted by carnivorous aphids. There is a bigger message here, but like a lot of Guy's books, he takes the piss out of the situation and leaves you giggling.
May 7, 2022
A creature feature not for the squeamish. Mostly enjoyable, however the aim to make the reader want to throw up in their mouth took precedence over any form of character development or plot. There was a definite meat-grinder feeling accompanying any character introduced with them mostly ending up part of the horror gore infused machine that is Abomination. That said, I thought this was pretty good (but you have to like horror to get the most out of this).
January 16, 2019
Tremendously horrific animals on a rampage shocker by the ever reliable Guy N Smith, full of his trademark unpleasantries. It's not just that the actual attacks are described with nothing left to the imagination; the vast majority of the characters are also far from being sympathetic characters and what makes the animal attacks worse is that at their last moments they often think the most troublesome thoughts. There are moments when I caught myself thinking: "I can't believe he wrote that!" Not for the faint of heart.... or the easily offended.
September 16, 2024
Guy N. Smith's fortieth horror novel may well be his most personal. He's written himself into a few of his books but mostly in a wish fulfilment sort of way. Gordon Hall, the protagonist of 'Werewolf by Moonlight', his debut novel, is clearly Guy, but he's a bit more dashing, a bit more heroic and a bit more desirable to the ladies, as wish fulfilment characters tend to be. Here, his avatar is called Les Earnshaw and he's a townie come good as an organic smallholder in the country, living in Pen-y-Cwm, a small Welsh village. However, while he gives Earnshaw and his family scenes, they're not the protagonists because there really aren't any central characters at all.
The setup is this. Pen-y-Cwm is a quiet village, with a population of only 462, but it's suffering from the presence of Roeder Agrochemicals Ltd., who have a research center there. It's not the closed shop that the Midlands Biological Research Center was in 'Bats Out of Hell', whose story sparked from an accident. It's actively doing outdoors testing, releasing its sprays onto the local area, as a way to see what works in a live environment beyond their laboratories. As a result, Earnshaw, who has been in Pen-y-Cwm for five years, is fighting Roeder in the letters column of the local paper, a voice that everyone in the village knows, whether they agree with him or not.
The reason that 'Abomination' doesn't feel as preachy as it could is because Smith lets everybody in the story grouse. There are two sides in this David vs. Goliath battle. David is Earnshaw and the old timers tend to be on his side, acknowledging that he's talking sense, even if he isn't a local boy. Goliath isn't only Roeder, but also Len Wiseman, boss of the local farmer's union, who sees all the benefits that pesticides can bring to the modern farmer. Farmers who don't go in for the organic approach and like how much less work they have to do when sprays do it for them tend to take that side. And, while it's clear which side Smith is on, as an organic smallholder himself, he allows them all to bitch and moan and even things out somewhat.
'Abomination' came out in 1986, the first of his books to be brought into print by Arrow, and there was a clear reason for it, so clear that it constitutes the final word of the book. Two years earlier, forty-five tons of a gas called methyl isocyanate, was released from an insecticide plant in Bhopal, India, that was run by the local subsidiary of Union Carbide. It wasn't deliberate, the release due to substandard safety procedures, but it had a powerful effect. It killed between fifteen to twenty thousand people and left half a million others physically damaged. 'Abomination' is clearly Smith transplanting the Bhopal disaster into his own neck of the woods but also using it as a way to warn people of the dangers of using chemicals in the countryside.
While methyl isocyanate is mentioned and ends up playing a part in the final chapter as a sort of pessimistic coda to the story, it's not the pesticide that Roeder deliberately releases here. That's a chemical called DD7, which adapts the approach of certain weedkillers, namely to stimulate the growth of weeds until they outgrow themselves and die, to insects. Therefore, Roeder expects the local bugs to grow beyond typical size, which everyone living in Pen-y-Cwm can vouch is happening, whether they blame the agrochemical plant or the ongoing drought, but they also expect them to die, which they're stubbornly not doing.
And that brings this topical story into Smith's favourite subgenre of horror, namely animals on the rampage, albeit with one notable change to the formula. Usually, the horror is focused on a single species, whether it's giant crabs, locusts or bats, each of which Smith had already written about, a further couple in snakes and alligators due within a year, or the many other species covered by an array of other authors: rats, slugs, spiders, pigs, caterpillars, jellyfish, whatever. Here, Smith takes a very different approach, because DD7 affects a whole range of species and he's happy for them all to grow to three or four times their natural size and become aggressive in the process.
The first signs we see of this are when large frogs chase Earnshaw's daughter Emma in their back garden, a scene that references a space hopper, such a memorable horror in 'Satan's Snowdrop'. The first utterly outrageous scene features an old lady called Martha Vickers and a cabbage that erupts at her touch because it's full of giant earwigs, which promptly infiltrate her body and eat her from the inside. It's the most horrific scene in a long while from Smith but more are ready to join it soon enough.
Because there's no central protagonist, Les Earnshaw not riding up to save the day like, say, Cliff Davenport in many 'Crabs' novels, Smith is able to take the ensemble cast approach that he took in more pessimistic books like 'Bats Out of Hell' and queue up new victims for new giant bugs. The story does progress, this scene connected to that one, but it's really just a framework for a bunch of gruesome death scenes. And here, Smith doesn't remotely disappoint. Even having covered all thirty-nine of his horror novels to precede this one, I often found myself shocked at how far Smith went. 'Abomination' would stand tall among the splatterpunk or extreme horror titles of today if it were brand-new and it's almost forty years old.
It's hard to pick favourite icky scenes, not all of which result in icky death. When an army of flying ants attack the Pen-y-Cwm junior school, schoolmistress Sue Richards prevents it from going very wrong indeed. Earnshaw's accurate voice in the wilderness aside, she's easily the most endearing and sympathetic character in the book and as close as it gets to a hero, just as Franklin Roeder is the most overt villain, knowing full well the limitations of DD7 but releasing it anyway under the false reports he makes his employees write.
Certainly whoever owned my first edition paperback before me, which is an ex-library copy, had a favourite scene because he or she ripped it out of the novel. It's one in which shy schoolboy virgin Alan Marsden finds himself a girl at dance class who's willing to meet him on the riverbank to pop his cherry, but his orgasm to be spoiled by the realisation that they're both being eaten alive by giant ticks. Fortunately I have a pristine copy of the second edition and was able to read through this scene in that instead. It isn't the only scene to connect orgasm with being eaten alive either. Later on, we encounter what could be described as ant rape fan fiction. Oh yes, Smith goes there.
Surprisingly, the most disgusting scene isn't one in which animals eat humans, but the other way around. Little Andy Woodbridge is an ADHD nightmare for his parents but he outdoes himself at one point when he decides to eat a host of woodlice. He's completely honest about it too, though nobody believes him until he shows them and the results are precisely what you expect. So much for the lounge carpet. Just as inevitable is the following scene, when Andy stumbles onto a cache of extra-large woodlice and things go gloriously wrong for the little brat.
And so we go. All the little creatures in Pen-y-Cwm are growing to three or four times their usual size: aphids, ladybirds, moths, greenfly, caterpillars... There are stag beetles massing in the local church and there's a grave full of worms that writhe like snakes. Once the drought breaks and the village gets a good storm, the focus shifts to slugs, newts, frogs, toads, lizards... For anyone who's into the quintessentially British subgenre of horror that is animals on the rampage, this is truly a gift that keeps on giving.
There is one other detail that stands out in 2024, which once again puts Smith ahead of the curve. That was last obvious in 'Deathbell' and 'The Undead', from 1980 and 1983 respectively, where he gave deaf characters prominent parts. Here, he introduces us to John Holden, who feels topical in an era in which authors like Alison Rumfitt and Gretchen Felker-Martin write horror novels about trans characters. Back in 1986, I'd probably have read Holden as a transvestite, which he certainly thinks about himself, but it's clear that he goes far beyond that. He doesn't merely like wearing women's clothes; he actively wants to be a woman. He wishes that he has a vagina and fantasises about a muscular man filling it. In 2024, it's clear that he's not a transvestite; she's a pre-surgery trans woman.
And that's another way in which this feels notably ahead of its time. This is a visceral Smith novel that goes places even his books don't usually go and I wish it was still in print so that I could throw it at the modern extreme horror crowd. It does everything their books do, but with a message to boot.
Originally posted at the Nameless Zine in September 2024:
https://www.thenamelesszine.org/Voice...
Index of all my Nameless Zine reviews:
https://books.apocalypselaterempire.com/
The setup is this. Pen-y-Cwm is a quiet village, with a population of only 462, but it's suffering from the presence of Roeder Agrochemicals Ltd., who have a research center there. It's not the closed shop that the Midlands Biological Research Center was in 'Bats Out of Hell', whose story sparked from an accident. It's actively doing outdoors testing, releasing its sprays onto the local area, as a way to see what works in a live environment beyond their laboratories. As a result, Earnshaw, who has been in Pen-y-Cwm for five years, is fighting Roeder in the letters column of the local paper, a voice that everyone in the village knows, whether they agree with him or not.
The reason that 'Abomination' doesn't feel as preachy as it could is because Smith lets everybody in the story grouse. There are two sides in this David vs. Goliath battle. David is Earnshaw and the old timers tend to be on his side, acknowledging that he's talking sense, even if he isn't a local boy. Goliath isn't only Roeder, but also Len Wiseman, boss of the local farmer's union, who sees all the benefits that pesticides can bring to the modern farmer. Farmers who don't go in for the organic approach and like how much less work they have to do when sprays do it for them tend to take that side. And, while it's clear which side Smith is on, as an organic smallholder himself, he allows them all to bitch and moan and even things out somewhat.
'Abomination' came out in 1986, the first of his books to be brought into print by Arrow, and there was a clear reason for it, so clear that it constitutes the final word of the book. Two years earlier, forty-five tons of a gas called methyl isocyanate, was released from an insecticide plant in Bhopal, India, that was run by the local subsidiary of Union Carbide. It wasn't deliberate, the release due to substandard safety procedures, but it had a powerful effect. It killed between fifteen to twenty thousand people and left half a million others physically damaged. 'Abomination' is clearly Smith transplanting the Bhopal disaster into his own neck of the woods but also using it as a way to warn people of the dangers of using chemicals in the countryside.
While methyl isocyanate is mentioned and ends up playing a part in the final chapter as a sort of pessimistic coda to the story, it's not the pesticide that Roeder deliberately releases here. That's a chemical called DD7, which adapts the approach of certain weedkillers, namely to stimulate the growth of weeds until they outgrow themselves and die, to insects. Therefore, Roeder expects the local bugs to grow beyond typical size, which everyone living in Pen-y-Cwm can vouch is happening, whether they blame the agrochemical plant or the ongoing drought, but they also expect them to die, which they're stubbornly not doing.
And that brings this topical story into Smith's favourite subgenre of horror, namely animals on the rampage, albeit with one notable change to the formula. Usually, the horror is focused on a single species, whether it's giant crabs, locusts or bats, each of which Smith had already written about, a further couple in snakes and alligators due within a year, or the many other species covered by an array of other authors: rats, slugs, spiders, pigs, caterpillars, jellyfish, whatever. Here, Smith takes a very different approach, because DD7 affects a whole range of species and he's happy for them all to grow to three or four times their natural size and become aggressive in the process.
The first signs we see of this are when large frogs chase Earnshaw's daughter Emma in their back garden, a scene that references a space hopper, such a memorable horror in 'Satan's Snowdrop'. The first utterly outrageous scene features an old lady called Martha Vickers and a cabbage that erupts at her touch because it's full of giant earwigs, which promptly infiltrate her body and eat her from the inside. It's the most horrific scene in a long while from Smith but more are ready to join it soon enough.
Because there's no central protagonist, Les Earnshaw not riding up to save the day like, say, Cliff Davenport in many 'Crabs' novels, Smith is able to take the ensemble cast approach that he took in more pessimistic books like 'Bats Out of Hell' and queue up new victims for new giant bugs. The story does progress, this scene connected to that one, but it's really just a framework for a bunch of gruesome death scenes. And here, Smith doesn't remotely disappoint. Even having covered all thirty-nine of his horror novels to precede this one, I often found myself shocked at how far Smith went. 'Abomination' would stand tall among the splatterpunk or extreme horror titles of today if it were brand-new and it's almost forty years old.
It's hard to pick favourite icky scenes, not all of which result in icky death. When an army of flying ants attack the Pen-y-Cwm junior school, schoolmistress Sue Richards prevents it from going very wrong indeed. Earnshaw's accurate voice in the wilderness aside, she's easily the most endearing and sympathetic character in the book and as close as it gets to a hero, just as Franklin Roeder is the most overt villain, knowing full well the limitations of DD7 but releasing it anyway under the false reports he makes his employees write.
Certainly whoever owned my first edition paperback before me, which is an ex-library copy, had a favourite scene because he or she ripped it out of the novel. It's one in which shy schoolboy virgin Alan Marsden finds himself a girl at dance class who's willing to meet him on the riverbank to pop his cherry, but his orgasm to be spoiled by the realisation that they're both being eaten alive by giant ticks. Fortunately I have a pristine copy of the second edition and was able to read through this scene in that instead. It isn't the only scene to connect orgasm with being eaten alive either. Later on, we encounter what could be described as ant rape fan fiction. Oh yes, Smith goes there.
Surprisingly, the most disgusting scene isn't one in which animals eat humans, but the other way around. Little Andy Woodbridge is an ADHD nightmare for his parents but he outdoes himself at one point when he decides to eat a host of woodlice. He's completely honest about it too, though nobody believes him until he shows them and the results are precisely what you expect. So much for the lounge carpet. Just as inevitable is the following scene, when Andy stumbles onto a cache of extra-large woodlice and things go gloriously wrong for the little brat.
And so we go. All the little creatures in Pen-y-Cwm are growing to three or four times their usual size: aphids, ladybirds, moths, greenfly, caterpillars... There are stag beetles massing in the local church and there's a grave full of worms that writhe like snakes. Once the drought breaks and the village gets a good storm, the focus shifts to slugs, newts, frogs, toads, lizards... For anyone who's into the quintessentially British subgenre of horror that is animals on the rampage, this is truly a gift that keeps on giving.
There is one other detail that stands out in 2024, which once again puts Smith ahead of the curve. That was last obvious in 'Deathbell' and 'The Undead', from 1980 and 1983 respectively, where he gave deaf characters prominent parts. Here, he introduces us to John Holden, who feels topical in an era in which authors like Alison Rumfitt and Gretchen Felker-Martin write horror novels about trans characters. Back in 1986, I'd probably have read Holden as a transvestite, which he certainly thinks about himself, but it's clear that he goes far beyond that. He doesn't merely like wearing women's clothes; he actively wants to be a woman. He wishes that he has a vagina and fantasises about a muscular man filling it. In 2024, it's clear that he's not a transvestite; she's a pre-surgery trans woman.
And that's another way in which this feels notably ahead of its time. This is a visceral Smith novel that goes places even his books don't usually go and I wish it was still in print so that I could throw it at the modern extreme horror crowd. It does everything their books do, but with a message to boot.
Originally posted at the Nameless Zine in September 2024:
https://www.thenamelesszine.org/Voice...
Index of all my Nameless Zine reviews:
https://books.apocalypselaterempire.com/
December 3, 2024
A great flesh rendering, creepy crawly attack novel with a direct reference to agrochemicals and their effects on the environment
This one includes rape by ants,earwigs for those on the squeamish side
This one includes rape by ants,earwigs for those on the squeamish side
April 7, 2022
Experimental chemicals put into a small village makes the insects and frogs grow substantially larger and form a vengence on the human race. Frogs suffocating people, ticks sucking blood, ants stripping the flesh leaving only bones. Slugs and worms sucking and devouring, some extreme kills, insects entering every imaginable hole in the human.body. Smith definitely doesn't like chemicals in the environment. Nice but a little too heavy on the agenda. This book just after his death. R.I.P
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews