Satan's Mate

by George H. Smith

Cover copy reads: "He pursued them relentlessly..mad with lust, tormented by hate and savage desire!"

128 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1960

About the author

Librarian’s note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

George H. Smith was the pulp persona of educator and children's author George Harmon Smith. He used these initials to publish mid-century adult suspense and crime novels without impacting his career as a school principal.

Reviews

[Steven]

A stranger comes to town and all hell breaks loose in the bayou. Fast-paced with plenty of action but it's all sound and fury signifying nothing. Narrative point-of-view is a mess. Randomly omniscient. One sentence is objective the next is free-indirect the next is in another head. And the heads we are in keep dying so it is on to the next and the next and the next. Eventually the POV settles down and we stick with the stranger to the end. Will he survive or won't he? Will he save the town from the evil big shot running things? Will the baying bloodhounds - you just knew there had to be bloodhounds tracking them through the swamp didn't you? - catch the stranger?

[Nick]

I get similar satisfaction out of G. H. Smith's swampbilly pulp novel as I do from the mid-century hicksploitation B-movies I love dearly, so much so that it almost reads like an extension of such trashy melodramas as Shanty Tramp or Bayou. The violence is cruel, the sex is primal, and racism scars every page. The chapters are quick and the changes of narrator are quicker, often backtracking the story's timeline to get several characters' perspectives on the same events. The writing errs on the side of convenience but paints a vivid portrait of a seedy, backwater community and its pitiable inhabitants. Moderately recommended.