What do you think?
Rate this book
The Wood
Cold as death, the sudden mist seeped and coiled through the wood. Naked and terror stricken, the girl floundered ever deeper through the undergrowth and the clinging black mud, desperate to escape her pursuer. But in front a worse horror waited. For with the mist came the figures from the past - from many pasts - lurching through the blinding whiteness, reaching out to clutch, choke and smother the wood!
191 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published November 1, 1987
4 people are currently reading
207 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
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
January 7, 2025
One of the best Guy books I've read. Little more graphic than his usual fair. It's kind of like an out of control "Twighlight Zone" episode.
It starts out with a woman walking home from the disco by herself because she's had it with her boyfriend and wants a new start. She is picked up by a man who turns out to be a serial rapist, now a killer. She escapes from him into Droy wood. He chases her in there. Her boyfriend goes in too. Then more enter. They start to see things. A Nazi who thinks WWII is still raging. Bootleggers and even Droy himself. Weird stuff goes down.
A really good book and a really great cover. I'm not the only one who likes it. I have a vinyl LP by the English Dogs that took the art and put it on their cover. "Metalmorphosis." Great record, that too.
It starts out with a woman walking home from the disco by herself because she's had it with her boyfriend and wants a new start. She is picked up by a man who turns out to be a serial rapist, now a killer. She escapes from him into Droy wood. He chases her in there. Her boyfriend goes in too. Then more enter. They start to see things. A Nazi who thinks WWII is still raging. Bootleggers and even Droy himself. Weird stuff goes down.
A really good book and a really great cover. I'm not the only one who likes it. I have a vinyl LP by the English Dogs that took the art and put it on their cover. "Metalmorphosis." Great record, that too.
January 11, 2021
A tightly wound horror which leverages common sub themes to invoke a true sense of fright and flight in both characters and reader. Taking the haunted woods concept to the extreme and massaging it with sex and sin makes this one hell of a read. I'm a big fan of Guy N Smith and this one didn't disappoint.
September 9, 2018
Quintessential 80s pulp horror served up right. This short novel is one of the few of its kind that really gave me chills. An English peat bog is certainly a prime setting for a riveting horror story, and the writing invokes such rich imagery of the place that reading this on a cold, rainy day (as I did) certainly adds to the experience. Guy N Smith has written a lot of these nasty but fun tales, and if you are wanting to give one a read, "The Wood" is a great place to start.
There are some poorly executed moments that take you out of the story, particularly the scene where a girl assists the police in a reenactment of the last hours of a missing girl before she disappeared. Also, the story gets pretty ridiculous with its preoccupation with forced sex scenes, which ends up with no less than four characters stumbling about the woods nude throughout the whole plot.
But you really can't analyze books like this too much. The point is that the author intended to write a quick thrill-ride, and he delivered. So if you are looking for a little-known treasure from the golden age of horror paperbacks, "The Wood" will provide ample satisfaction.
There are some poorly executed moments that take you out of the story, particularly the scene where a girl assists the police in a reenactment of the last hours of a missing girl before she disappeared. Also, the story gets pretty ridiculous with its preoccupation with forced sex scenes, which ends up with no less than four characters stumbling about the woods nude throughout the whole plot.
But you really can't analyze books like this too much. The point is that the author intended to write a quick thrill-ride, and he delivered. So if you are looking for a little-known treasure from the golden age of horror paperbacks, "The Wood" will provide ample satisfaction.
May 26, 2013
This book was okay. It wasn't terrible, but it did have some serious head-scratcher moments. I liked the idea behind "the wood" itself, a place caught in time, where eldritch goings-on ensnare those foolish enough (or unfortunate enough) to enter. I also liked the atmosphere Guy Smith achieved here.
The problem for me was the plot. People do things in this book that folks (not to mention cops) would never do. Yes, I understand that The Wood influenced minds, but still ... there was a real lack of sympathetic characters here (in part because of the stupid things they do), and yes, I understood that haunted characters were trapped in cyclical time warps, but there's absolutely no need to make me read the same scenes over and over again. For a short book, it felt like it had a excessive amount of padding. This might have been much more effective at half its length.
Overall, not my favorite Guy Smith novel, but still a passable read for fans of pulp fiction who know what to expect going in.
The problem for me was the plot. People do things in this book that folks (not to mention cops) would never do. Yes, I understand that The Wood influenced minds, but still ... there was a real lack of sympathetic characters here (in part because of the stupid things they do), and yes, I understood that haunted characters were trapped in cyclical time warps, but there's absolutely no need to make me read the same scenes over and over again. For a short book, it felt like it had a excessive amount of padding. This might have been much more effective at half its length.
Overall, not my favorite Guy Smith novel, but still a passable read for fans of pulp fiction who know what to expect going in.
January 13, 2024
Review to come.
May 30, 2009
First published back in 1985 Guy N Smith’s novel ‘The Wood’ was yet another pulp horror novel that cam from the prolific writing career of this pulp horror master.
Set in the quiet village of Droy, the novel begins with a WWII nazi bomber crashing into Droy Wood, located on the outskirts of the village. There were no survivors from the crash landing.
The tale leaps forward to the present day where Carol Embleton on the way home late at night after dancing the night away at the local disco is forced to hide amongst the dark undergrowth of the woods to escape a sex crazed attacker who is after her.
The next day and there’s still no sign of Carol, so her boyfriend Andy Dark, a wildlife expert with the glorious title of ‘Chief Conservation Officer’, goes in search of her within Droy woods. The police soon get involved and by now they are looking for all three individuals, Carol, Andy and the crazed sex-killer James Foster.
The local girl Thelma Brown was the last to see Carol Embleton and so is asked by a police officer to accompany him to the woods to help locate the missing girl. When they arrive at the woods, Thelma realises that the officer isn’t who he says he is and darts off into Droy woods to hide.
A thick layer of fog masks the landscape of the woods, and as it does, so the dark secrets that have been lying within its expanse come out. The woods hold more dark and deadly secrets than just the remains of a crashed WWII German bomber. And the secrets it holds are not just dead, they’re awake and out for the blood of the living.
Atmospherically the novel works well creating an eerie setting for this tale of ghostly hauntings. Smith’s descriptive nature towards the dark and foreboding woods is superb, setting down an underlying creepy feeling throughout the tale. Alas, this does not save the novel from the loosely knit and altogether weak storyline that barely supports itself from start to finish.
The elaborate array of hauntings are intriguing and imaginative, but are never developed enough to bring out anything truly haunting. Smith’s controversial passion for including an undead Nazi is once again present in ‘The Wood’ with the WWII bomber whose spirit still roams the woods.
Smith also manages to cram in his usual necessity for a graphic sexual attack or two. This nasty premise adds a further unnerving element to the storyline, keeping the readers heart rate thumping away at a mile a second.
However, the one sin a pulp horror novel of this nature should never fall foul of, is to be boring. Pulp horror needs to be crammed with over-the-top violence, unashamed sexual scenes, corny and clichéd characters and above all an action packed and exciting storyline that doesn’t once let up. Alas, Smith’s ‘The Wood’ drags from one dramatic event to the next, with the intersections too slow moving, making the story as a whole cumbersome and jerky to the reader.
The plot is too loose, with far too little direction to keep the reader entertained by the overall premise of the story. Hardly any development to the plot is apparent throughout, as the reader stumbles through a suggestive yet unsubstantiated tale of a haunted woods.
That said, Smith manages to throw in brief moments of inspired originality that claw the reader back into the tale. Characterization is mediocre throughout, with barely memorable characters meeting their demise then almost instantly forgotten by the reader.
You usually know what you’re going to be getting with a Guy N Smith novel. Smith is a master of the intense and wildly over-the-top tales of elaborate horror. His unashamed use of excessive violence and depravity are what makes his tales so damn right entertaining. ‘The Wood’ does still have brief moments of these base passions of Smith’s, but without a strong storyline holding these together, the tale unfortunately fails to hold the readers attention.
The novel runs for a total of 170 pages, which is a little more than average compared with the majority of Smith’s novels.
Set in the quiet village of Droy, the novel begins with a WWII nazi bomber crashing into Droy Wood, located on the outskirts of the village. There were no survivors from the crash landing.
The tale leaps forward to the present day where Carol Embleton on the way home late at night after dancing the night away at the local disco is forced to hide amongst the dark undergrowth of the woods to escape a sex crazed attacker who is after her.
The next day and there’s still no sign of Carol, so her boyfriend Andy Dark, a wildlife expert with the glorious title of ‘Chief Conservation Officer’, goes in search of her within Droy woods. The police soon get involved and by now they are looking for all three individuals, Carol, Andy and the crazed sex-killer James Foster.
The local girl Thelma Brown was the last to see Carol Embleton and so is asked by a police officer to accompany him to the woods to help locate the missing girl. When they arrive at the woods, Thelma realises that the officer isn’t who he says he is and darts off into Droy woods to hide.
A thick layer of fog masks the landscape of the woods, and as it does, so the dark secrets that have been lying within its expanse come out. The woods hold more dark and deadly secrets than just the remains of a crashed WWII German bomber. And the secrets it holds are not just dead, they’re awake and out for the blood of the living.
Atmospherically the novel works well creating an eerie setting for this tale of ghostly hauntings. Smith’s descriptive nature towards the dark and foreboding woods is superb, setting down an underlying creepy feeling throughout the tale. Alas, this does not save the novel from the loosely knit and altogether weak storyline that barely supports itself from start to finish.
The elaborate array of hauntings are intriguing and imaginative, but are never developed enough to bring out anything truly haunting. Smith’s controversial passion for including an undead Nazi is once again present in ‘The Wood’ with the WWII bomber whose spirit still roams the woods.
Smith also manages to cram in his usual necessity for a graphic sexual attack or two. This nasty premise adds a further unnerving element to the storyline, keeping the readers heart rate thumping away at a mile a second.
However, the one sin a pulp horror novel of this nature should never fall foul of, is to be boring. Pulp horror needs to be crammed with over-the-top violence, unashamed sexual scenes, corny and clichéd characters and above all an action packed and exciting storyline that doesn’t once let up. Alas, Smith’s ‘The Wood’ drags from one dramatic event to the next, with the intersections too slow moving, making the story as a whole cumbersome and jerky to the reader.
The plot is too loose, with far too little direction to keep the reader entertained by the overall premise of the story. Hardly any development to the plot is apparent throughout, as the reader stumbles through a suggestive yet unsubstantiated tale of a haunted woods.
That said, Smith manages to throw in brief moments of inspired originality that claw the reader back into the tale. Characterization is mediocre throughout, with barely memorable characters meeting their demise then almost instantly forgotten by the reader.
You usually know what you’re going to be getting with a Guy N Smith novel. Smith is a master of the intense and wildly over-the-top tales of elaborate horror. His unashamed use of excessive violence and depravity are what makes his tales so damn right entertaining. ‘The Wood’ does still have brief moments of these base passions of Smith’s, but without a strong storyline holding these together, the tale unfortunately fails to hold the readers attention.
The novel runs for a total of 170 pages, which is a little more than average compared with the majority of Smith’s novels.
March 26, 2023
The Wood should serve as a reminder that, all nostalgia or romanticism aside, a lot of pulp is pulp for a reason. Yes, pulp gave us Conan and Cthulhu, but it also gave us mediocre, oversexualized stories such as this one. Graphic rape, characters running around naked for the entirety of the story, but also a pace that's so slow it should be illegal for a book this short as well as a total lack of literary depth. I've written elsewhere that unpretentiousness is not a license for mediocrity.
As for this book being licentious, let me assure you that it's not the least bit erotic, it's just obscene. The former might make me uncomfortable, but I can respect it nonetheless. Not even us Christians can quite agree where the line between acceptable and inacceptable eroticism should be drawn, after all. Obscenity is an entirely different beast.
As for this book being licentious, let me assure you that it's not the least bit erotic, it's just obscene. The former might make me uncomfortable, but I can respect it nonetheless. Not even us Christians can quite agree where the line between acceptable and inacceptable eroticism should be drawn, after all. Obscenity is an entirely different beast.
September 18, 2024
I remember liking 'The Wood' when I first read it almost four decades ago when it was new, but it resonated with me on a fresh read in 2024. No wonder some Guy N. Smith fans consider this their favourite of his horror novels. I'm not sure if it truly ranks up there with 'Deathbell' and 'Fiend' in my estimation, but it's got to be close. It's a very weird, hallucinatory read, in which Guy finesses some of his favourite go-to tropes into perhaps the most highly effective form: Nazis, rapists, Oke priests and, most notably, the blurring of time.
Given that I coincidentally read Alison Uttley's 'A Traveller in Time' this month and even wrote up my review of it right before this one, I know that what's going on here is termed "time slip". Guy had used this in a number of books, so that characters in their present day mysteriously slip back to a previous era without moving in space. Sometimes he phrased it as a vision, such as in multiple Mark Sabat novels, but often as an actual transportation, like in 'Doomflight' where characters in the modern day suddenly find themselves centuries earlier, where they're promptly sacrificed by bloodthirsty druids. Yes, that happens here too.
What's new here is that it isn't simply now and then. Time is a wild and woolly thing in this book, so that multiple eras apparently coexist in the same space, with characters bleeding across from one to another without any control over the process. Why Droy Wood is like this, we have no idea and Guy has no intention of filling us in. It just is and it's a particularly evocative location for time to malfunction, being six hundred acres of swampy woodland close to the British coast. The locals talk in the Dun Cow about how people often go missing in Droy Wood, especially when fog swirls in from the coast. Nobody gets out when the mist covers the wood.
It's a quintessential location for a horror movie. All Guy has to do is feed people into it so they can interact on its swampy ground. Of course, the people he feeds in have to be a heady combination of horror movie villains and their victims, with a few token upstanding types to keep the dynamics flowing. Rinse and repeat. Stir until ready. Out of all Guy's books that I've devoured thus far in my current runthrough, this is the one that screams most obviously for a sequel. Bizarrely, he never wrote one, instead extending his 'Werewolf', 'Crabs' and 'Truckers' series and writing a follow-up to 'The Sucking Pit', another quintessential story set in a wood.
The first character we see arrive in Droy Wood is Bertie Haas, Luftwaffe pilot and devout Nazi, as his plane is shot down during an air raid over England and he parachutes into the wood. He wishes that he'd listened to the clairvoyant in Stuttgart who told him not to go. Victor Amery, clerk by day and fire-watcher for the Home Guard by night, watches him descend. Of course, he doesn't get out of the wood, perhaps not unexpectedly given that he's the prologue, but he gets plenty to do within the pages that follow.
For a start, he gets to chain Carol Embleton up in Droy House, the decaying mansion that's as lost to Droy Wood as any of the unwary souls who ventured into it when the fog was in, even though he arrived in the wood forty years before she did. She's breaking it off with her conservation officer boyfriend, Andy Dark, by having a good time at the disco and walking home on her own. Sadly, she gets picked up in the rain by a pervert killer called James Foster, prompting rape in his car and an ill-advised escape by running naked into Droy Wood.
She gets chapter one and Andy Dark gets chapter two, as he chases in to find her. Chapter three is PC Jock Houliston; who's part of the search team for both of them. Before long, Thelma Brown, an old friend of Carol's, gets a chapter as well as she reenacts her friend's last night, re-living far more of it than she ever intended, due to the wood's sinister influence on the cop chaperoning her, Det. Const. Alan Lee. And so we go, with a few other characters joining the fray from stories told at the Dun Cow, like Vallum, a man who killed his wife and her lover in Droy Wood back in 1932. Of course, neither was ever seen again, except by us because they show up here in this mishmash of time.
Frankly, the whole idea of this book is a highlight but Guy doesn't skimp on the details either. He's happy to give us ghost smugglers battling Customs officers, Oke priests sacrificing rapists to their gods and Nazi pilots chaining up their victims in decaying mansions, but he's also happy to keep it happening because one of the benefits of time not behaving properly is that characters don't get to escape the wood as easily as by dying. Their nightmarish existences continue just as long as the wood desires. There are no ways out, making this a literal Hellscape, even if it doesn't look like an artwork by Hieronymous Bosch.
There are a couple of particularly gruesome moments that are worth calling out for extra-special mention. One lady, who isn't having the best day of her life when she runs into Droy Wood anyway, finds herself pushed into a chasm by a ten year old girl, only to then be raped by the animated corpse of her father. Meanwhile, a gamekeeper who both represents Guy himself and doesn't, given that his spaniel, like one of Guy's, is named Muffin, finds himself chained up by Haas and eaten by rats until he drowns. Guy was layering the horrors on top of horrors in this one.
It's not entirely dark, because there is a happy ending of sorts, but there are oodles of depravity and horror to enjoy and endure before we get there. The worst thing about 'The Wood' is that it's over far too quickly. The structure of the book is so fluid that it could have been a short story or a doorstop of a novel, but Guy kept it relatively lean and mean at a hundred and seventy pages. It's fair to say that I wanted a hundred and seventy more. As I mentioned, I'd have settled for a sequel but Guy never wrote one. His next half dozen horror novels were all standalone originals, then he returned to 'Thirst' and 'Deathbell' for sequels instead of this one.
Oh, well! At least we'll always have 'The Wood', pun well and truly intended. You just wouldn't want to go there in real life.
Originally posted at the Nameless Zine in July 2024:
https://www.thenamelesszine.org/Voice...
Index of all my Nameless Zine reviews:
https://books.apocalypselaterempire.com/
Given that I coincidentally read Alison Uttley's 'A Traveller in Time' this month and even wrote up my review of it right before this one, I know that what's going on here is termed "time slip". Guy had used this in a number of books, so that characters in their present day mysteriously slip back to a previous era without moving in space. Sometimes he phrased it as a vision, such as in multiple Mark Sabat novels, but often as an actual transportation, like in 'Doomflight' where characters in the modern day suddenly find themselves centuries earlier, where they're promptly sacrificed by bloodthirsty druids. Yes, that happens here too.
What's new here is that it isn't simply now and then. Time is a wild and woolly thing in this book, so that multiple eras apparently coexist in the same space, with characters bleeding across from one to another without any control over the process. Why Droy Wood is like this, we have no idea and Guy has no intention of filling us in. It just is and it's a particularly evocative location for time to malfunction, being six hundred acres of swampy woodland close to the British coast. The locals talk in the Dun Cow about how people often go missing in Droy Wood, especially when fog swirls in from the coast. Nobody gets out when the mist covers the wood.
It's a quintessential location for a horror movie. All Guy has to do is feed people into it so they can interact on its swampy ground. Of course, the people he feeds in have to be a heady combination of horror movie villains and their victims, with a few token upstanding types to keep the dynamics flowing. Rinse and repeat. Stir until ready. Out of all Guy's books that I've devoured thus far in my current runthrough, this is the one that screams most obviously for a sequel. Bizarrely, he never wrote one, instead extending his 'Werewolf', 'Crabs' and 'Truckers' series and writing a follow-up to 'The Sucking Pit', another quintessential story set in a wood.
The first character we see arrive in Droy Wood is Bertie Haas, Luftwaffe pilot and devout Nazi, as his plane is shot down during an air raid over England and he parachutes into the wood. He wishes that he'd listened to the clairvoyant in Stuttgart who told him not to go. Victor Amery, clerk by day and fire-watcher for the Home Guard by night, watches him descend. Of course, he doesn't get out of the wood, perhaps not unexpectedly given that he's the prologue, but he gets plenty to do within the pages that follow.
For a start, he gets to chain Carol Embleton up in Droy House, the decaying mansion that's as lost to Droy Wood as any of the unwary souls who ventured into it when the fog was in, even though he arrived in the wood forty years before she did. She's breaking it off with her conservation officer boyfriend, Andy Dark, by having a good time at the disco and walking home on her own. Sadly, she gets picked up in the rain by a pervert killer called James Foster, prompting rape in his car and an ill-advised escape by running naked into Droy Wood.
She gets chapter one and Andy Dark gets chapter two, as he chases in to find her. Chapter three is PC Jock Houliston; who's part of the search team for both of them. Before long, Thelma Brown, an old friend of Carol's, gets a chapter as well as she reenacts her friend's last night, re-living far more of it than she ever intended, due to the wood's sinister influence on the cop chaperoning her, Det. Const. Alan Lee. And so we go, with a few other characters joining the fray from stories told at the Dun Cow, like Vallum, a man who killed his wife and her lover in Droy Wood back in 1932. Of course, neither was ever seen again, except by us because they show up here in this mishmash of time.
Frankly, the whole idea of this book is a highlight but Guy doesn't skimp on the details either. He's happy to give us ghost smugglers battling Customs officers, Oke priests sacrificing rapists to their gods and Nazi pilots chaining up their victims in decaying mansions, but he's also happy to keep it happening because one of the benefits of time not behaving properly is that characters don't get to escape the wood as easily as by dying. Their nightmarish existences continue just as long as the wood desires. There are no ways out, making this a literal Hellscape, even if it doesn't look like an artwork by Hieronymous Bosch.
There are a couple of particularly gruesome moments that are worth calling out for extra-special mention. One lady, who isn't having the best day of her life when she runs into Droy Wood anyway, finds herself pushed into a chasm by a ten year old girl, only to then be raped by the animated corpse of her father. Meanwhile, a gamekeeper who both represents Guy himself and doesn't, given that his spaniel, like one of Guy's, is named Muffin, finds himself chained up by Haas and eaten by rats until he drowns. Guy was layering the horrors on top of horrors in this one.
It's not entirely dark, because there is a happy ending of sorts, but there are oodles of depravity and horror to enjoy and endure before we get there. The worst thing about 'The Wood' is that it's over far too quickly. The structure of the book is so fluid that it could have been a short story or a doorstop of a novel, but Guy kept it relatively lean and mean at a hundred and seventy pages. It's fair to say that I wanted a hundred and seventy more. As I mentioned, I'd have settled for a sequel but Guy never wrote one. His next half dozen horror novels were all standalone originals, then he returned to 'Thirst' and 'Deathbell' for sequels instead of this one.
Oh, well! At least we'll always have 'The Wood', pun well and truly intended. You just wouldn't want to go there in real life.
Originally posted at the Nameless Zine in July 2024:
https://www.thenamelesszine.org/Voice...
Index of all my Nameless Zine reviews:
https://books.apocalypselaterempire.com/
February 24, 2020
at one point in this novel, while searching for a missing girl, the police organise a bizarre reconstruction which seems to consist of dressing the missing girl's best friend in her clothes and sending her off to wander country lanes alone in the middle of the night. i'm not a criminologist but i'm pretty sure that's not how it works. in the course of this reconstruction, said girl gets abducted by some guy who's been possessed by a ghost rapist. or something. god only knows. the girl manages to escape into the woods where falls into a pit and is raped by a zombie.
two stars, because at least i finished it.
two stars, because at least i finished it.
March 12, 2010
Sure, it's a pulp novel, so you can't expect a lot of fullness to the story. However, with that being said, this is probably the worst Smith book I've read so far.
Ordinarily he has both gun blazing and by the end, you feel satisfied. This one left me scratching my head. There were several loose ends, tiny and meaningless characters, and lots of ho-hum story telling.
I've read better by Smith. I'll continue to read Smith. But if I were you, I'd avoid this title. It's a little bland.
Ordinarily he has both gun blazing and by the end, you feel satisfied. This one left me scratching my head. There were several loose ends, tiny and meaningless characters, and lots of ho-hum story telling.
I've read better by Smith. I'll continue to read Smith. But if I were you, I'd avoid this title. It's a little bland.
July 10, 2012
enjoyable
April 21, 2023
This is a real time waster, I bought for the cover and really that’s the only reason to own this book. For a short 171 pages it was a chore to get through with so much unnecessary padding, by the time the story gets going there’s a huge search party in the woods (as in an opportunity for large bodycount) instead the story ends abruptly and with little sense other than a few brief sentences summing up what’s gone on.
There were one or two cool descriptions in here, ghostly girl and serial killer turned creature of the fog, which conjured some images in my mind but the general premise of the book which was a good one, was badly executed.
As mentioned by other reviewers there’s unnecessary rape too where the characters spend the rest of the book running round naked so if that triggers you, well it’s just another reason to avoid this book. To be honest your time is better spent reading a King novel.
There were one or two cool descriptions in here, ghostly girl and serial killer turned creature of the fog, which conjured some images in my mind but the general premise of the book which was a good one, was badly executed.
As mentioned by other reviewers there’s unnecessary rape too where the characters spend the rest of the book running round naked so if that triggers you, well it’s just another reason to avoid this book. To be honest your time is better spent reading a King novel.
February 11, 2020
Warning: This book is very rapey, read at your own peril. It's basically spooky, English countryside meets the Bermuda Triangle. Classic in it's own way, definitely gruesome, sometimes confusing. I feel like there was a solid foundation but it was either underexplored or Smith chose the wrong primary antagonist, either way it's not a bad book, but I probably wouldn't read it again.
Read
August 7, 2019Recording the fact that I read this in either the late 1970s or early 1980s
August 1, 2021
Droy Wood is an evil place and indescribable events take place. Throw in a WWII german pilot, sex offender, police officer who commits an evil crime, they will walk the woods and see horrors that can't be explained. Lots of slime slipping down throats like contaminated ice cream. A goodie but probably only for real fans. Also a fog is always chilling.
October 1, 2011
This was a strange book but overall didn't thrill me a definite pass
November 6, 2016
Terrible. But I was warned.
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews