Õuduste «Paradiis»

by Guy N. Smith, Matti Piirimaa (translator)

Puhkelaager «Paradiis» on tulvil vaba aja veetjaid, kes ei oska aimatagi, et igaühest neist võib saada range saladuskatte all korraldatava saatanliku eksperimendi ohver.
Kõik tunnistajad hävitatakse ääretu julmusega, varjamaks jälgi.
Laagrist on võimatu ja mõttetu pageda, sest see tähendaks põgenemist elu lõpuni.

Genres: Horror

308 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 1989

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

[Dale · Rating 2 out of 5]

The Camp refers to an all inclusive vacation resort on the coast of England, which is upsetting enough. For some reason both the resort's management and the British government think that's the best place to test dangerous psychedelics on random vacationers.

The petty, dull holiday makers have complex delusions, such as a new ice age or illegal pregnancies. There are some complications, so to keep things quiet a government assassin very nosily starts murdering the subjects and everyone around them.

Pretty tame stuff for Smith next to giant crabs and onanistic mystics, but that's what happens the further into the 80s we go.

Not much going on, and what there is doesn't make a ton of sense.

More reviews at Trash Menace.

[Jason · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was entertaining but it could have been so much more. There were some good ideas but nothing was really explored and it kind of just ended.

[Wayne · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 the book gets and extra half star for Guy's b-grade drive inn style horror. It also looses half that star for muddling up the middle of this. Also for ending this thing abruptly as a head on collision.

It seems, for undetermined reasons, that the government of Britain is letting a scientist test his C-551 drug on holidaymakers at Paradise Holiday Camp. C-551 is sort of like a hallucinogen. It brings out the subjects inner thoughts, fears. They don't test the whole camp, just a certain few. So it's kind of like an episode of Fantasy Island. But not as fun for the subjects.

One couple think a new ice age is upon us. Another couple has the husband an uncaring git who is always on the make for money. Scamming the Inland Revenue service. His wife is an uptight ice queen who thinks she somehow becomes pregnant. They have a daughter who goes off with another subject, a hippie type who smokes his cannabis. That counter acts the C-551 and he kills the girl. There are two guys who come to the conclusion that they are guinea pigs and want out. The head of the testing brings in a problem solver to take out the subjects. All the subjects. There is also an anarchist who tries to rile up an uprising in the camp. He too is being tested. He enlists a gang of skinheads as his army. This sub plot is quite the laugh.

Reading a Guy N. Smith book is always fun, even when it's not very good. They just have that, like I said earlier, b or z-grade movie feel. Like coming away from a midnight movie that has you wondering why I missed it the first time around.

[Bilbo Nobwank · Rating 3 out of 5]

There was a period during the 1970s when I was a kid, where there seemed to be an entire genre of "some kind of accident turns harmless animals evil" horror fiction: James Herbert's Rats, Guy N Smith's Crabs, Nick Sharman's Cats, Richard Curtis's Squirm --and I devoured them all. I even remember one called "Night of the Lepus", where mutant bunny rabbits filled the killer animal role. Although surely that one was a joke?

Anyway, The Camp is an offering from Guy N Smith, author of the Crabs series. I'll not rehash the plot here. It's well-covered elsewhere in this 'ere boutique. But suffice to say that, while the mutant animals are missing, all the other pre-requisites for a good ol' 1970s pulp horror yarn are here:

* Hero called "Jeff" --the hero is always called Jeff or Geoff. It's the archetypal 1970s hunk name.

* Excrucitingly naff description of minor drug use. One of the baddies is a cannabis "addict" who proclaims that he "needs a fix". He buys his "fix" from another one-dimensional sleazy "pusher" who treats his customers with contempt because "cannabis addicts" will put up wth anything when they're desperate for a "fix".

* Embarrasingly bad sex scene around Chapter 2. Actually this was more of a James Herbert trademark. But Guy N Smith has a go. Hunky Jeff apparently "makes love" all night long [and this was pre- wee blue pills, remember!] to the female camp employee who falls in love with him, within ten minutes of meeting him.

* ...and who can blame her because; getting ready to go out on a date with her, hunky Jeff [who it should be pointed out is in his 20s], with his longish hair and beard neatly trimmed that day, dons "slacks" a light blue shirt and a cravat. Yes folks, our heart-throb hero is apparently the bastard love child of Noel Edmonds and Noël Coward.

[By the way, WTF are slacks? I've read people wearing them in American books and cringed at the word. But not come across it in an English book before. When I was a kid in the 70s, my mum used to refer to her belt-loop & pockets lacking hideous polyester trousers as "slacks". Thus I always assumed that men wore trousers and women wore slacks. So, whenever [as above] I read about a man donning "slacks" I can't shake the image of him pulling on a pair of garish 70s ladies polyester trousers.]

Anyway, enough of this jiggery-pokery. The Camp is a fun read. But the intervening decades have removed whatever horror elements it may once have contained. Reading it now is a bit like trying to concentrate on the plot of a 1970s TV programme or film, but being sidetracked by the width of the lapels and trouser bottoms, or the horrific wallpaper patterns.

[Mikepottz · Rating 3 out of 5]

Unsuspecting holiday-goers are going to get experimented on and have fantasies, some are going to have violent nightmares. Governments doing nasty things to innocent people and then cover up all the mistakes. Not alot of gore, not really pulpy enough for guy.

[NRH]

Recording the fact that I read this book most likely either in the late 1970s or early 1980s

[Rafal Gluchowski · Rating 3 out of 5]

The title suggest we're dealing with a "Friday 13'th-esque" slasher; in reality, though, The Camp is a surprisingly un-Guy-N.-Smith-like book — more a medical thriller than pulp horror.
+
At the Paradise holiday camp, a randomly selected group of people is subjected to secret, government-run experiments involving the constant administration of a new hallucinogenic substance. Nobody's entirely sure how it works (Guy doesn't bother with unnecessary details) — broadly speaking, it amplifies the subjects' sensations and imaginings to the max. The result is a series of fairly grotesque situations: a married couple, convinced a new Ice Age has arrived, sit shivering in their tent (even though it's the height of a scorching summer), a deranged leftist agitator tries to spark a workers' revolution at the resort, and a woman finds herself in the grip of a phantom pregnancy.

At first the experiment seems harmless, but once a hippie, addled by a cocktail of the drug and his own narcotics, flies into a frenzy and murders two girls, things get grim. Worse still, the antidote to the substance turns out to be useless — the victims sink further and further into madness. A government-hired killer arrives at the camp. People who threaten to expose the secret start dying in a string of unfortunate accidents...
+
The Camp stirs mixed feelings. On one hand, credit is due for Guy's ambition to write something better than his usual daily pulp. The sentences are more carefully constructed, the prose reads noticeably better, and there are fewer of his dubious stylistic flourishes (exclamation marks, italics, and the like). The plot gets by without an excess of cheap tricks, gratuitous sex, or gore.

The idea behind the novel is genuinely appealing; unfortunately, the execution is, as always, poor. Not only does the plot essentially go nowhere, it also breaks off pointlessly halfway through the story being told. That's a recurring ailment of Guy's — probably the result of having no plan and writing to meet agreed deadlines. It doesn't have to be a major flaw — after all, technical craftsmanship was never the point of Guy N. Smith's little books. GNS has earned himself a certain "reputation": crude special effects and trashy narration are his trademarks. But when he strips his prose of its pulpy meat and tries to construct a "proper" thriller, the technical weaknesses become all the more visible. A handful of campy scenes and a fairly well-drawn gallery of colorful characters just isn't quite enough. For ambition — a solid 4/5; for the novel itself, only 2/5, so, to sum up - 3/5