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Satan's Snowdrop
For centuries, its dark shape loomed over a bottomless chasm.
Near a Swiss waterfall, the old Reichenbach mansion stood deserted -- the last of their race, a Nazi torturer murdered by one of his victims. Human skeletons lay deep in the grounds, and evil plagued the air in every room.
Then a wealthy antiques dealer moved his family in, to bloodcurdling shrieks in the night, and visions of terror and madness.
For nothing could make the tortured victims rest. And no one was safe in the devil's house, where is foul mark -- a single blood-soaked snowdrop -- ruled supreme.
Near a Swiss waterfall, the old Reichenbach mansion stood deserted -- the last of their race, a Nazi torturer murdered by one of his victims. Human skeletons lay deep in the grounds, and evil plagued the air in every room.
Then a wealthy antiques dealer moved his family in, to bloodcurdling shrieks in the night, and visions of terror and madness.
For nothing could make the tortured victims rest. And no one was safe in the devil's house, where is foul mark -- a single blood-soaked snowdrop -- ruled supreme.
256 pages, Paperback
First published September 25, 1980
1 person is currently reading
225 people want to read
About the author
Guy N. Smith
175 books297 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 - 14 of 14 reviews
June 17, 2009
First published back in 1980, Guy N Smith had by then fully established himself within the pulp horror circuit. Moving away from his ‘when creatures attack’ inspired splatterpunk novels, ‘Satan’s Snowdrop’ delivered a haunting tale with a dark and disturbing storyline.
Principally set within the eerie backdrop of ‘La Masison des Fleurs’ – ‘The House of Flowers’, a large wooden mansion located close to the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland. The property has been recently purchased by the Pennant family who plan to live in the property for a short while before having it laboriously taken drown and shipped piece by piece to Long Island to be erected once again in a more homely environment for the Pennant’s to either inhabit or sell on for an impressive mark-up.
During the brief time the family spend in the house before it is shipped back, the family are subjected to a number of creepy and seemingly unexplainable occurrences, that take on a greater level of hostility with each occurrence. Starting off with a simple recurring stench of putrefaction that wafts throughout the house on random occasions, the hauntings take on a more deadly reality, with the unexpected death of a friend who was staying over after a welcoming party at the house. The hauntings then take on a more human element, with visitations of ghostly figures crying out for help and the figure of a man who excretes a pure evil appearing on regular occasions.
Veronica Pennant has witnessed too much already. Their son Tod Pennant is equally scared of the macabre house, but Al Pennant, whose hard work and effort has led to the purchase of the property, is determined to see the restoration and re-location through to the end. After coming face to face with one of the visitations himself, Al Pennant decides to take his family back to the States for the winter and return in springtime to make sure the re-location goes smoothly.
With the disassembly of the house now fully underway, the workmen are subjected to the evil that seems so powerfully present within ‘La Masison des Fleurs’. One workman is killed in a seemingly freak accident scaring the other labourers away from the job. Pennant successfully secures a new firm of workmen to see through the property’s re-location and all is finally set for the house to be re-built in Long Island. As the last of ‘La Masison des Fleurs’ is taken down the secret burial place of the Reichenbach torture victims is unearthed from underneath the property’s foundations.
After the dramatic death of their son Tod at the hands of the evil in the house, Veronica attempts to take her own life, leaving Al Pennant finally deciding to sell the freshly re-located property to the one person he knows who will take it – Bruce Parlane.
The house is once again disassembled and this time shipped over to Stratford-upon-Avon, where Bruce and his family move in. After a while the house begins to reveal its dark and evil underside once again. The house’s history that subjected it to the most horrific evil known to mankind at the hands of Reichenbach family has left its mark on the very fibre of the building. This evil that had soaked into the fabric of ‘La Masison des Fleurs’, has allowed the Nazi torturer, who died at the hands of one of his victims, to once again walk the floorboards of this macabre house. And now a brand new family are taking up residence in ‘La Masison des Fleurs’. Their fate is almost sealed...
From the very outset, Smith delivers a disturbingly dark undertone to the progressing storyline that successfully projects an uneasy air to every occurrence, no matter how mundane.
The mounting tension is second to none, with each glimpse of the evil lurking behind the novel’s macabre location delivering a haunting punch to the reader. When the evil visitations come, they come with impact. Smith unleashes a no holds barred approach to these ghostly presences, mixing in an eerie supernatural situation with pure splatterpunk delivery. Many moments throughout the tale are quite shocking in places, with graphic depictions of torture leaving a vivid imprint of the evil that lies behind the four walls of the house.
As the story unfolds further, with deaths becoming more frequent as more people are subjected to the house, Smith keeps up a fast paced and tightly written storyline full of dramatic surprises.
With the novel building in tension with each turn if the page, the suspense mounts up to a mighty crescendo at the novel’s grande finale. A dramatic and twisted ending ensues, with Smith unleashing a truly inspired yet deeply disturbing conclusion.
For the sheer love of unashamed pulp horror that this novel emits from each page, this is truly a fantastic piece of horror literature. The additional elements of the symbolic snowdrop give the tale further levels that keep drawing the reader into this haunting tale.
The characters are lifelike throughout, with a great level of care taken to forming and developing each ones individualistic traits.
This is certainly a strong contender for the highlight of this ridiculously prolific writers career. Even the cover artwork maintains the symbolic and dark quality that surrounds this creepy book. All in all this is a non-stop ride through hell that will keep you gripped to the tale from start to finish.
Principally set within the eerie backdrop of ‘La Masison des Fleurs’ – ‘The House of Flowers’, a large wooden mansion located close to the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland. The property has been recently purchased by the Pennant family who plan to live in the property for a short while before having it laboriously taken drown and shipped piece by piece to Long Island to be erected once again in a more homely environment for the Pennant’s to either inhabit or sell on for an impressive mark-up.
During the brief time the family spend in the house before it is shipped back, the family are subjected to a number of creepy and seemingly unexplainable occurrences, that take on a greater level of hostility with each occurrence. Starting off with a simple recurring stench of putrefaction that wafts throughout the house on random occasions, the hauntings take on a more deadly reality, with the unexpected death of a friend who was staying over after a welcoming party at the house. The hauntings then take on a more human element, with visitations of ghostly figures crying out for help and the figure of a man who excretes a pure evil appearing on regular occasions.
Veronica Pennant has witnessed too much already. Their son Tod Pennant is equally scared of the macabre house, but Al Pennant, whose hard work and effort has led to the purchase of the property, is determined to see the restoration and re-location through to the end. After coming face to face with one of the visitations himself, Al Pennant decides to take his family back to the States for the winter and return in springtime to make sure the re-location goes smoothly.
With the disassembly of the house now fully underway, the workmen are subjected to the evil that seems so powerfully present within ‘La Masison des Fleurs’. One workman is killed in a seemingly freak accident scaring the other labourers away from the job. Pennant successfully secures a new firm of workmen to see through the property’s re-location and all is finally set for the house to be re-built in Long Island. As the last of ‘La Masison des Fleurs’ is taken down the secret burial place of the Reichenbach torture victims is unearthed from underneath the property’s foundations.
After the dramatic death of their son Tod at the hands of the evil in the house, Veronica attempts to take her own life, leaving Al Pennant finally deciding to sell the freshly re-located property to the one person he knows who will take it – Bruce Parlane.
The house is once again disassembled and this time shipped over to Stratford-upon-Avon, where Bruce and his family move in. After a while the house begins to reveal its dark and evil underside once again. The house’s history that subjected it to the most horrific evil known to mankind at the hands of Reichenbach family has left its mark on the very fibre of the building. This evil that had soaked into the fabric of ‘La Masison des Fleurs’, has allowed the Nazi torturer, who died at the hands of one of his victims, to once again walk the floorboards of this macabre house. And now a brand new family are taking up residence in ‘La Masison des Fleurs’. Their fate is almost sealed...
From the very outset, Smith delivers a disturbingly dark undertone to the progressing storyline that successfully projects an uneasy air to every occurrence, no matter how mundane.
The mounting tension is second to none, with each glimpse of the evil lurking behind the novel’s macabre location delivering a haunting punch to the reader. When the evil visitations come, they come with impact. Smith unleashes a no holds barred approach to these ghostly presences, mixing in an eerie supernatural situation with pure splatterpunk delivery. Many moments throughout the tale are quite shocking in places, with graphic depictions of torture leaving a vivid imprint of the evil that lies behind the four walls of the house.
As the story unfolds further, with deaths becoming more frequent as more people are subjected to the house, Smith keeps up a fast paced and tightly written storyline full of dramatic surprises.
With the novel building in tension with each turn if the page, the suspense mounts up to a mighty crescendo at the novel’s grande finale. A dramatic and twisted ending ensues, with Smith unleashing a truly inspired yet deeply disturbing conclusion.
For the sheer love of unashamed pulp horror that this novel emits from each page, this is truly a fantastic piece of horror literature. The additional elements of the symbolic snowdrop give the tale further levels that keep drawing the reader into this haunting tale.
The characters are lifelike throughout, with a great level of care taken to forming and developing each ones individualistic traits.
This is certainly a strong contender for the highlight of this ridiculously prolific writers career. Even the cover artwork maintains the symbolic and dark quality that surrounds this creepy book. All in all this is a non-stop ride through hell that will keep you gripped to the tale from start to finish.
April 21, 2021
Published in 1980, SS still packs a punch, especially for such a slim little book. I guess you could call this a haunted house story, but that really does not do it justice. The main 'character' in the book is the old Reichenbach mansion, which starts out on an isolated mountain in Switzerland. It has been vacant for years, and after Reichenbach disappeared, there are no longer any claimants and it is being sold off by the authorities. Reichenbach himself, or at least the last one, was a Nazi and the book starts off with a guy-- a survivor of a concentration camp-- trying to bring him to justice (Nazi hunter). Lets just say it does not go well.
Years after the intro, a wealthy American antiques dealer hears about the house and checks it out with is wife and 10yo boy. He loves it and buys it, figuring he can move it to the States and make a mint. Without telling his wife, he also plans on living in it over the winter. The boy hates the house, however, and even the mousy wife hates it, but so it goes (the husband is pretty old school to say the least). Bad 'dreams' start happening, along with bad smells, and eventually, the bodies start piling up. I will not give a blow by blow here of the plot, but I will just stay that the house takes a merry journey, first to Long Island, and then to England, where the people who live there struggle to make sense of what the hell is up with the house and the death toll starts rising.
Smith does not pull a lot of punches here, but does add lots of interesting elements that take it beyond a typical haunted house story. Snowdrops are alpine flowers and they are carved into the house; there is also a particular snowdrop that blooms around the house and is associated with prior evil-- really a nice touch. Not great on character development, but that is ok as the characters tend not to stick around for long if you get my drift. 4.5 flowery stars, rounding down to 4 due to the slightly cheesy ending. Something of a lost little horror gem!
Years after the intro, a wealthy American antiques dealer hears about the house and checks it out with is wife and 10yo boy. He loves it and buys it, figuring he can move it to the States and make a mint. Without telling his wife, he also plans on living in it over the winter. The boy hates the house, however, and even the mousy wife hates it, but so it goes (the husband is pretty old school to say the least). Bad 'dreams' start happening, along with bad smells, and eventually, the bodies start piling up. I will not give a blow by blow here of the plot, but I will just stay that the house takes a merry journey, first to Long Island, and then to England, where the people who live there struggle to make sense of what the hell is up with the house and the death toll starts rising.
Smith does not pull a lot of punches here, but does add lots of interesting elements that take it beyond a typical haunted house story. Snowdrops are alpine flowers and they are carved into the house; there is also a particular snowdrop that blooms around the house and is associated with prior evil-- really a nice touch. Not great on character development, but that is ok as the characters tend not to stick around for long if you get my drift. 4.5 flowery stars, rounding down to 4 due to the slightly cheesy ending. Something of a lost little horror gem!
February 12, 2010
*warning* Unless you are a hard core horror fan like ME... Do not read. Horribly wonderful. Awesomely sadistic. Stayed with me forever. In a bad AND beautiful way.
October 4, 2024
Guy N. Smith had established himself on the horror bookshelves in the seventies with a string of novels with easily definable themes. City folk move to the countryside but don't understand country lifestyles and rub the locals the wrong way. Conflict between man and nature manifests in deadly attacks by the latter against the former. Whether it was werewolves or crabs or bats or locusts, the approach wasn't a particular varied one, even if it grew in pessimism and vehemence as the decade ran on. He wasn't any one trick pony, given the porn digests, Disney novelisations, thrillers and a sadistic war novel that also saw release in the seventies, but this novel was a major departure for him.
It's not surprising that Pocket Books picked it up for distribution in the United States, their only title of his, because it's fundamentally an American novel. It's not that the lead characters during the first half of the book are American, because those in the second half are British, the villain is German, a Gestapo torturer, and the key location that haunts the entire novel is a plot of land just behind the Reichenbach Falls, a cable car journey up from Meiringen in Switzerland. It's that the themes are all American, with a strong focus on evil strong enough to seep into a building and remain dangerous down the years; that building being surprisingly mobile, being packed into crates and shipped initially from Switzerland to the U.S. and then again to England, under the direction of the rich and powerful who do such things on whims.
It's the title that resonated with me first. It was pitched as 'The Scavenger's Daughter', the name of an evocative torture device that's mentioned early in the novel but doesn't otherwise factor into the plot. It was written under the underwhelming title of 'Snowdrop', which was then unsurprisingly changed to 'Satan's Snowdrop' in between the generation of the proof cover and the final publication by Hamlyn, the first edition carrying its eventual title on the front cover but its previous incarnation on the spine. It ended up with the right name, I'm sure, because it's a stellar juxtaposition of darkest horror and the most innocuous of flowers.
What it recounts is a journey of inevitability, reliant on the arrogance of the beautiful people who think they can do anything. Everything that happens here, every single death and every single disaster, could easily have been prevented, had a succession of these people just seen beyond their own narcissism. It's not a flattering story to Americans, really, as it takes brutal aim at a traditional American worship of a fake class of nobility, the sort of people who are famous only for having lots of money and who flaunt it on shows like 'Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous'. If he wasn't fictional, Al Pennant would surely have an ongoing invitation to showcase his latest property and trophy wife on that show.
He's the lead for the first half of the book, even though it's named for his son, Tod, and the character of most note exudes his foulness throughout it, even though he dies during the prologue. The latter is the villain of the piece, a man named Reichenbach, who is finally caught after a twenty-year revenge quest by one of his prison camp subjects, a French Resistance operative named Pierre Lautrec. His vengeance is short-lived because the German is shrunken and cancerous, already near death even before he visits karma upon him, shredding him with a steel-tipped bullwhip just as Reichenbach had taken his testicles two decades earlier with six expert strokes while he was manacled to a ceiling. After Reichenbach dies, Lautrec does too, whirled through supernatural visions and dropped down the steps of the house to die in front of a blood-drenched snowdrop in the Swiss dirt.
Fast forward in time and Reichenbach's house is a decaying mansion up for sale for half a million bucks. La Maison des Fleurs, they call it and Al Pennant, a millionaire from New York, snaps it up for a discount with plans to have it renovated in situ, live in it with his wife and son for a few months and then ship it back to the States in the spring to sit on a plot of land in Long Island. He gets as far the renovation and a posh party to celebrate, but then the deaths begin. One guest dies in her bed of sheer terror, having suffered a torture chamber hallucination. She's not the only one to see things in the house either, with Al's trophy wife Veronica and their ten-year-old son Tod tormented by them. Of course, confident old Al ignores them both, because if he didn't, we wouldn't have a novel.
Almost everything here feels like new ground for Smith. Only two aspects feel familiar. The brutality of the gore is one, because the proclivities of a sadistic Gestapo torturer are just perfect fodder for him. The other is a blurring of time, characters in the present day being whisked back supernaturally in time, but not place, to experience something crucial to the plot. That begins in the prologue with Lautrec's journey back to the prison camp before he dies. Elizabeth Quilmer, the guest who dies at the party, has no history with Reichenbach but is transported back to his torture chamber too, as is Al Pennant's wife Veronica, prompting her to press to leave the building with her son, against her husband's wishes.
Of course, Al doesn't let her, talking her out of such ridiculous notions, and that ends as badly as you're already expecting, with Tod taking a dive out of the window of the freshly moved La Maison des Fleurs in Long Island after a memorable scene with a demonic space-hopper—I kid you not—and Veronica sent mad by her son's death, dying herself ten months later in an asylum. And so Al has to sell, because what else can he do? His prime competitor, Bruce Parlane, is offering him a good price and so this house goes back into packing crates to be shipped into the English countryside to torment him and his family, Welsh wife Anthea and their son Rusty, the second half not a million miles distant from the first.
I liked this novel more on a fresh re-read than I remember doing back in the eighties, but it doesn't feel like a Guy N. Smith novel. I don't know if he was targeting the American market, which had seen a pair of his books already reprinted by Signet: 'Killer Crabs' and 'Bats Out of Hell'. Pocket took this one, then Dell took over for eight more in the second half of the eighties. However, he didn't break that market with regards to new material until the nineties, when Zebra started to publish some originals, starting with 'Witch Spell' in 1993, another primarily psychological horror novel, albeit in a different vein to this one.
What I liked was how Smith managed to adapt his traditional themes into a new framework. There may not be a clash here between city folk and country folk, but there's a clash between the arrogant rich of the world, whether they be American or English, and the regular people, the policemen, workmen and others, who all offer the same common sense advice but are all consistently ignored. Armand Heron is the chief gendarme in Meiringen and Al Pennant wants protection from him against whoever's aiming to get him to quit his investment; but what he gets is the firm statement that M. Heron wouldn't spend a night in La Maison des Fleurs for a million francs. If only the rich man had listened to the regular man, he'd still have a wife and son, if not a haunted house.
What I didn't like was how it so obviously played to the American market. Not subscribing to the theory that people who have money are inherently better than those who don't, I didn't give a monkey's about Al Pennant or Bruce Parlane. Quite frankly, I was waiting for them to get theirs, but Reichenbach takes his time and it's the innocents who suffer first. Then again, I can't really call Veronica Pennant innocent given that she presses to leave with Tod at one point, only to give in to her husband's rationalisations as she wouldn't be able to easily find another husband worth this many millions if she does. She's sensitive in ways that he isn't, but she's just as shallow and worthless. Of course, I was hardly rooting for the Nazi torturer, but he's emphatically a monster here rather than a man, so I don't know how much ideology is applicable. He was an evil sadist and would have remained so regardless of which uniform he wore.
I wonder what Guy really thought of this novel. It's not a bad one at all and it does its job well, though I have to note that it racks up a substantial cast of characters without many of them getting more than a brief moment in the spotlight. It's primarily about two rich families of three and they're the only ones who are given any real depth, which is difficult to achieve, of course, when they're so shallow. Many of the scenes feel like the inner monologuing that Guy was so good at, especially in moments of terror, is just let loose to run amok. Mostly it feels like an experiment to break into a new market; that failed and so was discarded. I don't recall any of Guy's other novels feeling so American in approach except perhaps 'Blood Circuit' a couple of years later, which I haven't revisited yet.
Maybe it was important to him, not as a horror novel but as the opportunity to explore one of his many fascinations within the framework of one. I'm talking, of course, about Sherlock Holmes, a character he adored and adapted into a number of his own detectives. Whenever he wrote a Dixon Hawke story or a Raymond Odell story, he was really writing a Sherlock Holmes story without the ability to mention that name. Eventually, of course, he was able to write a real Holmes story, 'The Case of the Sporting Squire', based on a case that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle mentioned but never wrote. It appeared in a Mike Ashley edited anthology, 'The Mammoth Book of New Sherlock Holmes Adventures'.
Holmes, of course, famously met his supposed end, along with his arch-nemesis, Professor Moriarty, at the Reichenbach Falls, such an important location here. Guy went as far as to visit this pivotal location, in 1958, and, of course, wrote about the trip in an article called 'A Pilgrimage to the Reichenbach Falls'. "My mission," he wrote, "was simply to satisfy my curiousity, perhaps to try and absorb the atmosphere engendered by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and to compare the scene of 'The Final Problem' with that story which had fired my imagination." He described a deserted Meiringen, a solo ten-minute cable car ride up onto the mountain and the deafening noise of the waterfall from the platform at the end of a trail.
It's an interesting piece, full of atmosphere, that clearly highlighted how this location stayed with the author, who was visiting as such even that long ago, rather than as a regular tourist. I don't find it at all surprising that it should eventually show up in one of his horror novels, especially given the way that he chose to end it. But there lie spoilers.
Originally posted at the Nameless Zine in July 2022:
https://www.thenamelesszine.org/Voice...
Index of all my Nameless Zine reviews:
https://books.apocalypselaterempire.com/
It's not surprising that Pocket Books picked it up for distribution in the United States, their only title of his, because it's fundamentally an American novel. It's not that the lead characters during the first half of the book are American, because those in the second half are British, the villain is German, a Gestapo torturer, and the key location that haunts the entire novel is a plot of land just behind the Reichenbach Falls, a cable car journey up from Meiringen in Switzerland. It's that the themes are all American, with a strong focus on evil strong enough to seep into a building and remain dangerous down the years; that building being surprisingly mobile, being packed into crates and shipped initially from Switzerland to the U.S. and then again to England, under the direction of the rich and powerful who do such things on whims.
It's the title that resonated with me first. It was pitched as 'The Scavenger's Daughter', the name of an evocative torture device that's mentioned early in the novel but doesn't otherwise factor into the plot. It was written under the underwhelming title of 'Snowdrop', which was then unsurprisingly changed to 'Satan's Snowdrop' in between the generation of the proof cover and the final publication by Hamlyn, the first edition carrying its eventual title on the front cover but its previous incarnation on the spine. It ended up with the right name, I'm sure, because it's a stellar juxtaposition of darkest horror and the most innocuous of flowers.
What it recounts is a journey of inevitability, reliant on the arrogance of the beautiful people who think they can do anything. Everything that happens here, every single death and every single disaster, could easily have been prevented, had a succession of these people just seen beyond their own narcissism. It's not a flattering story to Americans, really, as it takes brutal aim at a traditional American worship of a fake class of nobility, the sort of people who are famous only for having lots of money and who flaunt it on shows like 'Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous'. If he wasn't fictional, Al Pennant would surely have an ongoing invitation to showcase his latest property and trophy wife on that show.
He's the lead for the first half of the book, even though it's named for his son, Tod, and the character of most note exudes his foulness throughout it, even though he dies during the prologue. The latter is the villain of the piece, a man named Reichenbach, who is finally caught after a twenty-year revenge quest by one of his prison camp subjects, a French Resistance operative named Pierre Lautrec. His vengeance is short-lived because the German is shrunken and cancerous, already near death even before he visits karma upon him, shredding him with a steel-tipped bullwhip just as Reichenbach had taken his testicles two decades earlier with six expert strokes while he was manacled to a ceiling. After Reichenbach dies, Lautrec does too, whirled through supernatural visions and dropped down the steps of the house to die in front of a blood-drenched snowdrop in the Swiss dirt.
Fast forward in time and Reichenbach's house is a decaying mansion up for sale for half a million bucks. La Maison des Fleurs, they call it and Al Pennant, a millionaire from New York, snaps it up for a discount with plans to have it renovated in situ, live in it with his wife and son for a few months and then ship it back to the States in the spring to sit on a plot of land in Long Island. He gets as far the renovation and a posh party to celebrate, but then the deaths begin. One guest dies in her bed of sheer terror, having suffered a torture chamber hallucination. She's not the only one to see things in the house either, with Al's trophy wife Veronica and their ten-year-old son Tod tormented by them. Of course, confident old Al ignores them both, because if he didn't, we wouldn't have a novel.
Almost everything here feels like new ground for Smith. Only two aspects feel familiar. The brutality of the gore is one, because the proclivities of a sadistic Gestapo torturer are just perfect fodder for him. The other is a blurring of time, characters in the present day being whisked back supernaturally in time, but not place, to experience something crucial to the plot. That begins in the prologue with Lautrec's journey back to the prison camp before he dies. Elizabeth Quilmer, the guest who dies at the party, has no history with Reichenbach but is transported back to his torture chamber too, as is Al Pennant's wife Veronica, prompting her to press to leave the building with her son, against her husband's wishes.
Of course, Al doesn't let her, talking her out of such ridiculous notions, and that ends as badly as you're already expecting, with Tod taking a dive out of the window of the freshly moved La Maison des Fleurs in Long Island after a memorable scene with a demonic space-hopper—I kid you not—and Veronica sent mad by her son's death, dying herself ten months later in an asylum. And so Al has to sell, because what else can he do? His prime competitor, Bruce Parlane, is offering him a good price and so this house goes back into packing crates to be shipped into the English countryside to torment him and his family, Welsh wife Anthea and their son Rusty, the second half not a million miles distant from the first.
I liked this novel more on a fresh re-read than I remember doing back in the eighties, but it doesn't feel like a Guy N. Smith novel. I don't know if he was targeting the American market, which had seen a pair of his books already reprinted by Signet: 'Killer Crabs' and 'Bats Out of Hell'. Pocket took this one, then Dell took over for eight more in the second half of the eighties. However, he didn't break that market with regards to new material until the nineties, when Zebra started to publish some originals, starting with 'Witch Spell' in 1993, another primarily psychological horror novel, albeit in a different vein to this one.
What I liked was how Smith managed to adapt his traditional themes into a new framework. There may not be a clash here between city folk and country folk, but there's a clash between the arrogant rich of the world, whether they be American or English, and the regular people, the policemen, workmen and others, who all offer the same common sense advice but are all consistently ignored. Armand Heron is the chief gendarme in Meiringen and Al Pennant wants protection from him against whoever's aiming to get him to quit his investment; but what he gets is the firm statement that M. Heron wouldn't spend a night in La Maison des Fleurs for a million francs. If only the rich man had listened to the regular man, he'd still have a wife and son, if not a haunted house.
What I didn't like was how it so obviously played to the American market. Not subscribing to the theory that people who have money are inherently better than those who don't, I didn't give a monkey's about Al Pennant or Bruce Parlane. Quite frankly, I was waiting for them to get theirs, but Reichenbach takes his time and it's the innocents who suffer first. Then again, I can't really call Veronica Pennant innocent given that she presses to leave with Tod at one point, only to give in to her husband's rationalisations as she wouldn't be able to easily find another husband worth this many millions if she does. She's sensitive in ways that he isn't, but she's just as shallow and worthless. Of course, I was hardly rooting for the Nazi torturer, but he's emphatically a monster here rather than a man, so I don't know how much ideology is applicable. He was an evil sadist and would have remained so regardless of which uniform he wore.
I wonder what Guy really thought of this novel. It's not a bad one at all and it does its job well, though I have to note that it racks up a substantial cast of characters without many of them getting more than a brief moment in the spotlight. It's primarily about two rich families of three and they're the only ones who are given any real depth, which is difficult to achieve, of course, when they're so shallow. Many of the scenes feel like the inner monologuing that Guy was so good at, especially in moments of terror, is just let loose to run amok. Mostly it feels like an experiment to break into a new market; that failed and so was discarded. I don't recall any of Guy's other novels feeling so American in approach except perhaps 'Blood Circuit' a couple of years later, which I haven't revisited yet.
Maybe it was important to him, not as a horror novel but as the opportunity to explore one of his many fascinations within the framework of one. I'm talking, of course, about Sherlock Holmes, a character he adored and adapted into a number of his own detectives. Whenever he wrote a Dixon Hawke story or a Raymond Odell story, he was really writing a Sherlock Holmes story without the ability to mention that name. Eventually, of course, he was able to write a real Holmes story, 'The Case of the Sporting Squire', based on a case that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle mentioned but never wrote. It appeared in a Mike Ashley edited anthology, 'The Mammoth Book of New Sherlock Holmes Adventures'.
Holmes, of course, famously met his supposed end, along with his arch-nemesis, Professor Moriarty, at the Reichenbach Falls, such an important location here. Guy went as far as to visit this pivotal location, in 1958, and, of course, wrote about the trip in an article called 'A Pilgrimage to the Reichenbach Falls'. "My mission," he wrote, "was simply to satisfy my curiousity, perhaps to try and absorb the atmosphere engendered by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and to compare the scene of 'The Final Problem' with that story which had fired my imagination." He described a deserted Meiringen, a solo ten-minute cable car ride up onto the mountain and the deafening noise of the waterfall from the platform at the end of a trail.
It's an interesting piece, full of atmosphere, that clearly highlighted how this location stayed with the author, who was visiting as such even that long ago, rather than as a regular tourist. I don't find it at all surprising that it should eventually show up in one of his horror novels, especially given the way that he chose to end it. But there lie spoilers.
Originally posted at the Nameless Zine in July 2022:
https://www.thenamelesszine.org/Voice...
Index of all my Nameless Zine reviews:
https://books.apocalypselaterempire.com/
March 24, 2021
This nasty haunted house is probably the best Smith book I've read. While viewing a house in Switzerland, an American businessman decides that despite the local legends about evil past residents, the collection of torture implements on the wall, and the dried blood on the floor it will be a perfect family home. Spoiler - it is not.
Definitely an early example of splatterpunk - there's a lot of gruesome horror in this one. Also one character gets killed by a space hopper.
Definitely an early example of splatterpunk - there's a lot of gruesome horror in this one. Also one character gets killed by a space hopper.
August 15, 2008
This was another free bin book that actually turned out to be better than I expected. With a name like Satan's Snowdrop and an original publishing date of 1980 I was thinking the book would be a "cult panic" or an Omen ripoff. In actuality, it's a pretty good haunted house story with a Nazi theme. I can't say I'd recommend that you go out and buy it, but it was pleasantly unsettling.
April 1, 2025
This book is wild in all the right ways. A product of the 'cheap paperback horror' trend of the 1970s and 80s, it is gruesome. It has a Nazi ghost, a cursed castle, and, weirdly, more references to Sherlock Holmes than one would think possible in a book that is most assuredly not an Arthur Conan Doyle inspired mystery. With not one, but two families forced to deal with this terrible Nazi and his cursed castle, it reads like two stories, both of which are moral lessons on par with Friday the 13th.
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February 12, 2022lol przeczytalem ta ksiazke w wieku lat 12 i pamietam ze spac nie moglem... narysowalem ziomka z okladki na plastyce w pierwszej gimnazjum i moja nauczycielka byla niby dumna ale chwalila mnie ze zrezygnowaniem w oczach <3
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August 7, 2019Recording the fact that I read this book either in the late 1970s or early 1980s
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June 14, 20238.9.22
January 29, 2014
An old stilted house belonging to the Reichenbach family, overlooking the cliffs where Sherlock Holmes met/faked his death, haunts the families of two different men that move the house, first to New York, then England.
There's quite a bit of nastiness in the visions of the tortures that haunt the house's past: piles of limbs, crotches lashed off with whips, etc. In the "real" world, victims die of accidents or heart failure, including an exorcist and a boy killed by a possessed spacehopper.
As with too much supernatural horror, there is more page length dedicated to figuring out the rules than actual scary stuff. Does transferring ownership of the house end the curse? How about the mysterious snowdrop flower, will replanting it put the souls of the dead to rest? How exactly should it be planted? This kind of tedium bogs the whole business down.
More reviews at Trash Menace.
There's quite a bit of nastiness in the visions of the tortures that haunt the house's past: piles of limbs, crotches lashed off with whips, etc. In the "real" world, victims die of accidents or heart failure, including an exorcist and a boy killed by a possessed spacehopper.
As with too much supernatural horror, there is more page length dedicated to figuring out the rules than actual scary stuff. Does transferring ownership of the house end the curse? How about the mysterious snowdrop flower, will replanting it put the souls of the dead to rest? How exactly should it be planted? This kind of tedium bogs the whole business down.
More reviews at Trash Menace.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
October 4, 2010
Książka ogólnie jest w porządku, wciągająco się czyta, pomysł dobry... ale i tak nie mogę się oprzeć wrażeniu, że można było to napisać jeszcze lepiej ;) Np. autor rozwodzi się o tym, że ktośtam wyglądał okropnie, strasznie, nieludzko okaleczony, ale nie pisze konkretnie JAK wyglądał (a jeeśli już się gdzieś tam przyciśnie, to mało tego), to takie trochę irytujące. Wydaje mi się, że gdyby Masterton to napisał, to byłbym bardziej usatysfakcjonowany :D
May 21, 2015
20 lat temu było fajniejsze.
December 20, 2022
super ksiazka kalysk ale fajna
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