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Snakes
Slowly the snake slithered over his helpless body. Eyes, cold and unblinking, stared into his eyes. The long, long body dragged heavily across his throat. As he gulped in terror he could feel the dry rasp of scales against his Adam's Apple. Then, the sudden searing strike, the teeth sharp in his shoulder, the pain, the pain Motorway Madness, the papers called it once it again. The piled, burning cars and trucks. The blood and the wreckage. But this time there would be an added horror. Snakes. In transit and now escaping. Snakes that would coil and climb, creeping into garages and bedrooms...
- GenresHorror
170 pages, Paperback
First published November 1, 1986
2 people are currently reading
113 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 - 12 of 12 reviews
August 2, 2022
Like many of the Smith books I’ve read, this is just kind of boring.
December 28, 2025
A ridiculous book, full of wild supposition about snakes and their intent, an absolute mess of a choppy plot, but like all Smith's books, it's such charming pulp, so much ostentatious fun, and so easily readable, that you forgive it for its flaws and just enjoy the ride.
November 13, 2020
I was asked by a friend, "What are you reading next?" I told him "Snakes" by one of my favorite authors, Guy N. Smith. He gave me an "Oh, Hmmm. What's your favorite books by him?" I said, "Well there's...ahhh." "Exactly!" he said. Which brings me to my point. I do like Guy, but I do find his books wanting. Potboilers in most cases. The cover and synopsis are most always better than the book. They can be enjoyable in the right mindset.
The story starts off with a zoo closing down and shipping animals to different places. The snakes are sent out on the motorway only to be involved in an auto pile-up from which they slither off to do damage. About half this book is back stories of the perspective victims that get us nowhere. The other half is fun B-grade slimy reptilian attacks. It does go off the rails a tad when the snakes hunt out humans for revenge. It ends in a flash as well.
All in all, like every time I finish a book by Guy, I always think I'll take a leave from him for a bit. Then say he's not that bad and his next book will be better. There are so many yet to get too. And he's still churning them out.
The story starts off with a zoo closing down and shipping animals to different places. The snakes are sent out on the motorway only to be involved in an auto pile-up from which they slither off to do damage. About half this book is back stories of the perspective victims that get us nowhere. The other half is fun B-grade slimy reptilian attacks. It does go off the rails a tad when the snakes hunt out humans for revenge. It ends in a flash as well.
All in all, like every time I finish a book by Guy, I always think I'll take a leave from him for a bit. Then say he's not that bad and his next book will be better. There are so many yet to get too. And he's still churning them out.
February 20, 2025
It isn't that 'Snakes' is a bad novel, it's that it doesn't seem to fit.
From one angle, it's another of Guy's animals on the rampage novels, this one featuring snakes, if you hadn't guessed from the over-simplistic title, but it pales in comparison to its predecessor on that front. 'Abomination' was full of rampaging creatures of many kinds, effectively taking over a village and taking down everyone they can, while this one, well, isn't. Only snakes are able to play this time out and only eight of them are at large, albeit of six different species.
From another, that's because it's not really a horror novel at all, more of a thriller that features a horrific premise. A zoo has closed and all its animals are being rehoused. The snakes in the reptile house are being sent north in a truck, but there's a pile-up on the motorway during a storm and so out they go into the countryside. As always, there's a heatwave and the moorlands and woodlands make for good habitat. How much carnage can they wreak before a cold snap finishes them off?
From a third, the answer to that is not a heck of a lot, as the death count is frustratingly low. The motorway pile-up that sets the snakes loose is responsible for fifteen deaths in chapter two alone, but we're always aware from moment one that the snakes are going to have a hard time matching it. Sure enough, they don't, so the thrills come less from the snakes killing people and more from the snakes being a panic inducer, especially in carefully constructed scenes that trap people who are too scared to do anything about it.
From a fourth, there isn't really a solution (although, in the end, there kind of is). Usually, in this sort of novel, some character or other is tasked with figuring out a solution to the problem, like Cliff Davenport in Guy's 'Crabs' series. Here, everyone already knows what the solution is from the outset, but it's not theirs to control. Nature will take care of the job at some point, but the locals in Stainforth have to survive until it gets round to it in its own sweet time. That means little book scale suspense of the sort that built in Guy's identified thrillers, the 'Truckers' novels and 'Blood Circuit', but the potential for chapter scale suspense, which Guy does fortunately deliver.
From a fifth, taking the thriller approach inherently means toning down the gratuity that was so prevalent in 'Abomination'. That book was, quite frankly, absolutely jam packed full with glorious but utterly gratuitous death scenes. This time out, there are only two gratuitous scenes and they both pale in comparison with any random choice from that prior book. I'll highlight both, because they're here and they have a wider place in Guy's horror output, but also because you'll see how they don't really fit in a thriller.
The first of them involves one of two deaths during the aftermath of the motorway pile-up. One is PC Mark Bazeley, a brand new cop who's crushed to death by an African rock python, which is fair enough, but the other is the naked young model-beautiful twenty-year-old girl who stumbles into his arms before that happens. Like they do. Everything around them is death and destruction and she's convulsing in agony because she's been bitten by a western diamondback rattlesnake, but he takes a moment to see her in a very different way:
"For a split second his mind shut off and he saw her as a young man sees a beautiful naked girl. The shapely thighs parted, legs wide and kicking frantically as though she had just hit a climax. Moans that he wished were orgasmic cries of delight and the two of them anywhere else but here. Her hands came off her stomach, her fists clenched and she pummelled at him crazily, those groans escalating into screams. Back to reality, she was in unbelievable pain, probably dying."
It's only one paragraph of gratuity but it's there nonetheless and it would have fit better in one of Guy's truer horror novels. At least we know that this jackass gets his very shortly thereafter.
The other instance is longer, taking up four pages to happen and a couple more in aftermath. It's a randy forty-four year old woman, Joan Doyle, who settles back on her bed to enjoy a good lengthy masturbation session, only to be interrupted by the python at the bottom of the bed. Of course, it serves as a perfectly good phallic symbol but then it embraces her so tightly that her body bursts all over her bedroom, bits of intestine splashing against the walls. Now that's the sort of territory 'Abomination' covered, but it's out of place here.
Instead, we focus on individual character studies. Guy tells this from multiple point of views, each chapter for quite a while following a different character, but the important ones gradually racking up a few here and there in alternation. Guy is also careful to avoid these chapters existing entirely in isolation, so links them in simple ways, through personal connections or even just mentions. It's a good way to chop an overarching story up into individual segments each with their own focus, as a sort of jigsaw puzzle of a book, each chapter fleshing out the eventual picture a piece at a time until the whole thing's in view and taken care of.
For instance, chapter one is about Veronica Jones and her son in the reptile house at the zoo that is about to close. She's a single mum, as Ian's dad left when he was born. Chapter two is about the driver tasked with taking the snakes north, even though he's afraid of them. He's Ken Wilson, also known as Ian's Dad Who Left. Chapter three is about Mark Bazeley, that new cop who gets crushed to death after ogling a dying woman. Chapter four is about Chief Superintendent Burlington, who gets to lead the taskforce in Stainforth looking into the new snake problem. Chapter five is about John Price, his expert, a civilian with a degree in zoology who specialises in "poisonous snakes".
And so on. The main characters are Price, whose aunt lives in Stainforth and gets chapter seven as her death story, scared to death by a red herring, and Keith Doyle, a young gardener who's built a viable business for himself after leaving school. However, this never becomes Price and Doyle as a snake hunting team. Smith is content to keep them as individual characters in a book that's full of individual characters, some of whom come to a sticky end because of the snakes, if not specifically through their doing.
I've may have been a little cynical here, but this isn't a bad book. It's just not what it seems to be and so ends up a little disappointing. New English Library certainly marketed it as horror, which it arguably isn't. Had they labelled it a thriller and changed the cover design, ditching the blood red back cover blurb, maybe it would feel more effective. However, snakes simply don't work as well as the other animals that Guy sent rampaging around in his novels. Notwithstanding the symbolism in that masturbation scene, these snakes tend to bite and vanish. There's not much for a novelist to work with there, especially when compared to a raging werewolf, a malevolent giant mutated crab or a colony of meningitis-riddled bats.
When 'Snakes' works, it often works well, because Smith could conjure up a good suspense scene when he wanted to and he knew how to generate a showcase moment. The real value in this book comes from Keith Doyle being trapped in a garage by a rattlesnake; Keith again and his pregnant girlfriend Kirsten stuck overnight in an isolated sandpit inside a car that won't start with a coral snake waiting for them on the bonnet; and even PC Ken Aylott trying to prove himself on a snake hunt but tumbling into an old crypt where the snakes happen to be hiding. It's in moments within the book, rather than in the book itself, which was perhaps ill-advised and certainly mismarketed.
From one angle, it's another of Guy's animals on the rampage novels, this one featuring snakes, if you hadn't guessed from the over-simplistic title, but it pales in comparison to its predecessor on that front. 'Abomination' was full of rampaging creatures of many kinds, effectively taking over a village and taking down everyone they can, while this one, well, isn't. Only snakes are able to play this time out and only eight of them are at large, albeit of six different species.
From another, that's because it's not really a horror novel at all, more of a thriller that features a horrific premise. A zoo has closed and all its animals are being rehoused. The snakes in the reptile house are being sent north in a truck, but there's a pile-up on the motorway during a storm and so out they go into the countryside. As always, there's a heatwave and the moorlands and woodlands make for good habitat. How much carnage can they wreak before a cold snap finishes them off?
From a third, the answer to that is not a heck of a lot, as the death count is frustratingly low. The motorway pile-up that sets the snakes loose is responsible for fifteen deaths in chapter two alone, but we're always aware from moment one that the snakes are going to have a hard time matching it. Sure enough, they don't, so the thrills come less from the snakes killing people and more from the snakes being a panic inducer, especially in carefully constructed scenes that trap people who are too scared to do anything about it.
From a fourth, there isn't really a solution (although, in the end, there kind of is). Usually, in this sort of novel, some character or other is tasked with figuring out a solution to the problem, like Cliff Davenport in Guy's 'Crabs' series. Here, everyone already knows what the solution is from the outset, but it's not theirs to control. Nature will take care of the job at some point, but the locals in Stainforth have to survive until it gets round to it in its own sweet time. That means little book scale suspense of the sort that built in Guy's identified thrillers, the 'Truckers' novels and 'Blood Circuit', but the potential for chapter scale suspense, which Guy does fortunately deliver.
From a fifth, taking the thriller approach inherently means toning down the gratuity that was so prevalent in 'Abomination'. That book was, quite frankly, absolutely jam packed full with glorious but utterly gratuitous death scenes. This time out, there are only two gratuitous scenes and they both pale in comparison with any random choice from that prior book. I'll highlight both, because they're here and they have a wider place in Guy's horror output, but also because you'll see how they don't really fit in a thriller.
The first of them involves one of two deaths during the aftermath of the motorway pile-up. One is PC Mark Bazeley, a brand new cop who's crushed to death by an African rock python, which is fair enough, but the other is the naked young model-beautiful twenty-year-old girl who stumbles into his arms before that happens. Like they do. Everything around them is death and destruction and she's convulsing in agony because she's been bitten by a western diamondback rattlesnake, but he takes a moment to see her in a very different way:
"For a split second his mind shut off and he saw her as a young man sees a beautiful naked girl. The shapely thighs parted, legs wide and kicking frantically as though she had just hit a climax. Moans that he wished were orgasmic cries of delight and the two of them anywhere else but here. Her hands came off her stomach, her fists clenched and she pummelled at him crazily, those groans escalating into screams. Back to reality, she was in unbelievable pain, probably dying."
It's only one paragraph of gratuity but it's there nonetheless and it would have fit better in one of Guy's truer horror novels. At least we know that this jackass gets his very shortly thereafter.
The other instance is longer, taking up four pages to happen and a couple more in aftermath. It's a randy forty-four year old woman, Joan Doyle, who settles back on her bed to enjoy a good lengthy masturbation session, only to be interrupted by the python at the bottom of the bed. Of course, it serves as a perfectly good phallic symbol but then it embraces her so tightly that her body bursts all over her bedroom, bits of intestine splashing against the walls. Now that's the sort of territory 'Abomination' covered, but it's out of place here.
Instead, we focus on individual character studies. Guy tells this from multiple point of views, each chapter for quite a while following a different character, but the important ones gradually racking up a few here and there in alternation. Guy is also careful to avoid these chapters existing entirely in isolation, so links them in simple ways, through personal connections or even just mentions. It's a good way to chop an overarching story up into individual segments each with their own focus, as a sort of jigsaw puzzle of a book, each chapter fleshing out the eventual picture a piece at a time until the whole thing's in view and taken care of.
For instance, chapter one is about Veronica Jones and her son in the reptile house at the zoo that is about to close. She's a single mum, as Ian's dad left when he was born. Chapter two is about the driver tasked with taking the snakes north, even though he's afraid of them. He's Ken Wilson, also known as Ian's Dad Who Left. Chapter three is about Mark Bazeley, that new cop who gets crushed to death after ogling a dying woman. Chapter four is about Chief Superintendent Burlington, who gets to lead the taskforce in Stainforth looking into the new snake problem. Chapter five is about John Price, his expert, a civilian with a degree in zoology who specialises in "poisonous snakes".
And so on. The main characters are Price, whose aunt lives in Stainforth and gets chapter seven as her death story, scared to death by a red herring, and Keith Doyle, a young gardener who's built a viable business for himself after leaving school. However, this never becomes Price and Doyle as a snake hunting team. Smith is content to keep them as individual characters in a book that's full of individual characters, some of whom come to a sticky end because of the snakes, if not specifically through their doing.
I've may have been a little cynical here, but this isn't a bad book. It's just not what it seems to be and so ends up a little disappointing. New English Library certainly marketed it as horror, which it arguably isn't. Had they labelled it a thriller and changed the cover design, ditching the blood red back cover blurb, maybe it would feel more effective. However, snakes simply don't work as well as the other animals that Guy sent rampaging around in his novels. Notwithstanding the symbolism in that masturbation scene, these snakes tend to bite and vanish. There's not much for a novelist to work with there, especially when compared to a raging werewolf, a malevolent giant mutated crab or a colony of meningitis-riddled bats.
When 'Snakes' works, it often works well, because Smith could conjure up a good suspense scene when he wanted to and he knew how to generate a showcase moment. The real value in this book comes from Keith Doyle being trapped in a garage by a rattlesnake; Keith again and his pregnant girlfriend Kirsten stuck overnight in an isolated sandpit inside a car that won't start with a coral snake waiting for them on the bonnet; and even PC Ken Aylott trying to prove himself on a snake hunt but tumbling into an old crypt where the snakes happen to be hiding. It's in moments within the book, rather than in the book itself, which was perhaps ill-advised and certainly mismarketed.
April 11, 2020
I’ve read a handful of Guy N. Smith books, consider myself a pretty big fan and I had a good time with Snakes but it’s definitely less memorable than his best work. Alligators was much more enjoyable. Snakes feels like a piece he pushed out just to get another book done. It’s not without its moments and I could vividly visualize a lot of its gruesome situations but something with it never fully clicked with me to get past that 3.5+ star point. Mildly recommended for diehard fans but you could do a lot better with regards to “when animals attack” books. Like Guy N. Smith’s Alligators!
June 6, 2018
A Guy N Smith novel about Snakes terrorising a small town. Fast-paced. Pulp. Liked it.
October 14, 2022
Snakes is yet another book that paints Guy N. Smith as the disreputable ol’ curmudgeon of British horror. Smith’s usual characteristics can be hunted down and ticked off in this 1986 tale of lethal snakes, who thanks to a motorway pile-up, escape from a truck whilst being transported from one rundown zoo to another. There is the typical Smith anxiety about the hero being fast tracked into marriage, due to an unplanned pregnancy... a character effectively signs her own death warrant by engaging in masturbation (self-abuse rarely ends well in Smith’s world)... and if there is a single mother with a child born out of wedlock in a GNS book, you can be certain something very nasty is going to happen to the illegitimate kiddo. While Smith wasn’t able to work explicit sex scenes into this one per se, there are the expected pornographic flourishes, including the death throes of a naked snakebite victim being the source of eroticism for a police onlooker “the shapely thighs parted, legs wide and kicking frantically as though she had just hit a climax”.
The tone of Snakes is one of fist shaking misanthropy, if I didn’t already know that Newman was his middle name, I might be persuaded into believing that the ‘N’ in Guy N. Smith stood for ‘No Filter’. GNS pisses over just about everybody in this book. Children are annoying brats who deserve to die in motorway accidents, one female character has value that ‘began and ended between her thighs’, and the working classes are mostly bone idle and unemployed, save for the hero Keith Doyle, a jobbing gardener. Saying that Smith didn’t appear to have much time for middle class snobbery either, with Doyle’s marriage opposed to by the girl’s elitist father, a bank manager no less...and no horror author in the entire history of literature had it in for bank managers quite like Guy N. Smith, himself a former bank employee. Smith’s bee in his bonnet about trade unionism also manifests itself with one Thatcherite character being distracted from the threat of the snakes by thoughts of a despised leftish nemesis, whose unionist and anti-hunting antics are “part of a Marxist plot to bring about a revolution”.
Rich or poor, capitalist or socialist though, a shared stupidity unites just about all of the characters in Snakes. I mean everyone is meant to be on high alert for the escaped snakes, and yet two separate characters, a policeman and a solider both lay their eyes on what they think to be a large hose, and it doesn’t occur to either of them that this hose could in fact be –duh, duh, duh- a bloody big snake. Elsewhere a woman hears a rattling noise, and rather than be concerned that it could be the sound of a rattler, instead thinks it must be coming from a child playing with a rattle. Whilst a sexually frustrated widow mistakes the head of a boa constrictor for....well you can fill in the blanks yourself there.
GNS could never be mistaken for an animal rights type of person –heaven forbid- but I do detect a secret empathy, maybe even an admiration for the snakes here. Long suffering reptiles who have spent their entire lives imprisoned in tourist trap zoos (I think we can add zoos to the list of things Smith hated) and on some level might be justified in their revenge against man. As the book is keen to point out, its two suspenseful set pieces- Doyle being trapped in a garage by the snakes, and later trapped again in his van- are role reversals of the zoo situation “you paid a quid or so to go into a reptile house and gawp at snakes through glass” thinks Doyle “but this bugger was getting a close-up of humans in a cage for free”.
One problem with Snakes in terms of a horror novel is that the kills, mostly characters being momentarily bitten and then dying of snake poison, don’t really carry the same visceral charge as people being ripped apart by giant crabs. An issue that Smith does in fairness attempt to rectify with the introduction of a massive boa constrictor, which provides a few gore highlights towards the end “a human intestinal explosion had taken place, whoever had been in this room had been crushed with such force that they had burst”.
For the seasoned Smith reader, Snakes makes for a cosily familiar experience. Even so it is hard to ignore the feeling of no new ground being covered here, as if the book was a contractual obligation, and Smith went into it without any fresh ideas to hand. Snakes is akin to visiting an elderly relative, knowing full well that they are going to regale you with same tall tale that they tell you every time you come to visit. It’s a book that delivers what you’d expect from Guy N. Smith without really being a standout in his busy bibliography.
The tone of Snakes is one of fist shaking misanthropy, if I didn’t already know that Newman was his middle name, I might be persuaded into believing that the ‘N’ in Guy N. Smith stood for ‘No Filter’. GNS pisses over just about everybody in this book. Children are annoying brats who deserve to die in motorway accidents, one female character has value that ‘began and ended between her thighs’, and the working classes are mostly bone idle and unemployed, save for the hero Keith Doyle, a jobbing gardener. Saying that Smith didn’t appear to have much time for middle class snobbery either, with Doyle’s marriage opposed to by the girl’s elitist father, a bank manager no less...and no horror author in the entire history of literature had it in for bank managers quite like Guy N. Smith, himself a former bank employee. Smith’s bee in his bonnet about trade unionism also manifests itself with one Thatcherite character being distracted from the threat of the snakes by thoughts of a despised leftish nemesis, whose unionist and anti-hunting antics are “part of a Marxist plot to bring about a revolution”.
Rich or poor, capitalist or socialist though, a shared stupidity unites just about all of the characters in Snakes. I mean everyone is meant to be on high alert for the escaped snakes, and yet two separate characters, a policeman and a solider both lay their eyes on what they think to be a large hose, and it doesn’t occur to either of them that this hose could in fact be –duh, duh, duh- a bloody big snake. Elsewhere a woman hears a rattling noise, and rather than be concerned that it could be the sound of a rattler, instead thinks it must be coming from a child playing with a rattle. Whilst a sexually frustrated widow mistakes the head of a boa constrictor for....well you can fill in the blanks yourself there.
GNS could never be mistaken for an animal rights type of person –heaven forbid- but I do detect a secret empathy, maybe even an admiration for the snakes here. Long suffering reptiles who have spent their entire lives imprisoned in tourist trap zoos (I think we can add zoos to the list of things Smith hated) and on some level might be justified in their revenge against man. As the book is keen to point out, its two suspenseful set pieces- Doyle being trapped in a garage by the snakes, and later trapped again in his van- are role reversals of the zoo situation “you paid a quid or so to go into a reptile house and gawp at snakes through glass” thinks Doyle “but this bugger was getting a close-up of humans in a cage for free”.
One problem with Snakes in terms of a horror novel is that the kills, mostly characters being momentarily bitten and then dying of snake poison, don’t really carry the same visceral charge as people being ripped apart by giant crabs. An issue that Smith does in fairness attempt to rectify with the introduction of a massive boa constrictor, which provides a few gore highlights towards the end “a human intestinal explosion had taken place, whoever had been in this room had been crushed with such force that they had burst”.
For the seasoned Smith reader, Snakes makes for a cosily familiar experience. Even so it is hard to ignore the feeling of no new ground being covered here, as if the book was a contractual obligation, and Smith went into it without any fresh ideas to hand. Snakes is akin to visiting an elderly relative, knowing full well that they are going to regale you with same tall tale that they tell you every time you come to visit. It’s a book that delivers what you’d expect from Guy N. Smith without really being a standout in his busy bibliography.
November 7, 2022
What was the fascination with snake attacks in the 70s and 80s?
Well another good read and another animal attack book, maybe snake feeding habits are a bit embellished but hey it makes it all the better
Well another good read and another animal attack book, maybe snake feeding habits are a bit embellished but hey it makes it all the better
April 7, 2021
I love snakes, but this book has had me checking under my bed and in bushes! I really enjoyed this book...top notch Guy N. Smith!! 🐍💚
July 15, 2025
In my opinion this is not a horror
October 29, 2023
A creepy novel. Since reading this book, I unconsciously look at the floor every time I enter the house, for fear of seeing rattlesnakes or coral snakes. This state is estimated to last for some time!
August 1, 2021
Various deadly snakes on the loose in a small village cause havoc and ghastly death. A Cujo moment for a couple in a car gave me a small giggle and I did think of the far superior King.
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