Doomflight

by Guy N. Smith

1984 Hamlyn printing paperback fine condition. In stock shipped from our UK warehouse

Genres: Horror

224 pages, Paperback

First published January 8, 1981

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

[Mika Lietzen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ancient druids make modern life surprisingly difficult in Guy N. Smith's 1981 novel about a doomed airport. Why would they bother? Because they're druids and as everyone knows, druids are all about doing evil for evil's sake.

Set in a small English town called Fradley, the novel recounts the efforts by dodgy businessmen to build a modern international airport to compete with Heathrow on the site of an abandoned RAF airfield. Apparently the airfield was beset by accidents and after a while it was abandoned, becoming an overgrown field. Trouble ensues already during construction, with malfunctioning machines, disappearing kids and fires. A mysterious ring of stones is discovered beneath the surface and several people begin hallucinating or dreaming about chanting men in robes. After the airport opens the troubles only escalate further, with plane crashes, hotel fires and deaths, until the finale which goes absolutely gloriously overboard in the best eighties' style.

Surprisingly, Fradley is an actual place in Staffordshire near where Smith was born. There was an RAF field during the war, so it's safe to assume some of the background is based on reality. Checking up on some timelines, the late 1970s and early 1980s was also the time when the debate about developing Stansted airport into London's third airport took place. And of course the airport parody movie Airplane! came out in 1980. It's not a great leap to deduce that the spark for Doomflight came from one or more of these sources.

Having previously read only Smith's classic but somewhat uneven debut novel Night of the Crabs I had some reservations, but Doomflight proved to be a quick, fun, well-written read. It's silly, everything is exaggerated and the rotating group of characters (developers, local activists, hotel magnates, pilots and stewardesses) are mostly there for fodder, but that's what great eighties' horror is all about. There is a fantastic Englishness to the novel throughout, and admittedly the basic plot of something modern invading the quaint rural idyll of old England could easily pass off as a Wallace and Gromit movie, perhaps sans the multiple murders. Some of the violent scenes are in fact very effective, especially towards the profoundly nihilistic ending, with one local activist ending up in a pigsty and the main couple left facing a certain and excruciatingly slow death. One also cannot discount the effect of nostalgia; after reading Doomflight, an eighties kid like myself wanted to go read Zzap!64 magazine or play something like Doomdark's Revenge on the Commodore, with Iron Maiden blasting out of the speakers. That feeling alone is worth full five stars. Thank you, Guy N. Smith (1939-2020) and rest in peace.

Smith's novels are available as ebooks on his site at guynsmith.com.

[Ian Pattinson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a thin book, and I had the time to spare, so I read it in a day. And it's taken me over a month to write up the review.

Fradley aerodrome was built, and then abandoned during the war, and, at the start of the book, has been functioning as a storage space and makeout spot. In the prologue, we get a hint of the evil that resides on teh site, as a young woman is whisked away to be sacrificed by hooded figures.

Fast forward a little while, and the aerodrome has been purchased by Flyways (Guy N Smith wasn't great at making up company and product names) to be turned into a major airport for the Midlands. Even before the first sod is cut, the deaths start. But, despite the mortalities, and local opposition, construction continues.

The problem is, the airport has been built on the site of an old stone circle. It's even larger than Stonehenge, and still guarded by the spirits of the evil followers of the Old Religion who worshipped there. Thee grotesque Druids are able to bend space and time, or seriously cloud the minds of their victims, to kill people in recreations of their old domain.

When the airport is built, the deaths ramp up even more, with plane crashes, hotel fires, virgin sacrifices and more. There's so much chaos that one whole plane crash is skipped, and you only find out about it several pages later when it's mentioned in passing.

It's all fun, and a bit gruesome, but, as a whole, the book felt unfocussed. Just what the Druids wanted, or expected to achieve, was never explained. The reactions, of staff and public, aren't too deeply explored, and it ends with an event which feels unrelated, which was prophesied a mere few pages earlier.

Despite my misgivings above, I still enjoy these seventies vintage horror potboilers, so I'm going to give it a good score.

[Hal Astell · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't believe that I've read 'Doomflight' since my first time through forty or so years ago, but I guess that it's really stayed with me, because it feels as archetypal an example of his work as anything prior to it. It starts out addressing Smith's most frequent theme, the clash between country and city folk, an approach he'd taken throughout the seventies, but it adds a further clash between ancient evil and the modern day, something he'd touched on in 'Satan's Snowdrop' but would cover far more as the eighties continued, especially in his 'Sabat' novels. And the text mostly unfolds in the thoughts of its characters, their deepest wishes and fears and prejudices.

The country folk here are the peaceful locals in the rural village of Fradley, somewhere in the Midlands of England. The city folk are the coalition of rich and powerful businessmen who buy the former RAF air field that was closed down even before the end of the Second World War and has been mostly used ever since as a commercial warehouse, a lover's lane for the young and a practice area for learner drivers. It becomes Fradley, a major international airport that threatens to match Heathrow within a decade.

The setup is quintessential Smith but he shifts gears on us by having the country folk serve as a rumble in the background rather than the protagonists. Usually when he lets city folk take the lead, it's those city folk who have moved to the country and found a way to fit in, to understand how country life works and to be sympathetic to it. That's not the case here, because the primary characters are the powerful men who make this airport happen and the interlopers who work it. Hartley Lowe, the most prominent Fradley local, as the churchgoing former schoolmaster and member of the local archaeological society, is a vocal opponent of the airport, but he doesn't really achieve anything.

The people who achieve here represent the ancient evil, a nameless and faceless force out of time who chip away nicely at the populace to generate the growing death toll. They're Druids, who got a mention in Smith's debut novel, 'Werewolf by Moonlight' but don't really show up in his bibliography until now. Don't worry, they'll be back in future books, usually appearing in a similar fashion, as a character in the modern day suddenly finds themselves out of time, blurring from now to then and frequently paying an immense price for the privilege, often becoming a blood sacrifice on an altar of stone.

And that happens a lot here. The airfield in Fradley was built on fields owned by Edgar Swain but, under the tarmac and the grass, lies an immense stone circle, that's almost a character in itself and certainly achieves the most in this novel, emerging from the rubble of the airport vibrant and complete after an incalculable sacrifice at the hands of the Bird of Death. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. The first death is Susan Kemp, a young lady trying to dump her cheating boyfriend after a driving lesson on the abandoned Fradley runway before the new airport is built. She escapes him but ends up in open heath, where she's surrounded by toothless robed druids who promptly sacrifice her. And she's only the first.

That feeling of being utterly lost, moving quickly from a known place to somewhere supernaturally old and dangerous, is mirrored in Smith's approach to the structure of 'Doomflight'. Sure, he divides it into three logical parts but that's only the beginning. There's 'The Old Airfield', in which the idea manifests and the ancient evil stirs and the deaths begin. There's 'The Airport', in which the idea becomes reality but the ancient evil is pissed and the deaths escalate. And there's 'The Ancient Circle', in which the evil takes over and shatters the reality, with an exponential growth in the death toll.

But that means quite the passage of time and the involvement of quite the ensemble cast. There are a huge amount of characters here, though we naturally focus on a smaller number. However, Smith has an interesting approach that disorients us, in naming a whole slew of characters in conversation who don't actually appear in the book, while simultaneously refusing to name a whole slew more that he has walk on stage and off again, even ones to whom he gives dialogue. Nobody in Hartley Lowe's protest march is named except him. A large array of doctors, detectives, menial workers and the like show up, speak a line or two and are gone. Yet gossip gives us the names of friends, neighbours and relatives, who never appear in person. Some have been dead for years.

The majority of characters we follow are unsympathetic, not least the Flyways, Ltd. consortium behind this new airport: Charles Whyte, a brash American mogul; Phil and Roger Warboys, moving on up from their discos and nightclubs; and Frank Weston, who built his empire of five star hotels out of a boarding house. The people they work with are just as unsympathetic: Clive Manning, a corrupt planning officer; and Edgar Swain, who sold the entrepreneurs the land. We don't care about any of them but we don't necessarily hate them enough to want to see them dead. That feels odd too, as does the fact that they often don't actually get theirs, except in nightmares or frustrations.

More sympathetic are the people working for Flyways, especially the couple of Lance Evans, a youthful flying instructor, and Pamela Bridges, an air stewardess. Like everyone else at Fradley, these two have been persuaded away from solid jobs elsewhere by bumper salaries, but they soon came to regret their choice to move. They feel the evil bubbling underneath Fradley and find that they want out, soon after arriving. They're tormented by this evil, in ways that Smith was so good at detailing, merely by dipping into their minds. It doesn't necessarily show up and tap them on the shoulder, as the ghost of Wilson, a daredevil American pilot, does a couple of times to others. It just makes them unsettled, unwilling and uneasy, so that they snap at each other and make bad decisions even as they know they'll regret them later.

I wonder what people thought who read this as their introduction to Guy N. Smith. While it might seem to be a logical first choice, given how it tackles so many of the pivotal themes of his horror novels, it's a hard one to get to grips with unless you have a background in his work. It's a pessimistic read, not quite at the level of 'Bats Out of Hell' or 'Locusts', but it's definitely a downer to reflect the times in which it was written. Yet Smith avoids the scenes of pulp horror that he was so known for, merely setting scenes and letting us fill in the blanks, even in the finalé where what we surely know happens is obscured by an overwhelming bank of smoke.

It's also an ambiguous novel because, while we can fairly categorise people as decent or greedy, there aren't really any good guys or bad guys in the traditional active sense, certainly any heroes or villains. The monsters, if we can call them that, are ancient Druids who only exist in vague supernatural visions, even if they're able to manipulate their surroundings enough to drive their sacrificial knives into chests at the break of dawn. Nobody achieves anything here, even if it might seem initially that they do. Goals are all swept away in time, even if they're as simple as escape.

When I first read it, back in the mid-eighties, I don't think I was ready for it. I preferred easier novels to grasp, like 'Deathbell' or 'Entombed', and, of course, the more outrageous pulp offerings, 'The Sucking Pit' and 'Night of the Crabs'. Coming to it afresh as the twentieth novel in my runthrough of his novels, it feels important, still a little distant but a transitional point between what he wrote in the seventies and what I know he would go on to write in the eighties. In many ways, it epitomises what he did, but in an interesting way. It's stayed with me more than I ever thought it had and I think it's going to sit there in my mind as I read through Smith's next twenty novels.

Originally posted at the Nameless Zine in October 2022:
https://www.thenamelesszine.org/Voice...

Index of all my Nameless Zine reviews:
https://books.apocalypselaterempire.com/

[Cleaver Patterson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fun read. Gruesome as you'd expect, and a fast, pacey writing style.

[Jason Lehmann · Rating 3 out of 5]

Guy N Smith is a great horror writer and while good this book does have its flaws. Some of the characters are awful and while they all get there medicine some seem to get off a little lighter than others. Some of the choices by the lead characters are questionable which does not help the narrative. The horror is solid with some crazy kills and the ending is a blast. A solid read just not Award winning.

[Andrew Garvey · Rating 3 out of 5]

Full review soon at www.spookyisles.com

[Fraser McMartin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Thought it was pretty crap to be honest....sorry!

[Egghead · Rating 3 out of 5]

Haunted airstrip makes
People angry, horny, dead.
Blame local druids.

[noname noname · Rating 2 out of 5]

the fear lines were incredible, the author described very well how fear gets into characters of the story ... it s like how panic attacks get to people, but this is another context ...