Thirst

Thirst #1

by Guy N. Smith

Mel Timberley, professional lorry driver, swerves to avoid a hare and crashes into Claerwen Reservoir, polluting the entire water supply of Birmingham with the most deadly weedkiller ever created. Ron Blythe was the chemist who helped to create the spray and now, with thousands of people suffering and dying, his conscience forces him to try to work to find an antidote. Unfortunately, he gets stranded inside Birmingham, now sealed off, and full of anarchists, escape criminals and weedkiller-poisoned sufferers from the Thirst, all of which turn the city into a hell inside England.

Genres: Horror, Fiction, Science Fiction

219 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published February 7, 1980

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

[Wayne · Rating 4 out of 5]

A trucker is having a romp with a girl while carrying poisonous weedkiller through the countryside. The problem is, it's not his wife. Also, the girl's husband shows up and tells the driver that he is turning him in for joy riding with the poison. All this leaves him a bit crestfallen. He plumets into a water reservoir that flows to Birmingham, England.

It gets into the home taps and makes the victim thirsty. Then it produces festering sores and other marks all over the body. Rioting ensues to find drinkable fluids. Fires rage because the liquid in the water is inflammable. The death toll starts to mount in a big way.

Into all this, a research chemist who has a hand in developing the weedkiller is sent to Birmingham to find answers. He gets stuck there and along with a female he fancies, a convicted killer and an orphaned boy, they try to escape the carnage.

This is a pretty gory Guy story. One of his bloodiest, I would have to say. Loads of violence throughout. The one problem I had with this, as I have with a lot of Guy's books is that he goes off track a bit much. The story will be progressing, and he stops and goes down another avenue. He gets back in gear thankfully sooner in this outing.

[Rob Twinem · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was part of a number I picked up when helping my daughter no 2 decorate her new flat. Having not read anything by Guy N Smith before (living in the UK...not having read anything by Guy N Smith...where have I been!) I was eager to jump right into this fine example of late 70/80s horror. I was a great fan of Herbert and King during this period and indeed I remember reading The Rats on a beach in Greece in the 70s when I was young free and single...and of course beautiful!! The first thing that strikes the avid horror reader about books of that period is the art work and the cover....quite often the books were rubbish but the covers were fantastic and helped undoubtedly sell the material. Thirst has a fantastic cover (1980 edition) with a reservoir in the distance...where all the weed killer was deposited (see later) fronted by a screaming woman whose face is adorned with various sores and abnormalities. In the distance the sun is setting creating a red and cruel sky.....come on admit it...you want to read it!!

Mel Timberley is transporting a dangerous volatile tanker full of weed killer and unfortunately his mind is elsewhere. I just loved the opening paragraph it really drew me in...”The tanker lumbered through the night, its erratic passage reflecting the mood of its driver – angry; punishing the engine on stretches of straight road, torturing brakes and tyres on the bends” So with Mel reflecting on his troubles he is not concentrating on his driving and the responsibility of such a dangerous cargo....the inevitable happens and the toxic week killer ends its journey unfortunately in a reservoir that is the main water feed for the good people of Birmingham.

As with all good horror we meet an interesting cross section of the population and enjoy the spectacle of how they cope when drinking the offending water supply. At 200+ pages the story is short ( I always feel this is a great attribute in horror novels of this type as there is only so many ways an unsuspecting populace can meet its demise) Characters are introduced to the reader only to quickly disappear as they come into contact with the deadly water supply.

One character of note is Benny Wilkes living a life full of wasted opportunities under the watchful eye of a weak mother and a dominating father, Thomas Wilkes, who insists his son follow a nice safe career in banking. One day Benny decides to alter the brakes on his father’s car, leading to Thomas Wilkes demise expertly hidden under all the turmoil happening in a city under seize due to the contaminated water.

All stories must have a hero and I suppose Ron Blythe fits that model perfectly especially as he was the scientist behind the production of the week killer and therefore morally responsible. Ron has a wondering eye for the ladies and has had many affairs with younger more attractive women (well why shouldn’t he...Margaret was beautiful once but age has caught with her...a somewhat chauvinistic attitude!) The city of Brimingham is declared an emergency zone with rampaging looting gangs and inhabitants dying.....the world is crying out for a hero... step up to centre stage Ron. Ron attempts to break out of the fenced emergency zone with the beautiful Carol Evans (someone had to rescue her...why not Ron!) Ron loves Carol...Carol loves Ron...bye bye Margaret!! A bulldozer and an escaped convict, Mike Cummins, help our heroes breach the barriers and head for freedom...is all well with the world? There is a nice unexpected conclusion which leads to a satisfactory ending.

I enjoyed the first half of Thirst, meeting all the characters both good and bad and watching the carnage unfold but I felt the second half was a somewhat wasted opportunity descending into anarchy as a once proud city became the battle ground for warring gangs and wannabe soldiers. So in conclusion a fine example of horror of a certain age, not a work of great imagination but a fun way to spend an afternoon.

[Thomas Stroemquist · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read a battered Swedish translation paperback edition of this book at 12 years of age and it gave me nightmares for weeks. 30 odd years later, it still is in parts a very effective horror book.

I got the idea to re-read this one following Night of the Crabs, which I read in a group read (my choice, I'm afraid). That one has great qualities in being so much cheesy b-horror that a book can be, it's fast-paced and short. This book, written a few years later, is longer and better written. This is not, however, all for the good. It is not as easy to write this one off as "a bit of b-movie, cheesy fun" and this makes one scrutinize it a bit more.

As I said starting out, parts of the book are very suspenseful and thrilling, and some scenes really makes you doubt that it was written as long as 34 years ago - but it was in the era of the video nasties after all. At about half, the book loses pace some. Smith actually gives characters some background and history, but it is done immediately prior to introducing them in some way into the main protagonists' immediate vicinity or, more often, prior to killing them off.

Had the book kept up the pace and style of the first half, rating would have been higher, but the pace problem, coupled with some extreme suspension of disbelief needed to swallow some storylines and some coincidences brings it down some.

Also hard to overlook is the stone age view on women showing in parts, this time making it hard to believe that this was written just 34 years ago...

[Gavcrimson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thirst fits neatly between Bats Out of Hell (1978) and The Festering (1989) in Guy N. Smith’s bibliography, inheriting the former’s theme of societal breakdown, and anticipating the latter’s obsession for gore and puss. Both Bats Out of Hell and Thirst centre around man-made disasters....well, these being Guy N. Smith books we’re actually talking woman-made disasters, with Smith keen to place the blame for catastrophes at the feet of females.

In Bats, a woman’s furious reaction to her partner’s infidelity causes contaminated bats to escape from a research lab and bring a virus to the population of Birmingham. While in Thirst, a domineering wife’s refusal to put out for her trucker husband, leads him first to masturbation, then into the arms of a woman who comes from a place with a very long name. To add to the trucker’s woes, he is caught having it away with Maureen from Pontrhydfendigaid by her husband, who vows to get even by reporting him to his superiors. Not only for the affair, but for breaking company regulations by leaving a truck load of highly lethal weed killer stationary at the long-of-name place. It is all playing on the trucker’s mind when, back on the road, he swerves to avoid a rabbit and instead crashes the truck into the lake that supplies Birmingham with its water supply. A turn of events that’s good news for that bunny, but not so much for Brummies, with Birmingham’s now contaminated water supply turning anyone who drinks it into an insane, puss oozing killer with an insatiable thirst for water. First up to suffer this fate is the underwater diver who the police employee to search the sunken truck, closely followed by some teenage tearaways who are up to no good by the side of the lake. Young thugs were a type that GNS was never one to mince his words about (this particular bunch being “the scourge of the hills, the scum of Rhayader”). A little bit more perplexing is why underwater divers ended up so high on Smith’s hit list during this period. Thirst marking the beginning of open season being declared on underwater divers in GNS books, with gristly fates not only awaiting a frogman here, but also in The Undead (1983) and The Walking Dead (1984).

The creator of the weed killer, research chemist Ron Blythe is the type of character who could only be a hero in a Guy N. Smith book, and would likely be considered a heel, a villain or a ‘one chapter and they’re dead’ character just about everywhere else. Blythe is a pipe smoking refugee from an unhappy marriage to another domineering woman, who much like the scientist hero of Bats Out of Hell spends much of the book dodging responsibly for his actions. Blythe refuses to be guilt tripped by his wife, when she presents him with a newspaper headline about an eight year old boy who accidentally drank the weed killer that Blythe helped create, and ended up turning a knife on himself “skewering himself like a Sunday joint of rare beef”. Likewise Blythe is unrepentant about resorting to animal testing during the creation of the weed killer “horses from the knacker yard. They would have died anyway”. GNS always preferred his heroes to be of the horny, bed hopping variety, and Blythe doesn’t let the team down there either, proudly boasting “my wife is the only woman I get into bed with to go to sleep”.

Men in GNS books are rarely around women very long before they are mentally undressing them and speculating what they’d be like in bed. It is a characteristic likely to lead any female reader to ask out loud ‘Do men really think like this?’ a question that any man in the immediate vicinity is sure to remain tight lipped about. Smith had of course supplemented his income during the 1970s by writing erotic fiction, particularly for the Gold Star stable of magazines (New Direction, Sexpert, Sexuality). Smith’s incorporation of pornographic elements into his horror fiction was...let’s face it, among his most distinct trademarks during this period. Factoring heavily into his books’ popularity among young men, and the reason why well-thumbed copies of Night of the Crabs were discretely passed around schoolyards back then. While Smith’s relationship with Gold Star had amicably ended a year before Thirst was published, Smith was still happy to supply the pornographically minded read that his horror audience expected of him. Blythe dispatching himself to his brother’s house in Birmingham with the intension of both finding a solution to the contaminated water problem, and to have sexual fantasies about his sister-in-law. It is debatable which of these Blythe regards as the higher priority. The red hot mind of Ron Blythe turns out to be a perversely funny place to spend a chapter or so in. Blythe’s thoughts going from the obligatory mental undressing of Cathy, his sister-in-law ‘small firm breasts, nipples erect’, to speculating how many times a week Cathy and his brother have sex “probably an average of once”, to catching sight of her on the stairs ‘from where he stood he could see right up her skirt...pale blue undies’. In the court of Ron Blythe, Cathy is eventually found to be ‘a little raver...she was wasted on his brother’, with Blythe reaching the conclusion that a spot of wife swapping might be mutually beneficial to both he and his brother. Had this have been the type of fiction that Smith was used to mailing off to Gold Star, that is presumably the direction the Ron Blythe story would have gone in (potential titles ‘I Had My Brother’s Wife’ or ‘Wife Swapping: Birmingham Style’). However, as Thirst has a stronger alliance to horror, fate cruelly conspired to shoot down Ron’s sex plans for his sister-in-law, forcing him concentrate instead on the matter of saving the population of Birmingham. GNS initially focuses on the revolting effects the contaminated water has on the poor schmucks who drink it. Men have to endure red sores, white puss oozing from their bodies and decaying flesh. Women get a heightened sex drive and VD like symptoms, clearly meant to inspire sexual disgust in male readers ‘a living multitude of sores that breathed and grew, and were spreading upwards until they disappeared beneath the bushy pubics’. Saying that, Thirst does eventually call time on these body horror aspects in favour of death and destruction on a far grander scale. As Birmingham descends into anarchy, Thirst takes on the appearance of every 1970s disaster movie rolled into one. Jumbo jets fall from the skies, trains collide, there are mass pileups on the motorways and the government bigwigs who are meant to solve the crisis find themselves trapped in a burning building. It could be argued that Smith was a little late to the party here, on the big screen the disaster genre was pretty much played out by the time Thirst was published in 1980. Still GNS does manage to put his own personal stamp on the genre here, by revelling in the type of ultra-violence and sleazy sentiment that mainstream Hollywood wouldn’t have touched with a bargepole in 1980. It’s hard to imagine a character in The Towering Inferno blurting out that their one regret in life is never having visited a prostitute, yet that is what plays on someone’s mind while they are trying to escape a burning building here “Jesus, if I had my time over again, I’d squander a quid on one of those scrubbers”.

Thirst does carve a niche for itself by offering a very British spin on the disaster genre, with the carnage played out amidst some Birmingham specific locations like Hams Hall and Spaghetti Junction. Thirst was also written during a time when the national front and football hooliganism were rarely out of the headlines, and there are more than a few nods in those directions, with GNS giving his audience the fear that 1980s Britain was on the verge of lawlessness. The later stages of the book being filled with vicious skinhead yobbos running riot on the streets, and branching off into tribalistic groups of football supporters ‘even with death and disease ravaging the streets, soccer was still war. City and Villa fans found it impossible to join forces’.

Just when you think GNS has no more tricks up his sleeve, he tops himself with a twisted spin on the Frisbee craze. If I had to speculate here, I’d guess that GNS overheard a killjoy heckling some kids who were playing Frisbee with ‘you’ll have someone’s head off with that’. Then decided to work that moment of inspiration into the book, putting a lethal variation on the harmless Frisbee ‘the death disc’ into the hands of his yobbo baddies, which they use to decapitate coppers and rival skins. For a book that is tied to the anxieties and fads of 1980, Thirst isn’t without resonance in the 21st century. While the COVID-19 similarities aren’t as chillingly prophetic as in Bats Out of Hell, talk of an entire city being placed into lockdown, the police and the army being drafted in to keep the disgruntled populace at bay, and a Prime Minister being ousted in a vote of no confidence, does send shivers down the spine. What must have seemed like far-fetched fiction in 1980, isn’t so much when read in 2022.

Still even with a modern day holocaust raging there is always time for Cupid to draw back his bow in a GNS book. The death and destruction bringing Blythe together with Carol Evans, a young woman who instantly endears herself to him by refuting Ron’s claim that that he should be held responsible for the crisis. Carol insisting that it was all the truck diver’s fault. She then goes along with Ron’s thinking, when he reaches the conclusion that it wasn’t his or the truck divers’ fault, rather it was the truck driver’s wife who is to blame. “The driver was knocking off a bird out of his area so he used our truck as his transport, if he’d found a mistress nearer, or his wife had satisfied him enough at home so that he didn’t need to look elsewhere, we wouldn’t be in this mess now”. At least no one tries to shift blame onto the rabbit.

Carol Evans might well be Smith’s near-perfect woman, she’s unperturbed by a man blowing a cloud of tobacco smoke in her direction, believes in the re-introduction of the death penalty and is the proud owner of ‘small breasts with firm pink nipples’. On the downside, Carol isn’t a virgin, and does come from Wigan...but I suppose you can’t have everything. Romances do tend to spring out of nowhere and quickly escalate in Smith’s world. I will admit to having a grin on my face long after reading the part of the book where Ron confesses the most personal, intimate details of his life to Carol, in spite of the fact that they only appear to have known each other for an hour or so. Carol has to play Agony Aunt and lend a sympathetic ear as Ron complains about how the sex has gone out of his marriage, how he dislikes the fact that his wife has put on weight and won’t do anything to lose it, how he broke the law by having a vasectomy without getting his wife’s consent, how he had the snip in order to cheat on his wife “it kind’ve gives me license to commit adultery without risking any maintenance orders against me”. Mental baggage cast aside, the couples’ clothes soon follow, as Ron and Carol end up in bed together, and Ron vows that if they ever get out of Birmingham alive he’ll have his vasectomy reversed.

It is customary in GNS books to have at least one character who was modelled on the author himself. In fact Thirst actually has two characters which fit that criteria. First up being Ron’s brother Simon, who is part of the banking industry, working at the treasury in central Birmingham, as Smith himself had at one point. The fact that his brother has settled for such an ordinary, 9 to 5 life, agitates Ron throughout Simon’s time in the book. In Ron’s eyes his boring sibling is nothing but ‘a slave to the system’ and has ‘a conditioned mind’. Indeed, when Simon’s wife becomes ill, not only does he insist on leaving for work as usual but demands that Ron not call him at work while he is down in the vault, for fear that this will cause trouble with his superiors. Brother Simon also comes under criticism for failing to live up to the physical perfection that Smith demanded from his creations, becoming yet another GNS character to be chided for carrying around excess weight ‘he had a band of fat around his waist...regular exercise would have lessened it’.
For all the issues the book has with Brother Simon over his lack of ambition, emotional detachment and extra pounds, the insights we get into Simon’s life suggests he is fairly content in his role as Mr. Ordinary. Simon even enjoys that rarity in a GNS book, a harmonious marriage. Something you can’t claim of Ron, what with his affairs and secret vasectomy. Say what you will about Brother Simon, but he does appear happy with his lot in life, in stark contrast to Benny Wilkes, the other character in the book whose life mirrors Smith’s own in several troubling ways. Wilkes is the victim of a domineering, bank manager father who forced his offspring into an industry that is a constant source of misery and unfulfillment to his offspring. All of which leaves Benny feeling like an automaton ‘a machine which carted monies, cashed cheques and refused to converse with its fellows’. In his 2013 autobiography ‘Pipe Dreams’, Smith remains guarded around the subject of his own bank manager father...I don’t even think he ever even refers to his father by name (for the record it was Joseph Newman-Smith). The few insights to be gleaned there are telling though, Smith recalls his father thwarting his chances at higher education ‘he was a bank manager and nothing short of my following in his footsteps was acceptable to him. My mother went along with this, she did not have any other choice and neither did I’. Once his father retired from the banking world, Smith found himself working at the same branch his father had ruled with an iron fist, leading the other employees to persecute the younger Smith upon discovering his parentage. Given the older Smith’s unwavering belief that his son should continue in the family tradition, you do have to wonder what he made of GNS eventually dropping out of banking altogether in order to write books about giant crabs. Joseph Newman-Smith died in early 1978, not long before Thirst was written. Am I reading too much into this? Or was Smith using this section of Thirst to work through personal trauma? It’s easy to lose sight of where autobiographical elements end and horror fiction begins here. “His word was law in the home as it had been in the city branch of the bank which he had managed since the war” claims Wilkes of his hated father. The words Smith puts in the mouth of the father cut deeper than the pincers of any giant crab “I refuse to believe that I have produced a fool, banking is in your blood, Benjamin”. In the book, as in life, Wilkes is a fairly insignificant figure who doesn’t even figure in the Ron Blythe/Carol Evans storyline. His tentative connection to the main plot being that he finally decides to kill his father by fixing the brakes on the old man’s car. The large scale death and disaster that besets Birmingham soon after conspiring to help Benny’s crime go undetected. Secondary character as Wilkes might be, Smith’s writing here is at its most angriest and intense, these pages of the book threatening to burst into flames on account of the fury that is printed on them. “Banking, that was the cause of this cancer which was slowly eating away at his soul” screams the tormented brain of Benny Wilkes. Smith’s strict moral compass dictates that no wrongdoing should go unpunished in his books, however he does at least allow Wilkes the satisfaction of gloating at his father’s funeral with the kind of ghoulish relish that Tod Slaughter would have been proud of “the undertakers were really pulling a con trick. A plastic bucket would have been quite sufficient to hold all that was left of Thomas Wilkes”. There is also a confrontation between Wilkes and his mother, so vitriolic that is almost too painful to read “you did as he wanted. Helped him to persecute me. Sent me away to public school because it looked good. Put me in the fucking bank”.

Over the course of the GNS binge that I’ve been on recently I have come to appreciate that Smith was a far more diverse writer than he gets credit for. His bibliography including Disney novelizations, pseudonymous erotica, children’s books, a war novel, a Western and with Thirst alone spanning the horror, 70’s suburban porn and disaster genres. Even within horror, he was far from a one trick pony, with books like The Undead (1983) and The Cadaver (2007) delivering old-fashioned chills and largely abstaining from the excess he became famous for. On the other hand, if you do want to know where Smith’s reputation as a sex and horror extremist came from, by all means take a deep dive into the contaminated waters of Thirst. It stands as a testament to Smith’s talent for packing in enough incident to fill at least three books, yet deliver it all in a concise 224 page read. In his prime GNS books adopted the characteristics of his preferred type of male heroes; they’re tough, mean, fast and without an ounce of surplus flesh on them. Smith’s overall message here is that the wives of truckers need to be more attentive to their sexual needs, and that truckers themselves need to man up, put all that Watership Down sentimentally aside, and be prepared to run over more bunnies. Otherwise women, rabbits and the banking industry will be the death of us all.

[Bilbo Nobwank · Rating 1 out of 5]

I've not quite finished this one yet. But I'm close enough to breasting the tape to have earned the right to write a review. So there!

I'm also being a bit unfair in rating it as a one-star. But, as we all know, people only ever read the ones and fives anyway. So no point sitting on the fence! In a less polarised world, I'd rate it a three. Just for the sheer fun of how awful it is. But the secret with this book [and most of Guy N Smith's oeuvre] is to read it in the spirit of 1970s kitsch. If you take it seriously, you'll think its some of the worst dross ever published. If you read it for the [unintentional] comedy value, it's pure genius.

I mean the basic premise is completely absurd.

Imagine a chemical weedkiller [Weedspray by name] which, if ingested in the tiniest quantities results in; instant bubonic plague pustules, followed by an all-consuming rabies-like thirst, then homicidal insanity and finally agonising death. Imagine also that there's no known antidote and that this weedkiller is so unbelievably noxious that, even when massively diluted with water, it turns the water itself inflammable!

Got all that? Good. Now, if your incredulity has not stretched to breaking point yet, further imagine that:

1: This lethal concoction has somehow been licensed for sale in the UK. And is hugely popular and easily available over the counter from your friendly neighbourhood garden centre. It is also used by farmers. Yet amazingly none of it seems to have entered the food chain.

2: Up until a few days before the story begins, none of these horrendous side-effects had come to light. In spite of the product being hugely popular and having been on sale for years.

3: The company that makes Weedspray has actually been selling a much stronger product than is claimed on the packet. This is so that people will buy more of it because they think they need more Weedspray per gallon of water than is actually effective.

No. Me neither! --wouldn't you just sell a more dilute product, so you had two or three times as much "stock" to sell? But this unbelievably flimsy "It's a lot stronger than it says on the packet" sub-plot seems to have been shoe-horned in because even Guy N Smith realised that what follows is risibly far-fetched.

For, without delving too deeply into the plot: a tanker full of this Weedspray stuff crashes into a Welsh reservoir. One tanker. One humongous reservoir. So big that it supplies the entire city of Birmingham. But, even when diluted to that "drop in the ocean" extent, Weedspray is still so toxic that it poisons the entire water supply of that large city.

Cue several chapters of the usual Guy N Smith overblown and overwritten chaos that follows, as Birmingham turns into a war zone, complete with rioting "shaven headed" football fans [ a perennial favourite in Smith's panoply of villainy], out of control militia... and, of course our obligatory hero, suave pipe-smoking biochemist Ron Blythe, who actually invented the toxic muck in the first place and was in Birmingham as part of some committee charged with doing "something" about it all.

Needless to say, in the middle of all this death and destruction, our hero meets the obligatory "beautiful lay-dee", Carol, when he rescues her from an completely implausible sexual assault, attempted in a restaurant full of people. Of course, after this traumatic experience, the girl can't wait to invite Blythe back to her bedsit and then asks him to stay the night. Because there's nothing a woman wants more, after practically being raped in broad daylight than to invite a complete stranger back to her home.

Per standard Guy N Smith formula, the pair are soon going at it like bunny rabbits and are instantly "in love" with each other.

In the meantime, Birmingham has been cordoned off by the army, who are pretty much shooting anyone who tries to leave. For some reason that's not explained [probably because there isn't any logic to it]. Blythe and Carol decide that to escape from the city, they should try and make it to the offices of Blythe's "What the Feck Are We Going to Do About This? Committee" in the violent war-torn centre of Brum, rather than try and find a way out of the city, by some quiet, lesser used backroad on the outskirts.

About now we are introduced to a new character; a mass axe murderer called Cummins, who has a string of slayings behind him and really enjoys killing people. Cummins is being held in prison pending transfer to Broadmoor but escapes during a riot there --casually killing three more people in the process and also stealing a gun.

Guess where Cummins decides to hole up?

Oh. You're too good you are!

Yes, with all of Birmingham to choose from, Cummins breaks into Carol's bedsit where he finds Carol & Blythe in bed together. In the nip.

Now, when this psycho who kills people for a laugh, is confronted by a "beautiful" naked woman in bed and some random geezer with her, you might expect he would kill Blythe without a second thought and then have his wicked way with Carol before, probably, killing her too. But, no. After a bit of half-arsed threats and posturing, Cummins, the man with a gun and a string of bloody killings behind him already, decides that his best hope of getting out of Birmingham himself lies not in shooting his way out somehow, but in following Blythe and Carol's plan to get to the "What the Feck Are We Going to Do About This? Committee" offices. With even less justification in Cummins's case.

With Blythe now being obediently followed by Carol and Mr. Psycho-Killer, they set off again. Pausing only to adopt an orphaned boy, whose mother conveniently dies in front of them.

By this stage, as is customary in this kind of story, Blythe has become de facto leader of their party. So Cummins merely grumbles a bit about adding a "brat" to their party, but keeps tagging along himself, anyway.

This is as far as I've got so far. But I look forward to the gang adopting a stray kitten next, or maybe an amusing talking bird. And also to the inevitable conclusion whereby Blythe [the unarmed pipe-smoking scientist] either beats Cummins [the violent armed psychotic killing machine] in a fight to the death, or Cummins conveniently writes himself out of the plot by meeting his end in some other grisly way.

As for Weedspray, I'm on tenterhooks as to what will turn out to be the antidote in the end. Obviously something simple, plentiful and instant acting. So everything can get back to normal as quickly as possible and Blythe and Carol can skip happily off into the sunset together.

[Michael Ferguson · Rating 1 out of 5]

Reading this book felt like punishment. Quite possibly one of the worst books I have ever read. Uninspired, contrived and lacking in absolutely everything from a decent plot to character development. I can't believe it ever got published. The whole read left me wanting to put the book down and run away screaming, and not in the good way. Not worth it, would not recommend. If you want a good disaster/outbreak/plague/pandemic book I would recommend The Fireman by Joe Hill instead.

[Graham · Rating 3 out of 5]

Another trashy paperback from this prolific author, written in 1980 and so displaying slightly more finesse than some of his earliest works. While this is still behind the quality of later fare (CARACAL being a personal favourite), and his brusque, efficient prose style feels limited in comparison to more literary writers, THIRST is a book that's hard to dislike too much. It starts off with a big set-piece, barely bothers introducing the characters, and then delivers one gory piece of action after another. This one's mainly set in Birmingham, where plague-style horrors decimate the populace. It's unashamedly gruesome, pulpish fare designed to disgust and, to that end, Smith does the job (as per usual).

[Mikepottz · Rating 4 out of 5]

A reckless driver carrying weedkiller is going to cause the city of Birmingham hell. Dark red sores, masses of ulcers oozing thick yellow pus smelling like vomit and urine, the ulcers weeping like molten lava is going to turn people into savage animals with an unquenchable thirst. Fires will range throughout the city as the water with weedkiller will become combustible. City vs Villa hooligans will clash like on the terraces. Can the destruction be saved?

[Holger Haase · Rating 3 out of 5]

You always know what you get with Guy N Smith: unpleasant characters facing unpleasant deaths. And I wouldn't want it any other way.

[Bunny Burns · Rating 4 out of 5]

Love this! Total b-movie style pulp but of the most enjoyable kind. If you're looking for a (non) guilty pleasure, look no further.

[Ian Pattinson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Another slice of 70s/80s horror, though it might be better described as a disaster story with gruesome bits.

Racing to make a delivery, the driver of a lorry hauling a tanker of weedkiller goes off the road and into a reservoir. Weedspray, as it's imaginatively named, is the strongest, most horrible concoction imaginable. Painfully and incurably toxic- whether drunk or just through skin contact- it's also, somehow, highly flammable, even when watered down. This stuff is so ridiculously deadly that it's impossible to believe in. I know the story's set in the late 70s/early 80s, but they weren't this lax on health and safety.

Anyway, thanks to criminal incompetence and industrial cowardice, the poison enters the water supply of Birmingham, condemning most of the city to horrible deaths.

Ron Blythe is the main viewpoint character- though there are cuts away to others occasionally- and he's a long way from sympathetic. A serial adulterer and snob, who created Weedspray seemingly by mixing every other weedkiller together, he ends up trapped in Birmingham as part of the ineffectual disaster committee. As the city descends into chaos and carnage, he somehow gains a girlfriend whilst avoiding contact with poisoned water but being otherwise useless.

Sadly, from somewhere around the mid-point, the story's something of an extended, gruesome anticlimax. Timelines and logic get garbled. Somehow, in the midst of the ongoing disaster and social breakdown, one of the sub plots manages to include a full formal funeral. Even with suggestions that various events overlap each other, it still feels like they unfold over a month when I'm sure it's supposed to be less than a fortnight.

Not as much fun as Night of the Crabs, I'm afraid. However, I recently found a bunch of Guy N Smith, and similar vintage, books, so the trip through 70s/80s horror shall continue.

[WordyJenn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very much enjoyed it. I liked when we’d have a chapter of a random’s persons pov and their story during the events.

It didn’t feel like it was set in November probably because I’m reading it in a massive heatwave, but I felt it was better that way.

Definitely had one nightmare.