The Pluto Pact

by Guy N. Smith

A black magician screaming curses of hatred... A fiery object hurtling from the sky... A patch of earth where no blade of grass will grow... Centuries have passed since that terrible night of reckoning, but still the dark shadow hangs over a Scottish valley.

Bob Coyle believes that his home town is menaced by a new centre for disposing of nuclear waste—a lethally dangerous project he calls 'Holocaust'. Yet his efforts to alert the people fall upon deaf—or angry—ears. For them the centre means new-found prosperity.

But a series of strange deaths and brutal killings at last starts to bring home the danger... and if Coyle's worst fears are realised, countless millions will die in agony.

Then the terrible curse of Balzur will be fulfilled.

Genres: Horror

187 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published July 1, 1982

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

[Dreadlocksmile · Rating 4 out of 5]

First published back in 1982, Guy N Smith’s pulp horror novel ‘The Pluto Pact’ was released during the hey-day for the ‘dark occult’ genre of pulp horror novels when they were at their very peak. ‘The Pluto Pact’ was one of many such novels that cashed in on this current fad, delivering an eerie tale of an ancient curse, relived at the present time.

The novel begins back in 1595 where a Witchfinder rides into the Scottish village of Craiglowrie to execute the black magician Balzur. As Balzur is burning at the stake, he curses the Witchfinder and all of the people of Craiglowrie. The curse is a pact Balzur makes with the great god Pluto to send a fire to consume the people of Craiglowrie and all of their descendents. From that time onwards the people of Craiglowrie die terrible deaths, with a disease that spreads over their bodies in burning rashes. But always a few survived – enough to transmit the curse through the following centuries.

The tale leaps forward to the present day where Bob Coyle, the editor of the local rag the ‘Craiglowrie Herald’, has been attempting to warn the local people of the devastating dangers involved with the new nuclear waste reprocessing plant that is being built on the outskirts of the village. Coyle has dubbed the new construction ‘Holocaust’.

Coyle’s son Richard soon finds himself consumed with rage when his girlfriend discovers he’s contracted a rather disgusting venereal disease. His rage is expelled on his girlfriend, Linda Lakin, in a brutal assault that leaves her dead. Such violence is far from Richard Coyle’s normal reactions.

Richard Coyle isn’t the only one to suddenly find himself unleashing a violent fit of rage upon a seemingly innocent victim. The local vagrant Rupert begins hearing a voice in his head telling him to kill. Rupert assigns this voice to that of a prophet and begins murdering randomly, whenever the voice commands him to. But the dead spirit of Balzur is less than generous even to those who serve him.

All of these sudden murders seem connected in some way and with his son now under a police investigation for murder, Coyle begins to suspect the legend of Balzur’s curse might actually hold more weight than that of a simple myth. With the new nuclear waste processing plant’s construction now fully underway and the first nuclear ‘accident’ already reported; Coyle’s fears extend past that of just Craiglowrie and now out to the devastating effects that could be unleashed upon the whole world. What if Balzur’s curse is actually real?

Drawing on the recent fad for the ‘dark occult’ style of novels, Smith has produced an intensive and deliberately eerie tale of mounting tension. With the obvious direction to where the plot is leading already firmly cemented in the storyline from the first couple of chapters, the suspense is nail biting throughout. Smith keeps the pace building in momentum, with the death count rising and an even more horrific twist always lurking behind the gory murders.

Smith’s characters are rich and well developed, with a gritty realism portrayed to each one. The nuclear disaster is a hauntingly real prospect for the reader, keeping elements of the tale close to our current ecological fears.

With the storyline spiralling to epic proportions, humanity now on the very brink of utter annihilation from Balzur’s curse, Smith draws the tale to its grand finale, knitting together all of the aspects of the plot to one final conclusion. Whether you deem the tale’s ending as satisfying or not, it is what it is. It’s certainly not the strongest part of the book, but does wrap it all up successfully.

All in all ‘The Pluto Pact’ is a harrowing and creepy tale that keeps up an intense pace from the very outset. With moments of harsh violence scattered throughout the storyline, Smith has delivered a dark tale mixing aspects of the occult with a potential ecological disaster on epic proportions.

A thoroughly enjoyable read packed with everything a pulp horror fan is after. The books runs for a total of 187 pages and was published through Hamlyn Paperbacks.

[Hal Astell · Rating 4 out of 5]

1982 was a busy year for Guy N. Smith, but I vividly remember the moment when I discovered that it was a little busier than I initially thought. I'd found his work somewhere around 1984 or 1985, my first being the fourth Sabat book, 'The Druid Connection', which I picked up at a Welsh charity shop while we were on a holiday somewhere. I devoured it and quickly put together a bibliography of his work, cribbed from the "also by" list at the front of this book and whichever others I could locate in charity shops or on market stalls. This was before the internet, of course, so no Wikipedia to be an easy source of answers.

Most of Smith's books were published by New English Library, who had put out twenty-one of them by this point, most of them horror but also a war novel and four Disney novelisations. However, he had branched out in 1979 to write longer horror novels for Hamlyn, who also paid him more money for his work. His first book to be published in 1982 was one of theirs, 'Entombed', and that made six for them. At least so I thought. That assumption was shaken when I stumbled onto 'The Pluto Pact', sitting in a box halfway down the back aisle at a fleamarket in Huddersfield. This wasn't in my lists and finding it felt like I'd just caught sight of the Ark of the Covenant and it was within my budget.

Of course, I eventually discovered that there was a simple explanation. The first half dozen novels Smith wrote for Hamlyn had large print runs and went through multiple editions, five of them in a further Arrow edition after Hamlyn ceased their horror line. It was trivial to find them in the wild. 'The Pluto Pact', however, came after those. It and 'The Lurkers' were published late in 1982, at the end of Smith's time with Hamlyn, and they only saw one edition each, very possibly with a far lower print run. Neither was reprinted, not even by Arrow. They didn't turn up in the wild very often back in the eighties, let alone today. Without the internet, it would be easy to never find a copy.

And that's a shame because this is a decent novel, not one of Smith's standout titles but certainly a worthy one and one that combines so many of his standard approaches that it almost becomes a summation of what he was doing at the time. I haven't read it in decades, so was surprised to find how well it flowed. I'd mentally lumped it into a box with 'Warhead' as a grimmer look at the peril of nuclear power, but it really doesn't take that approach. 'Warhead' was surely as much a thriller as it was a horror novel, while this is pure horror throughout.

We're in Craiglowrie, a small Scottish town that's only grown beyond a village recently due to the placing of a revolutionary nuclear waste processing plant there. Naturally there's organised local opposition, the head of that effort being Bob Coyle, editor of the 'Craiglowrie Herald', but there's not as much as we might think, because what he dubs 'Holocaust' is bringing jobs and stability to a town that needs both. After all, it's not had the greatest history, going back to the time of legend, when a witchfinder burned a black magician at the stake there, only for Balzur to curse everybody in the town to death by fire. That's supposedly why so many die in Craiglowrie, a few survivors able to keep it barely alive.

And so we have a combination of ancient and modern, as we did in 'Doomflight' and so many of the horror novels Smith had published since then. The ancient is Balzur's curse, which Coyle resurrects for his anti-Holocaust articles, and the modern is the threat of deadly radiation. The sheer volume of nuclear waste that's coming into the Craiglowrie plant is unprecedented and the increased scale means increased risk, even if their safety measures are supposedly stricter than anywhere else in the world. The oxide processing techniques they're employing are new and cutting edge. What if a mistake was made and something goes wrong, you know, because a black magician has cursed the town and everyone in it?

So much of this book feels familiar, because it's quintessential Smith, but his traditional elements are combined in different ways to tell a new and topical story. It's set in the countryside, as almost all his books were, and it tackles the age-old conflict between locals, who understand the land and its history and traditions, and newcomers, who don't and often don't care. It has the tie back to an ancient evil that began in earnest with the druids in 'Doomflight' and was continuing on through a series of flashback scenes in the 'Sabat' novels. Of course, it has the fear of nuclear power that we saw in 'Warhead'.

It also has a fresh take on the unseen and inhuman killer that was so effective in 'Thirst'. Here, it's not weedkiller spilled into a city's water supply, it's the invisible danger of radiation, but the effect isn't much different. Coyle's own son, who like his sister works at the plant, is one of those affected by a leak and that turns him into a raging killer. His girlfriend, Linda Lakin, is a local who used to be a whore and he secretly fears might still be. When he discovers that he's burning up with Balzur's cursed fire, leaving him covered in ugly rashes, he takes it for a venereal disease that she's given him and so brutally murders her. He runs, long and far, when he realises what he's done, and that feels a little reminiscent of the constant moving around in 'The Son of the Werewolf'.

If the recurring themes in Smith's work make this feel so comfortable, it's a deep characterisation that makes it worthy. Bob Coyle is the most prominent and best-drawn character and he's given an array of conflicts to build on. He's a public figure with a powerful platform of his own, as the editor of the local paper, but the powers that be at the plant have crippled him through the unions; if he doesn't get his stories vetted, they'll walk, and that limits his voice. He's married to Jane but he's in love with his young secretary, Anne; Jane doesn't know about the ongoing affair but Sarah, his daughter, does and she ruthlessly holds a threat of revelation against him. He's the face of public opposition to the plant, but both his children work there. He has supporters but not everyone. It's a complex situation from moment one and it only gets more so as the book runs on.

Nobody else is as well-drawn as Bob Coyle, but Smith spends a lot of effort into ensuring that those other characters playing support aren't cardboard cutouts. If that's one of the biggest successes of the book, then perhaps it inherently means that there's less time for the more lurid horror scenes that Smith is so known for. There are some here, not least surrounding Richard Coyle, but there's a much greater threat of death in this one that there is an actual death toll. Even though it's clearly horror rather than thriller, Smith still builds some magnificent tension.

And so I liked this one a lot more and in different ways than I expected. It's not the depressing read it sounds like it ought to be, so it's no proto-grimdark novel like 'Warhead'. It's more traditional to Smith's usual horror novels, especially his more recent ones from the tail end of the seventies and into the eighties. It develops some of these themes a little further, as well as catering to the tastes of the day. It makes me look forward all the more to 'The Lurkers', up next, because I don't recall a lot about that one at all. I'm eager to rediscover it.

Originally posted at the Nameless Zine in August 2023:
https://www.thenamelesszine.org/Voice...

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

[Remi VL · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quickly builds tension and holds it till the end, although sometimes feels a little too angry. Ending comes too quick... Could have used a bit more wrapping up. It was written in the early 80s, so it's not always the most politically correct. :-p

[Mark Sutcliffe · Rating 2 out of 5]

A bit dated

[Curtis Smith · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not his finest but defiantly worth a read. My only complaint is the lack of his usual spicy side of terror.

[Dale · Rating 3 out of 5]

A plutonium processing plant in Scotland is in crisis after accepting too many deposits, and it threatens to blow up England and maybe the world - I'm not sure about the science here.

The plant is opposed by a small town newspaper publisher, and most of the page count is taken up by him cheating on his wife and being a general SOB.

For some reason the leak of nuclear materials causes a couple of men to kill prostitutes (casually referred to as whores by the narrator). The area is quarantined, and the book's mild horrors come from the resulting rioting and suicides.

Did I mention the warlock's curse? Well, neither did Smith, hardly, but the area is cursed by a warlock, which aside from a couple of dreams only manifests in the conclusion.

More reviews at Trash Menace.

[Neil Davies · Rating 4 out of 5]

Love the mixture of modern nuclear threat with old time horror. If I had to be critical I'd say the end is a bit sudden but that could be simply because I wanted to keep reading. Great fun.