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The Undead
Ron Halestrom is a new author, one successful book behind him, who moves into a new home with his family, to write more. But naturally, Gabor House has a dark secret which is trying to drive them away. Two hundred years before, it was the old manor house: home to the Mainwarings, owners of much of the locality. Young children had been going missing, but it took their own daughter Isobel's disappearance for them to send out a search party. They find Bemorra, the local imbecile, throwing her into the Gabor Pool. Bemorra is hanged until he is dead, but he has enough time to curse the locals.
- GenresHorror
176 pages, Paperback
First published August 1, 1983
73 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 - 5 of 5 reviews
March 1, 2021
Another awesome Guy N. Smith, the man never fails.
July 27, 2015
Took me a couple of chapters to get into this one, but once it grips you it doesn't let go. Yet another great pulp horror from Mr Smith.
September 24, 2024
While he started out writing in all sorts of genres, Guy N. Smith had found himself gradually forced into being a horror author and he'd embraced that fully in 1978, rapidly turning out a succession of horror novels. There were five between 1978 and 1979, four more in 1980, five in 1981 and six in his most prolific pure horror year of 1982. This was his third in 1983, with fourth still to come, and so it probably shouldn't surprise too much that it feels like we've read it all before. That's not to say he merely recycled the plot of another book to make this one, because he didn't. What he did was to take elements from a whole slew of his novels and combine them into this new one, not unlike the approach he took in 'The Pluto Pact'.
Talking of 'The Pluto Pact', we start out with Bemerra, a historical monster like Balzur in that book, who is similarly caught and killed to put an end to his murderous activities, but who similarly ends his life by cursing the locale, a curse that abides down the years until we show back up to see how it affects the modern day story that comprises the bulk of the book. Smith does vary his prologue, because we initially view Bemerra through the eyes of an innocent young girl, Isobel Mainwaring, who has befriended him, but his motives become clear when he gets to the pool in a quarry, which brings not only the titular location in 'The Sucking Pit' to mind but the deep pools in 'Entombed' as well.
Fast-forward to the modern day and there are modern-day city folk moving to the country, as they tend to do in most Smith books. This time, it's Ron and Marie Halestrom, who have bought a place with history, just like Martyn Hamilton in 'Deathbell'; but they're more reminiscent of the Foggs in 'The Lurkers', because, like Peter Fogg, Ron Halestrom is a new author, who wrote a book that had unexpected success as a bestseller and so is being asked by his publisher to write another. Also, like Janie Fogg, Marie Halestrom is a mouse who can't deal with the bad things that happen around them and so wants to leave as soon as is humanly possible.
They have a daughter, Amanda, who's deaf, more so than Rowena Catlin in 'Manitou Doll' who had been modelled on Smith's own daughter, Rowan. When she arrives, a little later than her parents because she's been away at a special boarding school', she befriends a local deaf-mute, reminding of Donald Hughes in 'Deathbell' but clearly patterned on Bemerra as an overt avatar in the eyes of superstitious locals. Initially, Amanda, is just as a daughter, but she grows as a character as the book runs on. She has quite the showdown with Beguildy in chapter seven, establishing dominance over him. She later picks up vibrations, goes on a quest to destroy the evil and, by the third act, is very possibly able to converse with the dead. She's an interesting character.
Of course, the Halestroms have bought a place, Gabor Hall, which includes Gabor Wood, home to the Gabor Pool, the blackwater-filled quarry in which Bemerra drowned his victims, so his ancient evil has tainted it. That's why people die there, like Eddie Reece, son of gameekeper John Reece, who works for the Major, a neighbour of the Halestroms who lives for dogs and shooting, just like the Foggs' neighbour in 'The Lurkers'. Eddie unwisely sneaks over to the Gabor Pool to fish and he is drawn into it by its ancient evil. The evocative front cover by Steven Crisp depicts the pool, with the skeletons that lurk within it enticing others to join them.
There are other characters here, too, to render the plot a little more complex and to help feed that ancient evil. There's a group of travellers who have arrived on neighbouring land, though Smith is keen to point out that these are modern day lowlifes rather than true Romanies, for whom he has much respect. There's also a holiday home for problem youth, Longlea Cottage, at which a social worker, Phil Barron, attempts to keep some sort of control.
He fails pretty miserably because they stone Beguildy's cottage, so he sets fire to their front door in response, at which point they blame the travellers and head over there with massive violence in mind, sparking a scene that firmly reminds of the biker brawl in 'Manitou Doll'. No unborn babies die this time, but there is a kid hit with a nailed board that sticks in his skull and Sean O'Brien dies before they burn the place. It isn't pretty and it sets a number of characters onto deadly paths the book needs to feed the story.
So, yeah, this is relatively derivative for Smith, who treated it somewhat like a scrapbook, taking parts from a slew of his other novels to combine in a new order here. It plays well enough and I'm happy to say that I enjoyed my revisit of this novel after a few decades, but it doesn't do anything special in the way that most of those source books did. 'Deathbell' especially was wildly original, a completely new vision in the vibrant British horror scene of the day and 'Entombed' benefitted in large part from a thoroughly original location. 'Manitou Doll' did much that stands out from the crowd too. Even 'The Lurkers', which wasn't really horror at all but more of a thriller, found a new angle for Smith within his larger body of work. This doesn't and it suffers a little for that.
To be fair, if anyone found this one first and it served as their introduction to Smith's work, then it does its job fine. There's nothing wrong with it and it has some fascinating aspects, not least the deaf daughter who may be compensating for the loss of one of her senses through the addition of another that we don't have. The Gabor Pool is an evocative location for continued death and the attack on the travellers' campsite is brutal, especially when we consider that none of the Longlea Cottage who are doing such awful things are far younger than they should be. In isolation, there's quite a lot here to impress a new Guy N. Smith reader. It's only if you're a confirmed fan and you've worked through his earlier books already that it's going to seem derivative.
That may be one reason why it was never reprinted in the UK, while Smith's next book, which I will happily tackle next month, did get a second opportunity for sales when Arrow started to reprint a chunk of Smith's work, starting in the late eighties. That's 'Accursed' and it's another novel from Smith that sprang from a fascinating item of local history that he wrote about in articles. See you then!
Originally posted at the Nameless Zine in February 2024:
https://www.thenamelesszine.org/Voice...
Index of all my Nameless Zine reviews:
https://books.apocalypselaterempire.com/
Talking of 'The Pluto Pact', we start out with Bemerra, a historical monster like Balzur in that book, who is similarly caught and killed to put an end to his murderous activities, but who similarly ends his life by cursing the locale, a curse that abides down the years until we show back up to see how it affects the modern day story that comprises the bulk of the book. Smith does vary his prologue, because we initially view Bemerra through the eyes of an innocent young girl, Isobel Mainwaring, who has befriended him, but his motives become clear when he gets to the pool in a quarry, which brings not only the titular location in 'The Sucking Pit' to mind but the deep pools in 'Entombed' as well.
Fast-forward to the modern day and there are modern-day city folk moving to the country, as they tend to do in most Smith books. This time, it's Ron and Marie Halestrom, who have bought a place with history, just like Martyn Hamilton in 'Deathbell'; but they're more reminiscent of the Foggs in 'The Lurkers', because, like Peter Fogg, Ron Halestrom is a new author, who wrote a book that had unexpected success as a bestseller and so is being asked by his publisher to write another. Also, like Janie Fogg, Marie Halestrom is a mouse who can't deal with the bad things that happen around them and so wants to leave as soon as is humanly possible.
They have a daughter, Amanda, who's deaf, more so than Rowena Catlin in 'Manitou Doll' who had been modelled on Smith's own daughter, Rowan. When she arrives, a little later than her parents because she's been away at a special boarding school', she befriends a local deaf-mute, reminding of Donald Hughes in 'Deathbell' but clearly patterned on Bemerra as an overt avatar in the eyes of superstitious locals. Initially, Amanda, is just as a daughter, but she grows as a character as the book runs on. She has quite the showdown with Beguildy in chapter seven, establishing dominance over him. She later picks up vibrations, goes on a quest to destroy the evil and, by the third act, is very possibly able to converse with the dead. She's an interesting character.
Of course, the Halestroms have bought a place, Gabor Hall, which includes Gabor Wood, home to the Gabor Pool, the blackwater-filled quarry in which Bemerra drowned his victims, so his ancient evil has tainted it. That's why people die there, like Eddie Reece, son of gameekeper John Reece, who works for the Major, a neighbour of the Halestroms who lives for dogs and shooting, just like the Foggs' neighbour in 'The Lurkers'. Eddie unwisely sneaks over to the Gabor Pool to fish and he is drawn into it by its ancient evil. The evocative front cover by Steven Crisp depicts the pool, with the skeletons that lurk within it enticing others to join them.
There are other characters here, too, to render the plot a little more complex and to help feed that ancient evil. There's a group of travellers who have arrived on neighbouring land, though Smith is keen to point out that these are modern day lowlifes rather than true Romanies, for whom he has much respect. There's also a holiday home for problem youth, Longlea Cottage, at which a social worker, Phil Barron, attempts to keep some sort of control.
He fails pretty miserably because they stone Beguildy's cottage, so he sets fire to their front door in response, at which point they blame the travellers and head over there with massive violence in mind, sparking a scene that firmly reminds of the biker brawl in 'Manitou Doll'. No unborn babies die this time, but there is a kid hit with a nailed board that sticks in his skull and Sean O'Brien dies before they burn the place. It isn't pretty and it sets a number of characters onto deadly paths the book needs to feed the story.
So, yeah, this is relatively derivative for Smith, who treated it somewhat like a scrapbook, taking parts from a slew of his other novels to combine in a new order here. It plays well enough and I'm happy to say that I enjoyed my revisit of this novel after a few decades, but it doesn't do anything special in the way that most of those source books did. 'Deathbell' especially was wildly original, a completely new vision in the vibrant British horror scene of the day and 'Entombed' benefitted in large part from a thoroughly original location. 'Manitou Doll' did much that stands out from the crowd too. Even 'The Lurkers', which wasn't really horror at all but more of a thriller, found a new angle for Smith within his larger body of work. This doesn't and it suffers a little for that.
To be fair, if anyone found this one first and it served as their introduction to Smith's work, then it does its job fine. There's nothing wrong with it and it has some fascinating aspects, not least the deaf daughter who may be compensating for the loss of one of her senses through the addition of another that we don't have. The Gabor Pool is an evocative location for continued death and the attack on the travellers' campsite is brutal, especially when we consider that none of the Longlea Cottage who are doing such awful things are far younger than they should be. In isolation, there's quite a lot here to impress a new Guy N. Smith reader. It's only if you're a confirmed fan and you've worked through his earlier books already that it's going to seem derivative.
That may be one reason why it was never reprinted in the UK, while Smith's next book, which I will happily tackle next month, did get a second opportunity for sales when Arrow started to reprint a chunk of Smith's work, starting in the late eighties. That's 'Accursed' and it's another novel from Smith that sprang from a fascinating item of local history that he wrote about in articles. See you then!
Originally posted at the Nameless Zine in February 2024:
https://www.thenamelesszine.org/Voice...
Index of all my Nameless Zine reviews:
https://books.apocalypselaterempire.com/
April 7, 2022
In Gabor woods a girl drowns in a black pool two hundred years ago and the man responsible is hung and a curse comes back to the village in present time. Fights break out, people are burnt, one guy attacked by snakes sliding down his throat. Mayhem descends until the icy black pool swallows the cursed. Bloody bonkers.
February 26, 2020
Interesting in many ways, this book is like nothing I've read before, not slow-paced at first just gentle in guiding you into the legend of Bemorra. Thoroughly enjoyed it from the first page until the last.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews