ANDREW GARVEY takes a look at Doomflight in his first vist to the work of legendary horror writer Guy N. Smith
Shamefully, despite hailing from the same county as him – Staffordshire – I’ve never read a Guy N. Smith novel before now. He’s always been one of those authors I was vaguely aware of but had never got around to experiencing.
A prolific writer of horror, non-fiction, thrillers, softcore porn and Disney novelisations (yes, really), it’s hard to know where to start with a writer who’s been active – and unusually prolific – for over 40 years.
So, in choosing my first Guy N. Smith experience I decided to go for the one with the most preposterous title and cheerily pulpy cover. Of course, after flicking through the impressively long list of his horror novels available as Kindle editions, this was no way to make a choice.
They ALL have preposterous titles and cheerily pulpy cover illustrations. So, more or less at random, I went with 1981’s Doomflight. And I had a lot of fun with it, for the following three reasons:
1) It’s a short book, easily read in two or three hours. There’s plenty going on, most of it mightily unpleasant, too. Smith isn’t a subtle, slow-building sort of horror writer.
2) There’s something so incredibly, wonderfully early 1980s about it all. From the rapaciously greedy developers building an unnecessary new airport on top of an abandoned Second World War airfield with a cursed past, to the wide-eyed veneration British people in that time had (I’m just about old enough to remember) for Concorde – a big, fast aeroplane with a pointy nose that hasn’t been flown since 2003. Then there’s the villagers opposing the airport, led by a somewhat crazed former headteacher and a mysterious librarian.
And of course, there’s the utterly sexist male characters and caricatures (the pilots trying to shag all the stewardesses and the stewardesses desperate to let them) and the ubiquitous smoking. It all adds up to a bit of a nostalgia trip for me and a fairly realistic if trashily explored, look at British attitudes of the early 1980s.
3) It really delivers on the deaths and the bloodshed. No character is safe and a gleefully gruesome demise is never far away. There’s ancient druids, naked virgin sacrifices (all breasts and screams and blood), aeroplanes crashing all over the place, great, big explosions going off everywhere, children downing… on and on it goes – all in 220 or so pages.
Still, undoubtedly fun as it is, Doomflight has its flaws. Smith throws so many thinly developed characters at the reader that it’s genuinely difficult at times to remember who’s who and what they’re all trying to achieve. The novel’s source of evil and horror – the druids whose sacred ground has been paved over by the airport – seem to come and go at random, with very little explanation how. Characters disappear without trace and the narrative skips forward several disjointed months at a time with very little warning.
The odd ending genuinely feels like it was copy and pasted from an entirely different book. And given that Smith released a whopping five horror novels that year, I can’t definitely confirm that bits of them didn’t get jumbled up together.
So, while I wouldn’t say I was instantly a fan of Smith’s work, there’s plenty of fun to be had and all those books he wrote about killer crabs do look awfully tempting….
You can buy Doomflight by Guy N. Smith from Amazon.
