Averoigne, and others. His fiction is highly de-
scriptive and prose conscious, and many of his sto-
ries are little more than tours of exotic landscapes
or descriptions of unusual and bizarre objects or
events. Much of his short fiction was reprinted in
hardcover by Arkham House during the 1940s, re-
assembled by Ballantine Books for mass-market pa-
perbacks during the 1970s, and reshuffled and
reprinted by a variety of publishers since. Although
a few of his stories are technically science fiction,
the vast majority make no attempt to rationalize
the wonders they contain.
Smith was highly influential not only in the
fantasy field but also in science fiction, in which
writers such as C. L. Moore and Leigh Brackett
were moved to imitate his decaying societies, often
setting them on distant worlds. His own stories
take the reader on a trip to a wondrous otherworld
such as in “THE CITY OF THE SINGING FLAME”
(1931) or to a far distant future when Earth is un-
recognizable and magic again holds sway, such as
in “THE ABOMINATIONS OF YONDO” (1926). He
describes a horrifying physical transformation in
“UBBO-SATHLA” (1933) and shows a civilization in
decline in “The Empire of the Necromancers”
(1932). His terrors could be familiar, traditional
ones such as the vampires in “A RENDEZVOUS IN
AVEROIGNE” (1931), mindless forces of nature
such as the flesh devouring plants in “The Seed
from the Sepulchre” (1933), or distorted versions
of familiar creatures such as the malevolent toads
in “Mother of Toads” (1938). Even his occasional
science fiction stories set on other worlds, such as
“The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis (1932) are simply dif-
ferent venues for the same type of story he nor-
mally set on Earth.
Smith’s enduring popularity is evident from
the frequency with which he is reprinted. The
most recent collections of his work are A Ren-
dezvous in Averoigne (1988), Strange Shadows
(1997), and The Emperor of Dreams(2002).
Smith, Guy(1939– )
It would be easy to dismiss the very prolific Guy
Smith as a minor hack writer who churned out
new horror novels with relentless regularity and lit-
tle entertainment value, and it is undoubtedly true
that no single novel of his has ever achieved either
best-seller status or critical acclaim. Smith works
very much in the manner of the pulp authors of
the 1930s and 1940s, writing to a set of limited for-
mulas, peopling his books with shallowly described
characters and often predictable terrors, and rarely
challenging the reader to think about the content
beyond the surface plot. Judged in those terms, he
comes off rather better. He writes in a clear, no-
nonsense prose style, his plots are coherent and
plausible given their initial premise, his characters
have understandable if shallow motives, and he de-
livers exactly what the reader expects.
Smith first began writing with Werewolf by
Moonlight(1974), a lightweight horror story about a
werewolf stalking the English moors. It was fol-
lowed by two similar sequels, Return of the Werewolf
(1977) and Son of the Werewolf(1978). His second
published novel was The Sucking Pit(1975), a story
of mysterious incidents taking place in the vicinity
of a pit of quicksand. Next came The Slime Beast
(1975), a predictable gruesome monster story fol-
lowed by a novelization of the minor horror film
The Ghoul(1976). Smith had established himself
quickly as a reliable if not exceptional horror writer.
His next novel inaugurated his longest and
most successful series. The premise of Night of the
Crabs(1976) is that a new breed of carnivorous
crab appears off the coast of Great Britain, crea-
tures capable of coming ashore in large numbers,
fearless, and able to attack and subdue larger crea-
tures, including people. This unlikely situation
continued in Killer Crabs(1978), The Origin of the
Crabs(1979), Crabs on the Rampage(1981), Crabs’
Moon (1984), and Crabs: The Human Sacrifice
(1988). In each case the crabs are repulsed but not
defeated, and in the final volume a new religious
cult begins to worship them. Smith used the na-
ture-in-uprising-against-humanity theme in several
other novels, most notably Bats Out of Hell(1978),
one of his best, in which a plague of vampire bats
becomes even more threatening when it is discov-
ered that they are carrying a new plague. Swarms
of insects threaten the world in Locusts(1979),
and in Carnivore(1990) the villain uses magic to
turn the entire natural world against humanity.
One of Smith’s better novels of the supernatu-
ral is Deathbell(1980), in which a cursed bell fore-328 Smith, Guy