The Sucking Pit
NEL – 1975
The Sucking Pit? More like… Fucking Shit. Guy N. Smith isn’t known for high-brow fiction. His Crabs series is infamous, and The Slime Beast has been reprinted by fancy publishers as an example of extreme pulp horror., but The Sucking Pit seems to have a reputation as his worst book.
After reading it, I can confirm that this is indeed very, very bad.
A man dies in his cabin in the woods, and when his niece comes to visit him and discovers his corpse she becomes possessed by his spirit. She then makes a potion out of hedgehog blood and this makes her extremely horny and violent. She starts living in her uncles cabin, and she throws her victims into a marshy swamp known as the Sucking Pit.
There’s a bit more to the story than that, but it’s not worth recounting here. This is a ludicrous pile of nonsense. I have enjoyed the other ultra simplistic crap that I’ve read by Smith, but The Sucking Pit was so monumentally stupid that I found it tedious. This is as low as it gets. This book both sucks and is the pits.
The Walking Dead
NEL – 1984
I read The Sucking Pit in an afternoon. Its sequel, The Walking Dead, is only a bit longer, but it took me almost 2 weeks to finish. Part of this was because I was busy with Christmas stuff, but it was largely due to the fact that I had very little interest in what was happening. I had to force myself through a chapter every night.
10 years after the events of The Sucking Pit, the Sucking Pit comes alive again, and all of the corpses it absorbed in the first book come back to life. The Sucking Pit has also developed the ability to call people to it so that it can brainwash them.
There was a scene in which a man is buried alive that was actually quite scary, but the rest of this book was absolute shite. The only other memorable bits were when a rapist cuts off his own cock and when a man decapitates another man after punching him in the erection.
I did appreciate the fact that this sequel did not try to make the events in the first book make any sense. It doesn’t limit itself with any such restrictions either.
The Sucking Pit is an infamously awful novel, and its sequel, while admittedly a slightly better book, is also very silly. I wasn’t disappointed by these novels, but they didn’t make me want to read any more Guy N. Smith either. I read four of his books last year, and I think I should probably wait a good long while before I go back to him if I expect to derive any further enjoyment from his writing. There is no subtlety or pretense in these books. They are as awful as they appear.
Nocturnal Revelries 