Post by Dreadlocksmile on Jul 23, 2009 19:59:01 GMT
Dreadlocksmile review:
1984 saw the release of Guy N Smith's novel `The Walking Dead' which formed the sequel to his 1975 classic pulp horror novel 'The Sucking Pit.'
Set ten years later, the novel follows on from `The Sucking Pit', with the principal character of Chris Latimer finding his way back to where Hopwas Wood once stood, and as such, where the Sucking Pit had taken so many victims. The area is now a barren, unsightly wilderness, as developers begin the arduous task of erecting fifty new houses on what had once been Hopwas Wood. But Harman's plan to fill the Sucking Pit with rubble at the end of the last novel, couldn't suppress the pure evil that lies restlessly waiting in the depths of the Sucking Pit for long. Soon enough the ground opens up once again, and now all the satanic secrets that lay waiting in the Sucking Pit are set loose once again.
Deep within the boggy depths of this quagmire, the living dead lie, waiting to unleash their revenge on the people of Hopwas. Their first victim, a JCB driver by the name of Mick Treadman, who is working on the development project, is dragged into the dark depths of the Sucking Pit as its seemingly bottomless abyss is once again opened underneath him.
The strange rippling surface of the Sucking Pit, with the brief glimpses of the restless dead it conceals, plays a hypnotic effect on a group of local youths. With the locally raised musician Carl Wickers playing a show that night at one of the nightclubs in Hopwas, an orgy of violence erupts when the Sucking Pit's hypnotic curse drives the possessed youths into a bloodthirsty rage at the packed show.
Deep within the dark and lifeless depths of the Sucking Pit, the evil that died within its unforgiving depths cries out for more victims. More of the villagers succumb under its evil trance. The reanimated corpse of Jenny Lawson lies waiting with her equally dead gypsy lover Corenelius; their revenge focussed on one individual now - Chris Latimer.
With the villagers around him succumbing to the hypnotic demands of the dead submerged within the Sucking Pit, Latimer attempts to rescue his newly acquainted lover Pamela and end the curse that embodies the Sucking Pit.
From start to finish Smith delivers an unrelenting and utterly over-the-top pulp horror feast. Following his extensively tried and tested formula for constructing a successful horror novel, Smith packs in hefty wedges of gore, violence and sex, all of which are laced with an occultist undertone.
The storyline bounds from one outrageous action packed event to the next. The violence unleashed at the Carl Wickers gig is pure splatterpunk, with pages of unashamed gory violence.
The tale's premise is however remarkably flimsy, with a very weak storyline barely holding the story's principal thrust together. As the novel draws towards its grande finale, the tension builds dramatically, only to be let down by an appallingly pathetic conclusion.
All in all, `The Walking Dead' is still a thoroughly enjoyable pulp horror novel, with a vast number of pages delivering an array of gory action. The wooden and cheesy characters are forgivable, only adding to the overall enjoyment of the tale. The simplistically weak plot and utterly atrocious conclusion are what really subtracts from the tale.
The novel runs for a total of 160 pages and was published through the New English Library.
www.amazon.co.uk/review/R32HHWUHE4PQ6E/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm