Ten years have passed since the events described in The Sucking Pit when Chris Latimer, minus Pat (things didn't work out: he blames the gypsies curse) finds himself driving past Hopwas Wood. It's not as he left it. All but a few trees have been cleared and the ground levelled in readiness for a new housing project. Fifty homes for the super-rich are to be built on the ancient Romany burial site. Latimer can't see Cornelius and his corpse clan suffering that without a fight ...
Mick Treadman, friendly JCB operator, lives long enough to inform Latimer that his old home is now occupied by businessman Ralph Clifton, the brains and financial muscle behind the redevelopment. Clifton has bribed henpecked Planning Officer Claude Minworth into allowing him to build on what was green belt land. Treadman waves Latimer on his way and is promptly sucked down - digger and all - into the black pool where the slimy dead await. Reading a newspaper report of the tragedy, Latimer, fearing the worst, decides it's time to return to the area.
The site has become a meeting place for a fledgling biker gang led by Mule Skinner who use it for scrambling practice on Sundays. Mule leads his crew - Whisky Mac, Gun-toter, Tobacco Joe and Cherokee - to the spot where Treadman's digger went down and stare into the pool. Mule's dad reckons the Sucking Pit is bottomless but his son is far from convinced ("it has to have a bottom, doesn't it, else the water would all run out the other end"). Something bubbles to the surface and disappears. When next they check their watches, three hours have passed. They've been studying the murky black water all that time!
Something's come over the boys. They're not renowned for trouble-making but Mule has decided that tonight they'll ride into town and hit the social club where ladies man Carl Wickers is performing a C & W set to the old fogies. Chris Latimer is also in attendance, Carl being a mate from the old days, and he even has a date - recently divorced Pamela - to take his mind off Carl's newly acquired 'Mexican' mustache and buckskin jacket. The zombified Mule and friends stroll in, plucking the darts from the board and letting fly - at the audience. An old boy cops one in the eye, a cringing woman in the back. The terrified punters go down under a hail of glasses and bottles before Mule leads his troops off into the night. During the ensuing high-speed chase, Mule causes a motorway pile up which wipes out the rest of his gang, two cops and various innocent parties. He doesn't even notice, just rides straight for Hopwas Wood and the Sucking Pit.
Reg Blackburn, frogman, is the next victim. He's sent down into the sludge to recover Mule and his bike and can't quite pluck up the guts to tell the cops to stick their job for fear of being called a coward. To calm his nerves, he focuses on Judy, the love of his life, and has soon given himself a hard-on. Imagine his delight when Judy swims toward him - and she's naked! It's unlike her to play hard-to-get though, and the more she teases, the angrier he gets. Why, I'm gonna kill that bitch! Which is exactly what he does some hours later when he returns home and she breaks the happy news - "I'm pregnant!"
Meanwhile, the police have had their fill of moody divers who can't do their job and hire two cranes to dredge the 'death bog'. Latimer, Carl and their dates decide to drop in on the proceedings. As the battered bike is hoisted out of the sludge a freak storm erupts - as does the Sucking Pit, reclaiming the land to the exact dimension of it's former self. Nobody will be building fifty houses here any century soon!
BIG FAT SPOILER
Cornelius, Roon and the Romany clan from the first book are back for the final 40 odd pages, revived by all the gory murders and mayhem instigated by the dark denizens of the Sucking Pit. These violent episodes - told in a series of increasingly nasty vignettes - include meek, henpecked Mr. Minworth picking up an axe and performing Jack the Ripper style butchery on his wife and a frump of a baby-sitter suddenly realising she can have a child this moment even if no man will touch her. Once the chopped down trees are restored to their former glory, the undead gypsies have one final mission to accomplish - revenge on Latimer who began the chain of desecration. Using a zombified Carl Wickers as bait - he performs an impromptu C & W set by the Pit in the middle of a mighty thunderstorm - they lure the surviving principal players to certain doom. But ...
That 'But ...' is maybe why people don't have such fond memories of The Living Dead as they do the first book because, up until now, it's all been pretty engaging, certainly far better than I remembered it. Trouble is, the ending is piss poor, as disappointing in its way as the limp climax to Wheatley's Gateway To Hell. GNS sets up a triumph by the forces of evil - which would be genuinely shocking - only to lob in a freak landslide, the Sucking Pit getting filled in - again - and all the animated corpses being dragged back into the bowels of the Earth. It just doesn't convince.
Oh well. Back on the bookshelf for another ten years .....
From the first, I set myself against "literature"; the story was the thing, and no amount of style could persuade me to select a story that lacked genuine, unadulterated horror. For those who wanted something high-brow there was plenty. - Christine Campbell Thomson
I read this over the holidays and enjoyed it plenty. It's quite an incongruous mixture of silliness and nastiness. The writing is as daft and camp as The Sucking Pit, and certain parts had me laughing inappropriately. There's loads of sex in this one and some nasty deaths, which don't seem disturbing or anything because of the way they're handled, but if you were to see them on the screen they'd be pretty bloody strong. As demonik says, the ending is the ultimate cop-out, inconceivable and weak as hell, which is a shame - otherwise this could be a real classic. In a way though, I suppose the rushed and stoopid ending adds to the pulp appeal.
It's probably the fact that the flaws haven't been airbrushed out that make these books so special. I mean, after a while, I even came to love that ridiculous ending!
I think Killercrab sums it up best on the Castledoom thread when he says of LeCale's novel:
Not bad. Not great either - but then this is pretty much what early Nel occult novels tend to be like and we love 'em for that disappointing edge as much as the promise they hold.
From the first, I set myself against "literature"; the story was the thing, and no amount of style could persuade me to select a story that lacked genuine, unadulterated horror. For those who wanted something high-brow there was plenty. - Christine Campbell Thomson
That's a damned fine cover. I remember actually picking this up in a charity shop snuggled in with the Mills and Boon. Actually finding a GNS in a shop was a thrill - still is. I honestly can't remember what I thought of it - but the fact I read it before THE SUCKING PIT probably helped.
Just rescanned the cover and reposted it as a larger image .... and *ahem* amended the title while i was about it.
From the first, I set myself against "literature"; the story was the thing, and no amount of style could persuade me to select a story that lacked genuine, unadulterated horror. For those who wanted something high-brow there was plenty. - Christine Campbell Thomson
Post by dreadlocksmile on Jun 19, 2009 20:46:39 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.
Certainly in agreement with you on this one. The Walking Dead got a lukewarm (to say the least) reception on our old board but i think much of that has to do with the infamous ending, so cosmically poor it lingers in the mind long after you've forgotten all the great bits that precede it. Perversely, nowadays i wouldn't have had him finish the book any other way. I guess it gives it character!
From the first, I set myself against "literature"; the story was the thing, and no amount of style could persuade me to select a story that lacked genuine, unadulterated horror. For those who wanted something high-brow there was plenty. - Christine Campbell Thomson
Oddly enough I think the cover to The Walking Dead is excellent and certainly got me to read it. Of all the books reviewed I'd probably revisit this first for a second taste.