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Post by erebus on May 31, 2012 14:21:40 GMT
Just reading through this one again after many many years. As far as Guy N Smith books go this is a very different kind of book. The plot basically concerns a Holiday Camp where various members and visitors there are acting rather perculiar. Although its a heatwave outside, Billy and Valerie Evans believe the world to be in the middle of an ice age and have holed up in their chalet wrapped in overcoats. Another young man has become paranoid that his girlfriend is going to ring the police on him for holding her captive, she herself believes she is a prostitute. Another man becomes a loud mouth trouble causing activist and so on and so forth. The reason for the delusions is due to a government experiment being secretly conducted on the holidaymakers .Unbeknown to them they are secretly being spiked with the drug C-551. Proffessor Morton is the culprit and his young assisstant Ann Stackhouse is slipping the drug into peoples food . They are also both lovers. Whilst Morton studies the guinea pigs on secret cameras and monitors. Ann befriends the next victim/target Jeff Beebee. This causes a rift with the proffessor and he has to hire a hitman to clear things up. And also take care of a drug dealer on site making a pest of himself.
This is around the half way mark. And unbelievably enough we have only just had the first bit of violence. A young woman is beaten to death. Also for a Smith novel there has hardly been any graphic sex. Amazing. Its 288 pages in length so it may pick up the pace as we go on. Its a good read, but for fans of Smith who wallowed in the depravities of the Crabs, Cannibals, Sucking Pits and Slime Beasts, this might be a little to reserved for them.
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Post by erebus on Jun 12, 2012 12:59:35 GMT
Here is a review for the book in the January 1990 issue of FEAR magazine.
Guy N Smith. You either love the guy's work or hate it , but you can't help but be impressed by his sincerity. He holds no airs and graces about his writing. It's horror entertainment with no frills and even Charles L Grant who is renowned for his subtle works of horror, has a soft spot for Guy's novels. His Latest book The Camp, takes a symbol of our innocent pleasures , the holiday camp, and turns it into a nightmare playground. The holiday paradise has been turned into one massive test site for a drug called C-551. Designed to produce peachful hallucinations, it instead unleashes the desires of its victims - in this case the holidaymakers. Massacre follows murder and from the very first you know your in for a bloodbath. Though not particulary inventive , The Camp is a hectic excursion into horror , a quick dip rather than a full immersion which is no bad thing. Closer scrutiny of this story would have had me sharpening my critics hatchet , but I still enjoy the nonstop, profligate romps occasioned by the likes of James Herbert, Shaun Hutson and Rex Miller. As they say, don't waste time writing about it, go out and have a ball.
Not much of a helpful or thorough review. But I pretty much agree with some of what he said. Which isnt the case with some other books by Smith they reviewed and were quite cruel about.
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Post by dem bones on Jun 12, 2012 22:18:03 GMT
Can't say I ever much took to Fear but have the issue you mention and it's the same one where Stuart Wynne describes The Slime Beast "a classic of bad taste trash" which, again, seems fair enough, though I'm not sure he meant it as a compliment. John Gilbert, the man responsible for the review of The Camp, also dispensed a pasting or several to Richard Laymon, most notably when he awarded One Rainy Night a miserly one and a half skulls out of five (this from a man who rated All Hallows Eve).
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Post by erebus on Jun 13, 2012 12:32:22 GMT
I loved FEAR mag Dem. And was very saddened when it stopped at issue 34. Issue 2 was a blinder and Oliver Frey's art was excellent. Yes he does bad mouth One Rainy Night. Going as low to call the town Bill instead of Bixby ( oh how we laughed ) . Although he did a good job, I always found editor John Gilbert a little arrogant. I could be wrong about him of course, but the guy never seemed to smile either. On another note the Koontz book Face of Fear gets a bad review also saying his earlier works should never get republished. Scandalous! I rather liked that novel. Can't have him bad mouthing GNS though. I will search for other Fear negative comments about him. Perhaps we could form a lynch mob.
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Post by andydecker on Jun 13, 2012 18:27:31 GMT
On another note the Koontz book Face of Fear gets a bad review also saying his earlier works should never get republished. In hindsight one wonders what they would have to say about the unreadable boring crap he writes today ;D Can't have him bad mouthing GNS though. I will search for other Fear negative comments about him. Perhaps we could form a lynch mob. Save me a torch
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Post by dem bones on Jun 13, 2012 21:59:59 GMT
cover scan and the entry from one of the Vault "site"s many rotting tentacles. Guy N. Smith - The Camp (Sphere, 1989) Les Edwards Hi De Hi! meets James Herbert’s The Fog as blissfully unsuspecting holiday campers are used as guinea pigs for the new C551 drug and take to butchering one another in their chalets.
“A bit far fetched, even by GNS standards. A holiday camp becomes the site of bizarre mind control experiments” concludes Vault’s tame GNS authority, funkdooby.Just pulled down some sample issues of Fear to skim, see how I feel about 'em all these years on, so maybe some ill-reasoned, unintelligible bollocks to follow in the not too distant.
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Post by dem bones on Jun 14, 2012 7:17:14 GMT
Here you go, erebus. I figured we'd have a thread for the magazine somewhere. FEAR
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Post by erebus on Jun 14, 2012 13:30:39 GMT
Ah Thank You Dem. Looking back over that thread I myself have contributed to it. How absent my mind is getting. Its a shame the mag didn't prosper. Although I imagine it would have totally abandoned its heavy literature content and become a generic movie mag. They are good to look back on though, and again the Cover art is stunning.
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Post by dem bones on Apr 2, 2018 8:17:32 GMT
Guy N. Smith - The Camp (Sphere, 1989) Les Edwards "What we need to know is what does a drop out, an unemployed person, virtually anybody fantasize about, and how do they react when their dreams or nightmares become, to them, reality ... If we knew why football hooligans went on the rampage, why meek and mild clerical workers became sadistic murderers, then we are halfway to solving some of the problems prevalent in society today."Welcome to the Paradise holiday resort, North Wales, where, unknown to themselves, a select few of the lucky 5,000 campers have been volunteered as guinea pigs for a Government-sponsored experiment in human behaviour. The C-551 program is the brainchild of Professor Anthony Morton, MAD SCIENTIST, a grey-haired smoothie who is having it away with his young assistant, Ann Stackhouse. As "catering supervisor" to the camp, Ann's job it is to spike the meals of random (translation: working class) guests with a "harmless" hallucinogen, so lover-boy can study their reactions. While little kids kick a beach-ball around outside, Mr. & Mrs. Evans, convinced that a second Ice Age is upon us, shiver in their chalet contemplating the end. To remain here is to either fall prey to looters or die of slow starvation: to venture beyond the door is to freeze on the spot. Morton finds their plight hilarious. "Conventional, below average intelligence. Food, beer, fags and football for him. Your Mr. Working Man at the lower end of the echelon. For her, drudgery at the sink and dreaming of an exciting lover on the side. Their combined fantasies combine to produce the New Ice Age." And it gets even better when Alan Jay blows into the camp. Jay, a malodorous hippy hitch-hiker from Herefordshire, won a weeks stay in Paradise in a competition, and everyone despises him on sight. Stoned on arrival, a freebie dose of C-551 so blows his mind that he no longer recognises his girlfriend, nor she him. Not that Donna recognises herself either. She believes herself a prostitute named 'Cindy.' Alan beats her up and holds her hostage while he gets his head together. Ann next targets Jeff Beebee, a self-employed builder. Jeff is not in the best of spirits - he was ditched by his snooty girlfriend within moments of checking in (they argued over an ant) - but his luck's about to change. When push comes to shove, Ann, who has grown increasingly uncomfortable in her work and suspicious of Morton's motives, likes Jeff and can't bring herself to tamper with his minced beef. We think we know where this is heading and we are right, but the ensuing grapple is so devoid of cheap thrills as to require an emergency revisit of Funky's Sex In Smithland to restore flagging morale. So far, so Hi de Hi meets The Fog (minus the ultra-violence), but with the arrival of Dave Dolman, bolshy former shop steward, things take a turn for the Carry On At Your Convenience ... [to be continued]
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Post by helrunar on Apr 2, 2018 12:52:38 GMT
Another holiday camp from Hell yarn--it seems to be a sub-theme, of sorts, in a certain strand of British pulp/cult narrative.
I'm sure there were a number of NEL publications that either hit this vein or had it as an element.
Thanks for the giggle, Kev!
Steve
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Post by helrunar on Apr 2, 2018 14:48:48 GMT
And I was fine with everything described until you got to the ... minced beef. SCA-REAMMMM!
shuddering,
Steve
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Post by dem bones on Jul 22, 2018 4:51:36 GMT
And I was fine with everything described until you got to the ... minced beef. SCA-REAMMMM!shuddering,Steve Jeff Beebee feels your pain to such an extent that he turns instant vegetarian. "By the way, I wasn't over impressed with the minced beef last night." Maybe Ann should have spiked it after all. GNS ups the ante when Dave Dolman, a bogus militant trade unionist straight from a Daily Ma*l editorial hits Paradise. Dolman is a former shop steward, dismissed from his own union for sparking a wildcat strike over a tea break dispute and generally being Bolshy for its own sake. Dolman tells everyone he lives in a London Council semi when the truth is he owns a country cottage in Devon, thank you very much. A week into his holiday, he decides to stir things up. His first attempt at sparking a workers revolution ends in humiliation when he topples from his soapbox during the donkey derby (won by Benjamin III ahead of Hobbit and Muffin) and breaks an arm, leaving his top recruit, Arthur Smith, the disgruntled chief groundsman, to carry on agitating. Meanwhile Jay the malodorous hippie has come to believe he's holding a prostitute hostage. The "hooker" in question is Cindy, his drugged girlfriend. Jay, paranoid and confused, murders a seventeen year old girl who - under the influence of C-551, imagines him a handsome swimming pool Adonis. Jay next takes a razor to his hostage before Muliman, the Government's professional assassin, shoots him dead. Morton's experiment is now beyond control and, horror of horrors, the supposed antidote doesn't work! Meanwhile Dolman has recruited the groundsman's son, John, who "claims to have been one of the organisers of the Heysel Stadium riot in 1985" to put the revolution back on track, but Smith is only interested in violence and unleashes the combined forces of Wolves and West Brom skinheads against the holidaymakers. Tooled up to the nines, they rampage through Paradise chanting "Here we go, here we go, here we go" and kick several campers to death. "we were waiting for a workers revolt, instead we got this, the soccer hooligan's summer festival! The media will have a birthday!" gripes top Government official, 'The Commander' who commands Muliman to kill Prof. Morton, Ann Stackhouse, Jeff Bee, Dolman, the few surviving guinea pigs and any and everyone who may have learned of the experiment. In short, massacre the entire camp and blame the Russians or whoever. Marvellous cover painting, decent premise, but, after the slow, relatively quiet first third of the novel, The Camp goes over the top too fast for me. Win some, lose some.
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Post by dem bones on Aug 3, 2018 21:05:54 GMT
- David Phillips, A Guy With A Tale To Tell, Dark Horizons #31, 1990.
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Post by andydecker on Aug 4, 2018 17:27:14 GMT
- David Phillips, A Guy With A Tale To Tell, Dark Horizons #31, 1990. Interesting. Frankly, the covers of the last Smith novels after 89 are not very good. With or without Smith' input. The Zebra ones are especially blah.
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