ACCURSED

[erebus]

Well if its good enough for Dr Phibes. Its good enough for Guy N Smith. So inevitably he tackled the age old Egyptian curse theme.

We begin with Reverend Mason whom has unearthed the tomb containing the mummies Dalukah and her lover Ab-aner. Entombed together forever for their crimes . Mason's guides are the superstitious types who bail out and leave him to salvage the mummies alone. He brings them back to the UK for research. To the disgust of his housekeeper, who claims they stink up the place and are disgusting. So he buries them in his garden.

Flash forward a few years, Emily Brownlow has won a few bob on a spot the ball type thingy, with that she buys a posh house on River View. One of those Hyacinth Bouquet types she would be devastated if the neighbours knew of her wealth, and the fact that husband George has recently become unemployed. George is a little tired with his wifes prattling and strict cleanliness rules,( Coal must be washed, carpets in the sheds etc ) he's more concerned about the crisis in the far east. Over breakfast he tells her enough is enough , he's gonna build himself a bunker in the back garden to protect against nuclear war. It doesn't go down to well.

George digs down and soon finds a strange amulet depicting a double headed snake. He becomes fixated, this is the amulet of SET the glowing snakes eyes urge him to continue his excavations. In the process he is almost buried alive, and is visited by the rotting corpses of Dalukah and Ab-aner. He wakes up screaming from the dream, but slowly but surely he's going round the bend. Quoting curses and ancient egyptian text.

The couples daughter, Sheila is with her boyfriend Adrian down by the river not to far from the house, Adrian is after a bit of Hows your Father, and thinks his luck might be in, but his amorous advances are soon thwarted by a seething army of frogs. Thousands of the buggers. When one died ten took its place, claims the book. They make it safely home, much to a delirious Emily " My lawn is full of frogs and my daughter comes home naked, its disgusting ". George, however knows the truth, its the plagues of SET he proclaims.

Barry, who is George and Emily's son is having problems of his own. Girlfriend Rita is being a problem. Hardly surprising as she's just seen ghostly shadows come to life in her room and re-enact the deaths of the two mummies. A Giant snake also manifest before her and vows he will have vengeance for SET. At this point we the reader are wondering what the hell is going on.

After and earlier run in with a snake down the river, George is back in the garden, a giant Locust pops by which is quickly deposited in a jar. The Centre for Overseas Pest research, don't help out but one solitary Locust is the least of their worries. Rita has gone into a coma after her Ghostly visitation and scalded herself badly in her bathroom ( plague of boils perhaps ?) She later dies. George is frantic, not with the loss, but because she's been cremated SET won't be happy. More head scratching by the reader.

He's right though. Her ghost visits Barry whilst he's locked in his bedroom, he ends up in the nuthouse. Back down in the garden all manner of insects are advancing. George and an agitated Emily are attacked by Grasshoppers, Beetles, Ants, Ladybirds and even dive bombing Bumblebees. Inside the house is clouded with flies. This reminded me of his other book, and personal favourite ABOMINATION. Anyway moving on.

George isn't phased by all this. His bunker is now like a pyramid below the ground. Complete with altar for the sacred amulet. But by this part of the novel his rants about Egypt, SET and Curses is coming a little tedious.

Adrian survives an attack of frogs and bugs to visit Sheila. She's been avoiding him for a few days. Turns out she's up the duff. Dad George ain't to pleased, thats the very reason Dalukah and Ab-aner were ran through with swords and mummified all the centuries ago. That stinking bunker/pyramid is going to come into good use after all. Emily the wife by now has basically lost the plot.

Aubrey Houghton from the council turns up one day at the house. Reports of a strange construction has been filed, without planning permission Houghton wants to get to the bottom of things. Nobody is home so he sneaks round back. He discovers the strange mound of soil and the door he ventures below. The strange double headed snake wards him off, as do a few thousand scorpions and spiders. Crawling up his pants leg and round his tackle. He staggers to the surface were a few grasshoppers get in on the act. I was awaiting a grisly demise here, Dr Phibes and Richard Lewis style. Sadly he escapes with just a bleeding shin and a warning never to return. Thats just a little over halfway so with this I decided to give the book a break and come back later. Hopefully, as to be truthful it isn't really kicking on this one.

[erebus]

Ok lets get this finished.

Barry escapes the the booby hatch, well when I say escapes he just basically walks out. It wasn't even that easy for Michael Myers. Slack security aside his reasons are due to the Ghostly visitation from Rita. Worse of all he now has the plague. Well its called the plague here for Egyptian reasons, but really its gangrene.

When he stumbles home Dad, George puts him down in the tomb and spill yet more mumbo jumbo about SET and prepares him for the next stage, so of he goes back into the house to shave off all his hair.
Meanwhile Sheila has got fully engrossed in all this and persuades Adrian to meet her in the park. Delighted he obliges, he's even more grateful when she strips off and gives him a quickie. And with that its off back with him to the tomb as the have to take part in the BODYWATCH, yep, Barry has popped his clogs. Down here Adrian flips out as he sees a huge fly go into Barrys mouth, then as he hears it buzzing around in his belly a huge Spider appears and follows it down the throat and captures it. Now at this point I was really wondering what the hell I was reading. If a bird entered the fray to tackle the spider that would have been the last straw .

Anyway way back in the house Emily is wondering why George is cutting up all her finest linen into strips. Its obvious where thats going. Also she notes how much more buff and masculine he's looking with his newly shaved head, Heck he's even whipped off his eyebrows too.

The end of the novel is upon us. I will tell no more but it all ends in mass hallucination, a stillborn child , evisceration, innards in tupperware bowls, and a huge mushroom cloud. And to be quite honest with you I was glad to bring this tiresome book to a close.

Its a damn shame really as the subject matter could be put to good use. And I for one was expecting him to do things with the various curses and plagues from the Egyptian lore. Sadly after a decent start the novel gets clumsy and uninteresting, and quite a chore at times to read. Not regarded as one of his better books don't think I'll be returning to this in a while.
Ive had this book for well over a decade, but never felt the need to read it. Had the NEL version first, but bought the Arrow edition to complete the SET ( see what I did there ) but not his worse book, it certainly can't compare with his gems we all love and cherish.

[ripper]

I also have had a copy of this one for quite a few years, but I don't think I shall be dusting it off any time soon.

[bluetomb]

We begin with elderly grave robber Reverend Mason, in Egypt, at the entrance to his last tomb. Most of his guides have deserted him, fraught with superstition, and this proves not unfounded. He is visited by a spirit in the night, and when he opens up the tomb in the morning finds that its contents has been foretold. Not too fazed, he takes the mummies of Dalukah, high priestess, and her low born lover Ab-Aner, and a carved obsidian skull and two headed snake amulet, home to the Midlands.This is actually an unlikely case of grave robbing for good, as at last he has freed Dalukah and Ab-Aner from the curse of Set that has bound them for centuries, and the whole book might have been over in 20 something pages, but Mason's housekeeper objects to their smell and so he decides to bury them in the garden. With the mummies in the ground, he throws the amulet after them, binding them once more. Then he expires.

Cut to the present (early 80's). The Reverend's place has been bought up by the Brownlow family, redundant George, snobbish social climber Emily, daughter Sheila (with a boyfriend, Adrian, from the council estate, who Sheila doesn't care for) and son Barry (whose girlfriend Rita is a little more posh and so deemed acceptable). Emily won a lot of money in a newspaper competition, but covers up this and George's redundancy, saying their money comes from his design work. Cracks are apparent straight away, even before George, alarmed by increasingly ominous tidings from Libya on the news, decides to dig out a nuclear bunker in the garden. Emily is pretty displeased but he is undeterred. Before long his excavations uncover a two headed snake amulet, which seems to communicate with him. And things start to get weird...

There was so much potential in this one. A blend of nuclear paranoia, nuclear bombs and nuclear family, double headed like the snake. Curses, mummies and possession, a conflict between true ancient evil in the form of Set and the ambivalent Dalukah and Ab-Aner, it might have been brilliantly packed and bonkers. And for about a third it really is pretty promising. The mythology does seem a bit muddled but it gets moving at a pace and delivers a good scary mummy encounter, satisfyingly nasty supernatural death and a gooey chuckle at coitus interrupted by frogs. It really seems to be powering up for something pretty ace... but then drops back several gears for no good reason for quite a big chunk of its length. Little in the way of effective incident and too much mediocre mumbo jumbo. I can enjoy mumbo jumbo quite a bit, but it really has to be either well researched or imagined, and coherent, well integrated and developed. Guy N Smith is no Karl Sanders, and so the mumbo jumbo here is just a bit flat. Also, the characters just aren't interesting enough to sustain slower drama. A couple of well written sequences (a visit from a council man and Barry's time at and then escape from a sanatorium), but not enough to stop me from setting this one aside for about a month while I read something a bit more intriguing to me.

Luckily, with around 60 pages to go this perks up again. Things really kick off, the danger gets mortal, and pretty grim. Punches come, and keeper getting harder and faster until the book reaches something like feverish excitement. Chaotic, a bit messy, but this is somewhat appropriate. A hell of a close too. So in the end it's a good read. But that dodgy mid section can't be ignored. And the different plot elements could definitely have been better woven together. Basically everything just gets jammed together at the end instead of being worked out properly over the whole course of the book.

This probably isn't one of GNS's best. It's only the fourth of his I've read mind. Much better than The Pluto Pact, and more personally appealing to me than Abomination. But not as cheery as Night of the Crabs. Somewhat recommended I think would be my final verdict.

I think Alligators shall be my next GNS read, though it may not be for a while. Have around 20 to hand so I've decided to read them alphabetically.

[dem bones]

Very much enjoyed your review, Mr. Tomb. Seems both yourself an Erebus are in agreement that Accursed is not prime GNS, but it's shot up my wants list regardless, if only for the mummy theme. Not read The Pluto Pact but thought Abomination was every bit as enjoyably horrible as Night of The Crabs and sequels (Rampage is personal favourite: still not got Human Sacrifice).

[Swampirella]

Sept 29, 2017 20:19:36 GMT dem bones said:

Very much enjoyed your review, Mr. Tomb. Seems both yourself an Erebus are in agreement that Accursed is not prime GNS, but it's shot up my wants list regardless, if only for the mummy theme. Not read The Pluto Pact but thought Abomination was every bit as enjoyably horrible as Night of The Crabs and sequels (Rampage is personal favourite: still not got Human Sacrifice).

It's one of my favorite GNS's, for what that's worth.

[dem bones]

Guy N. Smith - Accursed (Arrow, 1983: originally NEL, 1983)

Blurb:
The Brownlows lived an unremarkable suburban life until the day they found the Egyptian amulet buried in their garden.

Inscribed with ancient writings of ‘Set’. the earliest god of evil. it would unleash a hideous curse...

And they are the powerless victims - in the ultimate holocaust.

Ever wondered what it would be like if the God of chaos and destruction unleashed the seven plagues of Egypt on Birmingham?

It begins in the Valley of Kings mid-1920's with an accidental good deed. Reverend Mason, veteran archaeologist and grave-robber, violates the tomb of the murdered High Priestess Dalukah and her lover, the soldier Aba-Aner. They are absolutely delighted about this, especially when he removes the sinister amulet of Set which has trapped their souls in Limbo this past 2,000 years. But no sooner is Mason back home at St. Edith's vicarage than he undoes his work. When his housekeeper complains that the mummies smell awful gamey, the Reverend meekly lays them to rest in a neighbouring orchard, flinging the amulet after them. To add insult to injury, he grants them Christian burial. Damage done, Mason suffers a fatal heart attack.

Half a century on, the former vicarage is now 'River View' and home to the Brownlow's, George (52), Emily (48), teenage offspring Barry and Sheila. Emily lives in mortal dread that the neighbours will learn the secret of her hard earned wealth: she scooped the jackpot in a national 'Place the ball' competition the very same week George was made redundant and signed on the dole. Barry, who works in a solicitor's office, is dating Rita Hendon, a lab assistant at the Centre of Research into Tropical Diseases. Much to Emily's chagrin, Sheila is hanging out with Adrian Capper, an - I can hardly bring myself to type it - council estate resident (or "a common yob" as Mrs. Brownlow would correctly have it. Ch*v's weren't invented in 1983). She absolutely forbids Sheila to have anything to do with the working class, ensuring the pair are inseparable. Well, Sheila needn't think she's getting up to any ... unpleasantness! "I always say sex is the most over-rated thing in the world. Women only do it to please their husbands and I sometimes wonder if men get anything out of it. I reckon they only do it to try and prove something."

The escalation of hostilities in Libya persuades George that the world is on the brink of nuclear war, the perfect excuse to piss off Emily by erecting a fall out shelter in the garden. As he sets to digging, George is reminded that "there's supposed to be some Egyptian mummies buried somewhere hereabouts" - wouldn't it be funny if he found them!

George finds the mummies. He also finds the amulet of the two mesmeric snake heads. And it begins!

Sheila and Adrian, making out by the river, are set upon by frogs and forced to flee home naked. George sustains an agonising if non-fatal snakebite when a dead branch morphs into an adder. Rita Hendon is contaminated by some disgusting disease and dies swollen and hideous (spare me the crocodile tears. Hendon knew the risks when she took the job). Everyone around him is too stupid and blind to see it, but George Brownlow realises the truth. It's the end of days!

TBC ...

[helrunar]

This one sounds like a hoot. Wonderful write-up. Although I've never read anything by Guy N. Smith (reminds me of how shirty Dorothy L. Sayers reportedly got whenever anyone omitted the "L"), I always look forward eagerly to your embarkation upon a new series of embroideries inspired by one of Smith's effusions.

H.

[andydecker]

I re-read this some time ago. It was fun, maybe too long. I have the NEL edition.

[dem bones]

Jul 22, 2019 19:45:43 GMT andydecker said:

I re-read this some time ago. It was fun, maybe too long.

Seems to be a common failing with his work post the superslick 70's novels. In my limited experience they tend to start well, get bogged down in the middle when GNS realises the contract is for a 200-300 pager. Honourable exceptions: Abomination and The Festering, both of which are impeccable. Anyway:

Because their mummies have been removed to another Continent, Set must revive Daluka, Aba-aner and their plague-infested baby so he can kill them again, cast their souls back to Purgatory. With the end of days upon us, the God of destruction is working against the clock.

Bereaved Barry takes to thrashing around in bed at night and moaning in a strange tongue. George break down the door but it's OK, nothing unsavoury, he's merely being haunted by dead girlfriend. Even so, the strain on the poor lad is evident in his sunken eyes and corpse-like pallor. Barry is committed to the local "mental hospital" at Shelderton (what will the neighbours think?). Rita's ghost next takes to visiting the boy's father, informing him matter-of-factly that Barry is doomed. She insists George work an anti-Set ritual to save him from eternal torment.

An insect flash mob led by grasshoppers set upon George and a now subdued Emily in the garden. Mr. & Mrs. Brownlow are mercilessly stung, bitten and slimed over in an attack that ceases as swiftly as it were launched.

Sheila is pregnant. We're not sure who by or with what, but she thinks it's best for Adrian's sake that they break up. Ade pays her a visit in a last-ditch attempt to make her see sense, come live with him in a bedsit, but the frogs and their beetle partners lie in wait.

It's better news regarding the fall-out bunker. George is finally satisfied that he's excavated a deep enough hole, time to begin construction of his pyramid-shaped shelter from the planks, polythene sheets, concrete mix and debris lying about the garden. Emily no longer mocks his complete lack of experience in such matters, and anyway, turns out it's a lot easier than he'd anticipated.

The two-headed snake amulet takes pride of place upon an altar.

That's the state of play come the close of Book 1: The Living. It's been fun - especially the when insects attack sequences and Emily's inner ruminations on the evils of sex - though prospect of another 100 pages is a little daunting.