Guy N Smith Doomflight

[andydecker]

Guy N. Smith - Doomflight (Hamlyn, 1981, 221 pages)

Les Edwards

Sue and Frank have a lover´s quarrel at the old aerodrome at Fradley. Sue flees the car and runs afoul of some men in robes, who rip off her clothes and sacrifice her on a stone altar. Of course nobody believes Frank and he gets life.

Some businessmen buy the old airport and build a new one. They don´t care for the old ghost stories that are connected with Fradley, the countless deaths in its RAF days in the war. Or the bitter protests of local old school teacher Lowe who thinks the Place as evil because the druids did human scrifices there in their stone circle. Nobody believes him.

There are accidents and violent death, from the beginning the business is deep into the red. A local schoolboy meets the ghostly druides who are enraged about the intrusion of modern life and is murdered. But Fradley gets build.

Enter young couple Lance and Pamela. Lance is a pilot, Pamela a stewardess. As everyone else they suffer from the evil atmosphere at the airport, which leeds to strife and more cheating than usual among the lusty pilots and her boardcrews. There is a fire at the airport hotel, a DC-10 crushes on the runway and destroys a part of the hotel. Another is lost over the channel. And always there are ghostly apparitions of the druids involved.

Desperate because business is going downhill the surviving owners do an airshow with WWII planes. Lance flies a machine. Another pilot gets crazy and attacks him; they crash. Lance survives badly burned, but in his coma he has a run-in with the druids, who deliver a last warning. Either Fradley gets closed or the bird of death will descend.

Lance and Pamela terminate theit jobs; still they witness the landing of the Concorde at Fradley which draws a huge crowd. They flee when Pamela realizes that the Concorde is the bird of death. But it is too late. An assasin after a dictator on board on the plane has an A-Bomb which finally levels the airport.

This is kind of a frustrating GNS. The concept of a haunted airport where ghost druids from the past are wreacking bloody terror is a sound idea, and there are a lot of creepy scenes where reality blurs and the victims are helpless druid bait. Still the novel lacks a strong center and active protagonists, one short vignette follows the next and it is always the same. Random or not so random victim encounters the druids and gets slaughtered. Rinse and repeat. Then there are some strange shortcuts where stuff with major dramatic impact like the crash of the second passanger plane happens off stage, aber just mentioned in some throw away dialogue. (Especially this reeks as if it was cut for length out of the manuscript or GNS realized that he became too long. It is nothing short of awkward.)

On the whole the book reads as if GNS lost interest along the way. Even the end with the Concorde feels flat, and the bit with the atombomb – which comes totally out of the blue – is strange.

I tried hard to like this, maybe because I really love the cover. But this just lacks the energy of many other GNS books. A high concept novel which just didn´t materialize on the page as it could have.

[erebus]

I haven't read this near on two decades and only that one time. I too recall being dissapointed by it but I am re visiting GNS books and this one will get its turn.
And I always found that cover kind of creepy in my younger days.

[dem bones]

Guy N. Smith - Doomflight (Hamlyn, 1981)

Les Edwards

Blurb:
Fradley airport seemed as good as dead - all that remained was cracked concrete and scrubland, half ruined buildings, rusted steel hangars - and rumours. Strange, grotesque tribal killings, bizarre 'accidents', the legend of the dead airman who returns to lead trespassers to a horrible fate .....

Then a private company decides to turn the site into a major international airport. A local teacher warns of the ancient Druids who will wreak terrible vengeance on those who desecrate their stone circle - but he is dismissed as a madman.

Each day the casualties increase and their threat grows more chilling. For deep under the modern runways a huge abyss is opening - the wrath of the gods has been incurred and demands human blood.

The Bird of Evil will not rest until Fradley airport has been devoured in the ultimate DOOMFLIGHT


Can only agree with you, gents; this didn't work for me either and, to make matters worse, I read it back to back with the mighty Abomination. It begins well - the nasty murder, the problematic construction of airport, etc - but to my mind, Doomflight loses its way once Fradley is up and running. The human sacrifice scenes involving the Druids are effective but Wilson, the rotting pilot depicted on the cover, has two memorable moments and then seems to disappear off radar altogether as GNS drags the novel into an apocalyptic direction for no discernible reason - or at least, none that I could fathom. The (kind of) hero's inspired suicide by rifle/ pigs reads to me as though it belonged to another novel.