Spotlight: Guy N. Smith
Dear cineasts, fright lovers and others.
Sometimes you end up walking on mysterious trails by coincidence or chance. But is there really such a thing as coincidence? Are we fate driven? Are the paths we walk composed by threads already spun by Urd, Verdande and Skuld, the ancient Norns of the Nordic Mythology? Or is it more like a mud pit where everyone struggles to keep their nose above the surface? And speaking of mud, what kind of nice little fellows can we expect to find in there? Crabs! A whole bunch of them! Nasty little buggers, some would say. Tasty though.
www.shortly.film have the great pleasure of collaborating with the much-living past of the late Mr. Guy N. Smith and his legacy through Black Hill Books which has resulted in the competition The Guy N. Smith Short Film Callenge which you can read about here.
Guy N. Smith had his first story published in a local newspaper at the age of 12, followed by 55 more before he was 17. It was a good start to a writing career and he owes much of it to his mother (historical novelist E.M. Weale) who gave him every encouragement. His father, though, was insistent that he should follow family tradition – and so Smith went into banking. Hence it was another twenty years before he became a full-time author and he had some catching up to do!
The 1970s were a boom time for pulp fiction and he made his debut with Werewolf by Moonlight (New English Library, 1974). It was Night of the Crabs, though, that really established Smith as a popular writer – virtually overnight – in the memorably record-hot summer of 1976. The title became that year’s ‘No.1 Beach-Read.’ Night of the Crabs saw numerous reprints, spawned five sequels and several short stories, and there was even an unofficial ‘rip-off’ movie… The crabby bestseller enabled Smith to go full-time as a writer.
The idea of using crabs for an animal attack novel was a no-brainer since Smith had always had an irrational dislike of them – and in fact believed himself to be seriously allergic to shellfish, something his widow now disputes! (He was definitely very allergic to strawberries, having suffered several extreme reactions, but the evil red berries were never given their own horror series.) At the time, Smith was living a reasonably conventional life in Tamworth, Staffordshire, with his wife and four kids. With the success of Night of the Crabs, however, it was time to move on. In 1977, Smith and his family moved to Black Hill in a remote part of the Shropshire/Welsh countryside, where he could write away to his heart’s content, undisturbed, churning out 4-10 novels in a year! And the rest, as they say, is history. Pulp horror history.
