Night of the Crabs / Crabs’ Moon: Night of the Crabs 2 – Guy N Smith

Big ‘uns. Bigger’n sheep. Big as cows

When an author has such works as Thirst 2: The Plague, The Slime Beast, Abomination, The Festering and Cannibals to his name, you know you are either in for a treat. Or not.

Guy N. Smith is a hugely prolific writer of many genres, but he is most famous for his Crabs series of seven novels, of which I am the happy owner of four. He is also partly the inspiration for the excellent comedy show Garth Merenghi’s Darkplace.

Pulp horror is great. There is no getting away from it, Like a B-movie both these books have everything you need. Not just the trashy horror but the cheesiness and the instant likeability, especially when giant crabs are storming around causing chaos.

These two books are a telling of events on two different, albeit close parts of the Welsh coast from whence some cunning crustaceans get into some fast paced not to mention gory rampant killing action and the combined stories overlap just enough without getting to repetitive.

So what is the actual plot, I pretend I hear you ask, well the book covers tend to give it away.  For those of you not instantly turned off by the blatant selling of what can only be described as an unlikely scenario should know that this is quite a layered book, there are ideas about capitalism, wildlife, the nature of the unknown, a range of human emotions are explored as well. Or perhaps I am just reading between the lines a tad to much.

So overall I can narrow the good points, for there really are no bad points in this kind of literature, to four…

• Violence – This is what we have brought the book for, and it delivers with hideous aplomb, there are limbs rendered asunder, explosions, bloody gore everywhere and other various high octane adrenaline bits of excitement. These are also some mean and crafty crustaceans.

• The Writing – There is a lot to be said for the writing, it is so many things from awkward to unintentionally hilarious to downright (gloriously) unpolitically correct, sometimes just plain odd. interestingly though it does give a sense of dislocation from real events to strange happenings, a sense of unreality to proceedings.

• The Characters – The characters have delightfully obscure names and not a lot else of a redeeming nature. In fact most of the characters are either dull, annoying or just being written in to be slaughtered. There is an abundance of dramatic lines that are delightfully over the top,

• Sex – Essentially there is a lot of soft core porn type writing to be had here, especially in Crabs’ Moon, in fact in both books the characters seem more interested in having sex than doing anything about the evil menace lurking.  How best to judge the spirit in which the book and the series is written is epitomised when a couple are in a steamy lovemaking clinch one of our heroic protagonists uses the hilarious double entendre:

Nothing mattered now, not even the giant crabs.