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The Sucking Pit #2
The Walking Dead
The black sullen water closed over his head. Bubbles of vile-smelling marsh gas rose from the slime and mud of the pool. Still deeper he sank, eyes staring, wide-open. Now strange figures - human figures - swam before him with weed-entangled hair and outstretched, beckoning arms. An unearthly siren song of desire and death swelled and rang in his ears. Soft water-bloated flesh stroked and nuzzled against him. Down, down they took him. The creatures of the pit, who were dead yet could never die, bone white in the inky blackness, sucked and pulled at him. Claimed him for their own.
- GenresHorror
160 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published October 1, 1984
2 people are currently reading
141 people want to read
About the author
Guy N. Smith
176 books302 followersI was born on November 21, 1939, in the small village of Hopwas, near Tamworth, Staffordshire, England. My mother was a pre-war historical novelist (E. M. Weale) and she always encouraged me to write.
I was first published at the age of 12 in The Tettenhall Observer, a local weekly newspaper. Between 1952-57 I wrote 56 stories for them, many serialized. In 1990 I collated these into a book entitled Fifty Tales from the Fifties.
My father was a dedicated bank manager and I was destined for banking from birth. I accepted it but never found it very interesting. During the early years when I was working in Birmingham, I spent most of my lunch hours in the Birmingham gun quarter. I would have loved to have served an apprenticeship in the gun trade but my father would not hear of it.
Shooting (hunting) was my first love, and all my spare time was spent in this way. In 1961 I designed and made a 12-bore shotgun, intending to follow it up with six more, but I did not have the money to do this. I still use the Guy N. Smith short-barrelled magnum. During 1960-67 I operated a small shotgun cartridge loading business but this finished when my components suppliers closed down and I could no longer obtain components at competitive prices.
My writing in those days only concerned shooting. I wrote regularly for most of the sporting magazines, interspersed with fiction for such magazines as the legendary London Mystery Selection, a quarterly anthology for which I contributed 18 stories between 1972-82.
In 1972 I launched my second hand bookselling business which eventually became Black Hill Books. Originally my intention was to concentrate on this and maybe build it up to a full-time business which would enable me to leave banking. Although we still have this business, writing came along and this proved to be the vehicle which gave me my freedom.
I wrote a horror novel for the New English Library in 1974 entitled Werewolf by Moonlight. This was followed by a couple more, but it was Night of the Crabs in 1976 which really launched me as a writer. It was a bestseller, spawning five sequels, and was followed by another 60 or so horror novels through to the mid-1990's. Amicus bought the film rights to Crabs in 1976 and this gave me the chance to leave banking and by my own place, including my shoot, on the Black Hill.
The Guy N. Smith Fan Club was formed in 1990 and still has an active membership. We hold a convention every year at my home which is always well attended.
Around this time I became Poland's best-selling author. Phantom Press published two GNS books each month, mostly with print runs of around 100,000.
I have written much, much more than just horror; crime and mystery (as Gavin Newman), and children's animal novels (as Jonathan Guy). I have written a dozen or so shooting and countryside books, a book on Writing Horror Fiction (A. & C. Black). In 1997 my first full length western novel, The Pony Riders was published by Pinnacle in the States.
With 100-plus books to my credit, I was looking for new challenges. In 1999 I formed my own publishing company and began to publish my own books. They did rather well and gave me a lot of satisfaction. We plan to publish one or two every year.
Still regretting that I had not served an apprenticeship in the gun trade, the best job of my life dropped into my lap in 1999 when I was offered the post of Gun Editor of The Countryman's Weekly, a weekly magazine which covers all field sports. This entails my writing five illustrated feature articles a week on guns, cartridges, deer stalking, big game hunting etc.
Alongside this we have expanded our mail order second hand crime fiction business, still publish a few books, and I find as much time as possible for shooting.
Jean, my wife, helps with the business. Our four children, Rowan, Tara, Gavin and Angus have all moved away from home but they visit on a regular basis.
I would not want to live anywhere other than m
I was first published at the age of 12 in The Tettenhall Observer, a local weekly newspaper. Between 1952-57 I wrote 56 stories for them, many serialized. In 1990 I collated these into a book entitled Fifty Tales from the Fifties.
My father was a dedicated bank manager and I was destined for banking from birth. I accepted it but never found it very interesting. During the early years when I was working in Birmingham, I spent most of my lunch hours in the Birmingham gun quarter. I would have loved to have served an apprenticeship in the gun trade but my father would not hear of it.
Shooting (hunting) was my first love, and all my spare time was spent in this way. In 1961 I designed and made a 12-bore shotgun, intending to follow it up with six more, but I did not have the money to do this. I still use the Guy N. Smith short-barrelled magnum. During 1960-67 I operated a small shotgun cartridge loading business but this finished when my components suppliers closed down and I could no longer obtain components at competitive prices.
My writing in those days only concerned shooting. I wrote regularly for most of the sporting magazines, interspersed with fiction for such magazines as the legendary London Mystery Selection, a quarterly anthology for which I contributed 18 stories between 1972-82.
In 1972 I launched my second hand bookselling business which eventually became Black Hill Books. Originally my intention was to concentrate on this and maybe build it up to a full-time business which would enable me to leave banking. Although we still have this business, writing came along and this proved to be the vehicle which gave me my freedom.
I wrote a horror novel for the New English Library in 1974 entitled Werewolf by Moonlight. This was followed by a couple more, but it was Night of the Crabs in 1976 which really launched me as a writer. It was a bestseller, spawning five sequels, and was followed by another 60 or so horror novels through to the mid-1990's. Amicus bought the film rights to Crabs in 1976 and this gave me the chance to leave banking and by my own place, including my shoot, on the Black Hill.
The Guy N. Smith Fan Club was formed in 1990 and still has an active membership. We hold a convention every year at my home which is always well attended.
Around this time I became Poland's best-selling author. Phantom Press published two GNS books each month, mostly with print runs of around 100,000.
I have written much, much more than just horror; crime and mystery (as Gavin Newman), and children's animal novels (as Jonathan Guy). I have written a dozen or so shooting and countryside books, a book on Writing Horror Fiction (A. & C. Black). In 1997 my first full length western novel, The Pony Riders was published by Pinnacle in the States.
With 100-plus books to my credit, I was looking for new challenges. In 1999 I formed my own publishing company and began to publish my own books. They did rather well and gave me a lot of satisfaction. We plan to publish one or two every year.
Still regretting that I had not served an apprenticeship in the gun trade, the best job of my life dropped into my lap in 1999 when I was offered the post of Gun Editor of The Countryman's Weekly, a weekly magazine which covers all field sports. This entails my writing five illustrated feature articles a week on guns, cartridges, deer stalking, big game hunting etc.
Alongside this we have expanded our mail order second hand crime fiction business, still publish a few books, and I find as much time as possible for shooting.
Jean, my wife, helps with the business. Our four children, Rowan, Tara, Gavin and Angus have all moved away from home but they visit on a regular basis.
I would not want to live anywhere other than m
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
December 29, 2019
This one was better than I expected it to be. It follows the normal Smith formula of a simple idea, a rambling plot and lots of sex and violence, but managed to make it work better than is often the case. I didn’t have a clue what was going on a lot of the time, but the horror scenes were well executed and effective. Don’t let the title deceive you, it’s not actually a zombie novel, instead it’s about a malignant marsh (The Sucking Pit - this is a sequel to that book) and ghostly Romanies that rise out of it to bewitch the living.
June 12, 2009
1984 saw the release of Guy N Smith’s novel ‘The Walking Dead’ which formed the sequel to his 1975 classic pulp horror novel 'The Sucking Pit.'
Set ten years later, the novel follows on from ‘The Sucking Pit’, with the principal character of Chris Latimer finding his way back to where Hopwas Wood once stood, and as such, where the Sucking Pit had taken so many victims. The area is now a barren, unsightly wilderness, as developers begin the arduous task of erecting fifty new houses on what had once been Hopwas Wood. But Harman’s plan to fill the Sucking Pit with rubble at the end of the last novel, couldn’t suppress the pure evil that lies restlessly waiting in the depths of the Sucking Pit for long. Soon enough the ground opens up once again, and now all the satanic secrets that lay waiting in the Sucking Pit are set loose once again.
Deep within the boggy depths of this quagmire, the living dead lie, waiting to unleash their revenge on the people of Hopwas. Their first victim, a JCB driver by the name of Mick Treadman, who is working on the development project, is dragged into the dark depths of the Sucking Pit as its seemingly bottomless abyss is once again opened underneath him.
The strange rippling surface of the Sucking Pit, with the brief glimpses of the restless dead it conceals, plays a hypnotic effect on a group of local youths. With the locally raised musician Carl Wickers playing a show that night at one of the nightclubs in Hopwas, an orgy of violence erupts when the Sucking Pit’s hypnotic curse drives the possessed youths into a bloodthirsty rage at the packed show.
Deep within the dark and lifeless depths of the Sucking Pit, the evil that died within its unforgiving depths cries out for more victims. More of the villagers succumb under its evil trance. The reanimated corpse of Jenny Lawson lies waiting with her equally dead gypsy lover Corenelius; their revenge focussed on one individual now – Chris Latimer.
With the villagers around him succumbing to the hypnotic demands of the dead submerged within the Sucking Pit, Latimer attempts to rescue his newly acquainted lover Pamela and end the curse that embodies the Sucking Pit.
From start to finish Smith delivers an unrelenting and utterly over-the-top pulp horror feast. Following his extensively tried and tested formula for constructing a successful horror novel, Smith packs in hefty wedges of gore, violence and sex, all of which are laced with an occultist undertone.
The storyline bounds from one outrageous action packed event to the next. The violence unleashed at the Carl Wickers gig is pure splatterpunk, with pages of unashamed gory violence.
The tale’s premise is however remarkably flimsy, with a very weak storyline barely holding the story’s principal thrust together. As the novel draws towards its grande finale, the tension builds dramatically, only to be let down by an appallingly pathetic conclusion.
All in all, ‘The Walking Dead’ is still a thoroughly enjoyable pulp horror novel, with a vast number of pages delivering an array of gory action. The wooden and cheesy characters are forgivable, only adding to the overall enjoyment of the tale. The simplistically weak plot and utterly atrocious conclusion are what really subtracts from the tale.
The novel runs for a total of 160 pages and was published through the New English Library.
Set ten years later, the novel follows on from ‘The Sucking Pit’, with the principal character of Chris Latimer finding his way back to where Hopwas Wood once stood, and as such, where the Sucking Pit had taken so many victims. The area is now a barren, unsightly wilderness, as developers begin the arduous task of erecting fifty new houses on what had once been Hopwas Wood. But Harman’s plan to fill the Sucking Pit with rubble at the end of the last novel, couldn’t suppress the pure evil that lies restlessly waiting in the depths of the Sucking Pit for long. Soon enough the ground opens up once again, and now all the satanic secrets that lay waiting in the Sucking Pit are set loose once again.
Deep within the boggy depths of this quagmire, the living dead lie, waiting to unleash their revenge on the people of Hopwas. Their first victim, a JCB driver by the name of Mick Treadman, who is working on the development project, is dragged into the dark depths of the Sucking Pit as its seemingly bottomless abyss is once again opened underneath him.
The strange rippling surface of the Sucking Pit, with the brief glimpses of the restless dead it conceals, plays a hypnotic effect on a group of local youths. With the locally raised musician Carl Wickers playing a show that night at one of the nightclubs in Hopwas, an orgy of violence erupts when the Sucking Pit’s hypnotic curse drives the possessed youths into a bloodthirsty rage at the packed show.
Deep within the dark and lifeless depths of the Sucking Pit, the evil that died within its unforgiving depths cries out for more victims. More of the villagers succumb under its evil trance. The reanimated corpse of Jenny Lawson lies waiting with her equally dead gypsy lover Corenelius; their revenge focussed on one individual now – Chris Latimer.
With the villagers around him succumbing to the hypnotic demands of the dead submerged within the Sucking Pit, Latimer attempts to rescue his newly acquainted lover Pamela and end the curse that embodies the Sucking Pit.
From start to finish Smith delivers an unrelenting and utterly over-the-top pulp horror feast. Following his extensively tried and tested formula for constructing a successful horror novel, Smith packs in hefty wedges of gore, violence and sex, all of which are laced with an occultist undertone.
The storyline bounds from one outrageous action packed event to the next. The violence unleashed at the Carl Wickers gig is pure splatterpunk, with pages of unashamed gory violence.
The tale’s premise is however remarkably flimsy, with a very weak storyline barely holding the story’s principal thrust together. As the novel draws towards its grande finale, the tension builds dramatically, only to be let down by an appallingly pathetic conclusion.
All in all, ‘The Walking Dead’ is still a thoroughly enjoyable pulp horror novel, with a vast number of pages delivering an array of gory action. The wooden and cheesy characters are forgivable, only adding to the overall enjoyment of the tale. The simplistically weak plot and utterly atrocious conclusion are what really subtracts from the tale.
The novel runs for a total of 160 pages and was published through the New English Library.
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August 7, 2019Recording the fact That I read this book most likely either in late 1970s or early 1980s
April 6, 2023
Weird ending.
March 3, 2026
Been reading Guy N. Smith since I was twelve. I don't suppose I will ever stop now. He isn't a bad writer. Just a bad novelist.
March 14, 2015
The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural calls Smith “endearing” and the man has certainly written a lot of books, from Sabat IV: The Druid Connection to Sexy Confessions of a Window Cleaner. But many of his reviews are not very good. And yet he has a fanclub, an annual convention, and a quarterly newsletter. So, in the interests of science, I sat down with the sequel to his cult classic, The Sucking Pit, and read The Walking Dead (1984) so you don't have to. And trust me: you don't want to.
Read the rest of this DOA review.
Read the rest of this DOA review.
August 1, 2021
The sucking pit has opened up after being filled in. The pit wants to seek revenge and turns some of the village folk into murderers. Some ghastly kills, an axe slicing bone and brain and crimson rain from the ceilings. Better than the first book, will hopwas village ever be peaceful again or will the romany people cause indescribable terror for eternity.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews