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Sabat #2
Sabat: The Blood Merchants
Mark Sabat, ex-priest, SAS-trained killer, exorcist, is a man with a dreadful mission. Driven and haunted, he has to seek out and destroy his mortal enemy. An enemy who has been chosen the Left Hand Path, who embodies the eternal principle of Evil. An enemy who is his own brother.
160 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published May 1, 1982
1 person is currently reading
64 people want to read
About the author
Guy N. Smith
175 books299 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
June 20, 2024
The 2nd book was better than the first. I'm looking forward to reading the rest of the series.
December 22, 2016
Pulp-styled horror fiction, with plenty of italics and !exclamation marks! and written in a full-tilt, ridiculously macho hysteria of violence, masochism and misogyny. They don't write them like this any more.
September 27, 2024
It was going to be next to impossible for Guy N. Smith to top 'The Graveyard Vultures' in his second Mark Sabat book, but he does give it a good shot. There's plenty here that's deviant, whether it's the topical involvement of neo-Nazi organisations, the primary one led by Sabat's former colonel in the SAS who now believes himself to be the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler, or the deviant sex that he enjoys with that very same colonel's wife, now possessed by Lilith. The far more personal death count also includes three babies, one murdered by skinheads ahead of a riot and the other pair bled out in ritual sacrifices. It may not be 'The Graveyard Vultures' but it doesn't hold back.
Smith teases us though, because the first chapter opens up proceedings with a pair of rapes that aren't. A teenager called Shanda thinks she's about to be raped by a corpse-like punk she danced with at the disco, but he stabs her in the throat instead. He's a Disciple of Lilith and another has a similar experience with a prostitute called Stella Lowe. She takes him to an empty building where it's clear he's going to rape her, except he stabs her in the throat instead too. These are murders, nothing supernatural, but the press plays them up as vampire attacks, as DS McKay explains to his former SAS colleague, Mark Sabat, after his phone call interrupts a masturbation session.
There are four dead the previous night, we learn, each stabbed in the neck and their blood sucked out through a neat round hole. He wants Sabat's help with such an unusual case and that pays off because Sabat has connections the CID don't. He visits a brothel to elicit the help of its madam, an old lover called Ilona, who knows more about him than probably anybody else alive except the evil soul of his brother Quentin, still trapped inside his body and always waiting to get the upper hand. It actually works too; Sabat saving Ilona as she's attacked and gaining someone to question and an odd syringe gun at the same time, but he's not interested in handing them over to the cops.
Instead we get bloody. He takes the youth to Ilona's bondage dungeon and manacles him against a wall. He's a teenager, a proud member of the Disciples of Lilith and also an actual Nazi, a member of the Liberation Front, the organisation that Vince Lealan, Sabat's old colonel, was involved with that led him to be kicked out of the SAS. Sabat can't get this fanatic to talk so he kills him with his own weapon, an act that backfires horribly when Lealan shows up under a fake name and murders Ilona in the same way, then sets his followers on the other girls upstairs.
The Nazi angle played well with me back in the eighties because it was a topical thing back then. If America is struggling with its extreme right wing nowadays, we English went through the same at an earlier point in time. This book was published in May 1982, the same month as its predecessor, and anyone of my age in the UK will remember that as Thatcher's Britain. There were race riots, a plague of football hooligans and a broken urban landscape that led to the Specials's famous song 'Ghost Town'. It was a divided country, like the US is now and it took a while to remedy. Until it was, it played out like a less intense version of this novel. Fortunately it now feels like history.
It also feels very eighties in its approach. The origins of splatterpunk has come up a lot recently in circles I move in and that was an American movement whose name was coined by David J. Schow in 1986. However, while he was trying to bring the gore of the movies into fiction, the Brits had been doing that for a decade and change, ever since James Herbert's 'The Rats'. We just gave it names like "nasty novels", a term on the back of plenty of Hamlyn horror novels to inspire comparisons to the video nasties, which weren't far in the past at that point. And this is truly splatterpunk before that name existed. How else would you describe Mandy Wickham's baby Davey being stolen from a pram so his throat can be bitten out by the goddess Lilith so that her army of hypnotised neo-Nazi disciples can drink his blood?
The catch to this one is that it shifts between a lot of subgenres of horror, if not a broader field we might call exploitation fiction, and it ends up a little unsure of what it is. It's an occult novel, which we knew coming in, because of the eternal battle between Mark Sabat, ex-priest, ex-SAS man and exorcist, and the soul of his brother, Quentin the Evil One. That battle's definitely ongoing, with an interesting section after Sabat finds himself trapped and hypnotised by Lilith into becoming one of her disciples, Quentin taking the fore for a while. However, that's not all it is.
The Nazi angle is definitely horrific, but it delves into the skinhead genre that had been pioneered by New English Library in the seventies, the same publisher that put out the Mark Sabat books. It also moves this one into thriller territory at points, Sabat's SAS training proving very useful when Lilith sends three of her disciples into his house to kill him. Needless to say that doesn't work how she plans, but the brutality of the scene reminds of the ultra-violent kung fu novels the seventies threw out, like Marshall Macao's 'K'ing Kung-Fu' books. Let's just say Sabat leaves one to die of his wounds, including severely crushed testicles.
The vampire angle is played up by the press, headlines like 'The Legions of Dracula Came to Town' the sort of lurid eyecatchers the Sun might boast, but Smith doesn't. There's no suggestion of any sort of traditional vampire here to go along with the traditional werewolves he brought over from the continent to ravage the Welsh borders and rural Scotland in the seventies. The first chapter is clearly about youths stabbing women in the throat rather than tearing them out with teeth, and a chapter later we learn about the weapon they used.
It eventually gets mystical, as Smith's occult novels often did, with Sabat visiting the astral plane, changing form as needed and seeking gods on the eternal battlefield. That doesn't happen much here, even though I remembered it being so frequent. He doesn't spend a lot of time in a chalked pentagram. However, when he does later on, he sets himself up for a vision of the past, visiting the Paris of 1438 to figure out how wicked sorcerer Pierre Vallin plays into proceedings. It's odd to read about neo-Nazi murderers and skinhead rioters in the same book as an exorcist mystically visiting the fifteenth century in the vision form of a rat. But hey, I'm not complaining!
Smith would return to Mark Sabat soon enough, of course, because he published four of these in a little over a year, but there are two other books to come before 'Cannibal Cult', namely the last of his novels for Hamlyn, 'The Pluto Pact' and 'The Lurkers', the two that never appeared in the "also by" lists in the front of the others. I don't think I've read either since my first time through back in the eighties, so I'm especially looking forward to those. Join me next month for the first of them!
Originally posted at the Nameless Zine in July 2023:
https://www.thenamelesszine.org/Voice...
Index of all my Nameless Zine reviews:
https://books.apocalypselaterempire.com/
Smith teases us though, because the first chapter opens up proceedings with a pair of rapes that aren't. A teenager called Shanda thinks she's about to be raped by a corpse-like punk she danced with at the disco, but he stabs her in the throat instead. He's a Disciple of Lilith and another has a similar experience with a prostitute called Stella Lowe. She takes him to an empty building where it's clear he's going to rape her, except he stabs her in the throat instead too. These are murders, nothing supernatural, but the press plays them up as vampire attacks, as DS McKay explains to his former SAS colleague, Mark Sabat, after his phone call interrupts a masturbation session.
There are four dead the previous night, we learn, each stabbed in the neck and their blood sucked out through a neat round hole. He wants Sabat's help with such an unusual case and that pays off because Sabat has connections the CID don't. He visits a brothel to elicit the help of its madam, an old lover called Ilona, who knows more about him than probably anybody else alive except the evil soul of his brother Quentin, still trapped inside his body and always waiting to get the upper hand. It actually works too; Sabat saving Ilona as she's attacked and gaining someone to question and an odd syringe gun at the same time, but he's not interested in handing them over to the cops.
Instead we get bloody. He takes the youth to Ilona's bondage dungeon and manacles him against a wall. He's a teenager, a proud member of the Disciples of Lilith and also an actual Nazi, a member of the Liberation Front, the organisation that Vince Lealan, Sabat's old colonel, was involved with that led him to be kicked out of the SAS. Sabat can't get this fanatic to talk so he kills him with his own weapon, an act that backfires horribly when Lealan shows up under a fake name and murders Ilona in the same way, then sets his followers on the other girls upstairs.
The Nazi angle played well with me back in the eighties because it was a topical thing back then. If America is struggling with its extreme right wing nowadays, we English went through the same at an earlier point in time. This book was published in May 1982, the same month as its predecessor, and anyone of my age in the UK will remember that as Thatcher's Britain. There were race riots, a plague of football hooligans and a broken urban landscape that led to the Specials's famous song 'Ghost Town'. It was a divided country, like the US is now and it took a while to remedy. Until it was, it played out like a less intense version of this novel. Fortunately it now feels like history.
It also feels very eighties in its approach. The origins of splatterpunk has come up a lot recently in circles I move in and that was an American movement whose name was coined by David J. Schow in 1986. However, while he was trying to bring the gore of the movies into fiction, the Brits had been doing that for a decade and change, ever since James Herbert's 'The Rats'. We just gave it names like "nasty novels", a term on the back of plenty of Hamlyn horror novels to inspire comparisons to the video nasties, which weren't far in the past at that point. And this is truly splatterpunk before that name existed. How else would you describe Mandy Wickham's baby Davey being stolen from a pram so his throat can be bitten out by the goddess Lilith so that her army of hypnotised neo-Nazi disciples can drink his blood?
The catch to this one is that it shifts between a lot of subgenres of horror, if not a broader field we might call exploitation fiction, and it ends up a little unsure of what it is. It's an occult novel, which we knew coming in, because of the eternal battle between Mark Sabat, ex-priest, ex-SAS man and exorcist, and the soul of his brother, Quentin the Evil One. That battle's definitely ongoing, with an interesting section after Sabat finds himself trapped and hypnotised by Lilith into becoming one of her disciples, Quentin taking the fore for a while. However, that's not all it is.
The Nazi angle is definitely horrific, but it delves into the skinhead genre that had been pioneered by New English Library in the seventies, the same publisher that put out the Mark Sabat books. It also moves this one into thriller territory at points, Sabat's SAS training proving very useful when Lilith sends three of her disciples into his house to kill him. Needless to say that doesn't work how she plans, but the brutality of the scene reminds of the ultra-violent kung fu novels the seventies threw out, like Marshall Macao's 'K'ing Kung-Fu' books. Let's just say Sabat leaves one to die of his wounds, including severely crushed testicles.
The vampire angle is played up by the press, headlines like 'The Legions of Dracula Came to Town' the sort of lurid eyecatchers the Sun might boast, but Smith doesn't. There's no suggestion of any sort of traditional vampire here to go along with the traditional werewolves he brought over from the continent to ravage the Welsh borders and rural Scotland in the seventies. The first chapter is clearly about youths stabbing women in the throat rather than tearing them out with teeth, and a chapter later we learn about the weapon they used.
It eventually gets mystical, as Smith's occult novels often did, with Sabat visiting the astral plane, changing form as needed and seeking gods on the eternal battlefield. That doesn't happen much here, even though I remembered it being so frequent. He doesn't spend a lot of time in a chalked pentagram. However, when he does later on, he sets himself up for a vision of the past, visiting the Paris of 1438 to figure out how wicked sorcerer Pierre Vallin plays into proceedings. It's odd to read about neo-Nazi murderers and skinhead rioters in the same book as an exorcist mystically visiting the fifteenth century in the vision form of a rat. But hey, I'm not complaining!
Smith would return to Mark Sabat soon enough, of course, because he published four of these in a little over a year, but there are two other books to come before 'Cannibal Cult', namely the last of his novels for Hamlyn, 'The Pluto Pact' and 'The Lurkers', the two that never appeared in the "also by" lists in the front of the others. I don't think I've read either since my first time through back in the eighties, so I'm especially looking forward to those. Join me next month for the first of them!
Originally posted at the Nameless Zine in July 2023:
https://www.thenamelesszine.org/Voice...
Index of all my Nameless Zine reviews:
https://books.apocalypselaterempire.com/
January 26, 2017
Of Smith's Sabat stories, this is by far the best. Topical for it's time (especially about Nazi skinheads), it's scary and bloody and sexy without being creepy about a middle-aged man having sex with teens.
Read
August 7, 2019Recording the fact That I read this book either in the late 1970s or early 1980s
June 10, 2022
A smirking white face, appeared to hover in the air. Feeling a needle injected in her neck, deeper, deeper, the jugular veins spouting blood, the realisation of a vampire. Three more victims. A weapon made to extract blood quickly was seized by Sabat ex priest/SAS trained extensive knowledge of the occult able to astral project from a Nazi skinhead trying to use it on a prostitute. They were blood merchants a group known as the disciples of Lilith. Lilith the goddess of evil drinks the blood of an infant. A reincarnation of Hitler will extract blood for a lady in a S & M cellar and torture her, stringing blood against damp walls like an old mans mucus. The skinhead goons are controlled by hypnotism and drugs and the demonic leader a succubus seducing men capturing their souls and sending the world into anarchy. A riot will see skulls cracked and grey like frog spawn will ooze out. The good vs evil will see Sabat bought to the brink of eternal suffering.
April 6, 2022
The writing has improved in this sequel.. Its all about race instead of occultism until the very end which makes the first book still so much better.. the race war starts to escalate but goes nowhere towards the end.. which is where the story became interesting as it moved a slight distance away from skinheads.. as with the first novel I can't say I'll be reading this again anytime soon
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews