Manitou Doll

by Guy N. Smith

Roy and Liz Catlin take a week's holiday to visit Jacob Shaefer's funfair, and their young deaf daughter Rowena forms an unlikely bond with Jane, the fair's Red Indian fortune teller. Jane also does plenty of carving for the fair, fashioning the Punch and Judy dolls and the horses on the rides. She realises that evil forces are mounting and that something terrible is about to happen, but she fails to understand that it is through her and her carvings that her grandmother's curse on the white people will be fulfilled.

Genres: Horror

240 pages, Paperback

First published May 28, 1981

About the author

I 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

Reviews

[Christine · Rating 3 out of 5]

The fair is in town, and one tent belongs to "Jane, the Red Indian fortune teller," who also sells hand-carved totems, which she instructs her customers to keep with them at all times, as they will protect them from evil spirits. Opening day, a huge fight breaks out at the fairgrounds and one of the men finds his way into Jane's tent, assaulting her and stealing a carved figure afterwards. That man just so happens to get into a fatal motorcycle accident upon leaving, somehow ending up decapitated and essentially torn to pieces...
Liz and Roy Catlin are vacationing with their 8 year old daughter, Rowena at the seaside and immediately Rowena is drawn to the fair. She makes her way to Jane's tent and is smitten with the lady for some reason. Even though Jane has a dislike for the white race in general, she finds she has a soft spot for Rowena, and carves her a wooden doll.
During their entire vacation, it rains nonstop and as days go by, death begins to plague the fair and all surrounding areas. Every single time her parents take their eyes off her, Rowena runs away from the hotel room, to the fair, to see Jane. Rowena begins sleepwalking and having nightmares about the doll Jane gave her. Their car breaks down, effectively stranding them there. Something is happening that leaves the Catlin's with a bad feeling.
Roy also finds himself drawn to Jane, for entirely different reasons, and Jane finds a confidant in him - confessing that she finally figured out she is responsible for all the tragedy; the day of her assault, she cursed not only that man, but the entire fairground. Roy tries to convince her it's a coincidence, but she knows the truth. The figures she carved have taken on a life of their own. Not just Rowena's doll, but she has carved the horses on the carousel, the puppets in the puppet show - Jane's work is all around them.
There is only one person able to help Jane stop the killing she accidentally brought upon the fair: Rowena.
"Once they were wooden figures; at least that is what I thought in my foolish innocence. I made one, then another without realizing. I created an army of evil and now I am powerless to stop them."
Can Jane and Rowena stop the figures before they kill anyone else?
----------------------
After reading The Festering, I was so excited for another Guy N. Smith - but unfortunately, for me at least, this was a far cry from the fun I had with The Festering. It was confusing and just dragging. It seemed to kind of just be random killing sprinkled in-between +250 pages of other mundane goings-on.
A killer doll book could have been amazing, especially from this author, but it just missed the mark with me. The cover on my copy is amazing, so that saves this book for me.

[Gavcrimson · Rating 4 out of 5]

The multi-genred Manitou Doll begins as a particularly savage Western (complete with scalpings, racial epithets and the rape of a squaw), quickly transforms into an equally savage biker novel (complete with more rape and a preposterously violent gang battle at a funfair) before settling into a supernatural revenge tale taking place during a family's lousy, rain swept, holiday by the sea. Protagonist duties are shared between deaf, red haired girl Rowena Catlin- who is gifted a wooden doll by Native American fortune teller Jane- and her father Roy Catlin who sees an escape from his oppressive, loveless marriage in the form of the aforementioned fortune teller, the mere sight of her causing him "the early tremors of an erection". Will he make a go of the marriage for the sake of his daughter, or follow where his loins are leading him?

Taking precedence over this domestic drama is of course Manitou Doll's horror elements, which emanate from Jane being raped by two Hell's Angels. A case of history repeating itself, since back in the days of the Wild West Jane's ancestor Mistai was raped by a US cavalry man and sought vengeance by making wooden dolls, vessels for the spirit of Okeepa. Jane turns out to be a chip off the old block when it comes to carving killer dolls and as a result it's soon curtains for the Hell's Angels. However with Okeepa's vengeful spirit unleashed, Jane quickly loses control of the situation as the various puppets and wood carvings she made for the funfair she works at turn against British holidaymakers...who soon discover they have more than bad weather to worry about. Jane also angers Okeepa by copulating with a white man, a turn of events that Roy's wife Liz isn't best pleased about either.

There are usually bits of Guy N Smith's own DNA scattered about the characters in his books, and Manitou Doll is no exception. While Roy Catlin fails to live up to Smith's pipe smoking, lithe bodied, aquiline featured ideal of manhood, epitomized by the likes of Cliff Davenport and Mark Sabat, there are common bonds between character and creator. Both Smith and Catlin have daughters who are deaf, and neither are strangers when it comes to holding down tedious office jobs. Roy being a wage slave to a firm of solicitors where his snooty superiors regard him as a dogsbody...seemingly echoing Smith's days working at various branches of the Midland bank. The success of Night of the Crabs allowed Smith to leave the banking world behind and become a full time writer, Roy Catlin isn't so fortunate. As such it's tempting to wonder if Smith saw Roy as the type of disappointed, unfulfilled man that he could have become had Night of the Crabs not started to fly off the shelves during the hot summer of 76.

It is easy to see why Smith's books (click-click-clickety) clicked with the masses back in the 1970s and 1980s. If you want to know what a working class holiday gone badly wrong was like back then, Manitou Doll nails that piece of British history, perfecto. Rain stops play, cars break down, the AA have to be called out, couples bicker and fail to connect with the holiday cheer, and the only form of nearby entertainment is a clapped out fairground with tired animal attractions and rigged fruit machines. Anyone going through such a humdrum experience in real life could pick up a copy of Manitou Doll and be transported to a version of their own reality that's enlivened by wild outbursts of bloodshed, and the titillating fantasy of getting your end away with a Native American fortune teller while the missus isn't looking.

As you might expect from a 1980s Guy N Smith book, Manitou Doll proudly sits on the cultural naughty step these days. An evil dwarf, apparently the childhood victim of polio is described as a “mis-shapen monstrosity” who resembles “a gorilla in the way he moved”. While Jane confesses to Roy that she was raped by Hell's Angels...but it turns out it's okay because she secretly enjoyed it "although to all outward appearances I remained emotionless. I even orgasmed". At which point Roy becomes jealous of the Hell's Angels, and gets an erection thinking about it.

Manitou Doll arrived at a busy period in Smith's career (it's one of five titles he had published in 1981) and as such it does feel like it's pages were a dumping ground for whatever horrific idea or genre came into his overworked head. Manitou Doll encompasses Western and biker elements, even throwing in some 'animals on the rampage' carnage towards the end and falsely teasing a possible return of the killer crabs at one point “whatever it was that followed her was only yards away, slowing down now like some giant crab". Some of his ideas fail to land, a few don't make a great deal of sense, but overall Manitou Doll has more hits than misses when it comes to horror set pieces, and it's impossible to argue that the punters weren't getting their money's worth out of Smith here. A shrunken head in a jar, a macabre Punch and Judy show, even more male 'protrusions' (a Smith trademark), and a double decapitation are amongst the type of pulp horror excess that £1.25 bought you back in 1981.

Line most likely to cause you to spit out whatever you are drinking at the time "her eyes were riveted on the size of that which she would be compelled to take inside her, it's length and thickness almost rivaling the handle of her father's tomahawk".

[Sara]

Many night and sky rain dead body
my tears go down with my dife
just that wood doll my pluser
whatever i hid still my tears took
my angry from sky sound
my angry from wanten earth
my angry from rape tree
just my wood doll make cross
rivir of dead body passed by
no green
falso tent
echo of silint sound whisper
dark falow y
go my wood doll sleep

[Hal Astell · Rating 4 out of 5]

It sometimes seems surprising that Guy N. Smith only wrote eight books for Hamlyn over a quick four years, because they stand proud and strong and seem to represent a greater proportion of his output than they actually do. Perhaps that's in part because every GNS fan remembers at least one of these among their favourites. Perhaps it's partly because each of them do something very different, so they stand together as a strong sampling of his horror work.

'Manitou Doll' is the fifth of these eight and it's a very focused novel, almost every page dedicated to a simple family enduring a disastrous holiday in what has to be Eastbourne, even though it isn't named. They're the Catlins, Roy and Liz with their daughter Rowena, who has only partial hearing. It's easy to see them as a sort of distorted reflection of the Smiths, appropriate given the setting in a sleazy rundown fairground. Maybe Guy visited such a place, saw himself in the Hall of Mirrors and wondered what his skewed alter ego might be like in other terms than just the physical.

Roy is average in every way and hates that about himself. He's stuck in a dead end job as a solicitor's cashier, his marriage is on the rocks and his daughter has to lip read because she can't hear enough of what people say. Even when he manages to get them off to the seaside, the rain won't quit and his car breaks down. It has to be said that Roy and Liz are pretty awful parents, because eight year-old Rowena vanishes off on her own every time they so much as blink and it takes them far too long to notice.

By comparison, average is one of the few words that can't be used to describe Smith, who wrote over a hundred books, adopted donkeys, played Subbuteo for charity, dowsed, ran a smallholding and a shoot, sold secondhand books, collected everything and was even the British Pipe Smoking Champion. He was stuck in a dead end job too, in banking, until 1976 when the runaway success of 'Night of the Crabs' allowed him to escape that rut. Also, his eldest daughter, Rowan, was born with partial hearing.

I loved this new approach to crafting his lead character, because Guy had already written enough characters that were wish fulfilment versions of himself, most obviously Gordon Hall in 'Werewolf by Moonlight'. Why not create his polar opposite in Roy Catlin? And, as Hall saved the day in his stories, why not have Catlin fail miserably to do likewise, leaving it to his eight year-old daughter to make the difference instead?

I also loved how he allowed this novel to slowly find its way into horror through a slew of other genres. Smith had often said that he really wanted to write westerns, though there was unsurprisingly not much of a market for them in England in the seventies. He wrote horror because it sold and sold well. Well, this starts out as a western, with bloodthirsty American soldiers hunting down the Plains Indians in Kansas. When it jumps forward to a present-day Eastbourne, it becomes a biker novel, like so many of the novels Guy's main publisher, New English Library, issued in the seventies.

Of course, there's horror in both the western and biker sections and traditional horror in a number of ways. For one, evil manifests physically here. There aren't too many good guys in the American soldiers hunting Native Americans, but Levine is the one we focus on, the muscled sadist with fetid breath, ragged fingernails and grimy flesh pimpled with blackheads. He rapes Mistai, the virgin daughter of the Cheyenne chief, and murders Young Bear, who is tasked with getting her to safety. The leader of the Hell's Angels is Fat Fry, a grossly overweight youth whose first act is to punch a woman in the face and boot her son into a booth, so an unfortunately placed nail can paralyse him, if not kill him. He rapes Jane, the Red Indian Fortune Teller. And we haven't even got to Salin yet, a lecherous deformed dwarf with wasted legs and mismatched eyes.

For another, the entire novel depicts history repeating itself, though Smith relies on us to figure that out rather than alternating chapters. We get the prologue in 1868 then a few flashback visions here and there to nail the point home. It shouldn't surprise that Jane is Mistai's granddaughter and they both respond to their respective rapes in the same way: by cursing not just the rapist but all of his kind, down to their children and their children's children. Needless to say, that doesn't work out too well for the tourists visiting a funfair in Eastbourne on their holidays, whether they deserve retribution or not.

The way they curse is to pray to their god for revenge, who happens to be the demon god Okeepa, the torture symbol of the Plains Indians. He's in everything that Mistai and Jane carve and they both carve a lot of figurines in wood. In Jane's case, the fairground owner Jacob Schaeffer has her carve everything from the figureheads on the rides to the Punch and Judy characters. Once the curse is in place, all of these become a sort of evil army of murderous dolls and they have godlike powers to act upon their generation-born hate.

While 'Manitou Doll' is longer than 'Doomflight', let alone all of his NEL novels, and not a lot shorter than 'Satan's Snowdrop', it's far more tightly focused than any of them. While there may be twenty-six named characters who appear, and a few more who don't, only a few really get anything to do. There's a long drop after the three Catlins and Jane to the local chief inspector, Landenning, and Jacob Schaefer. Almost everyone else is there to be set up for a gruesome death and a few are only mentioned as they pass through a scene. Most of the characters aren't even given names, because they'd be distractions.

A couple of historical visions or nightmares aside, it's also ruthlessly chronological. Even the chapters are given a scope in time, dedicated to a part of a day: Wednesday morning, Wednesday afternoon, late Wednesday afternoon, etc. Historical prologue excepted, the whole book unfolds between Bank Holiday Monday and early Saturday morning, with one brief epilogue on Saturday afternoon when it's all over, the sun emerges, the birds come back and everyone left alive after the carnage of the previous night can go home, to talk no more about their holiday in Eastbourne.

While it's fair to say that the death count doesn't approach the crazy numbers of novels depicting Britain falling apart under an overwhelming threat, like 'Thirst' and 'Bats Out of Hell', the deaths do happen frequently and mostly in small numbers. Most arrive one or two at a time, so we're personal witnesses. Billy Freeman and his girlfriend Sylvia are hurled to their death from the Big Dipper. PC Brian Andrews is bludgeoned to death by a hallucinatory clown in the Hall of Mirrors. Stewart Middleton is sucked into the sea by an evil spirit while swimming to Beachy Head.

Often, we stumble on bodies, many of whom are nameless. There's a dismembered body in the Ghost Train tunnel. There are a couple of corpses draped over the waltzer cars. An entire crew of a small fishing boat are crushed when a lifeboat rides right over them. An unborn foetus is terminated when Fat Fry puts the boot into his mother's abdomen after she accidentally stuck candyfloss in his face. Every now and again, we know who they are, like Paul Stott, his body discovered by Rowena, his head bashed to a pulp. One old man is ironically hit by an ambulance, skidding in the mud.

So there's plenty of death here and that could be extended to the Punch and Judy show, in which Punch goes berserk and bludgeons everyone with blood spurting out of each of the puppets in a hallucinogenic bloodbath. There's still more danger, because Smith has the tension continually ratchet up until everything comes to a head on Friday night and Saturday morning. And through all of that stumble the woefully inept Roy and Liz, never realising that their innocent little eight-year-old daughter Rowena is far more able than either of them.

Next up, Guy returns to New English Library for his final werewolf novel, 'Wolfcurse' and then a return to his most successful series with its most outrageous title, the legendary 'Crabs on the Rampage'. See you then!

Originally posted at the Nameless Zine in December 2022:
https://www.thenamelesszine.org/Voice...

Index of all my Nameless Zine reviews:
https://books.apocalypselaterempire.com/

[NRH]

Recording the fact that I read this book in either the late 1970s or early 1980s

[Egghead · Rating 4 out of 5]

guy n. smith tackles
native american pain
with evil fair dolls

[Vincent Darkhelm · Rating 2 out of 5]

If only Guy N. Smith's talent matched his imagination, he would be a titan. But it doesn't. So he isn't.

[Magickalelf · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent, well paced novel. Guy N. Smith at his best. Strange story but it draws you in and holds your fascination. Loved the setting of a disheveled Amusement fairground during a rain-sodden family holiday.

[Mikepottz · Rating 3 out of 5]

Revenge from a carved Native American doll in a carnival setting, people murdered in the house of mirrors, ghost train, big dipper. Lacks the typical gore and schlocky writing of Guy n Smith which is a disappointment because thats what I love.

[Elso · Rating 3 out of 5]

Just looking at the artist work on the cover of Manitou Doll you start to get the chills and you may want to take a second look for I am sure the eyes will follow you around the room.