This is the sixth instalment in Guy N Smith's “nature on the rampage” killer Crabs series. This time the story revolves around psychotic animal rights campaigner Pete Merrick and his small group of campaigners, who mange in the opening chapters to behead the leader of a fox hunt and inject turkeys with strychnine in the run up to Christmas. With the mutated, cancer-ridden crabs on the rampage, Merrick develops a belief that they are gods rising up to extract vengeance on mankind in revenge for mans cruelty to animals. He begins to devise ways to sacrifice people to the crabs culminating in the sacrifice of socialite Susan Delphore. When Susan's boyfriend, ex-SAS soldier, David Knight learns that it was Merrick that killed her he sets out to gain revenge – against a background of the crab final attack. "Crabs: The Human Sacrifice" carries the feeling that Smith was fast running out of interest with the giant crabs concept, with the focus of the story placed on Merrick and his band of militant animal rights activists. Smith's depiction of the animal rights group is incredibly reactionary and probably arises from his own interest in outdoor sports – he has written a host of non-fiction books on the topic. Merrick, however, is a brilliantly over-the-top psycho, who is willing to go to any insane lengths, in between bouts of sado-masochistic sex with his compliant and long-suffering girlfriend, Christine. Knight is a bit of a clichéd hero, but this may be as a result of Smith having little time for niceties such as character development. The pacing isn't as frantic as previous books but still moves along at a fair clip and the bloody splatterpunk quotient is upped from the previous books if that is possible – one scene of Merrick and Christine eating cancerous, rotting, oozing crab flesh in some form of perverted quasi-religious rite is pretty nauseating. The crab action is less than the previous books, with the appearance of the mutants fairly limited and dull. "Crabs: The Human Sacrifice" isn't the best book in the series but it is still an entertaining enough slab of madcap splattery pulp horror fiction.


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