This review first appeared on scifiandscary.com
‘Killer Crabs’ is the first sequel to Guy N Smith’s ‘Night of the Crabs’ which I reviewed back in April. The action moves from Wales to a luxury resort on a small island off the coast of Australia, but aside from that the action is pretty similar. It’s got giant crabs, it’s got determined heroes, and it’s got a plenty of dismemberment.
Plucky scientist Clifford Davenport from the first book makes a reappearance. He’s joined this time by macho, unpleasantly racist, highly sexed, local fisherman Klin. I’m not sure Klin is actually a name, but that’s what he’s called. Klin bears a remarkable resemblance to Quint, the grizzled boat captain in ‘Jaws’. Only with more casual racism (against the Japanese) and even casualler sex, the latter with saucepot hotel resident Caroline du Brunner. Klin walks around with a permanent erection, a fact Smith chooses to refer to frequently. So much so, in fact, that it’s amazing that Klin can stand upright enough to actually fight the crabs.
You get the impression that Smith has thrown the sex in to keep the punters happy, rather than because his heart in really in it. If Herbert’s depiction of sex in books like ‘The Spear’ is bad, at least he tries to be sexy. Smith doesn’t even seem to bother. One memorable section in ‘Killer Crabs’ reads:
“Klin was watching her thighs closely. They had parted slightly, no more than inch or so, just sufficient for him to see part of the damp pinkness which lay beneath the dark hair…
’I like big things,’ she was still staring down at his erection, stroking it through the soiled cotton.”
Fortunately, the gore is more inventive than it was in the first book. In one great scene, a fisherman who has survived an attack by the crabs that has destroyed his boat, grabs a piece of driftwood to keep himself afloat, only to realise it’s his own severed leg.
The plot is somewhat better than that of the first book, there’s no spy shenanigans this time, instead the sub-plots revolve around some stolen money and the fact that some of the characters aren’t who they claim to be. It’s all very silly, but it succeeds on its own terms. It’s a pacey, gory piece of pulp fiction that’s diverting enough to spend an afternoon with, even if it’s not going to leave a lasting impression.
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I've seen this episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 before. Several times.

Sometimes, creative types get roped into working out of their comfort zone. Occasionally, a director has a vision that is stomped by a paycheck. In this case, I'm referring to the many times I've seen a monster/crime movie.

Ten minutes in, you can tell what happened. The director/writer had his heart set on making a crime movie, but the producers order him to produce a cheap yet lucrative horror flick. What you get is a crime thriller where the monster lurks on the edge of the film, occasionally eating characters that the plot is done with, until the film remembers in the last fifteen minutes, "Hey, I'm a horror movie, time to let the monster shine!"

In other words? They just didn't care.

This book is the platonic novelization of those films.

We have an crime novel with giant crabs on the edge. We have a duffel bag of 20,000 pounds driving the plot. We even get main characters who are NOT KILLED BY CRABS, something that will become vanishingly rare as the series goes on.

Oh, there’s also some rather large crustaceans in parts.

Our tale starts picturesquely.

"With the coming of January the spawning cod began migrating into Vestfjorden off the bleak Lofton Islands."

I swear, I can't help but hear that in Orson Welles's voice.href>

We're introduced to Ol Larsen, skipper of a fishing boat. Larsen is a man worrying about becoming obsolete and the hereditary angina he expects to kill him, walks down to his cabin. Suddenly, a desperate knock sounds at his door.

Curtain falls. Chapter ends. Ol Larsen, the most fleshed out and intriguing character in the entire series, is never heard from again. I just reread that chapter, and I still have no clue how in ties into the series. It's like Smith accidentally pasted the start of another book into his manuscript without noticing.

In the books to come, my mind will often wander to wonder what became of Ol Larsen.

From this point on, our tale is entirely set in Australia. Our “hero” is Klin, a badass fisherman who everybody loves. Klin doesn’t care, though; Kiln’s cool on his own! People hate him, but secretly, everyone wants to be him!

Imagine a fishing-obsessed 9 year-old making up the coolest guy he can think of, and you have Klin.

Also, he’s really racist against the Japanese.

Our first act is dominated by Klin’s struggle to shoot the Japanese poachers stealing his fish. Thus begins Guy N. Smith’s obsession with poachers, which will last through every book of the series I’ve read. Of course, the crabs eventually get involved, and our clicking killers start to get up in everyone’s face. Since this is a Guy N. Smith novel, there’s also an obligatory conversation about the Loch Ness Monster.

Our main female protagonist is, well, I’ll call her Sex Girl. Sex Girl has a name, but a name implies personality. Sex Girl spends the first half dozen of her scenes lying in her hotel room, naked, waiting for any one of the three main criminals to get awkward and physical with her. It takes about 70% of the book for her to put on clothes. Also, her legs tend to windmill when she orgasms. I teach sex ed classes, and I have only a vague image of what that could mean. I bet it could power a turbine.

Let’s start a tally.

Women Protagonists of the Crab Series
Book 1: Exists for the protagonist to put exposition in her ears and other things into her pants.
Book 2: Con-woman nymphomaniac who steals money so she can rent a sex hotel room and lounge naked inside it all day.

I got news for you, dear readers. That list isn't going to get better in the foreseeable future.

Along with Klin and Sex Girl, two other ne’r-do-wells come onto the scene. I’m particularly fond of the big game hunter obsessed with bagging a crab. They all begin to come to blows over the duffel bag as the crabs begin a full scale invasion of the island. Shortly afterwards, the book remembers that something has to be done about that troublesome monster subplot and we ease into our final confrontation.

The ending struggle against the crabs manages to have some actual suspense and daring-do. For that matter, watching the criminals run around in a version of “A Crab Called Wanda” is entertaining as well. Let’s be clear: this is trash, but highly entertaining trash.

Just watch out for those poachers. :shiver: ( )

Following the success of "Night of the Crabs", the prolific Guy N. Smith was quickly out of the blocks with this sequel. It follows the same splattery template developed in the first book, albeit with the crab action relocated to Australia and the picturesque location of Barbeque Bay on Hayman Island. At the Royal Hayman Hotel we meet a less than salubrious cast of characters, including a rugged local fisherman, a scarred bank robber in hiding, a loony-tunes big gamer hunter and sex-obsessed nymphomaniac Caroline du Brunner. When the giant killer crabs turn up and attacks the resort, Professor Cliff Davenport, the hero of "Night of the Crabs", is summoned from London to lend his expertise. With the characters at the resort intent on killing themselves over a suitcase of stolen cash, Davenport is left to track the crabs down to a remote mangrove swamp where the crabs have developed a breeding ground. "Killer Crabs" is an action-packed, unrelenting, over-the-top horror yarn, full of preposterous characters and unrealistic situations. The book is better written and has better construction than the original, but simplicity and ease of reading remain the focus of the narrative despite the many strange subplots – I suspect, however, that there are few reading a tale of violent, gigantic, rampaging, flesh-hungry crabs for poetic language and literary merit. The characters are brilliantly exaggerated, particularly the sexy and insatiable Caroline du Brunner and the ending of the book is as preposterous as the rest of it. "Killer Crabs" is unrelentingly good fun that delivers gore by the buckets, ludicrous subplots, outlandish characters and, of course, super-intelligent crabs hell-bent on attacking humanity - classically styled horror pulp at its best. ( )

June 18, 2011

Dear Headmaster Otis,

I feel terrible about my role in this recent outbreak of Crabs, which has brought so much shame on our fair institution. I just wanted to write to you to explain how I came to be involved. I’m sure you’ll see that it is really no fault of my own, and there’s probably no reason my parents would need to be notified of my very minor part in these events. It started a few weeks ago. I was sitting in study hall, minding my own business, reading Proust Infinite Jest The Zombie Autopsies. I had had a lot of coffee that morning… I don’t know, I guess because it was dark and overcast outside, and I just couldn’t seem to wake up. That was a big mistake. I usually try not to drink coffee on days I have study hall, because it’s all the way down at the end of “B” wing, and the only bathroom down there is in that poorly-lit corner across from the wood shop. In case you didn’t know, tough upperclassmen hang out down there, and steal kids’ lunch money. There’s also stories of smoking pot, and s-e-x going on in the janitor’s closet- but you didn’t hear that from me. So anyway, I had to pee so bad, I just had to risk it. I went into the bathroom, and I guess I walked in on something. There was a bad group of kids in there--- you know the ones. Troublemakers. There was Michael, who acts so respectable and studious, starting research groups and stuff, but really he‘s the one who brought Crabs to this school! Also, he once bought beer for me without even checking my I.D. See? Those are the ones you have to watch out for- the fine upstanding types, especially the thinking ones. Caris was there too. I’m sure you know all about him. He writes “bizarro” stuff, which means he’s probably a mental patient or criminal deviant trying to pass himself off as an author. Did you read that egg thing of his? That boy ain’t right. You may be surprised to hear our valedictorian, Karen, was present as well. (I know! Right? A girl in the boy’s lavatory! My mother warned me about her.) There’s a rumor going around that she reviewed a cookbook of jizz recipes!? That‘s sounds so crazy; I’m sure such a thing doesn’t exist. It’s probably just a conspiracy theory. But it is true that she has a pierced tongue, and what more do you need to know? That’s like a big message to the world saying “Stop me before I kill again!” And last, there was K.I. Hope, but you know, I just want to put in a good word for her, because she’s always really nice to me when those others aren’t around. I’m sure she was just there because the others tricked her into being there. She’s probably just going through a phase.

So when I walked in, they were all huddled around something I couldn‘t see, snickering. I just turned to leave right away, but Caris blocked the door, and asked me, kind of menacing-like “Where you going so fast, Bird Man?”
“I just had to pee, but now I don’t have to any more.”
The other three were whispering among themselves, like “Should we show him?”, then they kind of gathered around me.
Karen was smiling at me funny/flirty. “Since you’re cutting class anyway, why don’t you join us?”
“Uh… I should probably be getting back.”
Michael was hiding something in his jacket, and giggling like he was a little bit high. “We were just about to have a little fun.”
Then K.I. pressed up against me, like, you know, her body, and she whispered in my ear in a real Marilyn Monroe “Happy-Birthday-Mr.President” voice and said “I like to have fun… don’t you… like to have… fun?” And I don’t know what happened inside my brain then, but I heard my mouth saying to her “Oh… okay.” That’s when Michael reached into his jacket and brought it out: Crabs.

Things got kind of blurry after that. It was crazy. There were like, these giant crabs, and this guy, Klin who was supposed to be the hero, but really he was kind of a psychopath. He was rugged and determined, and didn’t take “no” for an answer! …which was a good trait to have when the question was “Can these Crabs be defeated?”, but not such a good trait when the question was “Would you like to have consensual sexual intercourse with me?“ The author kept telling us that the Crabs were evil, but why were they evil? They were just behaving like any crabs. Caroline du Brunner was an important character in this book, because she had frequent and powerful orgasms, during which she was often unable to focus her vision. There were a lot of people getting snipped in half by giant crab claws, and human heads washed up on shore, with "neck tendons" (?) hanging out of them. The Crab shells were impermeable to bullets, so the military was called in. Naturally there was an expert- a professor who knew why the Crabs were getting big, and how to stop them. Basically if you’ve ever seen one monster movie from the 1950’s where something normal-sized (a spider, a man, ants, etc) gets to be giant-sized, and then terrorizes a city (there are about a hundred of those kind of movies), then you don’t need to read this book. Actually, the best part of the book had nothing to do with Crabs- it was the suitcase full of money. That could have been written into a good story. We were all laughing so hard.. I don’t even know what we were laughing at now. I feel ashamed just writing all this. It seems so stupid now, but it was so much fun at the time. I guess we got pretty loud, or maybe somebody noticed I was missing, because eventually Eh?Eh! came in and was all like “What the fudge is going on in here?”, and we were all busted... but it was too late, because I already had Crabs by then.

Like I said before, I feel just terrible about the whole incident. It was a momentary lapse in judgment, which will never happen again. I think everybody deserves a second chance in life, don’t you? -especially when they were never involved in anything like this before (the Danny Bonaduce book doesn’t count, because I found it by accident). So I was thinking that since I learned my lesson and all, and since it will never happen again, there is probably no reason for you to inform my parents about this lone isolated incident. It would only unnecessarily worry them.

With Sincerest Apologies,
Bird Brian
GoodReads Class of 2008
(‘08 Rules!!)

P.S.- I am available to speak at schools, to warn other kids about the dangers of Crabs, so what happened to me won’t happen to them. If somebody could drive me there, my parents don’t need to know about it. ( )

I'm not afraid of crabs (or any other shellfish. or corn on the cob.) and neither are my friends. We know exactly what to do. Butter. Spices. Beers.







I enjoyed reading this book even though it took the idiotic humans until the very end to figure out that all they had to do in order to kill the crabs was cook them. And then they didn't even eat them. They just flew away and let all that sizzling meat go to waste.
Bunch of dipshits.
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