Mania By Guy N. Smith

Mania
By Guy N. Smith
1988 Sphere Books
Paperback, 234 pages

 

                Another excellent book from the Great Scribbler with another excellent cover by Les Edwards. You just can’t go wrong with that potent combination.

 

                Suzannah Mitchell and her 14 year old daughter Rose are caught in a massive blizzard and have to abandon their car and seek shelter. They wind up at the Donnington Country House Hotel, formerly the Donnington Nursing Home, which was a looney bin, a head farm. The thing is, since the name change, the clientele has remained pretty much the same. Suzannah and Rose feel very uncomfortable the moment they step inside and with good reason. There are loonies living in and running the hotel. Luckily for the Mitchells, Owain Pugh, a young man who is also stranded in the storm, shows up seeking shelter as well.

 

                The cast of characters is the best part of this book. You get a drunk, a flasher/ religious zealot, a chronic masterbator, and a pregnant virgin, among other eccentric and potentially dangerous tenants. The pregnant girl is of the most interest as she is either carrying either the second coming of Christ or the Devil’s spawn. Evil things are afoot in the hotel. A shadow of a beastly hand crawls across the ceiling and warnings of Satan’s presence are proof of that evil. But is there real evil in the hotel or is it just the collective madness of the unfortunate people who call the hotel home, the power of suggestion? And that is the crux of this story to me; is it real or is it craziness?

 

                GNS is ever the romanticist. Once again, he has Suzannah and Owain developing feelings for each other in record time. It works here because it gives them some sort of motivation. You see, with all of the wonderfully wacky hotel inmates, the two leads are pretty dry characters. They hope to save Rose from being a pawn in the plans of the bad guys, like anyone would, but offer little color to the proceedings. The story works much better for this. Also, despite being fourteen, I was reading Rose as much younger.

 

                Top shelf GNS right here; fun, fast paced, ambiguous and nerve-wracking. As an added bonus, one character is a picky book collector and has received a shipment from Black Hill Books, Guy’s own real-life mail-order book business at the time, and mentions that “the bloke was bleating for his cheque”. I always appreciate a little in-joke to lighten the proceedings.