The Death Guard

The winter following the end of the Great War, Britain is choked with demobilised soldiers. Edom Beldite, a wealthy industrialist, is driving home when outside a military camp he notices one man - tall, unshaven, in a tattered uniform - whom for reason unknown strikes him in particular. Stopping, he offers the man a lift to wherever he might be going. The man has nowhere to go, so the sympathetic Edom Beldite decides to take him home, feed him, house him for the moment.
The soldier's name is Goble, a researcher in the field of biology by training. He has seen the horrors of the trenches, the death, men made no more than machines of destruction, and there the seed of an idea had formed. An idea that would lead to the end of the show more degradation, the end of the suffering, the end of war forever: a creature that could stand in the place of soldiers, a creature impervious to fear or pain, more powerful and brutal than any man, which, if created, would be so terrific, so terrible, no enemy would dare go to war with Britain again.
Seduced by the man, his intellectual fervour, in one of Beldite's stables a rudimentary lab is made, and in time the tiniest of creatures, artificial life, are created. Hidden from all but their eyes the experiments go on, soon the lab is growing and their successes also. When eventually our narrator, Gregory, Edom Beldite's grandson, reaches manhood, Goble and his research has moved to an isolated location in the Belgian Congo; there are rumours of terrible things there and people in the nearby town are fearful. Beldite's factories are working for the government people say, they are making monsters. Suspicion spreads to the continent - Britain is arming herself, they say. Gregory makes his way into the factories but knows nothing for certain until, at last, it is before him, the hideous fruit of Goble's labour, massive and violent beyond all comprehension: the Flesh Guard...

I sought out this book because somewhere I read it was a favourite of H. G. Wells. Written in 1939, the lone work of the author, it is the closest thing to the unknown classic I've ever come across. A blend of horror and science-fiction, well written, exciting, tense, it foreshadows all that was to follow: the Second World War and, even more, the coming of the atomic bomb. So why is it unknown? Why, as far as I can tell, hasn't it been in print since the early 1990s? I think the reason for that is very simple: like many works of its day - especially science-fiction - it is very dated. However in one respect this book in particular contains certain sensibilities we have left behind: it is, as the introduction in my copy puts it, 'unthinkingly racist'. The black Congolese in the story are commonly referred to in ways which are entirely unacceptable today. Yet, while this may well put some readers off (and little doubt it does publishers), as a novel of its era and the climate in which it was written, as a work of pure science-fiction or horror, I simply cannot recommend it highly enough. show less