Nick Blake (1)

This review first appeared on scifiandscary.com: https://www.scifiandscary.com/carry-on-screaming-chainsaw-terror-by-nick-blake-1...

‘Chainsaw Terror’ is a book with an interesting history. In fact, the story of the book’s genesis and publication is in many ways more entertaining than the actual novel. It’s also a nice illustration of the conflict in the UK at the time between a public who were hungry for horror and a nanny state that was eager to protect them from the perceived dangers of it.
There are various versions of the book’s history available online, from what I can tell it goes something like this: Budding horror novelist Shaun Hutson is approached by his publisher to write a novelisation of ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’. He happily agrees, but the publisher fails to secure the book rights to the film and so changes his brief to just writing something horrible with the word chainsaw in the title. Hutson obliges with ‘Chainsaw Terror’ and it is published in 1984 under the pseudonym Nick Blake. The book is soon taken off the shelves of high street giant WH Smith, although it’s not clear whether that is because of the title, or because anyone there had actually read the book. Some versions of the story suggest the book was “banned”, but I suspect that’s not the case. What seems more likely is that once the largest bookseller in the UK refused to sell the book, the publisher, Star books, decided it wasn’t worth printing any more copies. The story continues with Star heavily censoring the book (some say by up to 25 pages) and re-issuing it under a new title (‘Come the Night’) in 1985. I’ll come back to that last part at the end of the review. You see, dear reader, I have both versions, so I can give you the low down on exactly what the differences are between them.
The book’s plot is pretty bare bones, almost to the point it isn’t worth talking about. A young boy witnesses his father murdering his mother. Years later as a young man he lives with, and lusts after, his sister. Eventually he kills her, and then a number of other women. As you might expect the killings are brutal and explicit and involve power tools. Hutson throws in some incestuous necrophilia for good measure. Around the midway point a rugged journalist gets introduced and starts investigating the disappearances. It would be a stretch to call him the hero, it feels more like Hutson suddenly realised he needed to write about more than just the sweaty brain of his villain.
‘Chainsaw Terror’ is a book that has a pretty clear purpose and achieves it. I wouldn’t call it good, but it is nauseatingly and memorably violent. The gritty scenes of murder and the London vice scene are more reminiscent of the dark crime books Hutson has come to write later in his career, than the horror we was writing at the same time as this book. It’s certainly an interesting entry in his canon, even if it isn’t his best book.
The controversy around its publication means the book is hard to come by, I’ve seen people asking £150 for a copy on eBay. So rare is it, that rather than doing a google search and downloading a cover image for this review, I had to take one myself. The reissue, ‘Come the Night’ is also pretty rare, although tends to be cheaper when it does come up for sale. It’s also available in an omnibus, published by Pan in 1999, that bundles it with two alien abduction novels Hutson wrote under the pen name Frank Taylor. This is by far the cheapest way of buying the book. You can pick up a copy from Amazon UK for 33p (plus postage).
Of course, if you did that, you’d be getting the “heavily censored” version, right? I have all three versions of the book, the original paperbacks of ‘Chainsaw Terror’ and ‘Come the Night’ and the omnibus version, so let me give you a blow by blow rundown of the differences….

There are none. Aside from the titles and covers, the books are identical. How the myth about ‘Come the Night’ being bowdlerised has come about I’m not sure. There is certainly evidence of a longer manuscript (Hutson has referred to it in interviews), but it was never published. Lesson: don’t believe everything you read online.
… (meer)