Shaun HutsonBesprekingen

Oh hell yeah. This was a fun read. Killer aborted fetuses!! What more could a gore hound ask for!

So i first read this book when i was 13 and had it confiscated by the music teacher!! Wasn’t suitable reading for teenagers apparently!

I do remember it being a bit gory and a few sex scenes. I’m sure the best line in the book is “He impaled her on his rampant member” or something like that. It amused me as a teen so when i saw this book in a charity shop i didn’t hesitate, i purchased straight away.

It isn’t as gory or as pornographic as i remembered but it still made me smile and i really did enjoy it. It’s never going to be classed as a modern classic but it is easy to read, its got a bit of everything, murder, gore, sex, romance and the living dead 😉

I was quite happy sat in bed with 1 of the cats Tim and Birdie sharing a good cup of tea reading this book when all of a sudden the bird went completely crazy! Wings out, tail feathers fanned out, screaming in sheer terror. Took me awhile to work out what had upset her so much but it was the photo of Shaun Hutson on the back cover!

She is absolutely terrified of him! Not sure if it was the big 80’s hair or the sunglasses but she was happy and content as long as she didn’t get a glimpse of the rear cover!!

Sorry Shaun, not sure what she would make of a recent photo but i think i should find out 🙂

Very strange bird bless her but i wouldn’t have her any other way!

So my advice, if you are bored and at a loose end, give the book a read and if your parrot freaks out at it please let me know

Have a good night

Debs and Birdie

Badly written with purple prose, extreme gore written in the most boring way possible and a plot that exists to facilitate that gore with side-plots that go nowhere and a plot twist that comes out of nowhere.

Video review here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bG0spMBD6Kc

While I realize that Shawn Hutson books are supposed to be cheap trashy reads, I found this one unbearable.
There are two plotlines followed in this book that are somewhat boring and tie together with a very stupid explanation.

This book is trash. But it is great trash!

Cows submitted to an experimental growth proceedure turn into bloodthirsty cannibals and terrorize small farming town.
Lots of gore, some gratuitous sex and we have a total winner.

Writing is meh at best and plot and characters mostly an afterthought but who cares about this, as long as the blood is flowing.

I believe this is the first I've read by this author. I like his writing style alot. I found both stories to by easy reads that quickly grab your interest, with unique plots, well developed storylines and well written characters. I will definitely aquire more work by Shaun Hutson in the future.

I wasn’t sure about this, but the last act really nailed it for me. As you’d expect from Shaun Hutson it’s extremely violent, really lean and fast paced. It’s reminiscent of the town vs country horror movies of the 70s (Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Hills have Eyes and especially Race with the Devil), but Hutson makes the protagonists a vacationing English couple which works really well. It also draws a bit on Hutson’s early novel Relics (no had thing). I polished it off in a little over a day and enjoyed the ride, but it’s really not for the faint hearted.

More absolutely disgusting slimy horror from Hutson. It’s not as good as Slugs, but it is good. The plot of pointless. All that matters is the sex and violence that it links together.

This review first appeared on scifiandscary.com: https://www.scifiandscary.com/spawn-review/

After the blistering ‘Slugs’, ‘Spawn’ was a bit of a disappointment. It certainly doesn’t feature the strong storytelling and enjoyably cinematic gore of the other novel. Like most of his books, it’s one I have read before, but I didn’t remember it well, beyond the concept. What a concept it is though, absolutely bonkers and arguably extremely offensive, it’s certainly a book that it’s hard to imagine being published any time other than during the 80s horror boom.
The book follows Harold, a hospital porter and ex-psychiatric patient, horribly scarred in a fire when he was a child, who rescues the corpses of aborted foetuses from the clinical waste furnace and buries them in a nearby field. When lightning strikes the mass grave, some of the foetuses come back to life. This happens without any real explanation and for no reason other than that’s what happens when lightning strikes dead things in horror books and movies. The reanimated babies then psychically communicate with Harold and make him do nasty stuff.
Alongside all of this, again for no real reason, is a parallel storyline about an escaped murderer and the policeman who is searching for him. There are loose connections, beyond geography, as the stories progress, but it’s only really at the end that they come together. This is a narrative technique that Hutson uses in a lot of his books and it’s not that successful here. More often than not, it feels like two different books stuck together to bring the word count up.
That probably wouldn’t matter too much if the gore was more fun, but it really isn’t, especially when compared to the delirious heights of ‘Slugs’. The book is undeniably horrible, but that horror comes most often from lingering descriptions of the aborted foetuses. As a result, it’s often hard to read rather than enjoyable. On the plus side, there’s tonnes of sex and he only uses the world “cleft” once.

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.

This review first appeared on scifiandscary.com
‘Deadhead’, like many of Shaun Hutson’s later books, inhabits that murky world between crime and horror fiction. His early work was unashamedly horror, and often horror of an over the top and quite silly variety. Killer slugs, undead babies and zombie hitmen all feature in novels packed with disgustingly detailed gore and wrapped in lurid covers. As he matured as a writer, he dropped the supernatural elements and his books became even darker. They’re horrific tales of people doing horrible things to each other. Unquestionably still horror, but more akin to something like ‘The Girl Next Door’ than anything Stephen King might pen.
‘Deadhead’ is very much that kind of book. It’s a stark, disturbing thriller about a private eye with terminal cancer searching for his young daughter who has been kidnapped by gangsters with a side-line in child pornography and snuff movies. If that description has put you off, then I strongly recommend not reading this book. It pulls no punches and there is one scene in particular which I’m surprised made it into print.
The question I ask myself, when a writer presents something that appalling on the page, is whether the book is good enough to justify it. I’m not as big a fan of ‘The Girl Next Door’ as some, but I think there is enough emotional weight in the story that the atrocities that Jack Ketchum describes don’t feel gratuitous. Hutson isn’t as good a writer as Ketchum, and as a result he doesn’t quite manage to make the grade. ‘Deadhead’ is shocking in a way that screams “look at me” rather than trying to make the reader think about the nature of evil.
Putting all of that aside (if it is possible to), ‘Deadhead’ is a decent thriller. The first half is a bit slow, with too much time taken on the build up; but the second is taut gripping. Hutson’s characters aren’t exactly deep, but at least you know which ones to root for. Of course, his defining characteristic as a writer is the attention he pays to violence. Hutson doesn’t tell you that someone got shot in the head, he tells you where the bullet entered their skull and where it exited. With an anatomical precision that any medical student would be proud of, he also gleefully describes exactly what it destroyed on its way through. ‘Deadhead’ is actually a lot less violent than a lot of his books, but when it is violent, it makes everyone else look tame, even Ketchum.
So, would I recommend it? Probably not, but if you’re a Hutson fan and you haven’t read it, you won’t be disappointed.

This review first appeared on scifiandscary.com: https://www.scifiandscary.com/slugs-review/

Confession time before we start. As a teenager, Shaun Hutson was my favourite British horror author. More than Herbert, who I found a bit ploddy at times, his books had a violent energy that really appealed to me. They’re blatantly ludicrous, but so efficiently written that it’s easy to forget that. Hutson never takes himself to seriously, despite the horribly dark themes he often ends up exploring, which gives the books an appealing, b-movie vibe. Hutson is, I would suggest, the Lucio Fulci to Herbert’s George Romero. Probably not objectively as good, but so entertaining and engaging that it’s hard to say for sure. Like Guy N Smith, whose books have featured in this column already, he wrote under a number of pseudonyms and in a number of genres. He published war stories and westerns, as well as penning a novelisation of the movie ‘The Terminator’. Director James Cameron supposedly disliked it so much that he refused to let it be published in the US, although it did make it onto UK shelves. It’s great.
Hutson did in fact claim to have been inspired to take up writing after reading Smith’s ‘Night of the Crabs’, saying that if a book that bad could get published he figured he might as well give it a go. He also claims that many of his books took no more than a weekend to write, which feels like it’s probably a credible statement. The common theme in all his work is lots of sex and violence. In a few months I’ll be discussing his infamous novel ‘Chainsaw Terror’, but this instalment focusses on his first book, ‘Slugs’.
That one-word title tells you everything you need to know really. It promises something horribly disgusting and Hutson delivers. The plot is very similar to ‘The Rats’, mutated creatures attack humans in a series of horrific vignettes and an everyman hero takes them on. In this case the hero is a health inspector, and the slugs are even more of an improbable monster than the rats. Hutson realises this and is wonderfully creative with the gore. He does include a few scenes where people fall and then can’t get up for some reason as the slugs slowly advance on them, but also gives them some other tricks. The titular creatures secrete slime that sends anyone who eats it homicidally insane, and infect anyone who accidentally swallows a slug with worms that then burst out of their faces.
It’s fair to say that the gore in this book is ramped up to 11 and it’s all the more fun for it. Hutson rarely lets more than a few pages pass without someone dying and he describes every death with a gleeful aplomb. There’s boatloads of sex too, which may go someway to explaining why I liked his books so much as a teenager. His penchant for the word “cleft” to describe the female anatomy does grate a little after a while, though.
This was a book I remembered fondly, and my reread of it for this review proved that memory to be correct. Measured by normal literary criteria it’s not a good book. The plot is bonkers, the characters are wafer thin and it lacks any real message. Taken on its own terms, though, it’s a masterpiece. Vibrant, energetic, memorable and grimly inventive. I loved every oozing, bloody page.

Hutson's books are always nasty fun and this is no exception. Violent, unpleasant but never less than very readable

Cons: This may or may not have a shitty pro-life message, I couldn't tell if it was that or if the author just wanted to write about something batshit insane like zombie fetuses.

Pros: At one point, a man breast feeds several zombie fetuses by cutting open his chest and feeding them blood while crying, which is easily one of my favorite moments of any horror novel.

This has all the essential elements of true trash horror: Gratuitous sex scenes, several loose eyeballs, children biting their parents to death, and slugs devouring a scrotum.

Back to the 80s mit menschenfressenden Killersalatschnecken, inhaltlich und stilistisch schlicht aber sehr sehr blutig und schön schräg unterhaltsam. Im Prinzip der Weiße Hai mit Glibbermonstern, dafür ohne jeden Anflug von Niveau. Ab und zu darf das schon mal sein.

https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3118952.html

This had been on my eventually-getting-round-to list for ages, on the basis that it came up as a possible addition to the list of sff novels set in Ireland. To be honest it barely qualifies. There are two plotlines, set several years apart; in one, a writer in 2002 finds that he is writing a novel without any memory of actually writing it, in what feel to him like alcoholic blackouts; the other plotline is the story of the novel, a thriller set around Good Friday Agreement times, in which a dissident British agent hints down a dissident Republican. I thought the violence was gratuitous and the politics pretty inaccurate, and the supernatural linkage between th two narratives not really accounted for; apart from that, it was quite well written!

Blutiger Segen – Politischer Gothic-Horror

Autor: Shaun Hutson | Titel: Blutiger Segen
Verlag: Festa | Seiten: 480
Preis: 4,99 € als eBook

Dieser Mix aus Horror, Gothic- und Thriller ist auf der Rückseite mit als „Packender Mix aus Krimi und Horror“ angekündigt. Der 1. Sean Doyle Thriller wird auch noch erwähnt. Das lässt an sich auf eine Reihe mit dem Hauptcharakter schließen, aber bisher ist nur dieser eine Band auf deutsch erschienen.

Klappentext
Unsterblichkeit – das ultimative Mysterium. Die Multimillionäre David und Laura Callahan lassen sich durch nichts aufhalten, um dieses Geheimnis zu lösen. Aber für David scheint die Aussicht auf ewiges Leben sehr unwahrscheinlich: Er wird nämlich von mehreren Profikillern gejagt. Und niemand weiß, wer ihnen den Mordauftrag gab, noch warum …
Eine Spur der Gewalt führt das Paar von einer entweihten Kirche in Frankreich nach London und in das politisch zerrissene Irland. Dort lauern nicht nur eiskalte Terroristen, sondern auch uralte, übernatürliche Mächte – und schon bald werden die Toten über die Lebenden lachen.

Shaun Hutson: »Einige meiner Figuren kann man eindeutig auf mich zurückführen, und das will ich auch gar nicht verbergen. Der Charakter von Sean Doyle (der auch in Blutiger Segen, White Ghost, Knife Edge und Hybrid auftritt) ähnelt mir sehr in seinem düsteren Ansichten, aber ansonsten ist er ganz anders. Doyle ist knallhart, sehr erfolgreich bei Frauen und kümmert sich einen Scheiß um die Meinung anderer. Ich dagegen bin klein, schüchtern und leicht zu erschrecken. Ein Interviewer hat sich mal an einer Psychoanalyse versucht und meinte, ich würde meine eigenen Wunschfantasien durch Doyle ausleben. Das ist natürlich Schwachsinn, weil ich, im Gegensatz zu Doyle, ein absoluter Feigling bin und so ein Leben voller Gefahren niemals führen möchte. Er ist eine erfundene Figur, schlicht und einfach, er tauchte einfach so auf, und ich mag ihn.«

Inhalt
Sean Doyle, Mitarbeiter der CTU (Counter-Terrorist-Unit) ist nicht bei allen beliebt, da er seine eigenen Methoden zum ermitteln hat. Er gerät in eine Geschichte um die IRA und Waffenlieferungen, sowie der Suche nach der Unsterblichkeit die mit einem Fenster, versteckt in einer alten Kirche in Frankreich, erlangt werden soll.

Cover
Auf dem Cover sieht man ein Stück eine blutigen Dornenkrone und einen Ausschnitt aus einer Kirche mit gekreuzigten Männern. Da ein Teil der Handlung in einer Kirche spielt, es es recht passend gewählt, ebenso zum Gothic-Thema das auftaucht passt die düstere Gestaltung.

Bewertung
Shaun Hutson empfängt uns in seinem Buch direkt in der Zeit der IRA, dem Konflikt zwischen England und Irland, von dem jeder bestimmt schon einmal gehört hat. Es wird über den Frieden verhandelt, und auf die Politiker dort ein wird ein Anschlag verübt. Soviel zum Einstieg in den Roman.
Shaun Hutson beschreibt die Szenerie, was sich abspielt, die Wirkung von Waffen auf den menschlichen Körper und alles weiter sehr genau und plastisch, teilweise allerdings in meinen Augen auch ein kleines wenig zu langatmig, was diesem aber keinen Abbruch tut. Der Schreibstil von him gefällt mir gut, sehr detailreich und man kann sich sofort in die Personen hineinversetzen deswegen, ebenso kann man sich sehr gut vorstellen was genau gerade passiert.
Der Roman gliedert sich in 2 Handlungsstränge, die am Ende in einem furiosen Finale mit einem großen Shoot-Out enden, das auch Verlagstypisch wieder recht blutig wird, jedoch nicht zu extrem und in keiner Weise übertrieben. Die Storyline ist doch recht anspruchsvoll, es kommen sehr viele Personen darin vor die in kurzer Zeit auftauchen und die man erst einmal auseinander halten können muß. Dazu sind es zu viele Namen die zur selben Zeit auftauchen. Die Story um die IRA hätte meiner Meinung nach ein wenig kürzer ausfallen können da dort doch in meinen Augen recht viel Füllwerk bei ist. Die zweite Storyline um das Fenster kommt mir ein wenig zu kurz, aber ich bin auch eher im Bereich Horror zu Hause. Es gibt am Anfang des Buches theoretisch noch eine dritte Storyline, die sich mit dem Ehepaar Callahan beschäftigt, man kann aber die in Frankreich und diese als eine ansehen.

Abschließend bleibt mir nur zu sagen das dieser Roman interessant ist, leicht verworren und es etwas dauert bis man einmal durchgeblickt hat und alle Charaktere kennt und zuordnen kann. Wenn die weiteren Sean-Doyle-Romane noch erscheinen wird man bestimmt einfach in die Bücher kommen.

Fazit: Interessanter, leicht verworrener Auftakt zur Sean-Doyle-Serie.

Did not finish. Over the top violence, not that well done.

My initial disappointment with this book was because I thought it was going to be a horror novel, as I didn't realise that the author also writes thrillers. I also think that the cover picture implies supernatural horror (although I picked up an old hardback with out a dust jacket so I didn't seen the cover until I registered it online).

What is worse is that I didn't find it frightening at all. That could be because there isn't a sympathetic character in the whole book, meaning that I wasn't even invested in the heroine staying alive.½

What a load of old rubbish. Seriously.
I can be quite fond of what some might regard as very silly books (I love James Herbert by way of comparison). But this is something else entirely.
Without giving away part of the story (as I honestly wouldn't want to spoil any book for anyone who may enjoy it, even this one) this book is somehow made worse for me by the supposed 'science' quoted to reinforce a plot(!) point. From start to finish this book is riddled with plot holes, inconsistencies and cliches and is ill-researched. But what is worse - it's just plain stupid.
I didn't like it.

Don't really know what to say about this book.....?

A health inspector finds out that common garden slugs are mutating into maneaters, growing in both size and appetite.

The book reads almost as a number of small stories detailing various residents encounters, many of which end in a grisly death.

The book is a nice easy read with the first half actually quite promising as a 'B' movie style horror, but as the novel reaches it's climax you feel the author has ran out of ideas.

There is also a sequel called Breeding Ground, which i may look at if I ever get that bored....

Enjoyable and easy read, but the inclusion of some supernatural fantasy seems uneccessary and for me sits rather uncomfortably in a thriller focused on terrorism and counter terrorism in N Ireland and the Republic. Doesn't make me want to follow this author. Number of reprints suggests others see it differently!

okay

For the most part it was enjoyable, but the ending let it down greatly, the ending was actually painful.