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

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.

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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. ( )