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.
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