Hammer: Shaun Hutson Twins of Evil

As the actual book seems got stuck into Amazon´s delivery pipeline, I ordered the Kindle edition. So no cover scan.

Well, Shaun Hutson doing a movie novelisation of a 40 years old vampire movie. Sounds interesting.

As always with this novels there is a foreword by John Hough, the director of the movie. This is a nice intro, nothing earth-shattering, still fun to read.

After that we got the writers intro, one of those "when I was six I saw my first Hammer movie" things. But he also makes kind of a manifesto how he approached the task, he didn´t want to update or "re-imagine" it (which is an interesting stance which I will come later to) and he hates Twilight. Well, who doesn´t?

This is written in a very different style then Hutson´s normal novels. Gone is the lean, hard-boiled, staccato words and chapters writing, here you get long paragraphs with lots of descriptions. This is a good read, but there is some padding in the 53 chapters. This is a long novel.

Now I like Twins of Evil a lot, what´s not to like about Peter Cushing as a semi-villian and the often nude Collinson twins. It isn´t so over the top like Vampire Circus and not so hilarious as Lust for a Vampire, and it is still a shame that the Black Mass scene which resurrects Carmilla is so tame because of the censors.

But some elements just doesn´t make any sense. Now the timeline and the locations of the Karnstein Trilogy is of course one of this mythological pasts. Still, this is explicitly dated in the novel as 1795, which make Gustav Weil and his witch-hunters even more unbelievable. I mean, the reader has to believe that in the napoleonic era somewhere in middle europe there are a bunch of puritans (shouldn´t they at least be calvinists?) who kidnap innocent girls and burn as witches - without a trial - while the lord of the domain and the authorities shrug it off. Even Weil as a character doesn´t make sense; what is his day-job and for what offense are the victims chosen? This is all so random and not in a good way.

But Hutson doesn´t meddle with this, like he said. He takes all the elements which doesn´t made sense and put them straight on the page, even those in the WTF category. He doesn´t improve the script, he doesn´t give Weil a back-story, he doesn´t explain any of the witch-hunting.

Of course this is perfectly valid approach to do a movie-novelisation. The problem here is that it is very awkward sometimes on the page, and Hutson involuntary has to do some damage-control for the motivations so that the characters doesn´t always appear as brain-dead. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn´t.

On the other hand Hutson can´t resist to unite all Hammer vampire movies into a new timeline. So now Kiss of the Vampire is happening at the same time as Twins as the heroes of this movie, the honeymooning Harcourts, have a cameo. Of course this will only be noted by Hammer enthusiasts, but it reads truly strange.

As expected Hutson has upped the gore and sex - this is Shaun Hutson, I really would have been disappopinted if this was not the case - so we get some explicit dismemberments, a morning star into your face and necrophilic oral sex. Of course all in good taste

Aside from the nerd quibbles this is a fun novel. Maybe it would be better if they sold this with a dvd of the movie because it is debatable if you really need this book. Still, it is something different for a change. Allegedly Hutson will do two others, and the next one is Mark Morris doing Vampire Circus and I can´t wait to read the begining of that one I still marvel that they managed to put this on the screen where a few years earlier they had to fight for every exposed nipple and blood on the hands.