Shaun Hutson - The Skull

[killercrab]

For years I've been evading reading Shaun Hutson's work - his horror badboy image bandied around wherever he was mentioned. He wrote The Slugs - yet another bad bug book to add to the masses.

I was in Cumbria the week of the shootings and towards the end of that week ran across a Hutson I'd never heard of The Skull. The blurb on the back sounded okay and I was in a strange mood for some raw rough storytelling - unpolished fuckoff horror. Couldn't of asked for a better book - a skull gets dug up and after getting bloodied , grows flesh which turns in a monster. A Homunculus to be precise. The rest of the book it rampages through the local population ( a small village 'natch) despatching the villagers in various graphic ways. A bit of supernatural mixed with bodycount.

I believe this was the second horror novel he wrote ( Death Day the first which incidently I also got from the same Chasser ). The Skull has touches of Quatermass and the Pit , it echoes The Creeping Flesh a bit - it's pacey and well constructed. The dialogue appears on your lips before you read it which is a neat trick. I wouldn't argue it's a masterpiece but it's certainly good enough.

Like I said I was in the mood - so wanted Hutson top bring it *on*. I'm now reading Erebus which so far is a ratchet up on both writing quality ( though I still predict dialogue) and more importantly slimey mucoid copper smelling gore! Which Hutson did you bloody yourself with then ?

KC

[erebus]

Of course my opinion of his work is very high ( what does that say about me )
Anyway his horror stuff was in this vein up until around Captives and Heathen. The works beyond that were for from his splatter fests and became more thriller based.
For absolute deranged sleaze and gore you have to read Chainsaw Terror. Its a blast.

[dem bones]

In a word, Slugs, although it was long after the event (i think Victims was in the shops at the time). Picked it up in a secondhand bookshop in Burnt Oak for pennies, and polished off most of it on the tube journey home. it was Erebus next - liked that one a lot - Assassin, Victims .... As with James Herbert post-The Fog, as far as my enjoyment of his work goes, it's been very much the law of diminishing returns. Each one i read i got off on slightly less than the previous one (although i like the sound of The Skull and Chainsaw Terror). i abandoned Stone Angels midway, never felt any great enthusiasm to even start Twisted Souls. i've read Spawn but can't remember a damn thing about it. Franklin gave me a copy of Breeding Ground (Slugs sequel) not long back and i belted through that, had a far more fun time with it than his more polished novels, so maybe i'll give another of the oldies a second go and decide i was his undisputed number 1 fan all along.

[killercrab]

I think Spawn is the one about foetuses coming to life ? However I could be mixing things up as I've been reading up on Hutson this last week and it's a blur. I'm blitzing through Erebus which does seem a popular one. Not to eager to check out his gangland stuff myself - but who knows?

Erebus - thanks for the input!

KC

[andydecker]

Jun 13, 2010 17:58:16 GMT killercrab said:

Not to eager to check out his gangland stuff myself - but who knows?

They are very hit and miss, just like his later "thrillers". Nemesis is the best one of the bunch, of course it is a horror-crime novel. I personally like Renegades, even if it is overlong and both elements doesn´t mesh good.

I have a soft spot for Deadhead because I liked the doomed hero. But a lot of the other were blah.

[killercrab]

I passed on another Hutson today figuring I'll find it cheaper at some point ( and having enough in stock if you like). I'm enjoying Erebus ALOT - okay the idea of genetically modified food might seem passe now - but back a few years it was less contemporary.

Nevermind the guy getting his dick bit off getting a whole chapter ! Trash on! ;D

KC

[dem bones]

Shaun Hutson - The Skull (Hamlyn, 1982)

Blurb
It has been waiting for centuries — buried in the place they call the evil ground.
It is waiting for just one drop of blood to restore it to life.
Now its chance has come. First the bones grow a covering of flesh.... Then a grotesque body appears ...
When the hideous monster is complete, it rampages through a flood-stricken village in its search for living flesh.
And those who survive its savage attacks confront a fate even more horrifying ...

it must've been that mention of Gary Brander did it, because no sooner had i written up The Mark Of The Loser than my first Hamlyn find of the new decade! Just look at that cover! isn't it magnificent? So pre-battered that, had it fallen into the clutches of the charity shops it would be on it's way to a landfill site by now (unless it was that branch of Oxfam Lord P. was telling us about, in which case we'd have to raise upwards of an arm and a leg to rescue it).

Lockston, Derbyshire. Against his better nature, twenty four year old surveyor Nick Regan has accepted a commission that will eventually see a luxury hotel built on the outskirts of his tranquil village, and now the weather is punishing him good and proper. Day after day of relentless rain has turned Lockston and environs into a glorified bog, but contracts have been exchanged and if they come in behind schedule the client won't pay. Nick tries to get things moving, only for a gaping chasm to open in the soil and suck down a JCV. Smart, just what he needs. The entire construction site is riddled with a network of ancient subterranean tunnels!

With Nick trying to figure his next move, Chrissie, his archaeologist wife, finds a curiously shaped sealed flask while escorting the local schoolkids on a field-trip. Back at the museum Professor Peterson, her kindly, wispy haired old mentor, dates the item as circa 1650 and instructs his smarmy young colleague Paul Swan to break it open because there's something rattling about inside. A moment of high drama: an inhuman shriek fills the laboratory, the most abominable, fetid stench sets Swan to vomiting gloriously into the sink, and there, inside the flask.... a tiny, perfectly formed human head floating in a pool of blood and semen. It's a homunculus!

A delighted Peterson launches into a stream of mumbo jumbo about Robert Fludd, the philosopher's stone & Co., which so annoys the realist in Regan that he storms out moaning about "nutters", Chrissie, apologising for his tantrum, following in pursuit. The Prof couldn't he happier. He wants to be alone with HIS discovery. "Regan can scoff: they could all scoff. He didn't care. When he knew the secret they would apologise to him. Apologise and bow down."

At Nick's request, Chrissie consults the ledger in the local library for any strange references to the site, but the best she can come up with is a paragraph concerning a haunted house in the nineteenth century. This is because Prof Peterson paid a visit only hours before her - and removed the volume relating to events in the year 1650!

i've already burnt through 50 pages and, in keeping with the Jamesian plot, it's surprisingly restrained. The body count to date is a modest zero and equally incredible, we had to wait until p. 25 for the first hint of bad sex, and even then it's straightforward stuff, over almost before you can admire Nick's "swollen organ."

Can he keep this up for the remaining 130 or so pages?

[dem bones]

P. 61 and we have lift off. Up 'til now, Hutson's played it like a slightly raunchier version of E. G. Swain, but a ghastly The Skull Of The Marquis de Sade moment has seen us safely delivered into proper, "his hand tore through her stomach wall and into the jellied mass of intestine" Hamlyn territory.

Regan leads a team of construction workers down into the icy tunnels, returns to surface clutching an out-sized skull with four huge incisors. While Swan is examining this strange specimen at the Museum, the jaws clamp shut, shredding both protective glove and the hand beneath. He's soon bandaged up but - the pain! Chrissie takes a look at it for him and almost loses her lunch.

"The hand had turned grey, swollen black around the cuts themselves. A fetid mixture of blood and some other watery liquid was running freely from the wounds. Hastily formed scabs had been torn apart by the escaping matter ...."

Swan is rushed to hospital to confound the medical profession by falling into a coma and turning deathly grey all over. Nineteen year old nurse Penny Ross is appointed to keep vigil at his bedside and is soon so engrossed in her racy paperback, Soft Flesh, Hard Men (illustrated), she doesn't notice when his eyes suddenly snap alert ....

Professor Peterson takes the loss of his resident taxidermist in his stride, having far more exciting business to attend. Now that it has tasted human blood, the skull is regenerating (see Reptilicus for a scientific explanation). A horrible layer of translucent skin clings to the bony contours and there's the beginnings of a stump. What will it eventually look like? Chrissie for one doesn't wish to find out and sneakily reports the find to the Museum's funding body who decide the potential danger far outweighs any advantages to anthropological research and vote two to one in favour of the skull's immediate destruction. Peterson seemingly takes defeat on the chin, jumps in his car and drives off like a maniac.

Chrissie is worried how the episode will affect her working relationship with the Prof, but when she catches up with him at the museum he's in a suspiciously chipper mood. There's been a break-in! The thief made off with the skull so no need to worry about it anymore! Chrissie suggests they call the police but Peterson wouldn't dream of troubling them over such a trifling matter. Entirely satisfied with his highly believable version of events, Chrissie departs to inform Nick of the burglary. The chuckling Professor drives home to check on the progress of his lovely skull which has now developed a neck, a pair of shoulders and the beginnings of a chest cavity!

To be very continued ...

[andydecker]

I always liked this one better than the supposed "first" novel the Slugs. Even if it is much more traditional in its structure than his later books.

[dem bones]

all finished now and yes, traditional as in "strangely nineteen fifties in feel", i thought, a bit like GNS's The Slime Beast in that respect. i've never felt the slightest inclination to tackle Shaun Hutson's later, 'better' work (Stolen Angels was the last i half-read), but this, the two Slugs books, Spawn and Erebus are great fun. Belting dialogue, too. The word 'sputum' shows up so often, i genuinely began to suspect it was a none too subliminal plug for a previous novel, and then there's:

"It's male, whatever it is," said Chrissie.
"How can you be sure?" said Sheridan.
"It had a penis."
The Doctor stroked his chin thoughtfully. "If it's the male, we are to assume that it needs a mate." He stopped, not sure whether his words were sounding ludicrous or not. "The purpose of every creature on earth is procreation."
"Perpetuation of species," echoed Chrissie.
"You said that it had a penis," Sheridan said. "We can assume that copulation would take place in the normal way. The only thing is, if the creature is one of a kind, what is it going to use as a procreative agent?"
Beech looked angrily at the doctor. "Sod all this scientific language. What the Hell do you mean?"

He'll find out soon enough.

By the final third of The Skull, the quiet approach evident in the early chapters is such a distant memory you begin to wonder if you imagined the first fifty pages, as Hutson takes the route of the trad James Herbert/ GNS nasty - grisly vignettes, wobbly "science", the-one-who-gets-infected, chilling epilogue, the common man as hero, etc. The monster is now fully formed, mobile and fast amassing the collection of human heads it needs to create more of its own kind. Fleeing the Professor's cellar once it's torn him to pieces, it sets up base at the derelict Lockston railway station, bad news for the village tramp, Desmond Muddlin, who keeps his stash of Mayfair's in the ticket office. Aroused from his drunken slumbers by scratching noises, Des sets out to investigate, suspecting its only the rats making a nuisance of themselves. In a rare show of pity, Hutson assures us Des was dead before the homunculus set to eating his insides.

Two nights later and denim clad Vic Salter and his bra-less wife Kerry are returning from her mothers when their mini breaks down. Vic, as miserable as he always is after visiting her parents, storms off in the sheeting rain to find a phone box. When his brother arrives to pick them up, the state of their mangled, half-eaten corpses is so gross that afterward he has a hard time remembering just how many times he threw up at the scene.

Nick and Sergeant Beech have now established that the homunculus has taken refuge at the disused railway station. Armed to the teeth they set out on their grim search and destroy mission. Chrissie insists that Nick drop her off at the Museum as she wants to perform an experiment on a human thigh bone recovered from the tunnels by squirting it with a syringe-ful of mouse blood. When nothing happens after half an hour, she gives it up as a bad job. Of course, the minute her back is turned ....

Trust me, it would take a very special novel indeed to keep me from my latest find, the omnibus of guaranteed sidesplitting mirth that is 'Allo. 'Allo: The Secret War Diaries of Rene Artois (relax: details to follow shortly) and The Skull held my attention right through to the suspenseful and bloody climax.

Highly recommended.

[andydecker]

Feb 21, 2011 20:10:19 GMT dem bones said:

Hutson's later, 'better' work (Stolen Angels was the last i half-read),

Stolen Angels is for me the Hutson where he lost something. This was a terrible bore, and after this his novels seldom worked for me as good as the earlier ones. It is as if he hadn´t any fun any longer with his work. As much as I admire his lean style he adopted at the time -which is so difficult to maintain - the storys were not the same.

[Deleted]

Feb 21, 2011 22:16:30 GMT andydecker said:

Feb 21, 2011 20:10:19 GMT dem bones said:

Hutson's later, 'better' work (Stolen Angels was the last i half-read),

Stolen Angels is for me the Hutson where he lost something. This was a terrible bore, and after this his novels seldom worked for me as good as the earlier ones. It is as if he hadn´t any fun any longer with his work. As much as I admire his lean style he adopted at the time -which is so difficult to maintain - the storys were not the same.

I enjoyed Hutson's work throughout my teens and early twenties. But after Renegades he seemed to slide into 'muscular thriller' mode and the supernatural elements took a back seat - or were excised altogether. I wasn't interested after that.

In retrospect, a lot of it was rubbish, but I still have a fondness for Relics and a couple of others.

[bluetomb]

Finished this one last night, the first Hutson I've read for a very long time. I read a half dozen aged 10-11 and from memory liked Renegades and Assassins very much and the others quite a bit, but I was defeated by the first chapter of Spawn and then just kinda moved on. The Skull has hooked me again though. The story has a monstrous skull discovered when a digger on a construction site falls into a subterranean cavern. It regenerates itself with blood after chomping on a hapless museum worker's arm, gets a helping hand from a misguided professor and then goes on a bit of a rampage. Much as I expected, its got prose that's basically functional, with the odd flash of inspiration, a brisk pace and cinematic vibe, perma-pissed off salt of the earth protagonist in surveyor Nick Regan, a spot of goofy sex ("Then the fury of her own orgasm overcame her and they writhed like trapped flies on a spider's web") and gloriously detailed horrific innards wrecking gore ("There was a sharp crack as the pressure shattered his larynx, driving it back in splinters into the muscular wall of his throat"). All topped off with a tip top tense double punch climax.


Unfortunately though, it definitely needed tightening up. Too much restraint. No sex till page 25 (first chapter is a tease), no gore till page 56, no slaughter till page 96, and the ultimate body count isn't that high, with only a few scenes getting really full on. Plus the origin of the creature is fumbled, it gets called a homunculus but what we get of its history doesn't back that up, so all the investigation bits and an entire early scare sequence just come across a bit as wasted energy. And speaking of that early scare sequence, how does a small village museum exactly and almost immediately date a find to 1650? Why would the professor and his staff decide that breaking it to see inside would be a good idea? And why is the professor casually mentioned as having destroyed it, with no further questioning? I know I shouldn't really be grousing about this sort of stuff, it just grates here because it goes nowhere. I can get behind silliness, but generally it has to be woven in the fabric of the story as a whole, not outlying. Still, its a fun read in general and when its on its really on. Worth a read...

[franklinmarsh]

Heh! I'd promised meself a rematch with this, and despite the combined sensory assault of Richard Staines and Father Brown, have managed to wade through it again. I still like it. Peculiarly restrained considering Hutson's reputation, and that's what gives it that little bit of difference. KC's Creeping Flesh analogy is apt, although it's blood rather than water that causes the regeneration, despite a downpour that lasts virtually the whole book. A village cut off, the aggressive but heart of gold protagonist and his Phwoar! Mrs., ineffectual policing, a decent monster, the stuggle of management and the working class, shotguns and Mayfair magazine. A slow-paced goodie.