Shaun Hutson - Nemesis (W.H.Allen 1989, Sphere 1991, 349 pages)
Time for a Hutson re-read
August 1940: while Hitler's bombers are busy reducing London to rubble, biologist George Lawrenson is nearing the climax of Project Genesis – a daring experiment aimed at breeding a super-race to combat Hitler's armies. But the results of his work are so appalling in their implications that Churchill personally orders Lawrenson silenced and all traces of his experiment destroyed.
Almost half a century later Jon and Sue Hacket are contemplating the ruins of their marriage. A relationship already under strain now seems to have been destroyed by the savage murder of their baby daughter Lisa, und the couple retreat to the small town of Hinkston to pick up the pieces of their shattered lives.
But Hinkston is a town with a secret. A series of horrific and unexplained murders has brought terror to the area, and when Sue approaches Dr. Edward Curtis – a man famous in Hinkston for his treatment of infertile woman – to help her conceive another child, past and present evils give birth to a new nightmare …
Reading Hutson today is a bit difficult. One notices a progress in his craft, on the other hand you also can't ignore patterns in his writings which not always are for the best.
Nemesis was published a year after the superior
Assassin. In hindsight this is a phase where the writer obviously recognised the changing market and tried to adapt. In which he succeeded commercially. He managed to sell his work to mainstream publishers until 2010. No mean feat.
Back then plots became are bit more complex, novels became longer. From the beginning Hutson tried a broad approach thematically, he never was exclusively what one could call a writer of the supernatural. And to his credit he didn't write the same story twenty times because it sold.
This surely helped him to survive when the horror bubble burst.
Nemesis is basically a mad scientist and his monsters' tale, but it also leans heavily into the thriller direction he a few years later increasingly followed to rather mixed results.
Nemesis is insofar interesting that it features evil children and murdered children, a topic he visited time and again. I never realized how many of his novels are basically about missing or murdered children.
Also,
Nemesis featured his from this point in his career often done technique of building his story on two parallel strands which at the end come together. And like in other books, this also brings mixed results. The bulk of the story is about the psychotic and cannibalistic children Dr Curtis produces. The other storyline is about the murder of the Hacket's daughter. After Jon Hacket chases on of the killers to a hot death on the underground-rails, his accomplice, a slimy paedophile, swears vengeance und stalks the Hackets to kill them. This part of the story is very one-dimensional, not very interesting and feels increasingly superficial. Also it stretches coincidence to the limit, as the bloody climax of this part of course happens in the same hour when Hacket discovers the truth about the evil children and how they are really conceived. Hutson basically used the same structure in
Assassin and
Renegades. In later years
Hybrid comes to mind, a novel which may be one of his most disappointing works yet.
The characterisation is entertaining, as usual all of Hutson's characters are bastards. Still, here he overdoes it quite a few times. The things – and the mutilations - the parents of the evil children endure are ridiculous and even in the context of the story unbelievable from a certain point on, and the twist on the last pages is so over the top that it killed at least my suspense of disbelief. But your mileage may vary. The story itself is rather weak, the less you think about it, the better.
At least the novel delivers in terms of sex and violence. The scene where the hotel owners daughter first seduces a male guest and then eviscerates him while still on top could be a classic, the same goes for the next to last scene, when the murderer gets his punishment while raping the heroine. As if the evil foetus of Spawn weren't enough.
But on the whole
Nemesis is an uneven book. It lacks the focused drive of the early, shorter works and in parts it drags a bit. But then it surprises you and suddenly does all the things you love about Hutson and which in later years were (regrettably) increasingly reined in.
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