Spawn
Shaun Hutson
Star, 1986
ISBN: 0-352-31375-7
There’s something about Shaun Hutson’s writing that congers up images of low-budget-direct-to-video-80s-horror flicks. Those slightly dangerous movies that seem to come from a creator lacking in sanity or maybe simply just trying to push things as far as they can. Pushing things maybe just a bit too far. These outliers are where the real terror might be, nothing has been sanitized for mass consumption. “Visceral” might be the word for it.
Shaun Hutson is a visceral writer that inflicts visceral reactions out of readers. He’s a black or white writer. You get/accept it or hate/dismiss it fully. I dig it. He came up like a lot of British writers of his generation, writing under various names for books with numbers on the covers. He worked in military fiction as Wolf Kruger and Stefan Rostov. Then in the Piccadilly Westerns as Samuel P. Bishop. Both genres at the time were known for their slightly more extreme content than they’re American counterparts, i.e. sex and violence. He fit right in. But he was already writing horror under his own name too, starting with The Skull in 1982. You gotta put words on paper to make it as a writer, whatever anyone wants just inject a little of your style into it like Shaun Hutson did.
Early on in his career, he wrote Spawn and it’s a bit of a guidepost to a lot of his career. It’s wild, gross, horrific, outrageous and attention getting. It’s a printed Video Nasty, it's a seriously NASTY book. I completely understand anyone’s negative reaction to it, but eh, the sulci in my brain have been melted out smooth and I could look at it as a wonderful trainwreck of horror, wild and tropey and jaw-dropping. It’s pretty much what I’m looking for most in a 80s horror novel. Something that’s actually SHOCKING, but just sedated tales of ghosts or ghouls that use “mood” as an excuse for not delivering the goods.
Spawn is about reanimated (by lightning) fetuses that run around and murder people in gross ways. It’s a bit like if the Garbage Pail Kids were homicidal maniacs. Harold Pierce is a developmentally challenged man who accidently burned his house down as a child (burning bugs) which killed his brother and mother. So, Harold isn’t off to a great start. Later he gets a job in a hospital where his job is INCINERATING UNBORN FETUSES. Just yikes. The fetuses remind Harold of his younger brother so instead of burning them he buries them. Bingo-bango lightning storm and POOF, all the fetuses are alive again and out for blood, literally they want blood like little vampires.
On a side-note there’s also a Serial Killer named Paul on the loose, this doesn’t amount to much other than giving us some gory kill scenes. The good guys are in the form of cop Randall and doctor Maggie, they’re on the trail. These two come off a little like stock characters, which isn’t surprising in a book with characters and situations this crazy. They needed to be reassuring, “normal” characters stuck in the middle of all this chaos.
And it’s all chaos. It’s filled to the brim with gory death scenes that are in poor taste for most people. Abortion is a touchy subject and it's not surprising that most authors wouldn’t write a nearly 300 page book about it but also making the fetuses monsters. It’s a bold move, that only Huston would do (maybe Garth Marenghi) and maybe that’s a good thing. Hutson’s writing is fast-writing, dashed-off writing with immediacy, which works better in some of his other novels. This has the ear-marks of a splashy young novelist's bid for recognition, good or bad.
I’m a Hutson fan, but this is probably my least favorite. It’s even a little too distasteful for me. Chainsaw Terror or Slugs for me thanks. I’m pretty sure this gut reaction is exactly what Hutson was looking for, so I’m glad I could deliver. But I do like how far Hutson pushed it in this one, sometimes bad taste is enough to clap about.
Roy Nugen is an award-winning writer, producer, property master, plus actor. He comes from a family of musicians, engineers, wildcatters, cops, lion tamers, and carpet salesmen. Evil Dead II changed his life and he once partied with Lloyd Kaufman.
He has written 15 short films including Bag Full of Trouble, Potboiler, Handle With Care, Death in Lavender, Hole in the Ground, and the feature film Arrive Alive, many of which have played across the country. He has been the property master on 17 short films and 2 feature films.
Roy is also a prolific book reviewer and collector of vintage pulp paperback books. You can read his reviews on his blog Bloody, Spicy Books and multiple magazines including Paperback Fanatic, Hot Lead and Sleazy Reader. He has also written afterwards for novels and for various websites. He lives in the only city that once arrested L. Ron Hubbard with his wife and cats.