Horror Rewind #9 – ‘Spawn’ by Shaun Hutson (1983)

Stephen King famously wrote in Danse Macabre, his 1981 study of the horror genre, “I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I’ll go for the gross-out. I’m not proud.”

Shaun Hutson – who writes like a man in a hurry – evidently decided to save time, skip the first two emotions and go straight for the gross-out, at which he was the 80s’ undoubted master. Spawn came hard on the heels of the book for which he’s best known, Slugs. In that, a plague of carnivorous slugs wreaks havoc in a number of creatively repulsive ways. Hutson had evidently read and (to put it mildly) been influenced by the early work of James Herbert: set man-eating beasts loose among civilisation and describe it all in explicit detail. Throw in some potentially fatal casual sex and repeat. Unlike Clive Barker or the Splatterpunks where the explicit gore and violence is used to make a point, in Hutson it’s an end in itself: everything else – characterisation, clunky dialogue, everything – is subservient to the gore.

In Spawn, fourteen-year-old Harold Pierce accidentally burns his infant brother Gordon to death while torturing craneflies. He then spends the next forty years in a mental home. Upon release he finds a job as a hospital porter, where one of his tasks is to feed materials to the furnace: this includes linen too soiled to wash, but also aborted foetuses. This triggers memories of Gordon and, racked by guilt, he secretly steals the foetuses and buries them in the ground to atone for his sin. A violent electrical storm, however, damages a nearby pylon and the surge of electricity into the earth resurrects them. Harold becomes their slave. Meanwhile, psychotic killer Paul Harvey has escaped from prison and is on the rampage.

So, how does Spawn stand up four decades later? Badly. Really fucking badly.

Firstly, credit where it’s due. The scene where, cradled in Harold’s arms, the first foetus wakes up is superbly done: a real skin-crawling yet utterly riveting piece of writing. As is the episode where a hospital porter is killed by the terrible mental powers of the mutant foetuses. It’s a shame that so much of this novel fails to live up to set-pieces like these, because there are things Hutson does well. Or at least, does in great detail: “He felt something wet dripping from his burning cheek. Things went black as his right eye swelled under the intense heat then, in a moment of mind blowing agony, the sensitive orb seemed to bulge and burst. Blood gushed freely from the ruptured eye.” The pace of the narrative always slows at moments such as this, like cars passing a crash on the motorway, to take in every gory detail of a scene.

The authority figure – ostensibly the hero – investigating Harvey’s escape is Inspector Lou Randall and although post-Sarah Everard we shouldn’t be too surprised by police attitudes to crimes against women, I think the blame here lies with the author rather than the character, when he reflects that his job recently has consisted of “nothing more serious than a couple of rape cases.” What?! But that’s just scratching the surface of what is a horribly misogynistic text. Judith Myers and Lynn Tyler, as soon as we’re introduced to them in separate scenes, examine their bodies, paying attention first of all to their breasts – because that’s what women always do, right? – then later on we are told that some pretty nurses are “tending towards plumpness as is the habit of their profession”. Any woman who enjoys sex is considered – whether by herself or by the paranoid, judgemental society that Hutson sketches out – a slag. Male police officers are all given forenames and surnames, making the solitary reference to a “perplexed police-woman” stand out. The key plot point – that the resurrected foetuses are taking revenge on the women who aborted them – doesn’t exactly proclaim ‘pro-choice’, and while Hutson might reasonably say in his defence that men are killed, too – yes they are, and usually decapitated – the moments of violence towards men are underwritten, being jump-scares which swiftly cut away (don’t worry, the pathology reports give you all the gore you want) while the womens’ bodies revolt bloodily and messily.

If none of that makes you cringe, then there’s worse. Harold’s fellow porter Winston Greaves is black, and when they first meet “Greaves smiled back at him and it reminded Howard of a piano keyboard. The black man’s teeth were dazzling.” Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.

It gets weirder. Once you notice Hutson’s portentous use of time it becomes almost funny: there are constant – and I mean once every three or four pages throughout the entire book – references to the time of day. Sometimes a chapter will end with a variation of “it was 3.17 a.m.” Now, if the cogs of your plot are running like clockwork then this could be a great way to ratchet up the tension: if, for example, the reader knows that many things are happening – or look like happening – simultaneously, then knowing when each event happens adds to the excitement. But none of this is the case. The time – the exact time, and Hutson always, bizarrely, gives the exact time (“at three-fifteen”, “[the] clock had crawled around to 12.26 a.m.”, “it was approaching 2.23 a.m.”) – is in plot terms utterly irrelevant; nothing is ever contingent on the time of day. It becomes even more curious when you realise that the plot structure has weird loops in it. We are introduced to Judith, who (after, of course, examining her naked body) wants an abortion (she phones her doctor to arrange it at 10.05 a.m., in case you’re wondering), and this scene comes between two others that appear to be on the same day. Then, while the follow-up scenes to those surrounding ones play out either later the same day or perhaps the next morning, we are back with Judith only to find that “more than a week” has passed since her operation. Even Shakespeare would have balked at such a flagrant use of double-time, but not Hutson. Odd to spend so much of your novel concerned about hours and minutes when you’ve lost a whole week somewhere along the way.

For a (very) long time there seems almost no relationship between the two plot strands and the connection point, when it comes, is not credible. It seems like the author had two separate ideas, neither of which would stretch to a 287-page novel, and simply joined them together.

As we’ll see in the next (bumper) Horror Rewind, the leading men in the works of James Herbert are ciphers, empty shell Everymen that the reader can place themselves inside of. But even they seem like fully-fleshed characters compared to Hutson’s. There are few sympathetic or even vaguely likable characters in Hutson’s writing. In his misanthropic universe there’s little sign of finer feelings – little in the way of mutual affection (although Spawn has an unlikely and unconvincing relationship between policeman Randall and too-good-and-beautful-to-be-realistic Dr Maggie Ford), no friendship (“he didn’t know how to make friends”), no human connection (“he hated trusting other people”) – which ultimately makes for grimmer reading than all the forensically-observed gore. Halfway through Hutson seems to realise that we should be backing Lou Randall, so we are given a page-long info dump on the family tragedy that (supposedly) haunts him.

Perhaps surprisingly, Hutson’s prose has similarities with that of J.K. Rowling. Both writers (I’ve only read the Harry Potter series and can’t comment on her adult fiction) spell out everything, as if either lacking confidence in their own ability or doubting their reader’s: or, perhaps, both. Hutson tells us that Judith is “twenty-five, eight years younger” than her partner Andy. Then, in the same paragraph – lest the mathematics defeat us – he helpfully tells us that Andy is “thirty-three.” Thanks, Shaun. Also, as if our memories are defective – or, as is more likely, that the cardboard cut-out characters fail to stick in our minds in any way – people are always reintroduced with their full name (forename, surname) as if for the first time. He’s not afraid of overwriting, either: the moon, for example, is a “wreathed white orb”. It’s also such a scary place, this world of Hutson’s, that no noun is allowed outside without an accompanying qualifier. Teabags and hedgehogs are both, oddly, described as ‘tiny’; compared to a cow, yes: a hedgehog is tiny, but they’re always larger than you expect (living ones, anyway); as for teabags, well, again, compared to a cow they’re tiny, yes, but really on a human scale they’re just…teabag-sized. Once you notice these little stylistic tics they’re impossible to un-see, and happen so frequently it becomes funny. Shaun Hutson is not a humourless man, but Spawn is not funny in any way he may have intended. It’s also unpleasant but again, not necessarily in the way he intended. Or maybe it is?

What else did 1983 give us in the world of horror? Well, Stephen King’s Christine was released, as was John Carpenter’s film version; a busy year for King also saw publication of Pet Sematary and (with Bernie Wrightson) Cycle of the Werewolf. Another King adaptation, Cujo, also hit the big screen, as did two of David Cronenberg’s best films: The Dead Zone (was 1983 peak Stephen King?) and Videodrome. The less said about some of ’83’s other releases like Amityville 3-D, Jaws 3-D and Psycho 2, the better. Elsewhere on the book shelves James Herbert published Shrine, Dean R Koontz Phantoms, and Robert R McCammon Mystery Walk.