Chainsaw Terror (1984, Shaun Hutson)

You don't have to go to Texas for a chainsaw massacre, you can stay in Kilburn.

Growing up in the 1980s I was always aware of Shaun Hutson- even though I largely shunned horror fiction back then- he was a big personality, gave hilarious interviews and looked like he should be fronting a heavy metal band, completely breaking with people's mental image of an English author being this Dennis Wheatley type elderly gent hunched over a typewriter, wearing a dinner jacket and his war medals.

I remember the covers for Slugs, Victims, Assassin, and so have these childhood memories of Hutson's work, without having experienced it until recently. The opportunity to break the habit of a lifetime came, very cheaply, my way recently. My local Tesco has this small section where people donate old books, it isn't staffed, but you're meant to drop some spare change into a charity donation bucket. A copy of his early book 'The Skull' appeared there, and so I picked that up only to realize I didn't have any change on me. Fortunately there wasn't anyone around, so I just simulated dropping money into the charity bucket. The next time I was there though I did purposely being along some spare change with me and dropped 24p in there, in very small change to make it look like I'm a better and more charitable person than I actually am.

This copy of The Skull has its fair to say, had a very hard life. It's in the kind of condition that would give book collecting aficionados nightmares. Every time I open it up part of the cover flakes off, the pages have this warped thickness suggesting it has been exposed to water, parts of it even have these muddy smears so possibly it may have been buried in the ground at some point, mirroring the plot of the book itself.

Despite practically needing to open its pages with a tire iron, The Skull was worth every one of the twenty four pence that I eventually paid for it. Looking around for what people had to say about The Skull online, I kept coming across references to this other early book of his called Chainsaw Terror. That sounded like music to my ears, especially when I learned it tackled two of my favourite subjects...Soho and women being violently killed with power tools.

The back-story to Chainsaw Terror is that it began life with Hutson's publisher pitching the idea that he should do a novelisation of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, only for that to fall by the wayside because the rights owners of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre wanted too much money. I gather there is a still a problem with novelising TCM since neither the original film, nor any of the numbered sequels have ever got tie-in novelisations. It wasn't until the 2003 remake that the TCM franchise got its first book adaptation. I doubt this was an oversight on behalf of the film companies that have owned TCM over the years, Cannon Films and New Line seemed keen to monetize their ownership of the property, so I have the feeling that someone connected with the original movie either wanted too much or just wasn't willing to play ball. There was a similar situation with the Death Wish sequels, where the author of the original novel Brian Garfield hated the movie adaptation and the direction the sequels went in, and was able to nix plans to novelise the movie sequels. To this day there hasn't been a novelisation of the original TCM, in spite of the current trend for novelising movies that never got a novelisation back in their day. Blood on Satan's Claw recently got a novelisation, as did Night of the Demon and Cruel Jaws, even Shaun Hutson himself has gotten in on the act by writing novelisations of two Hammer films...X the Unknown and Twins of Evil. For a project that began life as a TCM novelisation, there aren’t many traces of that remaining in Chainsaw Terror. Only one scene, where a man is clubbed with a hammer, spasms on the floor, then is dragged away to be cut up with a chainsaw, gives an insight into what a Shaun Hutson version of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre would look like. Instead Hutson, never one to be accused of good taste, appears to have been inspired by the true story of Dennis Nilsen, the gay serial killer who murdered several men and kept their bodies around for sex and company. In order to make this subject matter more palatable for an 1980s readership, the serial killer in Chainsaw Terror, Edward Briggs, is however straight, 'cause that makes him killing people with a chainsaw and making out with a several head that little bit more socially acceptable.

Hutson's version of a chainsaw massacre begins in 1978 when Ralph Briggs, a hardworking carpenter who shares his Kilburn home with his wife and two children, returns home to find his wife intends to leave him for another man. Ralph doesn't take this well, and responds by beating her up, murdering her with broken glass then using the murder weapon to slit his own throat. Setting out his stall early on, Hutson spares no detail when it comes to gushing gore or undignified details 'as blackness finally swept over him, his sphincter muscle failed'. Fast forward a few years to 1983 and surviving Briggs siblings Edward and Maureen are still living at their parents' house and are disturbingly re-creating the parent roles. Especially Edward, who is very much his father's son, having inherited his father's carpentry business and developed a jealous streak when it comes to Maureen. Despite regularly getting hit on by nympho housewives in his career as an odd job man 'he felt uncomfortable in the company of women' and bores holes in their walls, symbolizing his sexual frustration. Edward only has eyes for Maureen, and likes to jerk off while watching her through a peephole or molesting her in her sleep. History threatens to repeat itself when Maureen announces her intension to leave him for another man, and Edward decides that rather than allowing her to leave in peace, he'd rather she stayed in pieces.

When not making out with her severed head and calling her a whore, Edward rationales that he too should be allowed to go out and make new friends. So starts making pilgrimages to Soho, where he picks up prostitutes, then takes them home to meet his sister, and a variety of power tools.

As a kid I tended to look towards film and video as where the wild and outrageous innovations where being made, and regarded books as a far more respectable and staid medium. Well, the likes of Chopper, Bamboo Guerrillas, Eat Them Alive and now Chainsaw Terror sure have kicked that kind of thinking out of me. Respectable and staid are never words that will be synonymous with Chainsaw Terror. Eat them Alive is said to be a favourite of Hutson's, which makes perfect sense. Whereas with Eat them Alive though, it may have been that Pierce Nace's lack of experience in the horror genre may have led her to think that all horror books and movies were just wall to wall bloodshed and sadism, and therefore Eat Them Alive was a work of accidental extremism, there is nothing accidental about that extremism of Chainsaw Terror. This wasn't a book that was intended to go quietly into the night, this was 1984, the height of the video nasty panic, and Chainsaw Terror was blatantly designed to wind-up the tabloids, get confiscated by parents and teachers, to cause outrage and get arrested. The extent that it did get in trouble is where myth and reality have gotten a little blurred. For years the story that was trotted out about Chainsaw Terror was that it completely banned, and eventually re-released in a heavily cut version that removed all of the gore. In recent times a clearer picture of what happened has began to emerged. It appears that Chainsaw Terror fell foul of a leading book distributor, Bookwise, who refused to carry it, purely because it had the world Chainsaw in the title. This being around the time that the availability of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre on videotape was causing a stink, and a few years away from Fred Olen Ray's Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers having to forgo the 'C' word for its UK video release. The Bookwise ban effectively killed Hutson's plans for two further Chainsaw related books called Chainsaw Slaughter and Chainsaw Bloodbath, and lead to his publisher re-releasing it under the less controversial title 'Come the Night'. Another urban myth that has sprung up over this book is that the Come The Night edition is heavily cut, which has made Chainsaw Terror the preferred, and more expensive edition to seek out. In a twist in the tale, avid book collectors who have copies of both Chainsaw Terror and Come the Night have since compared the two and found that apart from the title, there are no differences between them, everything that is in Chainsaw Terror is in Come the Night. Rather than devalue Chainsaw Terror, copies of which are known to fetch around £300, this has actually increased the prices of the two editions of Come the Night. Both the 1985 reprint, and a 1999 edition which was part of a 'three books for the price of one' release that triple-billed it with two other Hutson books that had originally been published pseudonymously.

I'm guessing that Hutson used a pseudonym 'Nick Blake' on Chainsaw Terror because it started life as a commission. Still, while I can understand him writing war and sci-fi novels under fake names, on account of those genres not being what his name is synonymous with, Chainsaw Terror has Shaun Hutson written all over it, and entirely fits in with the nature of the books he used his real name on. If anything Chainsaw Terror is exactly how I'd imagined his books would be like over the years, far more so than The Skull which has always been attributed to him.

Persistent rumours have it that this book was pre-censored by the publisher and around 20 to 25 pages were removed prior to it being  released in 1984. There appears to be evidence of this in the scene where Edward Briggs is about to drive a power drill through the eye of a Soho prostitute, only for the writing to skip over the gore and cut to her dead. Which is uncharacteristic for Chainsaw Terror, this isn't a book to look away from the unpleasant side of life. There has also been speculation that the scene where Edward comes close to killing the two kids, only for their mother to come home and thwart his plans by tripping over the wire of his drill, may have originally been a bit longer and possibly Edward got a second wind. This I am on the fence about, that whole scene is set up for you to expect the worst, only to surprise you by pulling back, as if Hutson was saying "yeah you really thought I was gonna kill those kids, but I'm not that much of a sick bastard". Maybe I'm crediting Hutson with too much of a conscience there though, for all I know there's 20 extra pages floating around of Edward working those two brats over with a blowtorch and a power drill. The official line is that Hutson's original manuscript is now lost and unless that resurfaces the published edition is now the de facto uncut version. Hutson's book was also published in France as "La Tronconneuse De L'Horreur/The Chainsaw of Horror", but they merely got the same edition that we did in the UK.

There is a tendency to speak of Shaun Hutson in the same breath as Guy N. Smith, even though Hutson has been known to take the piss out of poor Guy over the years. Hutson is rumoured to be the source of the famous joke about Guy N. Smith… that Guy N. Smith was such a good farmer because he spread his own books on his land. Which seems to have amused Smith to the extent that he even included that joke in his own autobiography 'Pipe Dreams'. I'm not sure he author of Chainsaw Terror earned the right to look down on the author of Bamboo Guerrillas, it often feels as if Hutson and Smith were in continuous competition with each other back then over who could write the most scenes featuring inappropriate erections. I haven't done a boner count on Chainsaw Terror Vs Bamboo Guerrillas, but both must rate high on the peter meter. Hutson and Smith were also both big on writing heroes that bore more than a passing resemblance to their creators. Smith had his pipe smoking, aquiline featured, hunting enthusiasts, and in Chainsaw Terror, Hutson's man, Dave Todd is this leather jacket wearing, darts playing, sweary journalist, very much created in Hutson's own image.

Where Smith and Hutson do have a parting of the ways, is that with Smith I get the impression that once he became known as a horror novelist he self-consciously cut himself off from horror literature and cinema for fear of being accused of plagiarizing other people's work. In the 1990s, Smith wrote a guide to writing horror fiction, imaginatively titled 'Writing Horror Fiction', in which he goes into the history of pulp horror and comes across as well versed on people like H.P Lovecraft and Algernon Blackwood, yet gets terribly vague when it came to his own generation of horror writers. Hutson, on the other hand, seemed happy to be influenced by the culture that surrounded him. Reading Chainsaw Terror you can sense you are in the company of someone who has seen Taxi Driver, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and possibly rented out Pieces, little suspecting that it's director would soon after be taking a chainsaw to Hutson's novel Slugs. There is this Taxi Driver like subplot to Chainsaw Terror about Dave Todd trying to rescue a prostitute called Vicki Powell from her evil pimp, Maltese Danny. I also get the feeling that Hutson may have rented Blow Out, since his hero faces a similar moral dilemma of having to jeopardize the life of the whore that he loves, and have her wired for sound to order to trap the killer. Another film that Chainsaw Terror reminds me of, although it has to be a coincidence as they both came out the same year, is Fear City. Which similarly juggles a serial killer plot with that of a tough guy trying to extract a prostitute from the vice world. I guess Shaun Hutson and Abel Ferrara were singing from the same song sheet in 1984.

Chainsaw Terror is Shaun Hutson trying to do for Soho what the likes of Taxi Driver and Fear City did for the deuce. It's this neon lit, soul sucking, sexual netherworld that Hutson is determined to drag you through. Allot of what he writes, does surprisingly hold up to historical scrutiny. During one of Edward's visits to London's red light district he encounters a porn film called Sex School, which sounds as if it's informed by the John Lindsay blue movies in which adult actresses portrayed schoolgirls in the jailbait fixated plots of Lindsay titles like Jolly Hockey Sticks, Schoolgirl Joyride and Girl Guides' Misfortune, which would still have been floating around Soho in the early 1980s.
At one point Vicki Powell recalls being beaten up by Maltese Danny for turning down two rich Arabs, who wanted her to blow one of them, while the other one held a gun to her genitals. This is in keeping with the real life reputation Arabs had in the London vice world back then for paying well but playing rough. In her autobiography Cosey Fanni Tutti recalls Harrison Marks playing the part of reluctant pimp by mentioning that if she wanted to earn a grand there were some rich Arabs in town, but then laid it on strong that they were into the sexually severe...lots of anal... ultimately leading her to the decision that the fucking she'd get wasn't worth the fucking she'd get.

The knee jerk reaction to the Arab anecdote, and making the pimp Maltese, is to wonder if Hutson is being a bit racist here, but once again historical accuracy appears to be on his side. According to an authoritative 1960 book on London vice called The Shame of a City, the majority of the Soho pimps back then were from places like Malta and Trinidad. This isn't reflected in movies from that time like Beat Girl and Passport to Shame, where pimpish characters tended to be played by white actors like Christopher Lee and Herbert Lom. Even in a more recent film like Last Night in Soho, you have an evil white pimp played by Matt Smith. The irony is that both then and now, black or darker skinned actors are losing out on roles that they are historically entitled to play. Back then because of a casting preference for white actors, and now because of a tendency to avoid casting black actors in negative roles.

Something else that Hutson hits the nail on the head about is the foul stench of severed body parts, trust one who knows. At the risk of going off topic, all good sense suggests I need to explain just how I know what severed limbs smell like. A few months ago, myself and a friend were walking around a country park near where I live, and we were hit by this vile, utterly repugnant smell which we dismissed at the time as stagnant water or fly tipping. A day later, the whole area was cordoned off and crime scene investigation vans were everywhere...and it turned out that they had discovered a severed arm, then later when they sent frogmen into the lake, half of a human head. Then another country park was closed down, after limbs were found there, then a further country park got closed down because they found the torso. Two men have been charged with the killing, rumour is that they worked in the meat trade and that is how they managed to dismember the body and the sight of them hauling bags of meat around didn't automatically arouse suspicion. Had those two not been arrested and charged, I might have had second thoughts about commenting on this book. Chainsaw Terror isn't the sort of book you want to admit to reading when severed limbs start showing up in your neck of the woods.

For all the inherent Britishness of Chainsaw Terror, I suspect the only small window of opportunity for a movie version to have been made would have been in Category III era Hong Kong, its cheerful bad taste would have snuggly fit in with The Untold Story and The Ebola Syndrome. When we handed Hong Kong back to China, we also threw away the chance to see Anthony Wong as Edward Briggs. The nearest visualization we're likely to see of Chainsaw Terror is the mock trailer for Garth Marenghi's Bitch Killer. Which comes from the Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace spin-off series 'Man to Man with Dean Learner', in an episode about an ill fated actor whose career was destroyed by appearing in a movie version of a Garth Marenghi book about a chainsaw maniac. "the dirtiest, nastiest, sexiest film you'll see all year". I would wager that the person who came up with that trailer is also a person who has exposed themselves to Chainsaw Terror at some point. The Bitch Killer trailer even imitates the white on red lettering used in the trailer for Pete Walker's Frightmare. So, if you're not just paying homage to Pete Walker films, but the look of a trailer to a Pete Walker film, you are clearly someone with advanced, master level knowledge of British sleaze, and are probably the person who has paid £300 for a copy of Chainsaw Terror.

Although there isn't the safety net of 'this could never happen in real life' that you have with Slugs or The Skull, I think Chainsaw Terror still captures the 'fun' side of 1980s gore that you get with The Evil Dead, Re-Animator and The Deadly Spawn. Yes, they are gross and revolting but it's a thrill ride that isn't going to leave you mentally scared or weighing heavily on your conscience. At the same time, Chainsaw Terror does anticipate the morbid, depressing direction that the gore film was heading in with the likes of Nekromantik, Aftermath, Deadbeat at Dawn, A Gun for Jennifer, where it felt like these films were made by angry, nihilistic people and gore stopped being fun for a while. Despite walking a tightrope between the two, for my money Chainsaw Terror always manages to stay on the entertaining side of gratuitous violence.

No names from me, but I had a bad experience with a recent self-published extreme horror novel, that by rights should have been the heir apparent to Chainsaw Terror. So, why did I get on with Chainsaw Terror and not this newer book about a chainsaw maniac? I suppose it was because the newer book gave the strong vibe that its author really needed to get laid, rather than spending all day writing about naked female bodies being mashed up, and incriminated himself as a suspect incel in his book. Whereas Chainsaw Terror for all its excess and Hutson's insensitive rock n’ roll swagger, still has the faint ticking of a moral compass. Bad people get what's coming to them, there is a redemptive story arc for Vicki Powell, and an everyman hero you can get behind in Dave Todd. Danny the pimp is simplistically depicted as a one dimensional scumbag and there is no attempt to humanize him or get into his head that you'd find with books by Iceberg Slim or Donald Goines. Chainsaw Terror does spend allot of time with Edward Briggs, but even there you never sense that Hutson regards Edward as anything other than a freak and a weirdo. There's a line in the sand drawn between author and chainsaw maniac here that you probably wouldn't get with a writer of the incel persuasion.

Chainsaw Terror leaves the impression that once the cheque for writing it cleared, Hutson was down the pub or going to a Liverpool FC match, rather than buying a new chainsaw and slaughtering innocents. It should be mentioned that the copy I read of Chainsaw Terror is a library copy, which was evidently taken out of a local library for just about every week of 1986 and into 1987. A reminder of just how mainstream and popular, horror sleaze was with the British public, back in the wonderful, morally bankrupt decade that was the 1980s. Apart from with the one library user who felt compelled to write in pen, and in block capitals 'TRASH' on one of the closing pages of the book. Though I suspect that Hutson is of that rare breed of author who would take that kind of incensed defacing as a complement.