DEADHEAD By Shaun Hutson
Shaun Hutson is bloody marvellous. He writes brutal, nasty, horror fiction that makes you squirm. Since he started out in the mid-nineties Hutson has continued to ply his trade, producing in-your-face horror of the shock and gore variety. He’s the Jack Ketchum of the UK.
In Deadhead Hutson gives us Nick Ryan, former policeman and now Private Investigator, whose daughter, Kelly, is kidnapped by snuff-film makers who are blackmailing Kelly’s step-father. The backdrop is a series of brutal murders of homeless children.
Hutson sets the story in London, and gives us realistic details of a pre-cleanup Soho of depravity and pervery. His typical cast of characters, gangland bosses, dodgy property developers, and a dysfunctional family dragged into the hotpot of murder and sexual violence, are all present and correct.
Hutson provides his realistic setting for the horrific outbursts of violence, giving us brutal and gory details, so you can almost feel every piece of flesh flying at you after a shotgun blast to face. The sexual violence is uninhibited and really makes some scenes uncomfortable.
Huston is beyond any kind of limits most writers would set for themselves or their readers, and that’s where Hutson’s true power lies. Nothing is beyond his imagination, no matter how nasty, how wrong or how disgusting it is.
Deadhead is classic Hutson, like a raw wound you can’t help but play with!
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