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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Split personality., 31 Oct 2002
Hutson's latest is a skilfull blending of both horror and thriller genres. Not only does the master give us, essentially, three books in one, but we're also treated to a glimpse of what he can do with a quiet room, a dark night and an unstable mind, somthing that many fans would agree has been long missed in Hutson's work.Christopher Ward is a struggling novelist whose early success has slowly but surely run away from him. Now he spends his days working on a book that nobody wants to read, or publish, and his despondancy and general bitterness towards a literary world that doesn't seem to need him anymore sends him spiralling into madness. Or so it seems. Pages of his latest opus churn out from his printer, but he has no knowledge of how they came to be. Hutson's eponymous protagonist, Sean Doyle, is lent to Ward as a fiction within a fiction, and goes about his Anti Terrorist business with the now expected, nay, ubiquitous, fervour, blasting away IRA gunmen, drawing the wrath of his long suffering superiors, and even finding time to fight a few Islamic Fundamentalists along the way. But as Doyle's imagined life spews forth from a machine that Ward is sure he turns off every night before he retires, Ward's real one is falling apart like a badly structured plot; not something that Hybrid could be accused of. The "apparitions" come at night. The madness gestates by day. The clever locking together of each story, with Doyle hurtling along at 100 miles an hour, only to be interrupted by Ward's more sedate, but equally intriguing, plotline, means that any fan (or indeed those unlucky enough to have never read a Hutson tale) just has to read that little bit more before putting the book down. Criticism has been levelled at Hutson in the past for his stripped down prose, but the flowery efforts of other writers in the genre just couldn't match pace with Hutson's relentless bombardment of the reader's imagination. A quick glimpse into the mind of one who has just finished one of his books would no doubt show a landscape drenched in blood, sweat and testosterone with every cell grinning like a buffoon between the still smoking bullet holes, each on the size of a man's fist, naturally. Simply put: Simply brilliant.
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by Shaun Hutson
by Shaun Hutson
by Shaun Hutson
by Shaun Hutson
by Shaun Hutson
