What do you think?
Rate this book
Chainsaw Terror
Edward Briggs seems like a normal enough man. Not very friendly perhaps - but then who wouldn't after witnessing that bloody family tragedy?
Edward still lives in the house where it all happened. Now that's a little strange. So is his love for his sister. He doesn't like it much when she goes out. He'd much rather she stayed indoors with him. Always. In the cold, soundproofed house with the cellar workshop with the big, bloodstained workbench. And the tools...
Edward still lives in the house where it all happened. Now that's a little strange. So is his love for his sister. He doesn't like it much when she goes out. He'd much rather she stayed indoors with him. Always. In the cold, soundproofed house with the cellar workshop with the big, bloodstained workbench. And the tools...
173 pages, Paperback
First published March 15, 1984
2 people are currently reading
190 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews
February 4, 2023
I had been looking for a copy of this very elusive paperback by Hutson for a few years before I finally found a cheap copy. Alas, sometimes the chase is better than the catch! The rumors and backstory on Chainsaw Terror are much more intriguing than the novel itself, a basic splatterpunk slasher, albeit with powertools and chainsaws rather than knives. Huntson provides his trademark blood, excreta and sex with aplomb here, with our main protagonist being a reporter working on a story on the vice in London's Soho and some prostitutes and pimps to round out the cast. Some neat glimpses into the seedy underbelly of London but pretty cliché all the same. This does move at a fast pace, but you kinda know where it is going to go, so no real surprises along the way. It does read fast, especially as it is more a novella than a novel at only 170 pages or so. 3 limp stars 😒
October 23, 2023
One day, Ralph Briggs comes home to find his wife of 27 years, Sheila, packing up to leave him - for another man at that - tired of Ralph being gone 24/7, tired of zero intimacy for years on end, she is adamant the marriage is over and has been for a long time. But all Ralph sees is pure betrayal; he kills his wife, quite gruesomely, all while his son, Edward watches through the bedroom keyhole. Immediately after, Ralph kills himself.
Five years later, Edward has taken over his father's carpentry business and continues to live in the family home with his younger sister, Maureen. Edward is extremely withdrawn, shy, and uncomfortable around all women - except his sister.
However, Maureen is getting very tired of the status quo. She feels her brother has become way too overprotective - especially if she even so much as mentions a man's name - so she has kept her boyfriend of six months a secret. She stays with Edward in the house because she feels she owes it to him, not to mention the reaction he may have should she tell him she wants to move in with her boyfriend.
However, after growing increasingly desperate to leave the house, one night, she finally breaks the news. Edward goes ballistic, as predicted, and goes after her with a cleaver, decapitating her. He can't believe her betrayal. She's just like his mother - just like all women - a whore!
He keeps her severed head in a bedroom upstairs and continues talking to it, as if she were still alive. Soon, he begins bringing prostitutes home and "introducing" them to his sister - it's not long after that, that these women all meet the same grisly fate.
One such woman, Vicki, notices her friends are going missing, and it all centers around the same man she keeps seeing around. With the help of reporter and new love interest, Dave, they come up with a plan to find Vicki's missing friends for good.
-----------
Short, sweet and to the point. Like Norman Bates if he were obsessed with his sister instead of his mother. I'm very grateful to finally have a copy of the ever so illusive Chainsaw Terror. Was I hoping for a bit more? Yes, but still a very good read nevertheless.
Five years later, Edward has taken over his father's carpentry business and continues to live in the family home with his younger sister, Maureen. Edward is extremely withdrawn, shy, and uncomfortable around all women - except his sister.
However, Maureen is getting very tired of the status quo. She feels her brother has become way too overprotective - especially if she even so much as mentions a man's name - so she has kept her boyfriend of six months a secret. She stays with Edward in the house because she feels she owes it to him, not to mention the reaction he may have should she tell him she wants to move in with her boyfriend.
However, after growing increasingly desperate to leave the house, one night, she finally breaks the news. Edward goes ballistic, as predicted, and goes after her with a cleaver, decapitating her. He can't believe her betrayal. She's just like his mother - just like all women - a whore!
He keeps her severed head in a bedroom upstairs and continues talking to it, as if she were still alive. Soon, he begins bringing prostitutes home and "introducing" them to his sister - it's not long after that, that these women all meet the same grisly fate.
One such woman, Vicki, notices her friends are going missing, and it all centers around the same man she keeps seeing around. With the help of reporter and new love interest, Dave, they come up with a plan to find Vicki's missing friends for good.
-----------
Short, sweet and to the point. Like Norman Bates if he were obsessed with his sister instead of his mother. I'm very grateful to finally have a copy of the ever so illusive Chainsaw Terror. Was I hoping for a bit more? Yes, but still a very good read nevertheless.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
November 28, 2022
A straight to the point, fast read by "Nick Blake." Others know him better as Shaun Hutson. He doesn't much waver from his style while using this pen name. He just compresses it to 170 pages of mental crazies. Chainsaw and other tools mashing people up. Hookers and pimps. Wrongful feelings between brother to his sister. Oh yeah, there are some feelings between the reporter that is trying to figure out what's going on and a prostitute whose co-workers are disappearing. Worth the time to track down.
May 30, 2012
With feverish, sweat-rimed hands already staining the pages of the paperback, he began reading. His loins demanded the satisfaction of wet, wanton sex, while his heart craved the blood, the thick splashes of hot fluids, the reek of deathsex like a grey industrial cloud floating corpse-like in the dingy river of the sky.
The cover had promised fresh delights, the crudely-rendered chainsaw on the front preparing to rip out into the real world as if the prison of print could not contain the killer's lust for carnage. The blade practically throbbed, the viscera of spent life dripping from its hundred tiny claw-like blades. "TERROR THAT CUTS DEEP", the cover screamed. He hoped there would be more screaming than just the cover. Beside him, a stack of VHS tapes threatened to topple over, submerging the bag of Baked Wotsits beneath their plastic cases. The Driller Killer might be really thrilling, he had thought, but it had been a bore, something for those art school types who wanted to be on the edge but not wade into the abattoir and sift through the real guts. Video nasties weren't nasty enough. He wanted something where he could whiff the rich, fetid scent of a body's bowels loosening with the spasms of death.
When he snapped the book closed, he felt, for the first time in his life, a primal satisfaction. All that boring shit in books- plot, character, motivation- was cut out, leaving only the bloody chunks whirling across the room from the ripping power of the McCullough chainsaw. This was a real book: when people weren't being slaughtered, they were only a page away from sex or vomiting. Blood. Semen. Feces. Vomit. Fluids oozed on every page, dripping until the blood-drenched finale. Every butchered bowel expelled its foul cargo, and every time the scent was described in terms he could understand. Too many books thought he should be a doctor to get what was happening to some lovely's pink intestines, but Chainsaw Terror knew how to paint its scenes in blood without making him consult a textbook.
So what if the people in the book were too stupid to consult the police regarding their suspicions and chose to bait the killer themselves? It made sure more people were sliced 'n' diced. So what if it all it took to initiate a lesbian sex scene was a backrub after a hard day's prostituting? It seemed real enough to him. Probably happened all the time, just like psychos with tools went around doing a bit of the private wetwork on unsuspecting beauties. Sure, it was a little bit like a crap episode of Taggart directed by Herschell Gordon Lewis, but who cared? It was a real nasty piece of work, and he enjoyed it when the nasties went deep into the sewers, right into the reeking entrails of life, like a fat black rat feasting on the decaying bits of the world above.
He flipped back to the first page. The prostitutes in the book had kept offering a "half and half". Chainsaw Terror gave him a different kind of half and half: Half titillation, half mutilation. He couldn't wait to get thrilled again. He ate his Cheese Wotsits by the fistful, devouring them as he devoured every word again, the pages becoming gummy with orange thumbprint stains.
This, he thought, is what The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was supposed to be like.
Now if only he could find a copy of Garth Marenghi's Black Fang so he could see if a rat really can drive a bus. I hope that rat bloody well squishes the guts out of some people, he mused. Meanwhile, Edward Briggs's toolbox fury would suffice.
As he re-read the spicy bits, he hoped his mum would remember to bring him some ginger beer home from the store.
The cover had promised fresh delights, the crudely-rendered chainsaw on the front preparing to rip out into the real world as if the prison of print could not contain the killer's lust for carnage. The blade practically throbbed, the viscera of spent life dripping from its hundred tiny claw-like blades. "TERROR THAT CUTS DEEP", the cover screamed. He hoped there would be more screaming than just the cover. Beside him, a stack of VHS tapes threatened to topple over, submerging the bag of Baked Wotsits beneath their plastic cases. The Driller Killer might be really thrilling, he had thought, but it had been a bore, something for those art school types who wanted to be on the edge but not wade into the abattoir and sift through the real guts. Video nasties weren't nasty enough. He wanted something where he could whiff the rich, fetid scent of a body's bowels loosening with the spasms of death.
When he snapped the book closed, he felt, for the first time in his life, a primal satisfaction. All that boring shit in books- plot, character, motivation- was cut out, leaving only the bloody chunks whirling across the room from the ripping power of the McCullough chainsaw. This was a real book: when people weren't being slaughtered, they were only a page away from sex or vomiting. Blood. Semen. Feces. Vomit. Fluids oozed on every page, dripping until the blood-drenched finale. Every butchered bowel expelled its foul cargo, and every time the scent was described in terms he could understand. Too many books thought he should be a doctor to get what was happening to some lovely's pink intestines, but Chainsaw Terror knew how to paint its scenes in blood without making him consult a textbook.
So what if the people in the book were too stupid to consult the police regarding their suspicions and chose to bait the killer themselves? It made sure more people were sliced 'n' diced. So what if it all it took to initiate a lesbian sex scene was a backrub after a hard day's prostituting? It seemed real enough to him. Probably happened all the time, just like psychos with tools went around doing a bit of the private wetwork on unsuspecting beauties. Sure, it was a little bit like a crap episode of Taggart directed by Herschell Gordon Lewis, but who cared? It was a real nasty piece of work, and he enjoyed it when the nasties went deep into the sewers, right into the reeking entrails of life, like a fat black rat feasting on the decaying bits of the world above.
He flipped back to the first page. The prostitutes in the book had kept offering a "half and half". Chainsaw Terror gave him a different kind of half and half: Half titillation, half mutilation. He couldn't wait to get thrilled again. He ate his Cheese Wotsits by the fistful, devouring them as he devoured every word again, the pages becoming gummy with orange thumbprint stains.
This, he thought, is what The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was supposed to be like.
Now if only he could find a copy of Garth Marenghi's Black Fang so he could see if a rat really can drive a bus. I hope that rat bloody well squishes the guts out of some people, he mused. Meanwhile, Edward Briggs's toolbox fury would suffice.
As he re-read the spicy bits, he hoped his mum would remember to bring him some ginger beer home from the store.
January 20, 2020
This review first appeared on scifiandscary.com: https://www.scifiandscary.com/carry-o...
‘Chainsaw Terror’ is a book with an interesting history. In fact, the story of the book’s genesis and publication is in many ways more entertaining than the actual novel. It’s also a nice illustration of the conflict in the UK at the time between a public who were hungry for horror and a nanny state that was eager to protect them from the perceived dangers of it.
There are various versions of the book’s history available online, from what I can tell it goes something like this: Budding horror novelist Shaun Hutson is approached by his publisher to write a novelisation of ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’. He happily agrees, but the publisher fails to secure the book rights to the film and so changes his brief to just writing something horrible with the word chainsaw in the title. Hutson obliges with ‘Chainsaw Terror’ and it is published in 1984 under the pseudonym Nick Blake. The book is soon taken off the shelves of high street giant WH Smith, although it’s not clear whether that is because of the title, or because anyone there had actually read the book. Some versions of the story suggest the book was “banned”, but I suspect that’s not the case. What seems more likely is that once the largest bookseller in the UK refused to sell the book, the publisher, Star books, decided it wasn’t worth printing any more copies. The story continues with Star heavily censoring the book (some say by up to 25 pages) and re-issuing it under a new title (‘Come the Night’) in 1985. I’ll come back to that last part at the end of the review. You see, dear reader, I have both versions, so I can give you the low down on exactly what the differences are between them.
The book’s plot is pretty bare bones, almost to the point it isn’t worth talking about. A young boy witnesses his father murdering his mother. Years later as a young man he lives with, and lusts after, his sister. Eventually he kills her, and then a number of other women. As you might expect the killings are brutal and explicit and involve power tools. Hutson throws in some incestuous necrophilia for good measure. Around the midway point a rugged journalist gets introduced and starts investigating the disappearances. It would be a stretch to call him the hero, it feels more like Hutson suddenly realised he needed to write about more than just the sweaty brain of his villain.
‘Chainsaw Terror’ is a book that has a pretty clear purpose and achieves it. I wouldn’t call it good, but it is nauseatingly and memorably violent. The gritty scenes of murder and the London vice scene are more reminiscent of the dark crime books Hutson has come to write later in his career, than the horror we was writing at the same time as this book. It’s certainly an interesting entry in his canon, even if it isn’t his best book.
The controversy around its publication means the book is hard to come by, I’ve seen people asking £150 for a copy on eBay. So rare is it, that rather than doing a google search and downloading a cover image for this review, I had to take one myself. The reissue, ‘Come the Night’ is also pretty rare, although tends to be cheaper when it does come up for sale. It’s also available in an omnibus, published by Pan in 1999, that bundles it with two alien abduction novels Hutson wrote under the pen name Frank Taylor. This is by far the cheapest way of buying the book. You can pick up a copy from Amazon UK for 33p (plus postage).
Of course, if you did that, you’d be getting the “heavily censored” version, right? I have all three versions of the book, the original paperbacks of ‘Chainsaw Terror’ and ‘Come the Night’ and the omnibus version, so let me give you a blow by blow rundown of the differences….
There are none. Aside from the titles and covers, the books are identical. How the myth about ‘Come the Night’ being bowdlerised has come about I’m not sure. There is certainly evidence of a longer manuscript (Hutson has referred to it in interviews), but it was never published. Lesson: don’t believe everything you read online.
‘Chainsaw Terror’ is a book with an interesting history. In fact, the story of the book’s genesis and publication is in many ways more entertaining than the actual novel. It’s also a nice illustration of the conflict in the UK at the time between a public who were hungry for horror and a nanny state that was eager to protect them from the perceived dangers of it.
There are various versions of the book’s history available online, from what I can tell it goes something like this: Budding horror novelist Shaun Hutson is approached by his publisher to write a novelisation of ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’. He happily agrees, but the publisher fails to secure the book rights to the film and so changes his brief to just writing something horrible with the word chainsaw in the title. Hutson obliges with ‘Chainsaw Terror’ and it is published in 1984 under the pseudonym Nick Blake. The book is soon taken off the shelves of high street giant WH Smith, although it’s not clear whether that is because of the title, or because anyone there had actually read the book. Some versions of the story suggest the book was “banned”, but I suspect that’s not the case. What seems more likely is that once the largest bookseller in the UK refused to sell the book, the publisher, Star books, decided it wasn’t worth printing any more copies. The story continues with Star heavily censoring the book (some say by up to 25 pages) and re-issuing it under a new title (‘Come the Night’) in 1985. I’ll come back to that last part at the end of the review. You see, dear reader, I have both versions, so I can give you the low down on exactly what the differences are between them.
The book’s plot is pretty bare bones, almost to the point it isn’t worth talking about. A young boy witnesses his father murdering his mother. Years later as a young man he lives with, and lusts after, his sister. Eventually he kills her, and then a number of other women. As you might expect the killings are brutal and explicit and involve power tools. Hutson throws in some incestuous necrophilia for good measure. Around the midway point a rugged journalist gets introduced and starts investigating the disappearances. It would be a stretch to call him the hero, it feels more like Hutson suddenly realised he needed to write about more than just the sweaty brain of his villain.
‘Chainsaw Terror’ is a book that has a pretty clear purpose and achieves it. I wouldn’t call it good, but it is nauseatingly and memorably violent. The gritty scenes of murder and the London vice scene are more reminiscent of the dark crime books Hutson has come to write later in his career, than the horror we was writing at the same time as this book. It’s certainly an interesting entry in his canon, even if it isn’t his best book.
The controversy around its publication means the book is hard to come by, I’ve seen people asking £150 for a copy on eBay. So rare is it, that rather than doing a google search and downloading a cover image for this review, I had to take one myself. The reissue, ‘Come the Night’ is also pretty rare, although tends to be cheaper when it does come up for sale. It’s also available in an omnibus, published by Pan in 1999, that bundles it with two alien abduction novels Hutson wrote under the pen name Frank Taylor. This is by far the cheapest way of buying the book. You can pick up a copy from Amazon UK for 33p (plus postage).
Of course, if you did that, you’d be getting the “heavily censored” version, right? I have all three versions of the book, the original paperbacks of ‘Chainsaw Terror’ and ‘Come the Night’ and the omnibus version, so let me give you a blow by blow rundown of the differences….
There are none. Aside from the titles and covers, the books are identical. How the myth about ‘Come the Night’ being bowdlerised has come about I’m not sure. There is certainly evidence of a longer manuscript (Hutson has referred to it in interviews), but it was never published. Lesson: don’t believe everything you read online.
April 30, 2023
Ok look, I'm not a prude. (I've seen Showgirls on cable before.) I just question how a couple could be so inclined to jam their *checks* “rampant organs” together whilst nursing congealing knife wounds & a possibly broken eye socket. Not to mention them both being fully aware that their hooker besties are probably being chopped to bits at that very same moment. I’m just saying, priorities.
Anyhoo, onto this very elusive book. So elusive that the lore of how it came to be is just as interesting as the story itself. (Link in comments.) Nick Blake, aka vintage Shaun Hutson hid this gem deep in a musty dining room cabinet full of decaying body parts & I’m glad I did my digging. When it comes to the story, think Red Dragon meets Pretty Woman. Now throw in a little espionage (for the 80’s), the prostitutes are all being killed with different power tools, a heavy dash of incest, and also most of the romance is being directed towards a putrefied decapitated head. And then you get to the end & you’re like “Wait, where’s the chainsaw?” Then you’re like THERE IT IS. Quite a story, not for the weak-stomached but what is really?
p.s. I’m still reeling at them calling car horns “hooters” across the pond. 🤣 IKYFL.
June 27, 2019
Second time reading this one, and my last for a long time as the pages are threatening to fall out.
The story is a bog standard serial killer mummy’s boy deal, with the hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold in peril, desperately needing saved by her macho journalist boyfriend.
It’s dated, occasionally offensive, and people “shudder involuntarily” in almost every chapter, but it’s also packed with bloody mayhem and has that wonderfully sleazy British atmosphere that Hutson was so adept at.
The story is a bog standard serial killer mummy’s boy deal, with the hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold in peril, desperately needing saved by her macho journalist boyfriend.
It’s dated, occasionally offensive, and people “shudder involuntarily” in almost every chapter, but it’s also packed with bloody mayhem and has that wonderfully sleazy British atmosphere that Hutson was so adept at.
August 21, 2025
Very nice splatter/slasher. The British answer to the Texas chainsaw massacre, great and gory read
October 7, 2024
3.5 rounded down.
The London Chainsaw Massacre. Instead of a family of Lone Star Redneck Cannibals, it’s an Incestuous Limey Necrophile. The reviews calling it splatterpunk or torture porn are not too far off. It’s quick and dirty, lots of gratuitous sex and violence, fairly well written, and a fun time if you can laugh at some gross horror with extremely thinly veiled metaphors. I can see why it has this status of being a secret classic, especially if you randomly stumbled across it at a secondhand or consignment store and it had that original cover. Worth reading, not a life changer. I will certainly read other Hutson work now though.
I will never understand why publishers change names like this. Come the Night? What is that? It doesn't even have anything to do with the novel. Chainsaw Terror with a cover that presents a chainsaw as a giant phallus presents no confusion. You know exactly what you are getting. Reader/Consumer sensibilities can be so strange--or at least the publisher's perception of those sensibilities and their subsequent decision making.
The London Chainsaw Massacre. Instead of a family of Lone Star Redneck Cannibals, it’s an Incestuous Limey Necrophile. The reviews calling it splatterpunk or torture porn are not too far off. It’s quick and dirty, lots of gratuitous sex and violence, fairly well written, and a fun time if you can laugh at some gross horror with extremely thinly veiled metaphors. I can see why it has this status of being a secret classic, especially if you randomly stumbled across it at a secondhand or consignment store and it had that original cover. Worth reading, not a life changer. I will certainly read other Hutson work now though.
I will never understand why publishers change names like this. Come the Night? What is that? It doesn't even have anything to do with the novel. Chainsaw Terror with a cover that presents a chainsaw as a giant phallus presents no confusion. You know exactly what you are getting. Reader/Consumer sensibilities can be so strange--or at least the publisher's perception of those sensibilities and their subsequent decision making.
October 21, 2024
full review at
gavcrimson.blogspot.com/2024/10/chain...
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 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. 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.
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.
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.
gavcrimson.blogspot.com/2024/10/chain...
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 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. 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.
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.
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.
December 15, 2022
This was surprisingly very good, I was a expecting a straight up 80's style slasher, something along the lines of film The Slumber Party Massacre from 1982, and there was gory parts to it, but there was more suspense and depth that I was expecting.
It is defiantly worth reading if you can get your hands on a copy
It is defiantly worth reading if you can get your hands on a copy
January 25, 2020
Chainsaw Terror is not a great book, but I sure as hell enjoyed the process of reading about it, seeking a copy out and finally reading it.
June 9, 2023
Fun obscure slasher. I really enjoyed this one.
August 4, 2019
i read the "come the night" version of this book because this one is so hard to find and when you do they're hundreds to thousands of dollars. this is my 3rd book of shaun hutson and i gotta say my favorite by-far! the skull was ok at best, Erebus was good, but this was amazing! it is so hard to find books that are as gory as slasher films but this is even better! if you like movies like :texas...", Hatchet, or Halloween then this book is for you.5 stars all the way!
August 22, 2025
The history of this book is probably more interesting than the book itself. Horror author, Shaun Hutson of Slugs fame, was supposed to write a novelisation of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre but rights issues prevented him from doing so. Instead, he wrote this novel under the original title of Chainsaw Terror and set it in the seedy streets of Soho, London under the pseudonym of Nick Blake. The book deemed so graphic was quickly removed from the shelves. It was re-released under a new title and with different artwork as Come the Night. The original Chainsaw Terror sells for £100s now but this version can be found cheaply in an omnibus with two other science fiction Hutson titles using the pseudonym of Frank Taylor. Rumour has it that Come the Night is severely edited but others have confirmed it’s the same book as Chainsaw Terror as the pages all match up.
As for the book itself, it’s a very quick, satisfying read and I’m surprised Hutson didn’t release it under his own name as it’s very well written, and whilst the characters are paper thin, the plot is fast paced and never boring. Filled with sick violence and gratuitous sex, it bears the hallmarks of many of Hutson’s more famous books. Come the Night is probably a better title, as the chainsaw is barely used throughout. I was expecting a London Chainsaw Massacre but instead got a psycho killing prostitutes back at home tale instead. I definitely hyped this book up too much thinking I was going to be reading about Edward letting loose with a chainsaw in brothels, sex shops and porno cinemas so that was a bit disappointing but apart from that let down, I still enjoyed the book for what it was. The freedom authors had back in the 80s to go nuts with horror is sorely missed. They really don’t write them like this anymore and that’s a shame.
As for the book itself, it’s a very quick, satisfying read and I’m surprised Hutson didn’t release it under his own name as it’s very well written, and whilst the characters are paper thin, the plot is fast paced and never boring. Filled with sick violence and gratuitous sex, it bears the hallmarks of many of Hutson’s more famous books. Come the Night is probably a better title, as the chainsaw is barely used throughout. I was expecting a London Chainsaw Massacre but instead got a psycho killing prostitutes back at home tale instead. I definitely hyped this book up too much thinking I was going to be reading about Edward letting loose with a chainsaw in brothels, sex shops and porno cinemas so that was a bit disappointing but apart from that let down, I still enjoyed the book for what it was. The freedom authors had back in the 80s to go nuts with horror is sorely missed. They really don’t write them like this anymore and that’s a shame.
December 19, 2022
Simplisticly plotted to the point where reporting findings to the police would add unnecessary numbers to the word count.
This is Hutson throwing a lot of depravity at the reader, a fair few taboo subjects are touched upon, making this a delightfully grubby read.
I'm unsure if there ever was an "uncut' version of this but I do feel there's more of this tale to be told. The book revels in glorious passages of gratuitous sex and violence and yet pulled away in a few scenes which make me think there may have been a few trims.
The pace did dip a little at the midway point before picking up for the finale but overall this was a belting read.
This is Hutson throwing a lot of depravity at the reader, a fair few taboo subjects are touched upon, making this a delightfully grubby read.
I'm unsure if there ever was an "uncut' version of this but I do feel there's more of this tale to be told. The book revels in glorious passages of gratuitous sex and violence and yet pulled away in a few scenes which make me think there may have been a few trims.
The pace did dip a little at the midway point before picking up for the finale but overall this was a belting read.
August 23, 2024
From the man with nearly as many pen names as novels, Come the Night (aka Chainsaw Terror) is pretty much what you’d expect from Shaun Hutson (or in this case - Nick Blake): a pulpy chunk of senseless filth with all the subtlety of a bulldozer. A rotten lump of fetid cheese that’ll hold your attention, twist your face, turn your stomach, leave a horrible taste in your mouth. And yet, it’s not boring. Crap, yes. But boring? Absolutely not. I wasn’t exactly in it for the stirring prose and ideas. I bought a ticket to the trashy horror show, and that’s exactly what I got.
Come the Night doesn’t have time for character building or expo. It doesn’t give a damn about your expectations. It moves at 100mph from one kill to the next. Suspense? There’s no time for that. Where’s the next piece of meat? Where’s the next sex scene? Where’s the next… ahem… “moist cleft”? Blake/Hutson can use descriptors like “long seconds” and “long moments” as often as he likes (and he does). There are no long moments in this story. There is only smut.
The plot? It’s basically an inglorious slasher that puts a chainsaw in the hands of an incestuous incel (plus carpenter) and lets him run riot. Once he bags his first bod’ he just can’t stop. That’s it. It’s despicable stuff. And yet, I guess I actually kinda enjoyed it. The same way you’d enjoy a “so bad it’s good” slasher flick where your brain powers down to maybe 5% - leaving just enough capacity to spend portions of the running time debating whether the writer is legitimately trying to shock you or whether they’re simply taking the piss.
At least 60% of the kills in Come the Night result in the victim soiling themselves. That’s entertainment.
Come the Night doesn’t have time for character building or expo. It doesn’t give a damn about your expectations. It moves at 100mph from one kill to the next. Suspense? There’s no time for that. Where’s the next piece of meat? Where’s the next sex scene? Where’s the next… ahem… “moist cleft”? Blake/Hutson can use descriptors like “long seconds” and “long moments” as often as he likes (and he does). There are no long moments in this story. There is only smut.
The plot? It’s basically an inglorious slasher that puts a chainsaw in the hands of an incestuous incel (plus carpenter) and lets him run riot. Once he bags his first bod’ he just can’t stop. That’s it. It’s despicable stuff. And yet, I guess I actually kinda enjoyed it. The same way you’d enjoy a “so bad it’s good” slasher flick where your brain powers down to maybe 5% - leaving just enough capacity to spend portions of the running time debating whether the writer is legitimately trying to shock you or whether they’re simply taking the piss.
At least 60% of the kills in Come the Night result in the victim soiling themselves. That’s entertainment.
February 18, 2024
If you want a vile disgusting gore/ descriptive sex book. Than this is the one for you. Banned in numerous countries. The first half is a struggle cause it’s so violent. But the second half is when it gets really good. Ultraviolence. Yes please
February 28, 2025
Probably a high point in the corpus of noted schlockmeister Hutson, a generic if competent psycho/slasher tale that attains an impressive level of scuzziness; if you've been looking for the prose equivalent of a Don't Go in the House or a Pieces, well, you're in luck.
August 31, 2025
Typical Shaun Hutson. Fun gory read. I've obviously been reading too much smut as was expecting Edward to lock his sister in the cellar as his sex slave as he was in love with her not chop her head off and talk to it instead. oops 😅
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
April 11, 2023
It's bad, entertaining, has loads of gory stuff, if a triggerwarning list exists it'll be pages long and all that in just 173 pages.
May 5, 2023
Fun slasher novel written by Shaun Hutson under the pen name Nick Blake. If you enjoy Hutson’s work you’ll enjoy this one as well. Although it can be pricey finding a copy.
October 2, 2023
Blood, guts, sex and a serial killer with more than just a little issue. And a chainsaw!
Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews