The Kilburn Chain Saw Massacre

Chainsaw Terror (1984)

Come The Night (1985)

"Edward Briggs seems like a normal enough man. Not very friendly perhaps - but then who wouldn't after witnessing that bloody family tragedy?" So begins the back cover blurb for this cult paperback. 

IN 1984, British horror/war/crime novelist Shaun Hutson agreed to write a novelisation of Tobe Hooper's THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE. Star, his publishing company, failed to obtain the rights, but encouraged Hutson to write a chainsaw-based novel anyway. Producing a manuscript called Chainsaw Terror using the pseudonym Nick Blake, Star instructed the author to cut around twenty pages. However, despite this, Bookwise - the then largest book retailer in England - banned it from their stores, objecting to the word chainsaw in the title. By Hutson’s own account other retailers, including W. H. Smith, did not have a problem with the moniker, but later claimed that the novel was “banned outright.”

The book was retitled and re-released in late 1985 as Come The Night, which is regularly described as a heavily censored version. First print copies of Chainsaw Terror originally sent to non-Bookwise vendors are consequently now selling for exuberant amounts on eBay. But the reason that Chainsaw Terror goes for so much money is that the people buying them often believe it is the complete novel. It is; yet Chainsaw Terror and Come the Night are the same book. Because of this misconception and its distribution notoriety, plans for further entries - Chainsaw Slaughter and Chainsaw Bloodbath - were abandoned.

Come The Night offers a more generic cover, away from the splendour of the original artwork.

Our story is set in Kilburn, London, when in 1978 twenty-six-year-old Edward Briggs watched his father, carpenter Ralph, murder his wife with a shard of mirror, before turning the weapon on himself. Five years later, Edward's love for sister Maureen has turned to lust. Unknown to him, Maureen has been involved in a relationship with work colleague Michael Ramsey, and is eager to escape her life in the family home. Meanwhile, Vicki Powell has been working the Soho streets, trapped in a life of prostitution through oppressive pimp Danny Foster. And when fellow call girl Penny Dawson doesn’t return after agreeing to spend the night with a punter, Vicki gets concerned. Love has also been forming between herself and journalist Dave Todd, who has been working on a series of vice articles. With more people going missing, Briggs has certainly been busy behind closed doors.

Brutally nasty and written with sheer gusto, Chainsaw Terror's putrid pages drip with the stench of severed limbs and overtly-chlorine semen. The book draws on an array of pop culture influences rather than literary horror; Hutson has said he is more taken by physical rather than written media, particularly the kinetics of Sam Peckinpah. The only real nod to the THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE is a hammer clubbing, and it's more like an early 1980s maelstrom of William Lustig's MANIAC meets the Video Nasties panic, via Denis Nielsen and Ed Gein (Edward keeping his sister's head around also reminds of FRIDAY THE 13TH PART 2). To add to the mix, Hutson brings a couple of traits to the sex and violence: whenever somebody is cut up, they seem to shit or piss themselves. Also, Edward has the weird (yet perfectly sensible) habit of taking off all of his clothes before he goes into dismemberment mode.

While paperback versions of Chainsaw Terror and Come the Night are scarce, the entire text of Come the Night (and hence Chainsaw Terror) forms part of a 1999 Pan collection of three Hutson novels (which also includes SF stories The Abduction and The Visitation).

Hutson's depictions of prostitution is a suitably depressing neon netherworld, trying to do for mid-1980s Soho what TAXI DRIVER did for mid-1970s New York City. As Gavin Whitaker writes in his blog Gavgcrimson, a lot of what Hutson writes surprisingly holds 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."

For a history ripe with misleading information, there have also been tales of the uncut version of Hutson’s original manuscript being passed around. The author himself "confirmed" that a friend in Birmingham had run off several dozen copies of the fully uncensored text and had been selling them for £75 each. The extent of the publisher's censored material has never been clarified - not even by Hutson himself - but a couple of instances can lead to educated guesses. There appears to be evidence of this in the scene where Edward is about to drive a power drill through an eye, only to skip over the gore. Speculation also exists when Briggs comes close to killing two kids, only for their mother to come home and thwart his plans by tripping over the wire of his drill.

La Tronconneuse de l’Horreur/The Chainsaw of Horror was part of the Gore series in France, published by Fleuve Noir from 1985 to 1989. Distinguished by some of the most revolting covers ever, the series began with a severely abridged version of John Russo's Night of the Living Dead novel. Subsequent entries included Herschell Gordon Lewis, Guy N. Smith and John Halkin.

Actually Hutson's twelfth novel, Chainsaw Terror followed such opuses as The Skull ("It had been waiting for centuries, buried in a place they called the evil ground ... waiting for just one drop of blood to restore it to life,") Slugs ("They slime, they ooze, they kill!") and Spawn (which has telepathic, blood-feeding foetuses). He is Garth Marenghi before Garth Marenghi, a 1980s cult icon who looked more like the front-man of a Heavy Metal band. One of several authors who rose to prominence during the splatterpunk trend, the author acquired a rabid legion of fans, and his association with them even resulted in adopting their names into his work as victims. Hutson's page-turning, bombastic style exists in a potent mix of familiarity (main characters's love interests will usually be a blonde in jeans) and genre-splicing (Deathday's monsters are a hybrid of vampires, zombies, demons and serial killers). Throughout his 1980s horror novels he is obviously having a blast, with Iron Maiden playing in the background of one Breeding Ground scene.