Shaun Hutson, Victims - Synopsis:
"For Frank Miller, violent death had always been a subject close to his heart. As a photographer he built his reputation by taking pictures of murder victims for the police, becoming an avid connoisseur of human carcasses. But he found his true vocation as the creator of prosthetic special effects for horror films, using his intimate knowledge of death's handiwork to fashion perfect replicas of charred limbs, rotting corpses and severed heads. No one, it seems, could do it better than Frank Miller.
But suddenly Miller finds he has a rival - and this time the artist is using live flesh to sculpt his masterpieces. A vicious psychopath is carving out a career for himself as the most brutal killer of the century, leaving a trail of corpses in his wake - each one butchered in a different way as if the killer is trying to recreate famous murders of the past as part of some gruesome game. As the body-count rises and the police become increasingly baffled by the apparently unstoppable carnage, Miller comes to realise that the key to the killings may lie in his own morbid visions. But to stop the bloodshed he will have to come closer to death's foetid embrace than ever before".

Hutson launches in to this interesting and inspired approach towards the slasher genre. His experimental notion that some people are born to be murder victims rather than the murderer choosing the victims, is an interesting gruesome twist on the idea of fate. Hutson dives into the storyline of this twisted tale, with the usual mounds of splatter that we have come to expect from him. The plot is an interesting tapestry of different characters experiences that gradually weave themselves together to form the completed tale. The novel races from page to page as the bodies pile up and the action bursts through the pages.

Victims is not his best novel but more a standard Hutson offering. It's enjoyable to read and gripping from the start. It was originally published by W.H. Allen back in 1987 and formed his twenty-second full length novel (which includes his novels under the names Wolf Kruger, Stefan Rostov, Tom Lambert, Nick Blake and Robert Neville). Definitely worth a read.

Oh, and watch out for the infamous 'foetus in the microwave' scene. Truly gruesome and disturbed.