Renegades

Rating:
Summary: Your granny wouldn't like it!
Review: I guess there are a couple of ways of writing an effectivehorror story; firstly there is the subtle Barker, King or Herbert style of weaving a plot to draw in the unwary and then hitting the reader with a fiendish twist. The second method is perhaps more akin to the scattergun technique, piling horror upon horror until the poor reader is almost begging for mercy. Renegades falls smack bang into this second category and is about as subtle as a zombie with piles. Just when you think Hutson has plumbed the depths of depravity and dumped the foulest cocktail imaginable in front of you, a turn of the page invariably adds the wretched cherry on top! Without including any spoilers here, suffice it to say that the plot concerns the IRA, a man and woman anti-terrorist...a creepy abandoned church containing something nasty, a perverted couple seeking the ultimate thrill etc etc. You get the picture? Renegades employs quite a few clichés from the genre, but who cares? The plot merely provides a ghastly carcase on which Hutson drapes a series of increasingly nasty tableaux for your delectation. If you have the stomach to persevere, you'll find a hefty dose of (very) black humour and some genuinely clever twists and turns. Some extremely sexually explicit scenes might raise an eyebrow (!) or two. Best of all, Hutson sends the genre up mercilessly and must have written this with his tongue painfully and permanently embedded in his cheek. Devotees of the chiller genre will absolutely love this. Me? I felt like I needed a bath afterwards, but am happy to acknowledge a very effective horror novel.

Rating:
Summary: World record death count
Review: My first thoughts on this were that it had very little to do with horror at all. The 'demon' doesn't come into play until the very end of the book, and is preceded by reams and reams of graphic violence, mostly based around the IRA and terrorism.
The book does move at an astonishing pace, the sort of prose where you skip half the words in order to reach the next turn in the plot on the following page. There's certainly no poeticism here, it's potboiler all the way, but in this sense it is perfect for a lazy Sunday afternoon.
I was holding out for some sort of - if not happy, then at least optimistic - ending, but nope, no such luck. The death count gets higher and higher until it blows through the proverbial roof. The ending has a clever little twist, one that would make you cringe if you could see the book as anything deeper than the fun read it is.
To sum it up, I would say hardly life changing but perfectly enjoyable if you love a good bit of sex and violence.
Still can't help wondering if the whole 'horror' part was superficial to the story, but nevertheless, made it interesting.
Not great, but not bad either.

Rating:
Summary: World record death count
Review: My first thoughts on this were that it had very little to do with horror at all. The 'demon' doesn't come into play until the very end of the book, and is preceded by reams and reams of graphic violence, mostly based around the IRA and terrorism.
The book does move at an astonishing pace, the sort of prose where you skip half the words in order to reach the next turn in the plot on the following page. There's certainly no poeticism here, it's potboiler all the way, but in this sense it is perfect for a lazy Sunday afternoon.
I was holding out for some sort of - if not happy, then at least optimistic - ending, but nope, no such luck. The death count gets higher and higher until it blows through the proverbial roof. The ending has a clever little twist, one that would make you cringe if you could see the book as anything deeper than the fun read it is.
To sum it up, I would say hardly life changing but perfectly enjoyable if you love a good bit of sex and violence.
Still can't help wondering if the whole 'horror' part was superficial to the story, but nevertheless, made it interesting.
Not great, but not bad either.