There are certain writers who do not knock politely. They bash in hinges and grin through the splinters. Since the 1980’s, Shaun Hutson has
been doing precisely that – long before ‘extreme’ became a marketing badge and
splatterpunk found its modern clergy. If horror has a gutter laureate, Hutson
has long occupied the throne.
Relics opens up
with a premise that is archetypal and academic: an archaeological dig which
uncovers a subterranean chamber packed with the skulls of children. The bones
seem ancient. They are not. This unsealing coincides with a series of
ritualistic murders in which victims are disemboweled and their entrails
contorted into letters of the alphabet. Language becomes viscera.
Communication, carnage.
The
novel orbits two poles. On one side, a dig rich in Celtic ecofacts where
archaeologist Kim deciphers tablets foretelling the rise of an ancient God
named Dagda unless innocent blood is spilled. On the other,
inspector Stephen Wallace is tasked with pursuing a killer who gouges out eyes and
rearranges organs with a butcher’s finesse. Between it all lies a landscape of
British hooligans, sadists, and opportunists … figures far removed from the
incel loners who populate a universe like Richard Laymon’s. Hutson’s England is all
boot boys and bile.
The
procedural threads, it must be said, strain credulity. Wallace will appear at
crime scenes with uncanny punctuality, as if ushered by a narrative teleporter
rather than real transport. The investigative mechanics feel perfunctory, even
intrusive. Yet this has never been Hutson’s true arena.
His true arena lies in gore. When Hutson writes it, he does not suggest; he
saturates the fucking page. Blood has temperature. Excrement and other bodily
emissions are rendered without coyness. Animal cruelty, particularly in the
depiction of dog fighting and other scenes of calculated brutality, will repel
many. It probably should. However, the caveat is clear: this is pulp horror
operating without anesthetic. To enter such territory expecting restraint is to
misread the signpost.
Hutson’s
excesses are not limited to gore. His action scenes tend to sprawl, sometimes
running twice as long as they need to, and a firmer editorial hand could have
sharpened several confrontations. The narrative momentum sags under the weight
of its own enthusiasm.
What
elevates Relics beyond adolescent provocation is craft.
Beneath Hutson’s juvenile ferocity lies a writer who understands cadence,
pacing, and the architecture of dread. The suggestion of curses, of ancient
forces stirring beneath earth moving machinery, lends the narrative a mythic
undertow. Bizarre accidents at the dig hint that something older than law
enforcement has taken an interest.
For a
novel born in the 1980s, Relics is unsubtle, frequently excessive, and
occasionally clumsy in its scaffolding. Yet it possesses an energy that many
contemporary horrors, polished to a lackluster sheen, lack.
Part
archaeological nightmare, part occult procedural, Relics is
wholly committed to its own depravity.
