“Assassin” – Shaun Hutson, Star, 3.50

Herschell Gordon Lewis once said that his films were the first ones where everyone died with their eyes open. Similarly, Shaun Hutson’s latest novel is the first I’ve read where everyone dies with their head in little pieces. Bloody gobbets of brain tissue and fragments of skull litter every second page like confetti, courtesy of a large variety of very offensive weapons.

It’s less of a ‘horror’ story than previous efforts, being more a gangland thriller with the only supernatural elements being four zombie gangsters out for revenge on the people who killed them. The rest of the story includes a Manson-style family of psychos, bent coppers, informers, a hit-man who listens to heavy metal on his Walkman while working and a LOT of ammunition. There’s a love story in there too, though don’t expect to see Mr. Hutson getting signed up by Mills & Boon.

Make no mistake, the man can write. While any fool with a camera, some fake blood and a few cow intestines can make a movie capable of grossing-out the viewer, to do something similar with letters on a page is proof of talent, and there are at least two scenes in the book, the execution of a ‘traitor’ by a gang boss and a ritual murder, after which I had to stop reading for a moment. Oddly, the scene the author was proudest of (involving a prostitute and a zombie – I won’t go into details), left me totally unfazed.

Despite, or perhaps slightly because of this, it’s a good read – I went through the 300-odd pages in two sittings. The pace is fast, you’re never sure exactly what’s going to happen next (though the most violent and messy alternative is usually a safe bet) and the characters are interestingly flawed. If perhaps occasionally they have ‘CANNON FODDER’ tattooed too conspicuously on their foreheads, this is only to be expected in a book where the mortality rate of the characters is close to 100%. Overall, nasty – very nasty – yet still recommended for those with strong stomachs.

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No room for a real letter column this time, yet I couldn’t resist putting in the following extract from a reader – I think I’ll refrain from printing her name…

“You missed the obvious, didn’t you, tho’ it’s probably due to you being male – to be polite, it’s plastic, runs on batteries and often masquerades as a ‘neck massager’ in the Kaleidoscope catalogue…”

Only things that brings to mind are rechargeable batteries…

**** 10. “We just cut up our girl-friend with a chainsaw. Does that sound ‘fine’?”

Some things I hadn’t room to mention elsewhere. ‘Zines seen.

• Creeping Unknown 11 ( 32 A5 pages, 50p + SAE from Nick & Cath, 29 Westland Ave, Hucknall, Notts NG15 6PW) is more legible than last time, and as literate as ever.
• Imaginator 5 (36 A4, 1.25, Unit 1, Hawk House, Peregrine Park, Gomm Road, High Wycombe, Bucks) is getting better with each issue, tho’ Ken Miller’s fascination with castration is slightly worrying!
• Dagon 26 (60 A5, 1.40, Dagon Press, 11 Warwick Rd, Twickenham Middx, TW2 6SW) is a D.F.Lewis special – he’s responsible for ‘Dreamaholic’ elsewhere in TC4, so if you liked that, you know what to do.
• Green Goblin 12 (32 pages A5, 50p + SAE, John Breakwell, 170 Caversham Rd, Reading, RG1 8AZ) is a computer/fantasy/chat ‘zine, that’s pretty AND interesting at the same time.
• And an error in the address for Prisoners of War in TC2. Wallace Nicoll, 48 Broughton ROAD, Edinburgh EH7 4EE.

On the book front, “Born to be Bad”, the follow up to “Lost, Lonely & Vicious” is out, containing 40 more postcards of posters from B-movies. 5.95, and I can see me having to buy TWO copies, one to use and one to keep. Cunning swines, these authors.

A well-informed source (James Furman, chairman of the BBFC) says that “The Exorcist” will not be out on video in the foreseeable future, contrary to popular rumour: “We don’t think the time is really right yet”. However, according to “Time Out”, “The Evil Dead” will shortly be available again, “albeit in a significantly cut form”. Meanwhile, for “Texas Chainsaw Massacre”, Furman said “several companies have asked us if there’s any point in submitting it on video and we’ve said no”.

TC5 should be out in April (I need the rest!). Contents: Sybil Danning, film reviews, Dangermouse, more European stuff, bits on Black Sunday & Splatterfest ’90 (if I’ve enough stamina for both of them) + how NOT to synthesize psilocybin.

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Alun Fairburn’s Film Hit & Sh*t Lists

SH*T LIST	HIT LIST
Alien Encounter	Flesh For Frankenstein
Blood Tracks	The Thing (Carpenter’s)
Body Count	The Terminator
Barfly	Street Trash
Cujo	Blood Feast
Conquest	Blade Runner
Demons 2	Dawn of the Dead
Frogs	Day of the Dead
Haunted Honeymoon	The Stepfather
Mutant Hunt	House by the Cemetery

**** 9. “Although we may run out of Pan-Am coffee, we’ll never run out of T.W.A tea”

Glyn Williams rolls up his sleeves and gets stuck in.

“I’m not sure about the rules of this, but I’m assuming that I can invite 12 guests (6 male and six female). I prefer to include guests who are still living – deceased guests have little to say and tend to leave their food. I will place myself at the head of the table and send my wife to her mother’s.”

“When choosing guests I have preferred to ask people who are capable of intelligent conversation and who may have conflicting opinions to their fellow guests but who can argue in a witty and civilised manner (thus Mr. Tyson is excluded). The guests are not chosen because they have big breasts or have spent their careers inducing cinema audiences to seek out the nearest barf bags. I retain the right, however, to ferring in a whole platoon of bimbos through the back door whilst my dinner guests are taking their leave through the front.”

“Guests are selected from a variety of areas of artistic life with representatives from cinema (3), politics (2), music (1), literature (2), paintings (1), TV & theatre (1), and 2 guests who I consider to be capable of talking about anything and everything (but without hogging the conversation).”

“I think the assembled group would be able to keep a dinner party going well into the early hours of the morning, but in order to do so they need to be backed up by a good set of staff behind the scenes. I have, therefore, also added some random thoughts about selection of these back-room staff but, unlike the choice of dinner guests, this group is not to be taken seriously.”

“One or two notable absentees from my dinner table: it would be a real coup to have Salman Rushdie but I can do without letterbox flambe half way through the evening and Clive Barker is not included because I have already read or heard just about every opinion he holds on anything. Margaret Thatcher would be welcome if she was actually ON the menu.

Males	Females
Michael Caine	Catherine Deneuve
Dennis Skinner	Edwina Currie
Randy Newman	Maureen Lipman
Evan Hunter (Ed McBain)	Julie Burchill
John Arlott	Jane Fonda
Peter Ustinov	Bridget Riley

Meanwhile in the kitchen:

• Waiter and general dogsbody: My boss
• Washing up: Nanette Newman

Food Preparation:

• H.G.Lewis: Meat dishes
• Chesty Morgan: Fruit dish (Melons, obviously)
• Royal Shakespeare Co: Fish dish (Cod pieces only)
• Arsenal F.C.: a variety of vegetables
• Man who sold Brooklyn Bridge: cons-some
• Next door’s dog: whines
• Kylie Minogue: tooth-pick
• Julian Clary: After Eight mince

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**** 8. “Don’t you fucking look at me!!”

Even if you can’t get all 10 (2 more in the supplement!), enter anyway – if last time is anything to go by, we may end up with more prizes than entrants and since I need the shelf space, it’s either you lot or the dustman! Closing date, round about March 1st, shall we say, and bribery isn’t against the rules…

And finally, the following piece. After reading it, I spent half an hour banging my head against blunt objects. You have been warned.

Once upon a time, there was a lazy old frog who sat in the middle of the pond and did nothing all day except catch gnats, All around him the other animals hurried and scurried, but the frog never moved. Eventually, the other animals got fed up and a deputation led by the lizard confronted the frog.

“Now, look here frog”, said the lizard. “All you do all day is sit in the middle of the pond catching gnats. It’s not good enough, animals should be active.”

“Actually”, said the frog, catching another gnat. “I have just been planning my skiing holiday. Would that be active enough for you?”

The other animals laughed in disbelief.

“You could never learn to ski”, said the dragonfly. “In fact, I’m willing to bet a six month supply of gnats that you couldn’t learn.”

“You’re on”, said the frog, and went to pack his bags.

Three weeks passed, and the frog eventually returned to the pond. The other animals were waiting and, once the frog had settled in and caught a few gnats for his tea, they demand proof of the frog’s skiing prowess.

Slowly, the frog unrolled a large certificate presented to him by the Skiing school, and across the top of the certificate it said in bright red letters:

GNAT CATCHER CAN SKI.

Thank you, and goodnight.

Start off with a story I read, but unfortunately didn’t clip. The rough details concerned a teenaged boy with a personality disorder which caused him to have periodic fits of depression. During one of these, he tried to commit suicide by shooting himself in the head with a gun – he didn’t kill himself but the bullet destroyed the area of brain responsible for his illness. He’s now leading a normal and happy life.

Technological cock-up of 1989, according to the Weekly World News – a computer that was supposed to issue fines for traffic citations went haywire and charged 41,000 people with murder, extortion and organised prostitution, reported police in Paris.

HUMAN BRAIN TRANSPLANTED INTO CHIMP – A team of surgeons at Humbolt University Medical Centre in East Berlin removed the brain of a clinically dead teenage boy and placed it into the skull of an adult female chimp. “To our great surprise, the chimp is not only alive…but she is already trying to talk like a human”. Apart from sounding not dissimilar to “Bad Taste”, the question uppermost in my mind is ‘which member of parliament got the chimp’s one?’

CYCLOPS SKULL FOUND – Japanese scientists claim to have found the skull of a Cyclops on an island in the South Pacific and there is evidence to suggest it didn’t die until WW II. This is accompanied by a photo of it, which I showed to a zoologist friend of mine – he thought it was probably two skulls cut and joined together, the lower half of a ‘normal’ skull with the upper half being another skull rotated so that the hole where the spinal column entered became the ‘eye’. Ingenious, huh? Though what a Cyclops was doing on a Pacific island is uncertain.

DINOSAUR WIPES OUT AFRICAN VILLAGE – The WWN works on the principle of if you can’t get a picture, draw it; the picture on the next page demonstrates this technique in action. The story tells how the village of Mokokou, in the north-east of the Congo, was almost wiped out by a creature that left foot-prints measuring nearly 12 feet across and ‘bigger than 10 elephants’. 175 people were slaughtered by the beast, according to a radio ham who’d just returned from the area. Meanwhile, whatever size feet the creature depicted might have, they certainly are nowhere near twelve foot across (unless the people fighting it are forty foot high or thereabouts – could this be a future story in the making? ) and the dinosaur itself looks very like a brontosaurus, or similar VEGETARIAN dinosaur, admittedly with a malevolent sneer on it’s face. The editor clearly chose the other accompanying picture (not shown ) at random from a box marked ‘African Natives’ as the background is desert, rather than the swamplands where this creature is said to live. Jeez, I don’t mind them making stories up – a little more consistency wouldn’t go amiss.

More evidence that drug-abuse screws you up comes from the imbecile in Alabama who went out to buy crack cocaine. He was well swindled and was sold soap instead – this lunkhead then went and complained about it to the police…

An idea to consider as a present for that special someone this Christmas, or to drop hints for perhaps, is the collection of stories from the Sunday Sport: ‘Bus Found at South Pole’. It’s only when you see the stories extracted from the sex adverts and presented in undiluted form that you realise just how nonsensical the entire paper is. Little wonder that other papers regard it as beneath contempt, since if people realise the “Sunday Sport” is quite capable of making stories up, they might start wondering what’s to stop the other newspapers from doing the same, in a slightly more subtle fashion? That would never do, though of course I realise that our papers are ALWAYS truthful and NEVER fabricate, lie or distort the facts. Except with respect to people rich enough to be able to sue them for libel…

SHOCKED COPS FIND CHILD’S MUMMY IN APARTMENT – Er, that’s mummy as in corpse…

A historical tale: Robert Liston was a 19th century surgeon renowned for being a lightning fast worker in the days before anaesthetics. Unfortunately, in his haste he was often a little careless. Once, he amputated a man’s leg at the thigh in just 2 1/2 minutes – it was only later he realised the patient’s testicles were gone too. On another occasion, he was even quicker, though the patient died of gangrene, his assistant also had three fingers sawn off causing his death too, and Liston cut through the coat and tails of a spectator, who was so worried his manhood had gone, that he dropped dead of fright. This operation thus became the only one in medical history with a 300% mortality rate.

I’ll finish with a WWN exclusive. I make no comment, & just print it as it appeared.

QUEEN FLIPS HER LID OVER FORGOTTEN POTTY SEAT – ‘Cranky old Queen Elizabeth was in a royal tizzy during a recent visit to Kenya, snapping and sniffing at everyone in sight – because some ignoramus forgot to pack her favorite goatskin toilet seat! “Her Majesty was a holy terror the whole time she was here” said an employee at Treetops, a ritzy game-viewing lodge in the African bush. “She snarled at the help, she grumbled at Prince Philip – she even growled at a buffalo. Everyone was shocked because all this ranting and raving was out of character for her. Then word leaked out that she was mad as hell because she didn’t have her Billy Goat.” Billy Goat is the name palace staffers have given the fancy white-kid toilet seat the Queen normally hauls with her on foreign trips. “Elizabeth has become very attached to the thing”, said one insider. “After all, a queen doesn’t want to plant her royal bottom on just any old throne. Somebody’s head is going to roll when they figure out who left the billy behind”…”That’s what happens”, said a royal escort, “when the Queen comes to town – and leaves the seat of power at home”‘.