October Nightmares IV #8: Assassin (1988) by Shaun Hutson - Crooks vs Zombie Gangsters

By Sam Graham

What would happen if James Herbert had grown up in the North?

Shaun Hutson, that’s what. A few years ago I talked about this man. See Slugs.

Published in horror’s glory days (1988), Assassin is a gangster story set in London. Some of the gangsters though, are zombies. Not the brainless, shambling zombies of Romero fame, but rather the rotting, but basically alive kind of zombies that like to bang prostitutes and spaff live maggots down their throats until they die.

Y’know, that kind.

Carter is out main hero. He probably has a first name, but all the heroes of this genre operate on a last name basis, so who cares? He works for a mob boss of some repute. Across the other end of London, some gangsters arise from their grave with a singular goal: kill Carter’s boss.

Carter isn’t too bothered about his boss’ well being though; more interested in shagging the boss’ wife senseless. A few people get killed by the zombie gangsters, the boss thinks it’s someone else, a gang war ensues, they find out who it really is, the plot is pretty predictable. It’s basically Death Wish 4: Crackdown, if Charles Bronson was a rotten dicked, skull-fucking zombie.

Sex scenes are frequent and are written with as much grace and tact as those Razzle’s I once found in Dad’s allotment shed:

“She sucked harder. He thrust violently into her mouth, driving his penis up until it touched the back of her throat”,

Quips run rampant:

“The place is usually cleaner than Mother Theresa’s underwear”,

And gun battles break out seemingly at random. The gore is up to eleven:

“The flesh began to undulate, slowly at first but then with greater speed until a bulge appeared beneath the left cheekbones, rising like a boil, swelling like some obscene tumour, growing before his eyes until it finally burst.

“The boil was filled with maggots.”

Perhaps the biggest take-home of Assassin however is that Hutson celebrates one often forgotten fact about the Human body.

It’s common knowledge that upon death, the body lets go of its muscles. All of them. That goes for the bowel muscles too. Dead people often foul themselves. And if it isn’t common knowledge to you then sorry, but yes, you too get to suffer that one final indignity. Life gets its last laugh by covering you in shit the day you decide to give it all up.

But hey, you’re someone else’s problem by then.

Shaun Hutson knows this. Shaun Hutson seems to love this. He celebrates it in this book with a gusto I’ve rarely seen.

The very instant any character flatlines in this book, they immediately dump arse. Characters walk into a room with a few corpses and all they can smell is feculence. This happens over and over again. A guy takes a bullet during a car chase. His kegs are brown before he hits the back seat.

While the plot may drag on a bit and the book is only so thick due to its graphic descriptions of just about everything people like to do to each other, it’s a riot to read purely for how absurd it is.

These days Hutson has been penning novelisations to Hammer Horror classics and it’s interesting to note that he actually wrote the novelisation to The Terminator.

Whilst Herbert may have been scooping up the OBE for writing about paedo PE teachers getting their cocks cut off by school kids, Hutson was unceremoniously trudging through the trenches of pulp trash horror, doubling down on his oeuvre and making his stories pulpier and trashier than the rest. Kudos, Mr Hutson. Kudos.

And he didn’t have to put an adverb in every fucking sentence either. Eat that, Herbert.

Enjoyed this piece? Then 'like' The Crusades of A Critic on Facebook. Sam also has a Tech Noir novel, 'An Inside Joke', which can currently be viewed here; his first novella 'Iron Country' is available to buy here; a horror short story, 'We Must Never Found Out', published here; and finally, another short horror story 'Eagal' available to buy here. Phew.