First Edition (1982)
Rerelease Cover
First published back in April of 1982, British author Shaun Hutson’s novel ‘The Skull’ was the author’s first horror novel to be published (following the release of two war novels), and as such started off Hutson’s predominantly horror focused career as a writer.
The horror that befell the small Derbeyshire village of Lockston started off with the discovery of two objects – an ancient glass flask and a horrifyingly inhuman skull.
The perfectly preserved flask had been unearthed by Chrissie Regan and a group of school children during a museum sponsored archaeological dig in the fields surrounding Lockston. Back at the museum, Professor Ronald Peterson managed to date the glass flask to around 1650. However, upon cutting open the artifact, the museum’s team are subjected to an ear-piercing scream followed by a brief glimpse of a shrunken human head trapped within the confines of the bottle. Seconds later a foul stench overwhelms the room.
Once the room has been aired out, and the team are able to compose themselves, the Professor finds the contents of the ancient bottle to be a concoction of human blood and semen. Fluids which have been perfectly preserved within the flask for centuries.
Meanwhile, the entirety of the small rural village has been cut off from the rest of the country. It had been raining relentlessly for weeks; flooding all exits from the village and bringing down all lines of communication. On top of the localised isolation, the construction of a multi-million-pound hotel complex which was located just four miles from the village had also suffered delays.
Chrissie’s husband, Nick Regan, was the surveyor on the job, who’d been getting it in the neck for the delays. The contracts manager didn’t seem to understand they were unable to dig and lay the building foundations whilst the land was ankle-deep in boggy rainwater. Nevertheless, Regan had been pushed into attempting to commence the digging. A foolish endeavour which ended in his excavator being swallowed up by a huge chasm that opens up in the waterlogged ground beneath the machinery.
After clambering out from the JCB, Regan discovers he’s in a vast underground cavern, with numerous tunnels leading off in all directions. It’s within one of the tunnels, buried within the thick yellow mud of the surrounding walls, that Regan uncovers the skull. But it’s no human skull, nor that of any known animal. The lower mandible is larger that it should be, the eye sockets bulbous, and the cranium flattened out and sloping away. However, the most striking aspect of the skull was the teeth: the front four in the upper mandible displaying razor-sharp canines.
What Chrissie and Nick Regan don’t realise yet, is that the skull is from an ancient creature of pure unadulterated horror. Worse still, through the simple act of opening the ancient flask, the team had unleashed the lingering lifeforce of this nightmarish beast.
It’s a horror that spans centuries and has now been unwittingly woken from its captivity. A nightmare that had started with a man named Robert Fludd. A great alchemist who claimed to have created a human head from a mixture of blood and semen. Fluids dubbed the soul-substance which were thought to be the carriers of life. By mixing the fluids, alchemists were said to have created familiars. The homunculi. Beasts of terrifying ferocity hellbent on slaughter and unrelenting chaos.
A nightmarish creature which had now been unleashed upon the cut off, water-logged village of Lockston…
This is where it all started! Hutson’s first published venture into horror…and to be fair, it’s a fucking good first offering. A quintessentially 1980s British horror that shares more than a few similarities to Clive Barker’s ‘Rawhead Rex’ which first appeared within the highly revered ‘Books Of Blood: Volume III’ (1984) which was notably published a couple of years after Hutson’s novel.
Anyway, the story is the absolute epitome of 80s horror, in such a good way! Grisly and wildly over-the-top, drawing heavily upon occultist roots to unleash a monstrous beast that goes on a rampage, slicing and dicing its victims as it goes.
The setting is a Guy N Smith style of rural backdrop, kept localised by the unrelenting rainfall that’s cut the village off from any outside help. As such, we only have a handful of woefully unprepared local coppers on hand, along with the scientific staff from the small Lockston museum.
Fronting the storyline, we have twenty-four-year-old Nick Regan who’s by far and away the hero of the piece. A rough and ready surveyor who’s got to where he is through years of hard work and determination. As such, he’s not afraid to get his hands dirty, including grabbing a shotgun from the local gunshop and going out on a homunculus hunt!
Then we have his sexy scientist wife, Chrissie, who’s shit hot with all things science, but seemingly blind to the obvious deception that’s happening before her eyes. You see, her employer and boss, the esteemed Professor Peterson, has other ambitions for the blood and semen soup that they’ve unearthed! A small experiment involving the hideous skull and these ancient fluids and we’ve got ourselves one fucker of a problem. Oh, why is it always the doddering old scientists who turn out to be the bad ‘uns?!
Ergo, we have ourselves a homunculus roaming around the village, slaughtering everyone it comes across. So, from this juncture you can expect a good handful of grim and gory scenes as our recently reanimated pal tears apart those it stumbles across. Mind you, this is, however, an early Hutson offering, and as such you can see the author is still finding his feet with how much gruesome gore and brutal violence he can pump into his tale. That’s not to say we’re not treated to plenty of horror savagery, but it is noticeably more restrained than much of Hutson’s latter offerings.
Ditto, the writing isn’t anywhere near as accomplished as Hutson’s later novels. It’s rough and raw, with some laughable plot developments and outrageous interactions from characters. For example, we see the local bobbies instantly accepting the fact there’s a fuck-off big homunculus on the rampage, so its shotguns all around to sort this shit out pronto!
Nevertheless, as long as you’re willing to suspend all disbelief, then trust me, you’ll have a blast with this early Hutson offering. Admittedly a tad slower to get going than you might have expected, but then when it gets underway, the tale absolutely delivers the wild horror goods. This is what 80s B-Movie style horror is all about. Utterly entertaining rampaging creature chaos through and through.
The novel runs for a total of 188 pages.
© DLS Reviews
