Thanks for the memories folks, there are some lovley people on here. No place for Ciao where I`m goi...
Thanks for the memories folks, there are some lovley people on here. No place for Ciao where I`m going. Stuart xx
Member since:26.03.2003
Reviews:173
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“Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time... The wait is simply too long.”
Christopher Wards` career was in freefall, once a brilliant writer with more money and woman than he knew what to do with he now found himself without a publisher due to poor sales of his previous two books. His agent was busily hawking his wares around any publishing house that would entertain him but it wasn’t looking good, Ward needed to come to terms with the fact that the old magic had gone and he is not the writer he once was, and this latest bout of writers block could very well be the end of him. Seeking solace in the bottle Christopher started to get morose and forgetful, so when he entered his office one morning and found thirty pages of pretty damn fine writing he presumed that he had done it while in a catatonic type state. This pattern continued night after night with several pages of the best story he’d seen in ages being produced
but with no memory of having written them. Worse still he started to see strange shadow like shapes lurking in his back garden, and when he set about trying to capture his night time writing sessions on camcorder it wasn’t himself he saw on the tape but a far more malevolent force. But what could he do when the manuscript being produced look set to become a great book and had the potential to resurrect his failing writing career.
“Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.”
And what of the story being produced in his office, it was written about a Counter terrorist officer in Northern Ireland called Sean Doyle who was intent on bringing down rogue elements of the real IRA or the UDF. Doyle seemed to place no value in his own life and was happy to risk it repeatedly in his quest to bring down dissidents. He had been shot, stabbed and blown up while in pursuit of carrying out his job, and when a young real IRA player is intent on derailing the fledgling peace process Doyle is called in to stop him at whatever cost. Christopher Ward simply had to wait for the course of the story to flow to its natural conclusion, but when phone calls and meetings are attended by him without his knowledge something really has to be done, a man who cannot remember anything he does is a dangerous man indeed……..
“This is the challenge of writing. You have to be very emotionally engaged in what you’re doing, or it comes out flat. You can’t fake your way through this.”
I have been a fan of Shaun Hutson from his very early books like slugs and Spawn and I thought I had read all that he had to offer. Imagine my delight therefore when I discovered Hybrid lurking on the pages of Amazon.co.uk and the realisation that I had not actually read it. Hybrid is a very clever piece of writing from Hutson in that it contains a story within a story, I sometimes forgot I was reading about a struggling author so engrossing was the story about Sean Doyle and his Counter Terrorist work, I actually found myself caring far more for Doyle’s character than for that of Christopher Ward. The first two thirds of the book are largely taken up with the story within the story but then as the manuscript is finished it switches to the author and his struggles to find out how and why the story was being written. Hutson himself says in his acknowledgements that this was a tough book to write, and one can only imagine the skill needed to sew the two stories together so plausibly, hats off to Hutson for that.
“There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”
I thoroughly enjoyed this book, the writing has an easy and free flowing feel and I devoured it in a single day. Hutson knows how to add flesh to his characters and knows how to keep the reader turning the page in the quest to find out what comes next. The action of the Doyle story compliments the turgid writers block encountered by Ward to perfection, and I was nearly as pleased as Ward was when there was more pages of the Doyle story to be shared. The two stories are kept from becoming confusing by the fact that one is in bold font, and the fact that the Doyle story has numbered chapters while the Ward story has chapter titles. A clever piece of writing from Mr Hutson then which earns four stars out of five from me.
www.shaunhutson.com ISBN: - 0-7515-3308-4 460 Pages Paperback £5.49 on Amazon.co.uk
Pictures of Hybrid - Shaun Hutson
The Book Cover
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