I mentioned I might have to take a trip to the UK. Well, fiddle dee dee, life makes a mock of us all. I shall be getting on a plane this week, which means no posts for two, three weeks after this one. Family stuff. I shan't go too deep into it except to say that, if you have any Bournemouth recommendations, I should like to hear them. Not that I expect to have much free time, but it's nice to have options.
This week's post is inspired by recent events in Monaco.
A Ukrainian plutocrat was targeted by foreign assassins and very nearly blown to pieces. The target, Vadym Iermolaiev, managed to avoid death while his wife and their 13-year-old child suffered injuries. The wife seems to have been the most seriously injured. Monaco, famous for its security and serenity, is shocked to its core. Such things just don't happen there. Those security cameras are there for a reason; it ought to be impossible to do anything dastardly in Monaco.
The alleged assassin, 39-year-old Anastasiia Berezovska, was later found dead in what can only be described as suspicious circumstances. It would not be difficult to imagine this as an espionage operation gone horribly wrong.
To that end:
The Fearless Vampire Killers
Roman Polanski's Fearless Vampire Killers
The agents, either Edom or Edom-adjacent, are called in to trace a bomber.
The bomber managed to blow a hole in one of Monaco's exclusive apartment buildings, injuring two, one of whom is still severely injured and in hospital while the other, suffering minor injuries only, has been released.
The alleged target of the bombing. Cypriot billionaire Chris Dravot, is in seclusion aboard a superyacht in Monaco's Port Hercules. No visitors, no press. Dravot suffered only minor injuries, according to the media.
The more seriously injured victim is supposed to be his wife, Monica. However, agents who poke around that yacht discover that she's aboard too, and perfectly healthy. It was another person altogether who suffered grave injuries, and that person is Edom's own Hound.
If the agents follow up on this they discover that the injured 'wife' was supposedly transferred to a military hospital in Germany, after her crypto billionaire 'husband' pulled some strings. Only the best for his beloved, after all. Except the injured party never got to Germany. They were sent straight to Proserpine, where Seward is now working to save her life.
Of course, the agents aren't told any of this. They're just told to trace the bomber, capture alive, and interrogate.
Cue Thrilling Chase scene across Europe, ideally finishing up in a forest in Romania - Hoia-Baciu. There the agents discover the bomber's handlers, agents of Romania's security services, Serviciul Informatii de Externe. They have an underground bunker in Hoia-Baciu, where they plan to carry out their own debrief of the bomber.
Turns out the Romanians believe Hound, and by extension Edom, has been turned to the Conspiracy. This operation was supposed to be a proof-of-concept, and the bomb was loaded with vampiric banes. The more injured the target, the more likely that the target is (preferably was) a vampire, or at least a Renfield.
The only person who knows exactly what went down in Monaco on the day is the bomber, and if the agents don't hurry up and get her back the folks from Serviciul Informatii de Externe are going to solve that problem permanently.
Once upon I time I talked about Heath Robinson Assassination, using reporting on the killing of Iranian scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh as an example.
I based my discussion on a Guardian newspaper article which said:
“The operation was very complex and took place using electronic devices, and no one was present at the scene,” [Ali Shamkhani, secretary for Iran's supreme national security council] told Iranian media ...
A [Fars news agency] report said Fakhrizadeh and his wife were travelling in a bulletproof car along with three vehicles for bodyguards when gunfire hit his car. Fakhrizadeh exited the car to check the damage, the report said, speculating that he may have thought he had hit something.
“At this moment, from a Nissan car that was stopped 150 metres away from the martyr’s car, several shots were fired at the martyr from an automatic remote-controlled machine gun,” the [Fars] report said, adding that one bullet hit his back.
“Moments later, the same stopped Nissan exploded,” it said, adding that the owner of the car, which it did not identify, had left the country a month ago. It said the weapons may have been controlled by satellite.
The Iranian state-owned broadcaster Press TV cited unidentified “informed sources” as saying remnants from the attack showed Israeli arms had been used to kill Fakhrizadeh.
Turns out, some of this was a load of old hooey.
I’ve been listening to The Rest Is Classified podcast, part of the Goalhanger family of podcasts, and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in spycraft. Night’s Black Agents players and Directors should binge this, but their recent MKUltra discussion will interest Delta Green folks too.
From the Classified discussion, I discovered a few interesting facts.
Among them:
Fakhrizadeh was not driving a bulletproof car. He was in his own car which was, in fact, the Nissan mentioned in the article. It wasn’t protected in any way; it was a bog-standard, run-of-the-mill, please-shoot-me-full-of-holes Nissan.
Fakhrizadeh did not get out of the car. He was shot while driving, and fell out of the car, possibly trying to take cover. At that point he was seriously injured but not dead; the killing shots came directly afterward.
The explosion that destroyed the Israeli vehicle, which was intended to destroy all the evidence, didn’t work as intended. The machine gun survived more or less intact, or at least intact enough to be identified as a Belgian FN MAG general purpose machine gun – an old warhorse. That puppy’s been around, in one form or another, since the late 1950s.
The Heath Robinson machinery was smuggled in over a lengthy period, probably by people who didn’t know what they were carrying. Classified alleges that several people had been charged with smuggling in relation to this attack.
Officially, nobody knows who did it, though judging by the comments made on Classified there doesn’t seem to be much doubt as to who did what to whom.
Honestly? A lot of this reminded me of the preamble in the Forsythe novel The Day of the Jackal, which describes an attempt on the life of General de Gaulle. Particularly the description of the kill point, with one car out in advance spying on approaching vehicles to see if Fakhrizadeh was coming, while the kill team lies in wait further down the road.
The de Gaulle shooting was the Petit-Clamart attack of 22 August 1962, where the Organisation armée secrète (OAS) signaler was supposed to give the alert by waving a newspaper. At which point the gunmen further down the road were to take action. However, the whole thing went wrong when fading daylight made seeing the newspaper difficult. This delayed the shooting by a vital few seconds, allowing de Gaulle’s vehicle to slip past – though not unscathed.
It turns out, if Classified is to be believed, that the Fakhrizadeh shooting nearly came undone thanks to a similar problem, though this time it was distance, not fading light, that proved problematic. Thanks to the distance between the shooter and the kill site, the remote shooter faced a time lag of a few fractions of a second between the signal to shoot and the shot itself, which in turn affected accuracy. AI had to be used to solve the computational problem, allowing the instruction and the shot to happen simultaneously.
Still, consider: Petit-Clamart involved at least 12 people on the day, not including support staff and sympathizers, of whom 15 total were arrested. This includes the leader Jean-Marie Bastien-Thiry, who was the only one whose sentence of death was carried out. This was a devastating blow to the OAS, which didn't survive past 1963.
This is a significant difference from the Fakhrizadeh killing. In that attack, there were no operatives on the ground, either at the spotter car or the shooter. The whole thing was done remotely. We don't even know who was at the trigger, who the spotters were.
However, to my mind the biggest difference by far between the two assassinations was that de Gaulle was driven by a professional, Gendarme Francis Marroux, whose skills made the difference on the day. Fakhrizadeh insisted on driving himself. That may have been a fatal mistake.
So! Some of my comments in the previous article are comprehensively disproved. Though I did rely rather too much on one source, which was my error. Turns out the source was talking out of his hat.
Does any of this change the game advice I gave concerning Heath Robinson Assassination, Distance Shooter and Difficulty assessment? Not really. The advice stands.
However, since we're here:
Uncover the Shooter
An important target (eg. Edom Duke) has been assassinated, by someone using a specially built, remote-targeted rifle. The target's organization is in an uproar, and the agents are brought in to find out who it was that carried out the attack.
For complete success, the agents need to discover both the organization that sponsored the attack, and the shooter. Partial success means uncovering the organization, but not the shooter.
The assassination took place in public in a major European public place (eg. on the steps of Westminster Abbey, or in St. Mark's Square, Venice) and was witnessed by several people, including the target's bodyguards. An explosion took place seconds later which eliminated much of the evidence.
Tradecraft indicates there are perhaps half-a-dozen freelancers, world-wide, capable of carrying out the attack, all of them Wire Rats. Assuming, of course, that the attack was carried out by a freelancer.
Military Science identifies the type of rifle used, despite the explosion. It's a Russian SVD which, in combination with the Tradecraft clue, narrows down the suspect list to two, assuming it's a freelancer. Most Wire Rats would use different tech.
Notice or Forensic Pathology indicates that the target was chemically dosed with an agent that created what amounts to a glowing bullseye, invisible to the human eye, to assist targeting. Occult knows that the substance used to create this target is an alchemical substance favored by some Russian Satanic groups. This narrows the freelancer list to one.
It was:
Option One: CIA. The killing was orchestrated by Find Forever, who mimicked the kill style of a particular Russian asset to throw shade on the Litsky Brava Russian criminal group. Find Forever is playing a Yojimbo Option; it wants the targeted side to start fighting with the Litsky Brava, at which point Find Forever will offer its services against the Russian threat.
Option Two: Alraune/Unternehmen Braun The killing was orchestrated by a German-based group, either the German vampire program or the deathless Alraune, and whoever it was used an old Rote Armee Fraktion asset to do it. The Red Army shooter has been around since the 1960s but is forever updating their methods; back in the day, its codename was Trapdoor Spider. The killing was an attempt to remove what the targeting organization sees as a nuisance.
Option Three: Edom. The killing was orchestrated by Britain's vampire program, to take out an important Conspiracy target - though the agents may not know that the target was, secretly or otherwise, in the Conspiracy's pay. Edom hired an outsider to pull off the hit as it didn't want anything left behind that might allow the target's organization to work out who did it. The shooter is a former Turkish asset who wants enough money to retire, and who doesn't realize that Edom's bank accounts aren't as bottomless as they've been led to believe. This lack of funding may tempt the Wire Rat to betray his paymasters, at a crucial juncture.
Once upon a time there was a rich asshole named Ross Perot. He owned a nice house in Bermuda, but became very upset because he couldn't dock his yacht. There were reefs in the way. So he brought in a few explosives experts and blew up the reef. This was, as you might imagine, contrary to local law. The rich asshole told local law to fuck off, and off it duly fucked.
However, Perot did at least have the decency to make sure his explosives experts got off the island without spending a night in jail. He did this by putting them on board his private plane and zipping them out of the country within a few hours of the explosion.
I mention this because I, like many of you, have been paying attention to recent events in Haiti.
If you're going to go to the trouble of assassinating a president, why wouldn't you make sure the assassins fled the country?
Answer: you do that when you don't care what happens to the assassins, probably because they're idiots. With the possible exception of those few still on the run as of time of writing, who may be out of the country by now. Bet the triggerman (men?) had a plane or boat waiting. Either that or a shallow grave. Perhaps both.
Some sources claim the mercs had nothing to do with it, that President Moïse was actually killed by third parties shortly before their arrival. Plausible, certainly. It would mean the mercs are basically expendable patsies. Gullibles.
But, God a'mighty, how dumb do you have to be to answer an advert on the internet looking for someone to help arrest a president? Hands up who thinks American agents from whichever agency it may be can go to a foreign country, arrest and extradite any member of its government, whether the president or the local garbage collector. Go on, shame yourselves.
Nigerian 419 victims are Mensa members compared to Haitian American James Solages, who claims to have been hired to help execute a warrant, not a person. Or Manuel Antonio Grosso Guarín, former member of the Columbian armed forces, who posted pictures of his Haitian vacation on Facebook shortly before the deed.
The other question floating across my forebrain is why the hell did whoever the brains of the operation is need twenty eight people to shoot one man? [Assuming that the President's own guard didn't do him in prior to their arrival, of course.] Though I suppose the answer is, Brains didn't have anyone on the payroll capable of sneaking in like Sam Fisher, so Brains hired a mess of morons to ram-raid the place. Creche of cretins? Band of boobs?
Frankly, it just goes to show - if it needed showing - that thriller writers whose protagonists or antagonists are highly skilled ex-SAS/Special Forces types capable of killing a man sixteen different ways with a pencil, and who effortlessly execute insanely complex schemes while simultaneously completing the New York Times crossword, in pen, are talking out of their arses.
Paid killers aren't geniuses. Spies aren't charismatic James Bond types. They're silly, greedy little idiots playing with toys, or ex-military who've spent too long in the sun.
I mean, look at some of these clowns. The spy who couldn't spell. Kevin Mallory, who China paid a measly $25K for state secrets and is now spending his twilight years in prison. Mark Thatcher (fucked if I'll call him Sir, much less The Honorable) who bankrolled a coup and has since been refused residency in Monaco and Gibraltar, jurisdictions not famous for their integrity. Or, as Sir Roger Moore once said of Monaco's new quasi-criminal citizens, 'how do you say piss off in Russian?' The Achille Lauro PLO hijackers. Dangerous? Certainly. In the same way a 4 year old with a handgun is dangerous. But you'd never see these loons in a James Bond film.
Honestly, it gives me hope when I read about $80 million bank heists. Not that I want banks robbed, but at least someone's putting the effort in. That was a clever stunt. Or the Hatton Garden crew. Though to be fair the Bangladesh Bank Burglars were let down by a spelling error, and the Hatton Garden robbers were arrested after blabbing in a pub which the police were surveilling. Human nature strikes again.
Night's Black Agents and games like it thrive on highly skilled ex-SAS/Special Forces types doing the impossible and looking damn cool in the process. NBA even proposes the Hit as a potential active mission:
The agents must kill someone. This can be a simple sniping, or a gang rumble. Provide the target and his security, plan a weakness in one or both.
Of course, it doesn't come with an exfiltration plan.
Let's play with the concept, in a little scene I'll call:
A Large Splodge of Wonga!
[Wonga = cash. Quote from Simon Mann, one of Mark Thatcher's pals.]
The Hit went off more or less successfully. The agents might have lost some assets or a Network contact or two, but the target is down. Time to make that clean getaway ...
What happened to our clean getaway?
Mr. Smith let the side down, and either failed to arrange an exfiltration or just didn't bother. The agents are in hostile territory, with few escape routes. I've done something similar in Macau before, but that assumed vampiric involvement. This is a straight, old-fashioned hit, with no supernatural elements.
As to exactly where, I'll leave that to the Director. It could even be somewhere entirely fictional - in Swords of the Serpentine, say. The location's key characteristics are:
Relatively isolated. You can fly out or catch a boat, but either there are no land borders or the ones that do exist are cut off by mountains or similarly difficult terrain. Deserts, jungles, that kind of thing.
Alternatively it's easy to get across the border, but the folks on the other side are even less welcoming that the ones you're fleeing from. Diplomacy needed to wangle a safe harbour.
Heavily armed. The hostile territory's armed forces, police, internal security possess sophisticated armaments and aren't shy about using them. Shoot first and ask questions never is their operating protocol.
Even more heavily armed. Never mind the cops; the average citizen has a handgun, shotgun, SMG, machete, and is especially jumpy right now. So don't provoke an armed mob, not unless you like being barbecued.
Game of Thrones. The hostile territory's government has a few would-be leaders waiting in the wings. Theoretically the agents could cut a deal with one of these claimants: safety in return for ... something.
Asset rich, aka Wild Geese. The hostile territory possesses something that the outside world really wants. That means there are important state and non-state actors who might get involved, for a price. Maybe the Chinese Embassy will provide safe haven, or that mysterious multinational conglomerate can lend a jet.
Start at Heat 6 minimum. After all, the agents did kill someone important. Starting Heat can increase depending on how messy the Hit was, but it will not start at less than 6.
Then let the good times roll.
Even if the agents are captured, there's always a chance bribery - the large splodge of wonga - will get them out. Of course, capture can be difficult to arrange when the country's up in arms ...
From the Guardian, concerning the recent assassination of scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh in Iran:
“The operation was very complex and took place using electronic devices, and no one was present at the scene,” [Ali Shamkhani, secretary for Iran's supreme national security council] told Iranian media ...
A [Fars news agency] report said Fakhrizadeh and his wife were travelling in a bulletproof car along with three vehicles for bodyguards when gunfire hit his car. Fakhrizadeh exited the car to check the damage, the report said, speculating that he may have thought he had hit something.
“At this moment, from a Nissan car that was stopped 150 metres away from the martyr’s car, several shots were fired at the martyr from an automatic remote-controlled machine gun,” the [Fars] report said, adding that one bullet hit his back.
“Moments later, the same stopped Nissan exploded,” it said, adding that the owner of the car, which it did not identify, had left the country a month ago. It said the weapons may have been controlled by satellite.
The Iranian state-owned broadcaster Press TV cited unidentified “informed sources” as saying remnants from the attack showed Israeli arms had been used to kill Fakhrizadeh.
My first reaction: that seems needlessly complicated.
Think about all you'd have to arrange for this to happen. You'd have to smuggle in some fairly sophisticated equipment, get someone with above-average technical expertise to put it all together (don't forget whoever-it-is needs to be a demolitions expert as well as a mechanical genius), transport all that kit to the hit site and pray Fakhrizadeh chooses exactly that route. Since he's an assassination target you've got to figure he changes his driving route constantly to avoid becoming an easy target, so good luck with that. Hopefully your sources on the inside can give you Fakhrizadeh's route so you don't have to rely on blind luck.
You probably can't afford to leave the Nissan in place for longer than a few hours, so this all has to be done quickly as well as discreetly. Presumably you have to have a Plan B in case this doesn't work and you have to retrieve the Nissan and its gear to try again tomorrow. You'd then have to remotely control all that sophisticated equipment and do it in such a way that you can adjust the kill shot in case Fakhrizadeh doesn't obligingly stand exactly where you want him to. You then have to carry off the operation flawlessly and extract whoever it was that put all that equipment together. As assassinations go, this technical masterpiece makes the aerosol murder of Kim Jong-nam look like amateur hour.
Incidentally, jolly good luck on the shooter's part that not only did Fakhrizadeh get out of his bulletproof car and stand out in the open like a complete fool, but also his bodyguards didn't immediately intervene and drag the idiot under cover. Three vehicles, assume four people per vehicle - that's twelve bodyguards, any one of whom could have saved his life. Did Fakhrizadeh habitually bail out of his protective vehicle? Is that why his bodyguards weren't quick off the bat - were they used to his antics? Was he deliberately lured out? Otherwise this seems like an incredibly lucky break, worthy of Gavrilo Princip.
For those keeping score, the effective range of a heavy machine gun is well over 150m, so no problems there. An SMG would have an effective range of about 200m, so accurate shooting's getting a bit complicated and in any case an SMG would have next to no chance of penetrating the bullet-resistant car. An assault rifle's effective range is about 400m more or less, but has a similar problem with bullet resistance - and remember this all has to happen in a matter of seconds, because the target will rabbit as soon as the threat's obvious.
So if this happened at all the Nissan presumably had a mounted HMG of some description, since the shooter couldn't count on Fakhrizadeh getting out of the car and the HMG has the best chance of being able to eat through the car's resistance to hit the target. Even then, the odds aren't great - unless the target gets out of the car and obligingly provides the perfect opportunity.
Incidentally I cry bullshit on that claim Israeli armaments were used to carry out the attack. It might have been the Israelis, but if it was not even the most idiotic of spies uses easily identifiable home-manufactured equipment. It'd be like James Bond parachuting in with a Union Jack chute.
I can't help thinking it would have been easier to smuggle in a couple gunmen, purchase equipment on the ground, and hit the target the old-fashioned way. It sounds more like something I'd see in an NCIS Los Angeles plotline than a real-life Iranian assassination. After all, if your whole plan hinges on the target being kind enough to get out of the car and present you with a kill shot it really doesn't matter whether you're using Robocar or someone with a reasonably accurate rifle.
If you're wondering whether I can get past that, no, I really can't. This whole scheme would probably have gone down the crapper if Fakhrizadeh hadn't gotten out of the car. So why the hell did he? People do stupid things, but you've got to figure he'd been told again and again that staying in the car was the best policy - he's a prime target, after all. Did he really care that much if the paintwork on his company car got dinged?
That said, if the Wire Rats in your Night's Black Agents game aren't paying close attention to this theory then they just aren't trying hard enough.
Heath Robinson was a cartoonist who specialized in ridiculous, over-complicated mechanical devices; his American equivalent, and spiritual successor, is Rube Goldberg. The NBA support book Double Tap gives Achievement rules, in which:
when an agent meets the criteria for an achievement
and the player provides a colorful bit of roleplaying or hot-dogging
the agent gets a 3-point refresh of whichever General ability seems most appropriate
From that:
Heath Robinson Assassination. Carry out an assassination completely remotely, by using remote-control equipment of some complexity. No fair just exploding a bomb with your cell phone; get creative with your kill shot.
The Double Tap cherry Trapmaster is the closest equivalent to any cherry I might devise to cover this situation. I'm not about to reinvent the wheel.
However there is another possibility: Distance Shooter. The Wire Rat can use Mechanics pool for Shooting tests when using a remotely controlled rifle or similar weapon. I'm a little leery of this. It requires some prior assembly, and it kinda feels as if the Wire Rat's stealing the team sniper's thunder, but it does have that quasi-Cyberpunk feel that the best Wire Rat ought to be able to manage.
If I were assigning Difficulty to this task I would add 3 for every element of the task, on the presumption that the more moving parts involved the more opportunities there are for failure. So in this instance there are at least three elements of the task:
Placement/assembly of the assassination weapon. (You could split that into two elements, for greater Difficulty).
Remote control of the assassination weapon.
Remote viewing of the target.
That makes the total Difficulty 9. Tag-Team Tactical Benefits or Tactical Fact-Finding can help reduce that Difficulty to an acceptable level, or add in points to help the Wire Rat hit the difficulty.
When I was living in the UK, the first time around - so, late 80s early 90s - I loved the tattered horror paperbacks that seemed to spawn, unasked and unannounced, in second hand shops. This was roundabout the era of the British Horror Writer, folks like James Herbert, Clive Barker, Graham Masterson (The Mirror enthralled me, and I cannot for the life of me tell you why), and, of course, Shaun Hutson. I'm not sure what it was about the 80s that brought their particular style to prominence, but there were a couple things you could absolutely guarantee would be part of any novel any of these people wrote: gore, in large quantities, and sex, in not quite so large quantities. So basically squirting bodily fluids, and squirting bodily fluids.
Assassins is very much in that category. There's a moment in it when a zombie gets a blowjob, and I think I can safely say this scene sums up the story - maggots and all.
Hutson's an author after my own heart. "I have to get money … basically, that's how it works. Someone says 'here's an obscene amount of money, Shaun, would you like to go and write a book,' and then the Muse descends with incredible speed .. I do get writer's block every morning, at ten o'clock when I get into the office. I'd love to sit here now and say 'I go into the office at ten, then I drive my Ferrari for an hour, go write another chapter, then go off to Bermuda and do the first draft. But one doesn't. One clears off into the office, sits there - and I stare at a blank screen sometimes for two hours at a time - until something clicks into place. That's how you have to do it."
I don't know how much I'd like his stuff now. It's been a while since the 80s. I loved different things. Re-reading Assassins was a guilty pleasure, but it's a bit like re-reading Rats or The Mirror, both of which I enjoyed at the time, but would probably feel a bit meh about now. Which doesn't entirely make sense. Sure, they're trashy, but then so are most horror films - particularly if they're about zombies - and I still watch those.
Must admit, what I don't understand is how they made a film out of Slugs, but not this.
Still, if you were wondering what Hutson's style is like - now you know.
Gore isn't something you see a lot of in tabletop. Gunshots, yes, messy deaths, o Lord yes, explosions, Why Yes I Would Like Another. But I suspect if you tried something like this you'd get banned from the table:
Where there should have been a mouth there was just a gaping hole which seemed to stretch from the remains of his nose to the point of his chin. It was surrounded by wisps of grey hair and strands of rotten flesh which hung down like obscene raffia curtains over the gaping maw. The lips were little more than pieces of shriveled flesh which slid back to expel a blast of air so foul that Adam almost passed out. And, from the center of that reeking hole, a tongue emerged. Blackened and covered with thick yellow sputum which dripped like mouldering pus, it writhed like a bloated worm with a life of its own, twisting and turning in that putrescent gap, flicking in and out …
For starters, too many things are Like Something Else. For another, words are jammed together that make no sense together - mouldering pus, for instance.
But I have to admit, there's something there which grabs my attention. There's a quote about James Herbert which fits: Herbert doesn't just Go There, he Goes There, sets it on fire, and sells hotdogs.
I've been Keeper, Director, and what-have-you for more horror games than I care to count, but I can only think of one time I really got under the players' skin, in the same way writers like Hutson and Herbert do. That was the time I had a victim cut to bits and flushed down the toilet, except it didn't quite work, so the bathroom flooded. Happy days of youth, I suppose.
As with all gaming advice, I preface this with a 'check with your players before you do it' mantra. That said, if everyone's on board, (remember Consent, folks), then my advice for creating horror at the table has nothing to do with vampires, things that go bump in the night, or even atmosphere.
No, my advice is this: be prepared to Go There, set it on fire, and sell hotdogs.
Do I recommend this book? Christ Almighty, no. It's bloody awful, not least because the zombie assassins - the whole reason the book exists - vanish about halfway through and don't turn up again till the climax. Instead Hutson tells the story of the Sharon Tate murders, again. And again. The characters are two dimensional and utterly pointless, and the whole thing's about as engaging as Hammer Horror at its worst. Hutson basically takes Get Carter (complete with 'avenge dead brother' plot), Charlie Manson and Graham Ingels, jams it all together, and adds some softcore porn. There's nothing remotely complex about it.
But.
There's something worth learning from the bad as well as the good.
I see Assassins has been reprinted again and again, and can be had right now, in paperback, for less than the price of a pint in London. Even Foyles has it in stock. So there must be something to it, mustn't there? Hutson's published an average of one novel a year since 1982. That's a success story a lot of us would kill for.
Here's my takeaway. First, that the author only ever writes for an audience of one.
You can try to please everyone, and sometimes succeed. After all, Robert W. Chambers made an entire career out of pleasing a particular audience, and deliberately changed both style and subject matter when he felt the audience wanted something else. He wrote The King In Yellow.
Now, without visiting Wikipedia, name six other novels he wrote. The man churned out well over a hundred, and at least a score of them were turned into movies. It shouldn't be that difficult.
(If you managed it, well done, Ken Hite.)
Therein lies the problem. Most writers who try to please an audience churn out bland mush. Popular mush, sometimes. Dan Brown's rolling in lucre, after all. But mush is still mush, and unless you like the same damn thing every damn day, you're going to get bored writing it. Perhaps not bored spending the money, if you're making Dan Brown paychecks. But that would only carry me so far, and I suspect the same can be said of many of you.
Write to please yourself, and to hell with anyone else.
The second is, stop worrying about art, or the muse. I very much doubt Huston cares one bit about what I think of Assassins, or anything else he writes. He cares about the blank page, and he knows the only way to fill that blank page is to sit in front of the keyboard and make something happen.
Stephen King has, in the course of a long and successful career, said many things, but his writing advice is solid. I want to draw your attention to two from King.
First:
You have to stay faithful to what you're working on.
Second:
I recognize terror as the finest emotion, and so I will try to terrify the reader. But if I find I cannot terrify, I will horrify, and if I find I cannot horrify, I will go for the gross-out. I'm not proud.
Hutson ticks both boxes. Faithful to the subject, and gross-out almost every time, because he cannot terrify and only occasionally horrifies. Not that he cares. He's still writing. He's been sitting behind that keyboard for a very long time; he's not going to quit now.
So next time you're behind the GM screen, and you've the complete attention of a group of wide-eyed horror groupies, remember:
