Back in my student days, when I needed an escape from the po-faced nonsense of Virginia Woolf, I turned to the trashiest horror I could find. I turned to Shaun Hutson.

Time has made Hutson worse, not better. Hybrid tells the tale of an author with writer's block. And yet, as he spends his days and nights in a drunken stupor, he finds pages of a novel on his computer which he doesn't recall writing.

This is a neat idea, with the novel-within-the- novel being told in full. Sadly, neither part is satisfactory.

The novel within is actually a sequel to Hutson's own stories of Doyle the counter-terrorist in Northern Ireland, a man who's hard with a capital H. This is the kind of story that exists between Steven Seagal movies and gun mags, where Hutson can tell you Doyle uses .50 calibre home-made dum-dums in his Desert Eagle, but can't spell garda right.

Meanwhile, the horror part is a mealy-mouthed attempt at a twist in the tale which couldn't send a shiver down the spine of a camel in the arctic.

I may just go back to Virginia Woolf.

Updated: 08:56 Wednesday, October 29, 2003