Spawn (novel)

Spawn is a 1983 horror novel written by Shaun Hutson.

A child named Harold Pierce is playing a game which involves burning insects, when he accidentally sets fire to his home, killing his mother and his baby brother Gordon and doing severe permanent damage to his face. He is then considered insane and spends the next thirty-five years of his life incarcerated in a mental asylum where he is haunted by his dreadful mistake years earlier. However, when the asylum is set to be demolished, and all the patients are set to be moved to a new one, the doctors believe that Pierce's condition is stable, so they decide to release him. They manage to find him a job working as a porter in a hospital.

Meanwhile, Paul Harvey, a killer imprisoned for two murders, escapes. The prison warden informs the chief of police of Exham that he believes that Harvey will return there, as it is his home town, to kill again. He orders a thorough search for Harvey, although he is not found.

Pierce slowly settles into his new job and befriends fellow porter Greives. However, one of the aspects of his job involves burning aborted foetuses in a fire, which brings back painful memories. He eventually decides that it would be wrong to burn the foetuses, so he instead decides to sneak them out when nobody is looking and bury them in a nearby field. Shortly after, there is a powerful storm which fells an electricity pylon near the site of the grave. Pierce is paranoid that the workmen repairing the pylon will discover the grave, but they do not. He later returns to inspect the grave in fear that the rain may have washed it up, and he discovers, to his horror, that three of the foetuses are still alive.

In Exham, the police continue to search for Paul Harvey. They are now even move determined to catch him as two headless corpses have been found, and they believe Harvey was the murderer. They are also convinced that he is in Exham, as a shopkeeper caught him eating food from the shelves before chasing him out with a shotgun.

Meanwhile, Pierce begins to lose his sanity and continues to hear voices in his head, telling him what to do with the foetuses. They order him to cut open his chest and let the foetuses drink his blood, which he does. Greives decides to investigate Pierce's small hut near the hospital, as he can tell something is not right with Pierce. He is horrified to discover that Pierce has passed out due to blood loss, causing him to run from the hut towards the hospital. The shock of what he has discovered, combined stress of sprinting back to the hospital, causes him to die of a heart attack.

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