Hutson, Shaun
AVERAGE REVIEW SCORE:
2 out of 5
(1 book)
Slugs
Mike Brady, the Health Inspector of a suburban British town, stumbles upon a deadly threat to the inhabitants of Merton. In the sewers beneath the town a deadly new breed of slug has grown to crave the taste of flesh and soon they begin spilling over into people's gardens and houses.
Killer slugs. Sounds ridiculous, doesn't it? And, frankly, it is. One of the oldest tricks in the horror playbook is to take something ordinary and non-threatening and make it dangerous, and this is the trick that Hutson plays here. The problem is that the idea of fast-moving, semi-intelligent, flesh-eating slugs pushes too far beyond the willing-suspension-of-disbelief boundaries and no matter how gory this book becomes, it's almost impossible to ever take it seriously. The author could've gotten around this by not playing things entirely seriously, but instead Hutson writes this story entirely straight-faced.
Rather than a great horror story which makes you reassess an everyday part of your life, this book actually reads more like a B-movie video-nasty horror film. It hits all of the notes you'd expect from a low-budget horror, including but not limited to; people not taking the protagonist seriously, characters acting the way the plot needs them to instead of how a real person would act, a series of ever-increasingly gory deaths for characters who've just been introduced and a constant stream of unnecessary sexual content. This last hits its pinnacle when there's a scene where two teenagers are attacked whilst having sex and one of the flesh-eating slugs slimes up inside the girl's vagina. For some reason.
It wouldn't be impossible to enjoy this book, by any means, and if like me you read it somewhat ironically (it does after all have the tagline 'They slime, they ooze, they kill...' on its cover) then you can have a bit of fun with its trashy nature. But don't be deceived into thinking this isn't a bad book; it is garbage.
2 out of 5
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