A review by beefmaster
Slimer by Leroy Kettle, John Brosnan, Harry Adam Knight

4.0

The Fungus was one of my favourite reads of 2018 so why not ring in the New Year with his earlier novel Slimer? I would have purchased a vintage paperback of it, but there was only two editions (UK and US) and both go for big bucks. Valancourt Press, of whom I've spoken before, reissued both novels this year with terrific cover. The new cover for Slimer accomplishes a rare feat: it equals the original covers without feeling ironic or retro or overly modern. Well done, Valancourt! The book itself is a slim 160 pages but never feels too short. Any more and I might have baulked. It doesn't quite reach the breathless apocalyptic heights of The Fungus either in scope or in execution, but it's a terrific version of Carpenter's The Thing: six smugglers in search of rescue happen upon an abandoned oil rig, populated by empty clothes and the odd blood splatter. Quickly they realize they're being stalked and picked off one by one by a creature science should have never created! The creature itself isn't quite as fully realized a threat as the alien in The Thing and this has to do with the near-constant scientific infodumps, which often feel like petulant justifications for the very existence of its fictional creation. It's okay, authors, you don't need to come up with a rationalization for its powers! You can just let it be scary and unknowable. Of course, the scientific jargon and breathless explanations were in vogue at the time, thanks to Michael Crichton and Robin Cook and other thriller writers. A desire for realism, in part due to Stephen King's folksy populism, choked a lot of the existential horror from these ephemeral paperbacks. Slimer still boasts the ever-popular sexual fetishes of horror written by men in their thirties and forties, though in two Knight novels, cuckolding appears both times! Women are constantly bearing their breasts and men are constantly leering at their crotches. It's weird. But at least the only real sex scene in this novel isn't depicted as sexy, sparing all of us readers from whatever the authors believe to be sexy, erotic prose *shudder*. Like The Fungus, I had a lot of fun. Can't wait to read the third Knight novel I have, Carnosaur. <