Slime
John Halkin
Arrow Books, 1984
ISBN: 0-09-9338408
Do you like goo? Do you like ooze? Do you like jelly? Do you like gloop, glop and guck? Yes? Of course you do. The slimy stuff has long been a staple of horror, adding a little flavor with the “gross-out” scare. It mixes well with the blood and kills I suppose. So, we have determined that you the reader enjoy the gooey parts of horror. What about jellyfish? They are simple creatures, even lacking a brain. Surely, they couldn’t possibly be dangerous, could they? Well, just picture yourself back in the 80s in a time where (at least in a horror novel) that every living thing was out to get us humans. It was just a fact. Also, the novel doesn’t have much slime, sorry. I was disappointed too.
John Halkin went out of his way to prove that even the simplest forms of life were down right thirsty for human death and destruction. His magnum-opus horror “trilogy” all had to deal with the hunting of man by the little (sometimes big) goopy things that go bump in the night. He started in 1980 with Slither, a wonderfully gruesome book about giant (i.e. three foot long) worms from the sewer who had grown teeth and didn’t care for humans. He continued the trilogy with Slime and then wrapped it up with Squelch. The little villains of Squelch are caterpillars, who burrow into your skin and are generally like jerks. Presumably, he couldn’t think of any more titles that started with “S,” so the unofficial entry in the series Bloodworm where beetles AND more worms cause all the bloody fuss.
Do you sense a pattern?
Halkin’s work is all post James Herbert’s The Rats and to a lesser extent post Guy N. Smith’s Crabs series. The idea of BLANK animal/bug/sea creature attacking England and a stalwart hero facing them down is pretty much the rhythm these books fall into. And what a smooth rhythm. Pound-for-pound the British horror authors of the 70s and 80s produced better creature feature novels than the Americans. The UK versions were usually slimmer books with a shorter page count, brisker pace, had plenty of bloody attacks, and were full of sex. The problem with a lot of the American horror writers of the time was simply that they had to write big, fat Stephen King-sized paperbacks when really what they were writing was a 90-minute movie which played on the second bill at a drive-in.
John Halkin wrote what he knew. Halkin may or may not have been a pseudonym of a man named John Perry but Ramsey Campbell himself said that Halkin was working at the BBC. Which would make sense in that the hero of ALL THREE of his trilogy are TV men. Here’s the rub of this series: they are all the same. The plots are nearly identical. TV Man has problems with his marriage, has problems with BLANK monster, has affairs which are just as/more important than monster attacks, and at the end they save the day by being heroic TV Men.
In Slime the TV Man is Tim Ewing. He’s an actor who is slumming by starring in an action show called The Chronicles of Gulliver, where he plays a son of an oil-tycoon who acts as a “trouble-shooter” for the company. As a fan of 70s television and especially 60s/70s British TV like Jason King and The Professionals, this little bit probably tickles me the most. I can almost hear the groovy theme tune.
So, the jellyfish are swarming and killing folks, shooting their jellyfish poison and just proving to be a real big problem for the Brits. Various characters include Tim's soon-to-be-ex-wife who’s having an affair, a tabloid reporter Jane who’s out to get the scoop on Tim, there’s directors, marine biologists, directors assistants and the like. It’s a fairly colorful cast. The TV angle is fairly unique to the genre and it does add some interesting sub-plots. There’s a few really effective sequences of jellyfish terror in the book and a little gore, but it’s very mild in the gruesome department. What it ramps up is the sex department. Tim Ewing being a major TV star sure helps him have sex with seemingly every woman he meets. Obviously the little tag for the end of the book is the actor-hero actually plays a “real” hero and kicks jellyfish butt.
Outside of the glorious covers, both U.K. and American, I don’t know if I can whole-heartedly recommend tracking down all three of Halkin’s gooey trilogy. Dip your toes in with one of them and seeing if you’d like to read mostly the same book again would be your best bet. I enjoyed the book and am willing to read a slightly different version three times, but your mileage might vary. Halkin wrote a few more novels, some in the horror field but he did try his hand at the action novel and the big airport novel but was pretty much done writing by 1990. Whatta-shame. Who knows what other little slimy thing he could have thought up to kill us next.
Roy Nugen is an award-winning writer, producer, property master, plus actor. He comes from a family of musicians, engineers, wildcatters, cops, lion tamers, and carpet salesmen. Evil Dead II changed his life and he once partied with Lloyd Kaufman.
He has written 15 short films including Bag Full of Trouble, Potboiler, Handle With Care, Death in Lavender, Hole in the Ground, and the feature film Arrive Alive, many of which have played across the country. He has been the property master on 17 short films and 2 feature films.
Roy is also a prolific book reviewer and collector of vintage pulp paperback books. You can read his reviews on his blog Bloody, Spicy Books and multiple magazines including Paperback Fanatic, Hot Lead and Sleazy Reader. He has also written afterwards for novels and for various websites. He lives in the only city that once arrested L. Ron Hubbard with his wife and cats.