William Essex - Slime

[kooshmeister]

Ordered this off of Amazon at an ex's recommendation. So far it's quite interesting.



Truck driver Jake Seggit and his passengers Cricket Mallory and Dave Lassiter, a couple of doofballs working for the Upper Mississippi River Valley Chemical Corp. (wow that's a mouthful!), drive across the state line into Iowa. Their mission, to illegally dump some barrels of rejected PCB intended originally for transformers. The company is paying a local farmer named Greg Tusken to put the barrels into a sinkhole on his land.

As they unload the barrels, the trio notice one of the barrels is leaking. They unanimously decide it's meaningless and toss it in and drive off.

Flash-forward five years. A cute, innocent squirrel is minding his own business when he notices some greenish slimelike substance coming up out of the ground. It doesn't smell like anything, and, confused, the squirrel approaches it and promptly gets some of the stuff on his nose, which pulls him into the main mass. In a couple seconds flat the little rodent is melted alive by the acidic properties of the goop. Proving to be quite alive, the mammoth green puddle begins oozing through the forest and we see it just takes a little bit on you to doom you when a few specks get on the face of a doe, and she is eaten alive by just those little droplets.

Elsewhere, Elmer Hartline is a local farmer who has fallen on hard times, mostly thanks to his idiotic wife Hilda. Every time he tries some new business venture, she considers it too expensive and makes him quit just before he hits it big. At the moment, his latest harebrained scheme is to raise buffalo (!). When he goes out into the pasture to check on the herd, he can't find them anywhere! Furious and suspecting thieves, he goes to phone Sheriff Sawyer, not noticing the true culprit - the titular slime! - lurking in the tall grass.

The slime next targets Elmer's neighbor Charlie Maiden's farm. In contrast to Elmer, Charlie has it good. His loving wife Jodean has the biggest breasts in town, something both she and Charlie are quite proud of. Charlie's other pride and joy is his herd of cows, which, when he goes to check on the same as Elmer had his buffaloes. However Charlie gets there a mite early and witnesses his beloved bovines getting melted alive and consumed by the greenish gunk in their pasture. He falls to his knees in despair!

The slime comes over towards him and startles him by starting to get on him, but it backs off after touching his overalls. Deciding this means the slime won't harm him (in reality it's just the fabric of the overalls), Charlie dips a finger into the puddle, and, needless to say, he quickly joins his cows as a balanced part of the slime's diet. By the time Jodean Maiden realizes her husband is taking too long checking on the cows and comes to see if he's all right, the slime has gone. She finds the cows gone and Charlie's empty clothes. She sees a Jeep Cherokee go by and tries to flag it down.

The Cherokee contains Tim Walker and Nadine Benedict. Tim is the son of Alexander Walker, the owner of the local bank, and he works for his father as the loan officer. Nadine is his fiancee. Seeing Jodean, they think she is just waving and continue driving, blissfully unaware.

Meanwhile, the slime is continuing to expand across the farms and woodlands, eventually coming to another luckless son of a bitch's land. Mike Roberts is riding his tractor and minding his own business when he accidentally runs some of the stuff over. It splashes him in the face and begins dissolving it. Frantic, he tries and fails to get it off, and falls off the back of the tractor and narrowly avoids being ground up by his own combine. A small consolation, as the slime particles make short work of him, spreading and growing with the more of Mike's flesh it absorbs.

His tractor continues driving without him and smashes into the barn, causing it to collapse. Hearing the commotion, his wife Mary comes outside to investigate. Fearing Mike has been crushed in the rubble of the barn, she tries to phone the police only to be told that Sheriff Sawyer is already out at Elmer Hartline's place looking into his missing cattle...

[dem]

admirable stuff, koosh! despite raving about it elsewhere, i've never seen, let alone read a copy of Slime, but i can tell you that William Essex is also the prolific John 'Look Out Stephen King!' Tigges, author of such gems as Vessel and Book Of The Dead.

[kooshmeister]

Indeed, I myself had to resort to Amazon to get a very beat-up copy, as the usually reliable eBay (where I finally snagged Maggots) had failed me. The cover art always amused me and tonally made me mistake it for an R.L. Stine-level Goosebumps cash-in when I first saw a scan of it. The somewhat goofy title coupled with the doe-eyed kid being consumed screamed "young adult horror novel" to me.

However the cover is deceptive (and not just tonally; no little boy ever appears). The book is quite thick and quite adult in tone, although the descriptions of the actual deaths are surprisingly coy. Essex's manner of describing people getting dissolved by the slime calls to mind the detached clinical descriptions found in The Clone.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

After finishing with the Hartlines, Sheriff Fritz Sawyer investigates the crash at Mike Roberts' place. He can't find Mike's body inside the collapsed barn, but does find Mike's empty clothes. His next stop is the Maiden farm. He can find nothing. Charlie and his cattle have vanished! Hilariously, due to only Charlie's clothes remaining, Jodean Maiden thinks her husband has gone insane and is running around the county completely buckassed naked.

After Sawyer leaves, he confers with Tim Walker. Tim's initial theory is that the Maidens and Robertses are conspiring to defraud the bank somehow. However that doesn't add up, as Elmer Hartline doesn't do business there, but his animals are missing, too. Why would he be in on the scam?

Both Jodean Maiden and Mary Roberts go the way of their husbands not much later. First up is Mary. Whilst awaiting news on Mike, has her sister Thelma Rainer over to assist her on the farm. Both women get eaten by the slime despite a valiant attempt to make it back inside the house after encountering it in the Roberts' pigpen and getting some on them. Jodean bites it when she tries to rescue some calves from being consumed by the slime on its way back into the forest coming back through the Maiden farm. The biggest breasts in town make a lovely meal for the amorphous glob.

Later that night, truck driver Danny Bradshaw is arriving in town when he suddenly finds the slime crossing the road in front of his truck. He stops to investigate it, and, like Charlie Maiden before him, pokes it. One partially-consumed arm later, Danny is back in his truck and driving crazily into town to try and get medical attention for himself. He's eaten alive behind the wheel and the truck crashes headlong into a train at a railroad crossing.

A bit of realism here. I was initially annoyed when Sheriff Sawyer was introduced as the local lawman. It's a common mistake but there actually is no such thing as a "town sheriff" in the US. Instead, sheriffs are in charge of counties. So whenever a sheriff is presented as being the local authority in one of these stories I groan. Imagine my pleasant surprise when Police Chief Wally Simpson is introduced here at the scene of the truck wreck!

The bit of slime that ate Danny is now human-sized and exits the wreck unseen. It moves into the town proper and mostly contents itself with eating pets and other small animals including Bullets, the puppy belonging to Nadine Benedict's daughter Prissy. Prissy, who didn't witness Bullets' demise, sees the shiny green substance and is enamored with it. She almost touches it but her mother calls her away at the last second, and barely pays attention to Prissy's insistent talking about the "pretty green stuff."

During this time, the slime also consumes Carole Cluteler and her lover Rick Kelly. Carole is cheating on her pervy Chevrolet salesman husband Artie Cluteler, who once forced her to have sex with his friend Jack from his high school days. Now, while Artie is at work, Carole has invited Rick over for some fun. The two are in the middle of doing the horizontal mambo when the slime creeps up on them. Heedless of the two humans' romantic activities, it gobbles them up mid-coitus without letting them finish. Poor Artie comes home later and finding Carole gone, assumes she's finally left him.

The main body of the slime, meanwhile, successfully crossed the highway and ate the herd of cattle belonging to the richest man in town, J.T. Silence, who is immediately on Sheriff Sawyer and Chief Simpson's asses to solve the problem. The two decide to call in some scientific help, and Robbie MacFerguson and Betsy Rockton from the EPA are flown in by helicopter...

[kooshmeister]

Wow, did I ever fall behind on this. I'll need to find some time to read the rest of this sucker to complete the summary.

[kooshmeister]

Until I get off my ass, here's a little tidbit from the book I remembered to tide you guys over. Specifically, that some of the slime is captured in garbage bags (!) and passively stays there. And when the EPA scientists look at some of it under a microscope, its cells have mouths with little fangs.

[erebus]

You ever finish this book Kooshmeister I enjoyed your review so far. I totally agree with the cover. I too had Goosebumps rip off tagged to it. It looks like the kid on the cover has has a snotty sneezing seizure .
Would very much like to read this. Its obvious a Blob rip off. And it also reminds me of the Slime story in Pan Horror number 4. Its the type of trashy book I relish with a passion.

[kooshmeister]

Haha! At last! I continue!

Okay, so, J.T. Silence proves to be quite a jerk. When Sheriff Sawyer shows up at his ranch to look into his missing cattle, he more or less insinuates he'll get him fired if he can't find the cows. He also makes fun of Sawyer's "purty" police car and champions his World War II-era Jeep. Not that Silence is a veteran, no; he bought the Jeep secondhand. Anyway, he and the Sheriff drive around in the clunky old thing and turn up diddily squatt, so Sawyer leaves and confers with Chief Simpson and those EPA scientists.

Someone named Rose Wheeler's mother has gone missing. A victim of that pesky slime, we know, so Sawyer and Simpson drive out to the Wheeler house and encounter the slime. They witness it eat an earthworm. They decide to go and get Nadine Benedict, since she's a nurse apparently. Simpson stays at the Wheeler house to make sure nobody touches the slime. For some ungodly reason, she brings her daughter, Prissy. Now, you might think that Simpson being alone with the slime would mean he's on the fast track to ending up as slime-kibble, but no, he's alive and well by the time Sawyer, Nadine and Prissy return.

Nadine has no clue what the hell the stuff is. Simpson says it "moves around a little." Nadine pokes it with a stick, and also with a ballpoint pen (!). She suggests Simpson use his gun. And I don't mean he shoots at it. He prods at it with the barrel and it moves away from it. From this, our heroes deduce that the slime doesn't like wood, plastic or metal. Nadine remembers Prissy mentioning the "pretty green stuff," and also remembers how Bullets the puppy went missing. She puts two and two together, and everyone present is starting to conclude the bubbling pool of green glop is responsible for all the missing people and animals. They depart, but leave police officer Pete Gilder to guard the puddle.

Later, they return with Robbie MacFerguson and Betsy Rockton, the EPA scientists, who are just as stumped as everyone else. And Officer Pete has failed to get himself absorbed by the slime, too. How disappointing! Hey, slime! You're gettin' lazy! You're gonna need to step up your game and claim some more victims!

They're given a demonstration of the slime's carnivorous abilities when Sawyer feeds a bunch of "boxelder bugs" (whatever those are) to it. Betsy tries to capture some of slime in a glass jar, but the stuff no-sells, so Sawyer again employs boxelder bugs, putting them into the jar and then trying to scoop some slime in. This time, a bit goes inside, and gobbles the hapless insects up, and Sawyer screws the lid on tight. Robbie and Betsy repeat this a few times and pretty soon have quite a few jarred samples of slime.

As for the remaining puddle, Rose Wheeler lets them have a bunch of plastic garbage bags. Into these, they scoop the (surprisingly placid) gunk and bag it up tight. Now possessing about a dozen or so bags and jars of slime, Robbie and Betsy return to their helicopter and fly back to their lab. After they're gone, Sawyer and Simpson double-check to make sure it's all gone from the Wheeler residence, but are concerned that there may be more on the loose, and so they decide to get every available cop mobilized...

[kooshmeister]

I'm really sorry I've fallen behind on this one, guys. I promise I'll try and get it finished soon. For now, though, I've got my copy of The Worms with me (whilst Slime is at my mother's) so that's what I'm gonna focus on. But after The Worms is finished, I'll return to good old Slime.

[kooshmeister]

Giving his officers their marching orders, Chief Simpson basically sums their problem up as "a runny gelatin" that "eats stuff." He and Sheriff Sawyer issue orders for everyone to stay in off the street, but pretty much immediately the entire population of the town starts converging on the police station and looking none too please. Uh-oh. Methinks we might have an angry mob on our hands!

Elsewhere, teenager Terry Ralston is driving along in his father's pickup truck minding his own business and thinking about picking up some girls when he suddenly sees something out of the corner of his eye in Joe Turncock's pasture. Stopping, he watches as the slime consumes a whole herd of Turncock's cattle. Understandably freaked out, he floors it and begins speeding back to town to try and warn everyone.

Back at the Wheeler residence, Rose is perturbed that the cops didn't tell her where he mother went. Apparently she can't put two and two together after seeing the slime eat a bunch of bugs. She wanders into the garden where she sees some leftover bits of slime the authorities overlooked, and because she's an idiot, she pokes it. It feels cool, then tingly, then painful! Panicking, she tries to run inside, but trips on the porch and falls down, ripping open her cheek and ruining her nose. Jesus.

The slime begins consuming her hand, and eventually her entire arm. She makes the mistake of trying to rub it off with her other, bare hand, and all this does is get that hand dissolving too. She weeps and moans and pain and for some reason tries stifling her own screams using her slime-covered hand, getting the goo in her mouth. After that, she's done for. She quickly dies and the slime consumes her whole body, the moseys off to wherever it is that blob monsters mosey off to.

Back at the police station, Sawyer and Simpson demand to know why the hell the townspeople have disobeyed their orders. The townspeople, in turn, want to know what all "this crap" about staying safely inside and not touching any mysterious green ooze is about! Yeah! They want to be free to pointlessly endanger themselves and get killed doing stupid shit! 'Murica, fuck yeah!

Simpson basically calls them idiots asking them if they're to stupid to follow basic instructions, but they press the issue, demanding to know the whats and whys and all that stuff, so Simpson opts to elaborate, despite Sawyer's objections that it'll sound too dumb. Simpson tells them he'll spill the beans... but warns that if they're not back in their homes with the doors locked as soon as he's done explaining, he's arresting the whole lot of them for the crime of being annoying (actually he says disturbing the peace and inciting a riot, but same difference).

So the Chief tells them and everyone laughs. The obligatory references to Steve McQueen and The Blob are made and everybody guffaws because by God, are they clever! Simpson isn't amused. He tells them to laugh all the want, but the EPA scientists took a bunch of the stuff off in trash bags to study. The mob takes this to mean all the slime is gone and want to know if this is so, why the curfew? Simpson gives the obvious answer - that there may be more of it. When this is questioned, Simpson says too many people and livestock are missing for it to have all been done by the single puddle they found at the Wheeler residence.

Suddenly Terry Ralston comes tearing up in his truck and doomsayin', yelping about the slime eating Mr. Turncock's cows. The coppers realize their worst fears - that there is more of the infernal stuff - have been realized! Tim Walker (who has had so little to do in this story I sometimes forget he even exists, even in scenes featuring him) suggests deputizing some of the townsfolk to block off roads and whatnot. They leap into action! Although they... don't have a plan yet!

To be continued! Same slime time (okay maybe not at precisely 5:28), same slime thread!

[kooshmeister]

This won't be getting finished anytime soon. I had to ditch my copy due to excessive water damage/mold damage. I suppose I should've waited to finish the review, but, eh, I was concerned about isolating it from my collection ASAP so it didn't spread. My Goosebumps book Stay Out of the Basement and one of my copies of Eat Them Alive had to go, too.

[magus]

I have to say, your review/synopsis inspired me to find a copy of this book. It just came in yesterday and I can't wait to dive into it. If you're looking for a replacement copy, I found mine here: www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?isbn=9780843926408&n=100121503&cm_sp=mbc-_-9780843926408-_-used

[kooshmeister]

Oh, thank you! Glad to know you enjoyed my review, perpetually unfinished though it it at this point, heh.

[magus]

So my question is why SyFy hasn't bought up the rights to do a TV movie adaptation of this. It just feels like something they would want to do.

[kooshmeister]

One can only wonder. It'd be relatively easy to do. I can see the titular slime as really terrible CGI.

[kooshmeister]

Most of the townsfolk reject being deputized and just sorta run for the hills. So Tim Walker and Sheriff Sawyer are pretty much back at square one. The townspeople now mostly believe in the slime's existence, but nobody wants to actively aid the authorities in defeating it. Meanwhile, it turns out there are now actually three separate blobs of the stuff. The monster first split in two when the truck drove over it. The patch that was in Rose Wheeler's mother's garage was bagged up and is currently contained more or less safely at the EPA lab, where chief scientist Dr. Lee Russel is studying the garbage bags full of the stuff that has been brought in. He, Robbie MacFerguson and Betsy Rockton make the startling discovery under an electron microscope the slime is composed of molecules with mouths filled with sharp teeth. It doesn't dissolve its victims through any acidic properties, it literally eats them alive on a microscope level. The scientists struggle to find something that'll kill it.

The second blob is the bigger one that ate J.T. Silence's herd and then made mincemeat out of Joe Turncock's livestock, and is currently headed towards town while Chief Simpson and Sheriff Sawyer try and figure out what to do about it. They're keeping a close eye on it from a safe distance, observing its slow but determined ooze towards town. Its next stop is Ben Oates' pig farm.

Back in town, Tim Walker goes around to the Benedict residence to see Nadine, and after some mush there's talk of marriage. Um, priorities, people? Your town is being gradually eaten up by living lakes of toxic waste and you're discussing marriage? Nadine is also being kinda dumb here, as despite the threat, she's letting Prissy play by herself in the backyard. Oh, she says she's watching her from the kitchen window, but she quickly gets distracted making out with Tim, which is bad news for her daughter, who encounters the third and so far smallest blob of the slime, formed from the droplets the authorities missed when bagging the stuff up in Rose Wheeler's mother's garage. Having gobbled up Rose, it turns out that where blob monsters mosey off to is Nadine Benedict's backyard, and now it's oozing itself beneath Prissy while she's on her swing set.

Because she's the stupidest child character ever conceived in a horror novel, she still sees the ravenous goo as her "pretty green stuff" and isn't afraid of it, and doesn't yell for help or even act alarmed in the slightest. This is at least partially because it turns out that nobody told her that Bullets got eaten by the slime, to spare her any grief; well, now that's backfiring because Prissy doesn't see the slime as a threat. It's still her "pretty green stuff."

It takes next door neighbor Ellie Niggleston noticing what is happening to alert Prissy's amorous mother and her boyfriend to the danger. In what is supposed to be a tense scene but just comes off as toothless because A) you know they're not going to kill off Prissy and B) Prissy's complete lack of fear robs the scene of an urgency, Tim takes the gamble that the since slime doesn't consume inorganic matter it won't eat through his shoes or pants and walks through it to reach Prissy. He gets the idea from seeing the slime flow around and refuse to have anything to do with an old shoe Bullets used to like to chew, and remembers how it rejected a stick, pen and a gun barrel. He succeeds, but it's still a stupidly huge, pointlessly risky gamble. Anyway, he manages to safely retrieve Prissy from the swing and carry her unharmed out of the small lake of slime surrounding the swing set, in a scene that's kinda similar to the one in The Clone where they get through the gauntlet of ravenous clone tissue by covering themselves in sheets. Except even stupider.

The three go inside to call the cops, but when they come back, the slime has moved on. It's then that Tim notices his shoes aren't inorganic. He's wearing leather dress shoes. Meaning the slime doesn't just eat things that aren't organic, it simply won't touch things that aren't alive, presumably including corpses. With an idea in mind, he rushes out to meet up with Sheriff Sawyer out at the Oates farm.

Meanwhile, the slime, exiting the Benedict property, oozes into the yard of dog breeder Brad Neyens. He's working in his basement with one of those industrial strength vacuum cleaners and so he doesn't hear his animals' howls of pain and despair as they're absorbed. But his neighbor Jack Waylon does (no word on whether this is the same Jack who Artie Cluteler once forced his wife Carole to have sex with while he watched). Apparently both men are two of the only people left in town who are unaware about the roving blob of amorphous green flesh-eating ooze, since when Jack hears the dogs' yowling, he is annoyed rather than alarmed. Apparently, Brad's loudly barking dogs have been a source of tension between the two men for some time, and so he storms over to complain. By the time the two men actually go to investigate, all the dogs have been eaten and the now much larger third glob of slime has moved on. And, shock of shocks, it turns out that they have heard about the "green stuff," they just didn't believe it. But they do now. Or at least Jack does. Thoroughly unnerved, he urges Brad to call the cops. Brad insists that the killer slime story is just some bullshit that Chief Simpson made up to provide a convenient excuse for why he and Sheriff Sawyer can't solve the mystery of all the missing people and animals. Nevertheless, he is angry at his missing dogs, so he goes to phone the police station despite his skepticism.

At the Oates farm, the second blob of slime is fast approaching and Tim is explaining his theory to Sawyer and Ben Oates. Because he believes the slime won't eat anything alive, Tim's plan is to sacrifice half of Oates' pigs and put the carcasses in a circle around the blob to contain it until the EPA scientists can come and collect it. Oates refuses to go along with this plan, not because he refuses to sacrifice some of his pigs, but because he doesn't think they can kill enough of them in time to provide enough dead bodies to surround the slime with, and he'd rather shoot at it. So he goes and opens fire on it despite Tim and the Sheriff's attempt to stop him. All this does is cause some droplets to splatter onto his pants leg.

Like Charlie Maiden before him, Oates is initially saved because the fabric of his pants prevents the slime from directly touching his skin. But instead of simply taking his pants off, he tries to wipe his pants clean with his bare hand, and neither Tim nor Sawyer can do anything to save him as he becomes slime food. Jeez, at least in The Clone they chopped Dr. Agnew's arm off to save him. I'm sure a pig farm has no shortage of sharp objects. Instead, the second Oates' hand begins getting consumed, our brave heroes just run away and leave him to die. After a brief stop at the farmhouse to inform Oates' wife and daughter of his fate, they jump into Sawyer's police cruiser and speed off without even attempting to enact Tim's plan. They just leave the pigs to get consumed.

Oh, and they don't take Oates' wife and daughter with them, either. Great job, guys.