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Dec 13

Anything but my eyebrows! NOOOoOO!Click for full image

Greengerg Comments: The face is somehow not tasty enough for the man-eating slugs?
Published 1987

Many thanks to Greengerg!

Actually, that cover IS a classical work of art!I would touch it without protective gloves.I've seen worse. Far, far, worse.Interesting, but I would still read it in public.Middlng: Neither awful nor awfully goodWould not like to be seen reading that!Awful... just awful...That belongs in a gold-lame picture frame!Gah... my eyes are burning! Feels so good!Good Show Sir! (Average: 8.13 out of 10)
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31 Responses to “Slugs”

  1. Nix Says:

    I’m too busy being stunned by the weirdness of the book’s premise to be disgusted by its appalling cover. Who on earth would try to make *slugs* horrifying? Being attacked by a slug, well, why not pick something that can move a little faster, and that it takes effort to squash? Even snails would be more dangerous (and real organisms like botfly larvae are a hell of a lot nastier).

    (OK, so perhaps I’m a particularly bad target for this book, since I look at those slugs and all I can think is ‘aah, diddums!’: I suspect most people don’t think gastropods are cute.)

  2. Justin Leego Says:

    Quite impressed that their appetite is so ravenous that they can gnaw through skull as well as skin, muscle and cartilage. Good show, slugs, good show:

  3. A.R.Yngve Says:

    – “They gorged themselves on the slowest-running living flesh — feasted on the blood of those who had forgotten how to walk away.”

    – Gee, I didn’t know slugs ate scalp hair! Yuchh!

    – How does he grimace when the rest of the body (blood flow to brain and face, lungs, heart etc.) is obviously gone?

    – The SAASB (Society Against Anti-Slug Bigotry) is going to hear about this!

    – “This is for French Cuisine!”

  4. Dead Stuff With Big Teeth Says:

    Poor Harrison Ford! 🙁

  5. Herm Says:

    “I look at those slugs and all I can think is ‘aah, diddums!’: I suspect most people don’t think gastropods are cute.”–Nix

    Yes they do. And if they don’t, there’s something wrong with them.

    “Quite impressed that their appetite is so ravenous that they can gnaw through skull as well as skin, muscle and cartilage.”–Justin

    Well, see. I know the Giant African Land Snails we kept in the biology classroom needed extra calcium supplements – same principle as a salt lick for pregnant sheep. They were given some preparation of whitewash – yummy shell-building material!

    But, seeing as slugs don’t have shells, I guess this doesn’t apply here. I HAVE SPOTTED A PLOTHOLE MY DEAR SIR.

    (Also, given the choice between a human skull and a nice hosta leaf, I don’t know any slugs personally who would choose Option A.)

  6. Phil Says:

    I assumed these slugs had the magical power to ADD human flesh as they work their way DOWN the skeleton.

    Although this one is tagged as “font problems”, I quite admire the way the title font embodies a silvery slug-trail glint.

    To earlier commenters who discussed the ease with which one can ordinarily outrun a slug: have you learned nothing from the story of the tortoise and the hare?

  7. SI Says:

    Brain slugs! KHANNNN!

    Phil> Exactly! Just like all good horror movies, no matter how fast you run. The evil flesh eating slugs will always be right behind you.

  8. Adam Roberts Says:

    Poor chap. Devoured by slugs before he got the chance to plaster that wall.

  9. Kevin Says:

    couldn’t you just outrun the slugs?

  10. NGpm Says:

    Here we are with a killer slug infestation and we’ve limited our ability to fight back with SALT treaties.

  11. A.R.Yngve Says:

    As scary monsters go, slugs really do have the odds stacked against them: no skeleton, quite slow, salt melts them… so why use them at all?

    There’s a psychological explanation to why people keep using slugs in scary stories: The slug is a symbol of some repressed thought, urge or traumatic event.

    Of course, the slug is a symbol of failure at playing golf. (What did YOU have in mind? ;-))

  12. THX 1138 Says:

    It’s Shaun Hutson, guys, it just doesn’t have to make sense. Doesn’t a killer slug cunningly hide in a lettuce at one bit? This book did make the basis for a hilariously awful horror movie, too.

  13. Libraryman Says:

    wasn’t this made into a movie?

  14. A.R.Yngve Says:

    Shaun Hutson writes ALL the Hollywood movies nowadays.

  15. SI Says:

    Adam> Good point! But maybe the slugs started off with plaster… then went onto FLESH! It’s a natural progression.

  16. Brian B Says:

    I wonder if Shaun Hutson attended University of California Santa Cruz considering their mascot is this!: http://www.ucsc.edu/about/mascot.html

    Shriek in terror lowly vertebrates!

  17. Fred Zimmerman Says:

    Nice foreshadowing of the Ceti eel that Khan puts in Chekov’s ear in Star Trek II.

    http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/File:Chekovs_ear-ceti_eel.jpg

  18. A.R.Yngve Says:

    OW! There went my childhood memories! YEOW! There goes my pin codes! OUCH! Goodbye, names of past World Cup winners!

  19. David Cowie Says:

    Shaun Hutson was from my area, and my friends and I had a small amount of entertainment when we realised that the hotel bar mentioned in SLUGS was the bar of the Broadway Hotel in Letchworth! Where we had been!

  20. A.R.Yngve Says:

    Cool!
    (Inevitable follow-up question: Has Letchworth ever been invaded by a horde of ravenous man-eating slugs? An invading horde of drunken soccer fans may also qualify as inspiration for the book — and the cover!)

  21. Tom Noir Says:

    Slugs!!!

    Looking forward to Slugs 2: The Sluggening.

  22. Tag Wizard Says:

    Nicolas Cage and John Travolta star in: Slug Off

  23. Bibliomancer Says:

    Samuel L. Jackson in Slugs on a Plane:

    “Enough is enough! I have had it with these m************ slugs on this m************ plane!”

  24. A.R.Yngve Says:

    Did the book suffer from sluggish sales?
    (OW! Stop hitting me!)

  25. Dead Stuff With Big Teeth Says:

    What amuses me is that, if you read the previous entries one after another, it all comes out as The Fluger Herds The Masters of the Pit Slugs, which sounds to me like a jolly good title to a book.

  26. Tom Noir! Says:

    I imagine this is a short book:

    “OH MY GOD IT’S THE KILLER SLUGS! RUN!!”

    *brief running*

    “Oh, erm, I guess we’re safe now.”

  27. Tat Wood Says:

    @ Tom Cowie (if he’s still out there): Letchworth Garden City would be the ideal place for a slug uprising.

    @Greengerg: presumably the face is left because the terrified victim is sweating and thus killing slugs with all that salt. So there’d be a trail of armpits and discarded faces where they had passed. Assuming, that is, that their passage took less time that it took for passing crows to remove salty disjecta. I commend the cover-artist for not depicting a street littered with armpits, at least.

  28. A.R.Yngve Says:

    You can find the American movie made from this book on YouTube. (And it’s very, very dumb and gross.)

  29. GSS ex-noob Says:

    True to the source, then!

  30. Tor Mented Says:

    Ugh. I recently came home and found something similar to this – minus the human face – on my door. A bit of research revealed that it was two Limax maximus (literally, “biggest slug”), known by the common names great grey slug and leopard slug, in the act of mating.

    Wikipedia has an explanation on how these creatures mate. It is pure Lovecraftian horror. This is not something you can un-read.

  31. GSS ex-noob Says:

    @Tor: Maybe Shaun had the same experience and wrote about it.

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