It’s all over in a brisk 200 pages, and you can jazz it up by playing my own Shaun Hutson’s Slugs drinking game. I know you’re reading! Get out of the garden guys, and start living. Harold in particular meets his demise in a truly horrific scene involving not-quite sharp enough garden shears, in a cautionary tale for all you aubergine loving gardeners out there. Luckily, when the carnage begins in earnest, after a good 60 pages or so of suspense building, Hutson really lets loose. It’s not always successful, particularly the less than fascinating tale of Harold and his aubergines. For the most part these work well, and Hutson shows us a pretty morose and downbeat vision of small town British life in the 80s. It follows the template of The Rats pretty slavishly, offering little slice of life stories of working class Brits, shortly before they are offed by nature’s least deadly predator in increasingly outlandish fashion. But wait! It’s good, in it’s own grotty little way. Often derided as a poor man’s James Herbert, the once elegantly permed Hutson kicked off his career with this, a poor man’s version of James Herbert’s The Rats. That’s the opening sentence of Slugs, and it certainly sets the grimy tone, not just for the novel, but for the rest of Hutson’s career. “Ron Bell got through one verse Mull of Kintyre, then threw up.”
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