2000 AD Online Forum

On our hols, Mrs X and I were talking about short stories. She mentioned that when she was about 10 (so, 20 years ago) she had a collection of horror short stories in a paperback. I'd like to find a copy of it again to give her as a present. Thing is, all she can remember is:-

It was a thin-ish paperback.
With a mainly black cover and yellow writing.
And a cover picture of a woman spread-eagled before a devouring giant slug.

Any ideas?

Unlikely I know but this tacky cover deserves an airing - this guy looks like a graduate from the Guy N Smith school of hackdom.

It doesn't remind me of the slugs cover or the sequal, breeding ground, but I'll try and lodge it in my mind for my trips to the bootfaar.

Might be one of the imfamous 'Pan Book of Horror Stories'? I think they had different covers over time... but I can't google a comprehensive web site for them though I did find this...

Looking at them now I realised how my parents might have been a bit worried when I started reading them... but in the 70s pre vidoe, computer games, internet they were the only entertainment we had!

Link: Very Garth Marenghi

It's not Slugs or any of its sequels - it's a short story collection. It could be the Pan stuff. I had a few of them when I were a lad, and I had forgotten all about them. I'll let her see the covers. Ta.

I've got this one.

Here it is!

I read one of those once. Very odd! I don't remember there being any supernatural horror in the one I read, but quite a few lurid murder stories with decapitations and so on. One had a first-person narrator killing the family pets one by one, starting with the smallest and working his way up, as practice for doing in his wife when she got home.

The book seemed to be a collection of macabre, homicidal wish-fulfilment fantasies.

>The book seemed to be a collection of macabre, homicidal wish-fulfilment fantasies.

Yeah, great were'nt they!

And 'Clarance Pagat', 'Herbert Van Thal'... why don't writers have names like that nowadays?

Late 70s, eary 80s, I remember a book called Creatures or Critters or something & it was a collection of horror stories all along the 'when animals attack' theme. Can't remember any slugs but there was a story about killer snails. In one scene the snails climb up the wallpaper until their combined weight pulls the wallpaper from the wall & they knock out a victim by landing on him.

Was it by any chance called 'The End Is Nigh #4'?

The Monster That Challenged The World (1957)

" this guy looks like a graduate from the Guy N Smith school of hackdom.

Heh ... Shaun Hutson. A man who Ramsey (no relation) Campbell once accused of dragging the horror genre into the gutter, to which Hutson replied:

"Bollocks! It's already in the gutter - I'm taking it to the sewer."

Cheers

Jim