The slugs have returned. They slither along the dank, fetid tunnels of London's sewers in search of human flesh, and now they bring a new horror. Dr Alan Finch is the only man capable of destroying the breeding ground for ever. The author's previous novels include "Slugs", "Spawn" and "Assassin".
Though Shaun Hutson has developed a reputation as an extreme horror author (one of the originals, to be precise), I do think he is more than that. When it comes to literature, he is the equivalent of the British New Wave of Heavy Metal, a comparison he no doubt would relish. There is a technical proficiency to his work, much like the complex compositions, lyrics, and hooks of his beloved Iron Maiden. But also like the band, he applies classical themes to an in-your-face, confrontational style of art.
He wrote and published this sequel to his famous nature-amok novel "Slugs" during a time in British history when much of the population was feeling the effects of Thatcherism. The Miners Strike of 1984-1985 was a direct result of coal pits being shut down, costing thousands of jobs and literally putting entire villages and towns on the dole. Protests were put down with violent force, making people question whether they were living in a democracy or a police state. Punk was still a thing, but losing relevance as industrial music was reaching its peak, the new voice of the working class who was growing more restless and feeling disenfranchised. A crammed and crime-ridden London was seen as a place you tolerated if you couldn't afford to move out into the country, and serial killers like Peter Sutcliffe were the talk of the pubs, all making London feel like it hadn't advanced much beyond the dark and foggy days of Jack the Ripper.
Hutson's writing reflects this gritty reality of Eighties Britain, crafting classic horror stories that did not focus on characters that represented the elite or feudal peerage, but rather dealt with everyday people--punks and speed freaks, farmers and laborers, minor government officials, guys with filthy jobs, single parents, divorcées, the disabled and the homeless. Instead of haunted houses and cozy mysteries set in a country priory, his settings were places like bathroom stalls, peep shows, morgues, and sewers.
And he takes that grimy aesthetic further in "Breeding Grounds", delivering some of the most notorious and bombastic scenes of horror that certainly had rarely been written about before, but which we still remember to this day. Early on in this novel, two skinheads discover a body soaked in urine and vomit in a public bathroom stall while sniffing glue. You didn't see that in Stephen King novels, or at least not in that kind of visceral detail. This is the literary equivalent of an album by Whitehouse.
The story picks up exactly where "Slugs" left off. After an infestation of viscous carnivorous slugs is seemingly defeated, a batch of lettuce carrying surviving larvae is delivered to a produce dealer in London, spreading the slimy beasties and the disease they carry into the big city. The result is one extremely disgusting story of carnage and slime trails.
Speaking of Iron Maiden, singer Bruce Dickinson even mentions in his autobiography a particular scene of this book that made him almost lose his lunch, which was better than winning the Nobel Prize for Hutson. However, there are so many moments that might fit the bill that I am not sure to which one Dickinson was referring.
As disturbing as this novel can be, there is one element that might dampen the scares and take some readers out of their immersion. Hutson continually utilizes the slugs more as an aquatic threat. He does this in both novels. The slugs breed in sewers and swim very well. They invade homes through plumbing pipes. But these are not marine slugs, so they should drown in water after a few hours and not be capable of swimming. Of course, these are no ordinary garden gastropods. These are mutant science-fictiony monster molluscs that eat human flesh faster than a school of piranha. So I guess anything goes in these stories--and does. Still, he treats them more like mutant amphibious hagfish than slugs. What's worse, slugs do carry flukes, and so Hutson raises the stakes by making the flukes highly infectious, but then confuses the flukes for the slugs themselves, having the flukes form cysts in the brain which magically hatch more slugs. I can't say more for fear of spoilers, but yeah. Be prepared for some silly slug shenanigans that defy scientific possibility.
If you can suspend your disbelief enough, then you gore and gross-out hounds will have a blast with this raw and brutal classic. Now, I must warn those of you who've ever had a phobia of nasty public restrooms, or personally dealt with clogged toilets or broken septic systems, that this might be a little too mucky to handle. Hutson takes this fear of contamination, which likely drives our natural aversion to fecal matter, and exploits it to the fullest. Slugs, after all, do look like little living turds. Yet Hutson, being a mullet-sporting rockstar, was not content to limit his horror to the sewer. Combining body-horror, eco-horror, rage zombies, and slashers, this insane sequel tries and succeeds to top its predecessor by throwing at you anything gooey enough to stick.
So let me be clear--this novel is lewd, gross, ridiculous, sleazy, and campy. In short, it's just the kind of OTT stuff people have come to expect from Eighties horror, and especially from an author as metal as Shaun Hutson.
Perhaps someday we'll get a third Slugs outing, but I, for one, can stand to wait until I can bring myself to eat a salad again.
From the first word on page one, to the last, this was better, in my opinion, than the first Slugs book. In this one, the author throws everything at you. Explicit sex. Graphic violence. Slime. Urine. Excrement. Anything and everything having to do with nastiness.
This time around, a divorced young Dr. is thrown into the slugs' mayhem. Bodies of a homeless man. A sewer worker and others confound the authorities on what is to blame. They finally find out that slugs have taken over the sewers, and not only that, but all those who come in contact with their slime trails seem to become infected with a homicidal madness. People start to grow boils and lesions. Then they start to kill. So, society is attacked on two fronts.
A word of warning. Don't read this while you are eating or plan to anytime soon. Every slug attack gets more gruesome than the last. And every crazed human attacking another is much the same.
Best reason for some sewer worker dude character to be eaten alive by monstrous slugs:
‘The thought of the birth did give him a momentary smile. When the lad grew old enough he’d take him along to Stamford Bridge to watch Chelsea [. . . ] make sure the little fella didn’t get any bother. What if it was a girl? Shit, he’d look a bit of a prick taking a girl to watch football, wouldn’t he? He dismisses the idea. No, it was going to be a boy. No sweat’.
Eat away monstrous slugs, eat away!!! 😊
I’m being silly though and he doesn’t really deserve to have a ‘swarm’ of mad slugs breach his anus and devour him from the inside out, but this is an example of the fantastic offhand 80s horror novel sexism that crops up in narratives like this making me grin and shake my head these days.
Yes, Shaun Hutson's killer slugs are back in Breeding Ground and now they're carrying a disease that transforms people into homicidal maniacs covered in weeping boils. And they're in London!
The sequel to Hutson's classic Slugs brings the gross-out factor to whole new levels, with plenty of blood, guts, and every bodily excretion one can imagine. Super icky! But, entertaining as hell!
3.5 The killer slugs return! And this time their gross little slime trails turn anyone who touches them into homicidal maniacs. Will some random doctor and… the military I guess… save the day? None of that matters anyway as Breeding Ground more than delivers on the visceral mollusk threat. Carnage abounds and no one is safe from the little bitey bastards. Grisly fun that doesn’t spare the kiddies and even includes an unexpected end to a very graphic threesome. Quality trash that’s surprisingly well-written for the most part but seems to lose interest in itself around the 70% mark and opts for a pat solution.
A rare sequel that somehow manages to leave the original in the dust as Huston ups the ante with nearly every conceivable situation of man eating slugs.
Breeding Ground is a truly insane horror novel, making Guy N Smith creature features feel like nursery rhymes in comparison. This book is chocked to the brim with blood, guts, graphic sex, unflinching and purely unrestrained violence on nearly every damn page.
Usually this over the top reveling in gratuitous violence turns me off, but Hutson makes every instance of spilled viscera unbelievably fun.
To be honest, this really should surprise not a single person who knows Hutson and his penchant for glorious trash. The dude made an unapologetic name for himself by penning these kind of stories and books like this prove why his name is so synonymous with horror.
More absolutely disgusting slimy horror from Hutson. It’s not as good as Slugs, but it is good. The plot is pointless. All that matters is the sex and violence that it links together.
I wanted to finish the Slugs series and so I picked this one up and devoured it. Kills were great, story flew by, couple of laugh out loud moments (due mainly because of how absurd it was) and a lot of just letting things go because it turned crazy - but I enjoyed it, a good bloody fun book.
Although it hasn’t dated well, given the way Hutson writes women - who are just beings for him to ogle over and given no depth of character at all other than how their clothes hang off their stiff nipples or how their dresses or skirts hugged their solid buttocks - I’m not kidding you!
Thatcher's Britain. A laid off homeless person bursts into an army of slugs. Poe had his Conqueror Worm. Hutson has his Conqueror Slug. The uncaring Britain devours all.
Hutson is pretty shit at story, characterisation, etc. and his real talent lies in ludicrous, imaginative gore scenes. Breeding Ground doesn't bother with any serious attempt at plot (a lofty-for-him aspiration that often bogs down his other novels) and is all carnage. As a result it's one of the more enjoyable Hutsons I've read. A kill scene at a peep show was particularly good.
Much of the same as the first book pretty much, which isn't a bad thing. Gloriously over the top descriptions of the slugs chewing their way through their victims, yum, yum haha. Good 'clean' fun :)
Shaun Hutson's Goodreads author page suggests that there was a film adaptation of his early novel "Slugs" that he hadn't liked. Whilst there have been aspects of his writing I have not enjoyed, this gives me some hope, as Stephen King, a writer I've been a fan of for years, has also not been keen on some adaptations of his work. Although I hadn't read "Slugs", I was encouraged that there was a sequel, as this made me think of James Herbert's "Rats" trilogy, which was excellent work.
The novel opens quite innocently, with a couple of slugs inside a discarded lettuce, which gets eaten by a homeless man. He thinks he's eaten something which has disagreed with him, but when his body is found, it transpires he's eaten something which has eaten him back and the Police are as mystified as they are horrified, especially when bodies keep turning up showing similar injuries. Not far away, a local doctor treats a patient for strange boils, but thinks nothing of it until another patient develops the same symptoms, but then violently murders his parents.
Although the early parts of the novel may have been helped by knowing where the slugs had come from, "Breeding Ground" is very readable as a stand-alone novel and one of the best things about it is how readable it is. It's quite a short novel, as many of James Herbert's early works were, but it's packed with action and the pace of the novel rarely lets up. The slugs are ravenous and they both find and dispose of their victims with great speed and that is reflected in the pace of the writing and the pages turn over very quickly.
However, this does occasionally show the limitations of Hutson's writing, as his vocabulary isn't the greatest of writers I've happened across, which does mean that he can sometimes be a little repetitive. The slug attacks follow a similar format and blood gushes in the same way as carotid arteries are severed and sex scenes are familiar every time, regardless of the people involved. He also describes locations and situations in the same way each time, so there is a lot of fetid and putrescent things in these pages.
Hutson also has a habit, which has stretched throughout his career, of adding in sub-plots that do little but fill pages, but don't advance the plot, or provide much in the way of back story or motivation for the characters. There is less of that here than in other Huston novels, but the back story and romantic sub-plot involving the doctor didn't add anything but word count for me.
That said, for all his limitations, Hutson does write with a fair amount of detail without compromising the pace and the descriptions of both slug and human bodies being destroyed are presented with an occasionally disgusting level of detail. He seems to revel in the splattering of noxious substances and insides becoming outsides and it is when this is happening that the pace of the action seems occasionally breathless.
I didn't find this novel as good as early James Herbert, as Hutson is not nearly as good a writer. But this is a horror novel in the classic 1980s style, that owes as much to splatterpunk as it does to story. If you're not a fan of that style of writing, you're not likely to enjoy this, but for someone who has been reading and enjoying horror novels of this kind since then, this was a decent enough example of the art and mostly thoroughly enjoyable.
Slugs are back and bringing a new shiny infection to London.
You can tell some of this was inspired by James Herbets The Rats with the setting and the use of the underground system which I enjoyed. The slugs are way more brutal in this sequel and the infection adds a new layer with it not only being a gross painful death but turning the infected into killers.
I absolutely love the 80s horror, for how gross, brutal, and raw it is. Added some in-depth sexual scenes (that never end well, what a way to go) that make this a fun bloody read.
knocked a star as the ending was slightly anticlimactic for me and the infected seemed to turn into killers without any real explanation.
This was my first Hutson´s book (for some reason, the first book, Slugs, wasn´t even translated to my language). I was surprised by the graphical highly detailed gore. And highly detailed love scenes.
The doctor, Finch, was a complete jerk who shouldn´t graduate from medical school, but okay. I think he missed his laboratory diagnosis classes for sure. And he should calm down when around women and stop describing their bodies so graphically, otherwise he will end up in another marriage-gone-wrong situation. :)
The slugs didn´t spare anyone - not even a cute dog (very graphic and sad death) and his 11 years old master (who later died from the slug illness). That was a very sad chapter.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Breeding Ground (Slugs 2) by Shaun Hutson 🌟🌟🌟🌟 This is the 2nd take over from killer slugs! I enjoyed the direction that this story took with these killer slugs! I found it very entertaining. These gruesome slugs have been breading underground and are carrying a deadly plague inside them. If humans come in contact with these slugs, they become infected and it’s not a pleasant transformation. This book is graphic, gross, and very descriptive in the imagery. It is a little much on the sex aspects for my taste, but overall an enjoyable and creepy read!
I listened to the audio version, which had a great narrator! I enjoyed this book a bit more than the 1st Slugs book! 🐌🩸🐌
Hutson takes what he did with the infamous ‘Slugs’, polishes it up, and kicks the scope of the slug infestation into overdrive! I’m surprised this book is so underrated - in a conventional, literary sense it is a far superior book to the original - but it certainly does lose some of the zany, B-movie feeling that the first book had. Overall very pleased! Much better than ‘Assassin’, the last Hutson book I read.
Not my usual genre but I had read Slugs a number of years ago and found this in a local charity shop. Absolutely loved it, trashy, horrific, quick paced and in places believable. The characters are all well delivered too. In short the slugs are the true protagonists and really loved the tale of how they were beaten..or were they ?
You know what in for . Man eating slugs . So you know it going be gory fun ride . Like good zombie movies or book . It needs the gore . This have right amount of gore and violence. The store is good to . Over all a fun read if like gory horror books
So bad it’s….bad!😂. But fun to read. I read the original Slugs as a young teen, and wasn’t aware of this sequel until recent years. Entertaining enough that I can’t rate it too harshly, but it’s no classic. Ridiculously grim gore and terrible sex scenes in abundance!
Better than the first. Was gonna give it the four for most of the book but the third act sadly starts to drag. It ends really well though. I enjoyed my time with it. Super gross in the best way.
This was a well written story and I liked it. I was totally grossed out by the blood and gore. Narration by Simon Atchison was well done. I was given this book free for an honest review.