I knew little about this book before diving in. OK, I knew it was horror, and I knew I thought the cover was pretty brutal. I bought this on the back of the author tweeting about it being on sale, which shows self-promotion does indeed work!

Anyway, the book. The Growth is a weird blob-like toilet monster that is intent on destroying each and every creature within its reach with slubbery, slimy tentacles. And it doesn’t just come from toilets, any water outlet is its home. Which makes for quite a distressing predicament for the characters in this book. Because there’s water pretty much everywhere, see?

Dubbed ‘The Growth’ by the media, through its reign of death and terror, soon enough society has collapsed. The rich leaders manage to escape Britain while leaving everyone else to become lunch for the bog-beast. Do those left behind band together to fight for the survival of humanity? Of course not, this is human beings we’re talking about here.

The titular ‘character’ actually takes a back step for large portions of this novella, and instead the book focusses on the battle for survival by those unfortunates still in the cities. Add to this the creepy religious sect who feel the need to ‘save’ the sinners who succumb to this apocalyptic feasting, the scientist dude who thinks he has a cure, and the thug-turned-good-guy who feels it is his time to do something right for once, and you have a nice little ensemble of characters.

I can’t help but feel this should have been longer, though. Yeah it flew by, and was great fun while it did, but having this as a full-on novel with more history and backstories would have been preferable for me. Especially the aforementioned crazy religious brotherhood, they were real pieces of shit and I would have loved to hate them even more.

This was my first taste of Adam Hulse’s words, and I wolfed them down. I may have to taste some more. 

Categories: book review

Tags: adam hulse, book review, death, gore, horror, indie horror, monster, post apocalypse, the growth, violence