As you lie on your bed feeling safe at last, you smell something strange.

I read a lot of fond reviews about this one and decided to give it a go. Turns out it’s the horror equivalent to Twistaplot #3: Formula For Trouble. In its defense, Invasion of the Black Slime is far more readable, and not just because I grew up reading scary books (more on that another time).

Invasion of the Black Slime (And Other Tales of Horror) is a single gamebook with three different storylines. Occasionally you find gamebooks that try this, and usually what you end up with is a case of three under-developed ideas that should have had their own books dedicated to them. Not sure why this keeps happening in the gamebook genre. Maybe the author ends up with several story ideas that don’t carry much weight on their own and decides to stitch them together into an anthology. The idea of an anthology gamebook is novel, but it seems hard to pull off. It worked all right with Make It Happen #2: Master of the Past, and poorly with Formula For Trouble. Here the result is mediocre.

You are traveling cross-country on your bicycle when you almost literally bump into another boy on his bike who is fleeing the town of Silverlode. Right off the bat he gives us a tour guide’s introduction to the three possible stories you will follow.

It’s a very weak note to start the anthology on. Way to rob us of any surprise or tension. I know that the title of the book suggests at least one story will involve a black invasion of the slimy variety, but this may as well be a menu: “do you want slime aliens, Frankenstein, or haunted house?”

Also we get our first glimpse of the stilted dialogue, as the kid says at one point, “But I suspect it was more, for the blinding light was accompanied by an earth-shaking tremor that lasted two minutes.” Is this modern times, or the Middle Ages? Nobody talked like this in the 80s. Nobody talked like this in the 40s! Why am I suddenly reading Rime of the Ancient Mariner?

Still, all three stories, despite their flaws, also have their shining moments. Especially for a kids’ book. It’s not afraid to get a little gruesome.

The featured story involving the black slime has potential, a “body snatchers” sort of yarn where everyone is getting possessed by this gross alien goo that makes them hostile. The goo itself has a life of its own and can chase you like the blob or travel in the form of swarms of insects. It also arrived here in a flying saucer. It’s a grab bag of 50s B horror movie schlock that you may find charming or eye-rolling. I fell somewhere in the middle. As a kid I might have preferred this over an R L Stine book, but I probably wouldn’t have come back to it again, nor searched for it on ebay as an adult.

Some scenes are pretty memorable, like the chilling bit in the movie theater that would have stuck with me as a kid. Other times it gets kind of silly. What’s this weird black slime leaking through my hotel room wall, in this town that one kid warned me had been taken over by alien slime mold? Let’s clean it up with a paper towel and no gloves! One potential climax is pretty good where you flee from the slime in the woods, but for the most part the ending is weak…kind of like a lot of Saturday matinee B-pictures, which this story is probably emulating. So I guess in that respect, it does its job.

Story #2 is the Frankenstein arc. The kid in the prologue mentions the house of a lonely old scientist, and says to just ignore him. That’s probably good advice. Stopping in for a cup of tea and a good night’s sleep leads to the discovery that the good doctor is a madman trying to rebuild his son who died in a traffic accident years ago. This one has a bit more of a consistent vibe as you sneak around the house and discover all sorts of grotesque things, like preserved organs in jars, and the doctor’s late night hobby of grave robbing, and of course the story’s highlight, Garth!

Garth is Mad Doctor Jr, and he looks pretty scary, all things considered. I fully expected a typical Frankenstein, but not this hideous patchwork nightmare with his face hidden by gauze. He’s suitably frightening even when he’s not being much of a threat.

In story #3, our friend in the prologue says to keep away from the mad doctor and the town full of slime, and join him in a romp through his late Uncle Harry’s spooky old house. Somehow there’s a contest going despite the uncle being long dead, where anyone who survives the house gets a million bucks. Yeah, I got a proto-creepypasta vibe, too.

This arc is just bonkers. Every weird, spooky thing you can think of and then some is crammed into this house, and a good portion of the story doesn’t give you any choices at all: you just read a linear gauntlet of spooky images and phenomena until you find yourself at four doors, each with a random peril and ending behind it.

Some of the spooks in this house are actually frightening, like the demon in the mirror and the creepy mummy rising from its table, and malevolent spirits stepping out of paintings and groping for you in the pitch blackness. But none of the scares have any real connection to one-another, so it feels like a random spook cocktail thrown together to scare some kids. This house has everything short of a dude in a white bedsheet who shouts “Boo!” with nothing to connect any of them. What do a haunted painting, a floating demon head, and a mummy have in common? R G Austin’s paycheck! And even if you win the million dollars, the ending is so lackluster that you feel like you lost anyway.

With that said, can we talk about that artwork, though? Joseph A Smith brings his A-game on a regular basis with shockingly atmospheric illustrations. I suspect this is what made kids want this book (besides the possibility of actually dying in horrific, eldritch ways), not unlike what made us want Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. You might not remember any scenes from the stories, but this image of a screaming skull will burn itself into your impressionable little memory for life!

So of the three tales, The Black Slime Invasion and Son of Frankengrave both could probably stand on their own as individual books if fleshed out properly. I can’t see Uncle Harry’s Scream Shack working unless it dropped the “horror kitsch blind bag” act and adopted some kind of connected theme for all the scares. All of them are fun ideas for horror themed gamebooks for young readers, but the trick is to fully realize them and make them worth reading. Each story has its moments, but nothing that would make me want to revisit it, as a child or adult reader.

But we can agree that the art rocks across the board, so maybe this book is a worthy addition to your library after all.

Time for bed. Uncle Mac out.