When walking the dogs I sometimes used to pass a lonely-looking house. I never saw any sign of people staying there, though it would have made a perfect holiday home. I heard a rumour that the person who owned it didn’t live there and had been trying to sell it for years, and I often wondered if it held some sinister secret.
It might even have been the headquarters of the Slapstyx goblins!
For some time these gruesomely grubby goblins have haunted my head – and, I suspect, my home. When you live with dogs you have to expect a certain amount of dirt around the place, but I’ve sometimes felt there’s more dirt around my place than I can blame on the dogs – stubborn dirt that reappears with frightening speed after I’ve cleaned. I strongly suspect these goblins visit at night, slapping on the dirt and sticking it down so it can only be removed with the most heavy-duty – and eco-unfriendly – detergent. Such goblins would surely be a godsend to the manufacturers of said detergent.
That’s how I got the idea for The Slapstyx.
The story is set in a house where no one wants to live because it gets dirty again straight after it’s been cleaned. This is the HQ and training centre of the Slapstyx, a tribe of goblins whose job it is to fill our homes with dirt and grime. These grubby little pests work for Zachary Zigstack, manufacturer of ZOOM, the world’s most environmentally unfriendly detergent. They make dirt that can only be cleaned with ZOOM so everyone in the world will use it. ZOOM is turning the ocean into a sea of toxic slime infested with ravenous sea monsters, but the Slapstyx don’t care about that because Zigstack has promised to pay them in gold.
This heinous scheme jogs along nicely until Geoffrey, Zigstack’s star sales manager, moves into the Slapstyx house with his wife Grace, his son Miles and his twin stepdaughters Georgie and Gem. Geoffrey doesn’t know that Zigstack is up to, and he doesn’t believe in goblins; he only knows he’s found a nice big house by the sea, going for a ridiculously low price. But the twins soon rumble Zigstack’s evil scam and set out to put a stop to it…
Will they manage to do it before all marine life is destroyed? The Slapstyx are dangerous as well as dirty and have a nasty way of killing people who cross them!
The Slapstyx is now available in ebook or paperback – find it here
The Literate Lurcher 