After a particularly violent storm thrashes the coastal American town of Horton's Crossing, homeless man Nate Dooley decides to rob local druggist Tom Coffey. He botches it and accidentally kills the guy. Despite an attempt to revive his victim, he decides to go through with the robbery, and then goes into nearby Booger's Swamp to drink away what little guilt he feels with the booze he bought with his ill-gotten gains. Suddenly, he gets the sense that he isn't alone, as something black, slimy and horrifying appears to drag him away to be devoured in the swampy depths.
Later that morning, farmer Rafe Corteen and his daughter wake up to find their pigs missing and are pretty angry about it. Angrier still when they call the police and Sheriff Brad Regan says there's nothing he can do yet considering he's got this whole murder thing to solve. In reality, he's disinclined to bother investigating either crime and is just using the Coffey murder as an excuse not to go tromping around in the swamp. Returning home thoroughly annoyed, Rafe and Clara get a visit from their neighbors, Ben and Jake Gotch, Rafe's frequent drinking buddies, who've stopped by to say hi on the way to do some hunting in Booger's Swamp with their dog Destry.
The sum total of the Gotch Brothers' contribution to solving the mystery of the missing pigs is to suggest alligators did it before heading into the swamp where of course they come to same sticky end as Nate Dooley, though Destry the dog gets away. For some horrifying has been dredged up from the bottom of the sea by that storm the other night and taken up residence in Booger's Swamp and and is about to start making life difficult for the residents of Horton's Crossing. And perhaps the whole country.
In case you haven't noticed, the plot sounds a little familiar. This is because Norwood's novel is a pretty blatant ripoff of Joseph Payne Brennan's classic short story Slime (1953), just expanded into a full-length novel. Norwood changed the names of the swamp, town and characters and added a few new ones (Giles Gowse was childless in Slime, and if Rupert Barnaby had a sibling in Slime, they're never mentioned), but otherwise, the entire first half of Night of the Black Horror is pretty blatantly a rushed, lazy retelling of Slime. But what can you expect from Badger Books, the same people who graced the world with Rodent Mutation the same year...?
Night of the Black Horror provides examples of:
- Adaptation Expansion: It's basically Slime expanded into a full novel.
- Adaptational Name Change: Everyone.
- Adaptational Villainy: Henry Hossing was a very sympathetic, down on his luck derelict in Slime. Nate Dooley robs and accidentally kills someone pretty much immediately after waking up.
- Accidental Murder: Nate didn't intend to kill Tom when robbing him.
- Asshole Victim: Most of the characters who get killed, but particularly Nate Dooley, drunk, thief and murderer.
- Blob Monster: A big, black one from the bottom of the sea.
- Covers Always Lie: Both the cover art and the blurb make it seem as if the threat is a big, tentacled brain. It isn't. It's just a blob monster.
- Death by Adaptation: The druggist wasn't killed in the original short story, and certainly not by the homeless man. In fact, when Henry Hossing ends up as the slime's first victim, Jim Jelinson is the only one who hears his dying scream. It's therefore really ironic that in Norwood's reskin, the Henry equivalent kills the man who hears his death in the original.
- Disposable Vagrant: The slime's first victim is homeless man Nate Dooley. Not only does nobody look for him after he vanishes because he's just passing through and a stranger to the townsfolk, Sheriff Regan correctly suspects Tom's killer was exactly the kind of drifter Nate is and is disinclined to go tromping through Booger's Swamp looking for him, figuring that either he's long gone, in which case, there's nothing they can realistically do to find such a man, especially if he got such a head start, or he's sunk to his death in the impassable marshes, in which case who cares?
- Evil Smells Bad: As in Slime, the blob stinks to high heaven.
- Police Are Useless: Murdered druggist? Eh, the killer is probably long gone. Missing livestock? Um... gotta look into that whole murder case thing. In sharp contrast to Chief Underbeck and his competent police force, the county coppers in this book are kind of lazy and incompetent. To his credit, Sheriff Brad Regan does start taking things seriously as the number of people disappearing begins rising, because even an idiot can't ignore that many missing people. He and his men are still kind of doofuses though.
- Pragmatic Villainy: After realizing that Tom, the man he's robbing, is injured a lot more than he first thought, Nate actually does try to save him, but only because he wants to avoid a murder charge if caught.
- The Sheriff: Brad Regan, although he's kind of ineffectual.
- Swamps Are Evil: Booger's Swamp, its goofy name aside, is a pretty nasty place.
- Twenty Minutes with Jerks: One of the big changes Norwood made was to make the residents of Horton's Crossing into a crop of thoroughgoing assholes in comparison to their predecessors, the good people of Clinton Center.
- Typo on the Cover: The blurb Was this brain of pulsating cells completely indestructible, this formless horror which threatened the world needs a question mark.
