by William Meikle
Two partners, Sam and Steve, come across a spaceship that was lost mysteriously and accidentally unleash a blue plasma that feeds on everything it touches…
The bit about the ship was a nice touch “Sailors have the Marie Celeste; airmen have flight 109 … spacefarers had the Vordlak.” Experiments were done on it to harness energy from what was thought to be the supernatural but were actually drawing from another place with a Lovecraftian being living in it… Unfortunately, all the creepiness is done away soon after because the blue, glowing blob, basically another Shoggoth retread, while obviously dangerous, just isn’t that interesting. There are things about dreams and a black pyramid, but it’s not the main focus. It’s all just another setup to do a blob story.
This follows two sets of main characters because what happens on the ship causes a breach on Mars as well, with another blue blob consuming and growing. The main characters are OK, but nothing special. All the side characters are terrible, soldiers that just keep shooting at the plasm even though it was shown to be ineffective, and other spacefarers that, of course, don’t believe the things happening are real and choose to ignore them. It’s really obvious they were only there to die, and they were mostly pointless characters to the story.
The setup to this is great, as well as the short story that is used throughout, but it really lost steam in the second half and just became another generic story with Lovecraft stuff thrown in.
*** Three out of Five Stars (Average)
