Anyone who was a child in the 1990s will know the outsize role slime played in our early life. Think of those lazy Saturday mornings, the indolent hours every day after school spent in televisual worship. It was everywhere: poured over parents and teachers, decanted into baptismal pools for grumpy neighbours, rained down on the clueless and the over-competitive—on losers of all kinds.
Once, on a tour of Nickelodeon Studios around 1996, I was told that their industrial quantities of green goop were actually vanilla pudding—thinned with smooth apple sauce, then dyed to create its trademark vibrant shade. Yet this knowledge did little to loosen the grip this gloop held on me—the “perverse allure,” as Susanne Wedlich puts it in her remarkable new book Slime: A Natural History, that slime has for us all.