I am back with another book review, The Hatching by Ezekiel Boone. Thank you to Penguin Random House Canada for sending me an ARC of this book for review. As always, all opinions are my own.
I went into this book not really knowing what to expect. I knew there as going to be killer spiders, but other than that, I didn't really know what I was in for.
I don't know if I would really call this horror, but I'm not sure what else I would call it. According to my good friend Wikipedia, horror just has to shock or frighten the reader, so I guess it's horror. I think though, this book fits many categories of fiction, horror, apocalyptic, political, sci-fi, just to name a few.
What I enjoyed about this book, and appreciated, based on the story itself, was that it's not character driven. I would say that about 95% of the books I read are character driven, I think that's just because that's how most of the story are told. But this book, while there was a bunch of "side" characters, was driven by plot and really, by the spiders and the fear people generally felt regarding them.
We get a plethora of perspectives telling the story, some die off (not a joke) and the others come together in the end, puzzle pieces fitting into place with one another. There's a tour guide in Peru, a billionaire who is on that tour, a jogger, a Northern Chinese civilian, a reporter for CNN, a special agent, a seismologist and her assistant in India, the president of the United States (who's a woman, GASP), her chief of staff, the chief's ex-wife who happens to be a scientist who studies spiders, her grad students, along with a handful of dooms-day preppers and some Marines deployed on American soil, just to name a few!
We get glimpses of their lives, not in the past, but in the present. When first introduced to these characters, the author doesn't talk about what happened 5, 10, 15 years ago in each of their lives, because in this moment, with millions of spiders killing people at an unstoppable rate, none of that matters. All that matters is right now. Who will escape? Who will survive? And I think that is what adds to the horror, the terror that these people are feeling, and which the reader feels second hand.
These spiders are essentially a bio-mechanical weapon that have been released seemingly accidentally for no apparent reason. No one knows why and more importantly, no one knows how to stop them.
They aren't a group of terrorists targeting specific people or groups of people, and they aren't a bomb that blows up one part of the world and leaves the rest unscathed. They are killers who don't discriminate, moving from China to Peru to India to America. Four very densely populated countries, killing millions for no other reason than that they need to eat.
If you aren't a fan of loose ends, be warned. You may think that they will have everything figured out by the end, but they only know one thing. A week after scavenging the planet, millions of spiders drop dead. Everything stops. But the good scientist knows this can only mean one thing. This was only the first wave. More spiders are coming, these ones were just to eliminate as much of the competition, humans, as possible before the second batch of even more powerful spiders come, based on her calculations, in may two weeks, three if they're lucky. And they have no idea how to stop them.
Overall, this book was crazy. It kept me on edge the whole time, and, as someone who is the resident "spider killer," I'm a little more weary of those little eight-legged creatures.