I'd never heard of Ezekiel Boone, but this looked like it might be good fun. I do like a good creature horror - and John Connolly likes it and has he ever lied to me? Maybe he has. I don't know.
This started off fairly well. A guide showing his party through the jungles of Peru is introduced and immediately overrun by thousands of flesh eating spiders, along with most of the rest of his party.
As someone who likes a good shreddie or two in a horror story, this pleased me.
We then meet an FBI agent on a stake-out in Minneapolis. After finding out about his family situation, the scene shifts again - this time to a seismic lab in India. We learn about strange rumbles underground, too regular to be natural. Then we switch again to a university professor in Washington who's doing things she probably shouldn't be with one of her students. This chapter ends with her hearing about a live spider egg sac that's just been found near the Nazca lines that's been sent to her via fedex...
It continues bouncing around between characters, establishing a large cast, including the first female president of the USA - a drop dead gorgeous 42 year old, her chief advisor and lover (the ex-husband of our spider expert from the university), the surviving member of the ill fated trek in Peru - who happens to be a billionaire tech genius, some soldiers, a random writer of crime thrillers living on a Scottish island, and some survivalists in small town America, among others.
There are many more shreddies and some of them are really shredded quite viciously and enjoyably.
The story moves at a hell of a pace. There are some moments of extreme tension. However, the whole of the book is not as good as the sum of its parts.
One issue is the insistence on every character being described as incredibly good looking. None of them are short and squat with buck teeth. Every single lead character is a stunner. It would have been nice for an ordinary character or two to be in there somewhere.
The main fault is that the story doesn't so much finish as just stop. There are whole groups of characters who still haven't met or interacted with any of the other cast yet. The author characcter has witnessed spiders attacking someone, but made no impact on the overarching story at all. The survivalists haven't even seen the spiders yet. Indeed they're wondering if the spiders are real or just conspiracy.
This is because the story will conclude in book 2 - Skitter - which I am going to buy with no real qualms.
While I appreciate the fact that I probably wouldn't have picked up a 700 page book about flesh eating spiders destroying the world, a bit more effort to provide some closure to storylines in this one would have been good.
My final verdict on this will probably only be definite after I read Skitter.
No comments:
Post a Comment