Those people who pay attention to my ramblings may remember I reviewed a book with a very similar cover to this a few months ago. That book was The Hatching, and this is of course the promised sequel.
It's a great feat of marketing on the part of Mr Boone. I would never have taken the chance at reading a 1000 page novel about killer spiders by an unknown author. However, splitting that down into what I now find is a trilogy means that people like me picked up the first one on the off chance and found ourselves compelled to buy the second, and from the way this one finished, the third book will soon also make its way to my groaning bookshelves.
These are not great works of literature. There's no bon mots or hidden deeper meaning tp these books - although this one serves as unintentional metaphor for people's behavior in the pandemic. They are very smoothly written though. It might not be stylish, but damn is it fun to read.
It picks up about a week after the first one ended. As it says on the cover, the first wave of spiders is dead. They've left behind lots and lots of egg sacs. Some of them traditional externally visible egg sacs attached to walls etc, but a lot more inside the bite and sting victims left alive from the first book.
These spiders are the reason that mankind is scared of spiders to this day. Their last appearance on the planet, before recorded human history, was enough to leave a psychic scar on evolution. They're back now and making a similar impact.
Once again the pace is frenetic, bouncing around from location to location, building up the tension in carefully calculated bursts. We don't have quite as much shreddie action in this book as there was in the first. He's building up information about the spiders and how they operate. We know all hell is about to break out and the majority of the book is building up to that... There are some new spiders in town and they have more horrific tricks up their webbing than just skeletonising their victims in under a minute.
There are a few genuinely horrible (in a good way) chapters where the true threat levels shine through. A scene in a hotel sub-basement is a particular highlight and genuinely made me shudder. Elsewhere it's gloriously trashy nonsense. Again, in a good way. All the characters are brilliant and good looking, mostly rich and powerful, and the dialogue can be hilariously over the top. However this does match the ever escalating state of emergency so it's easily forgivable.
The scene where the first female POTUS takes her chief of staff aside for a quick half hour roll on the sack for some stress relief possibly stretches things a tad too far but the rest of the book stays within acceptable limits.
Don't expect a satisfying ending to the story this volume. In typical part two of the trilogy style, this finishes on a cliffhanger, when all the hell does break loose as we've been promised for the past 300 pages. Book three should be a humdinger.
For a book with more plot than action sequences it truly does read enormously quickly and easily. This is assisted by the very short chapters and jumping from one side of the world to the other.
The characters are broadly drawn and just about on the right side of believable.There is still one set of characters who haven't really impacted on the central storyline. The last time we saw them they'd worked something out and phoned someone in the security forces, but we still don't know the detail. Hopefully, we'll find out how they tie in in book three. Which I will definitely be buying.
I could see this being a very successful series of films or tv show if anyone optioned it. Enormous cast, exotic locations, flesh eating spiders, it's got everything.
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