Have You Read This? Review of Ezekiel Boone's The Hatching series

Remember when everyone was afraid of zombies? Books like World War Z and the The Walking Dead shows a world where the recently dead had become humanity’s greatest threat. The content written and produced about zombies could easily fill up its own section in a library, could probably be its own separate library wing, but consider something scarier, something just as unrelenting. Consider . . . 

"I wuv you," says spider before "kissing" you and then liquefying your organs.

Arachnophobia is a very well-known fear, possibly because of the alien nature of the spider (Six eyes? Eight legs?), not to mention that different spiders have different kinds of toxins, toxins that make your body feel like its in the grip of a trash compactor to simply rotting the flesh away. What makes spiders worse than zombies is that the old “destroy the brain strategy” wouldn’t work, simply because, in the swarms that dominate Ezekiel Boone’s Hatching series, there’d be thousands of other spiders ready to consume you after you wasted all your ammunition.

The three books in the series (The Hatching, Skitter, and Zero Day) follow an invasion of spiders from underneath the earth that emerge after an egg sac is excavated in the Peruvian jungle. What follows is a multitude of plot points, everything from people living out the invasion in relative comfort to a family man FBI agent wanting to protect his daughter to the President of the United States and her cabinet, including someone who’s done extensive research of this breed of spider and might be Earth’s last hope. The premise feels like a mid-70’s throwback, where insects, seemingly in retaliation, threaten mankind, but Boone does raise the stakes for the characters by having whole towns destroyed and countries using their nuclear stockpiles to try and halt the invasion, and the book almost feels like a Clive Cussler novel with all the globe-trotting and political intrigue from those who should be in charge.

Fans of zombie fiction, particularly World War Z, should enjoy this work, which uses multiple narratives, revealed in third-person instead of through interviews, that reveal what the spiders are and how people from different social classes, different countries, and processing and (maybe) surviving. The stakes are continually raised as the spiders seem to be changing, adapting to the conventional weaponry thrown at it by the world’s governments. What may ultimately save the world is a ragtag team from all walks of life (scientists, soldiers, and doomsday preppers) pool their talents and save the day. Zombies, spiders, or salamanders from Mars, it’s never just the government that saves the day in these invasion stories. It’s the pluckiness of the human spirit that keeps the human race going and keeps readers coming back for more.

Fearsome Five: Top 5 Short Story Collections Not Written by Stephen King

"Blasphemy" says grumpy horrormeister

Stephen King has published a lot of short story collections, and they can be found right next to his novels, which have then been made into movies (the rest will probably be made into movies eventually). Stephen King has also done a great deal for the short story medium, simply by increasing its volume, but there are other authors who have their own contributions to the tradition of frightening short stories. 

5) The Corn Maiden and Other Nightmares by Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates is not always thought of as a horror writer, but she has delved deep into the horror genre with works like the future serial killer work Zombie and the Gothic-influenced novella Beasts. Even her literary fiction like We Were the Mulvaneys and Missing Mom discuss the effects of violence on the perpetrator, those on the receiving end, and those caught in its ripples. If she’s not a horror writer, her writing shows an understanding of the dark impulses that underpin horror. This short story collection beautifully demonstrates how Oates strikes a balance between literary flourish and evil impulses. The story “The Corn Maiden,” for example, shows how multiple people are caught in the maelstrom created by a girl’s kidnapping, and “Beersheba” shows a man whose innocent answering of a phone call from his past leads to a fight for survival. 

4) The Best of Joe Lansdale by Joe Lansdale

I had debated putting on this list either High Cotton or Bumper Crop, the two anthologies that introduced me to Lansdale’s folksy, insane, fantastical horror, but this collection has just about all of his best work. It has the great short stories “The Night They Missed the Horror Show” and “Steppin’ Out Summer ’69,” both nods to that trope of teenage ennui and frustrated libido, and it’s really a toss-up which is funnier, even though “Horror Show” is by far the more horrific. This collection also includes Bubba Hotep, one of my favorite stories, which dares to pit an older Elvis Presley, here a resident of a Texas retirement home, against a mummy with a penchant for wearing cowboy boots. 

3) Books of Blood by Clive Barker

The ‘80s was dominated by King, Koontz, and Straub. Then came the triple threat (writer, director, artist) that was Clive Barker, and this collection of short stories is what added him to the Mount Rushmore of Horror Fiction (just picture that a Mount Rushmore of Horror Fiction exists). Barker hailed from England, but his subjects and his prose were far from gentile. The man who gave the world Hellraiser and Pinhead added more sex and violence but delivered it in gorgeously wrought sentences that felt like poetry. “The Forbidden” gave the world his other famous creation Candyman but also an exploration on the care and feeding of urban legends while “The Madonna” looks at the differences between men and women in a disturbing way that is distinctly Clive Barker (note: as a writer, you know you’ve made it when you become an adjective). 

2) A Long December by Richard Chizmar

He co-wrote Gwendy’s Button Box with King, but Chizmar, a long-time editor of the horror publication Cemetery Dance, is a skilled horror author with his own unique style. For readers looking for their horror in small doses with a twist ending that hits like a Mike Tyson gut punch, look no further than Chizmar’s lean and mean style. Clive Barker’s fiction is like an intricate cocoon woven around your brain, but Chizmar’s minimalist approach, almost mechanical in its efficiency, is a bolt gun between the eyes. Using more realistic scenarios, Chizmar’s stories feature protagonists who are often caught off-guard by the snakepit that is human emotion, whether it’s the mother who doesn’t know her children in “The Box” or “A Long December,” where a man discovers his best friend is a serial killer. 

1) The Best of Richard Matheson by Richard Matheson

Stephen King has actually cited him as an inspiration, and it’s easy to see why. Many people are probably aware of Matheson’s stories, if not Matheson the author. They have probably seen the movie What Dreams May Come with Robin Williams, not realizing that he wrote the novel. From “Duel” to “Steel,” from “I Am Legend” to The Shrinking Man, Matheson has cemented his reputation as a giant in speculative fiction. This collection has stories like “Duel” and “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” as well as little-known gems like ”One for the Books,” a Twilight Zone-like horror tale about a man who literally becomes too smart for his own good and “A Visit to Santa Claus,” a slow burn of a story about a man who is what we’d today call multitasking: taking his kid to see Santa and executing a plan to murder his wife. If you like this collection, try He is Legend, where authors offer their own reinterpretation of Matheson’s stories.

Any suggestions? Write me at scarylibrarian43@gmail.com.

Have You Read This? Review of Jonathan Maberry's Glimpse

There are some books that I read and I’m left feeling satisfied, like the story had followed and wound down to its natural, organic conclusion. Even with stories that don’t have a neatly tied-together ending, I appreciate the author giving me an ending to chew over, to work out in my head, and even speculate how it actually ended. There are also books that don’t seem to progress organically, moving through their individual points more like a trip through the fun house where the car you’re riding in the dark may take a hard right or plummet a story or two without you realizing. That is the case of Jonathan Maberry’s novel Glimpse, which is not necessarily a bad thing. Particularly when you consider the subject matter.

The novel follows a recovering junkie named Rain who is losing huge swatches of time from her day and seeing mysterious figures in a pair of cracked eyeglasses. This, of course, leads Rain to question her sanity as well as her ability to stay sober. Things get worse for Rain when she sees a child she gave up years ago and realizes he’s in danger, meaning Rain must not only risk her own sanity and sobriety but the life of her child whose connection to her only grows throughout the book.

The book has a lot of concepts and ideas that may not mesh as well as others but work together to create a surreal world existing behind the real one. Here is where a shadowy villain named Doctor Nine searches for victims and to continue taking from Rain, piece by piece. The idea of another world beneath the mundane one is a well-used trope in fantastic and horror fiction, hearkening all the way back to Alice in Wonderland, but the world of the Fire Zone, which makes Times Square look like a somber historical district, is well-painted by Maberry’s description. There are characters that do their part to move the narrative along, but also are deserving of their own tales due to their rich backstories.

Throw in time travel and alternate realities and this glut of concepts and ideas makes the narrative feel rushed at times, but it also leaves me looking forward to a sequel, if only to find out how it all comes together. Does Doctor Nine find another victim? Are there other worlds beyond the Fire Zone? Will the glasses show up in another piece of fiction? Hopefully, this isn’t the last we see of the ideas introduced in this universe.