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.