Breeding Ground

This is what I choose to believe the widows look like

Breeding Ground
by Sarah Pinborough

Like many people, I responded to this book on a visceral, emotional level. Not because I liked the characters (I didn't), or because they were well drawn (they weren't).



This book scared me because I'm scared of spiders.

Parts of this book worked really well for me. The premise is horrifying. The monsters are dreadful. The scenes that the book opens with, where Chloe is transfigured and eventually killed, are deeply disturbing. I think the book raised interesting questions about pregnancy, disease and abortion.

Unfortunately, raising the questions was about as far as it got. Instead of pursuing any of those leads, the author gives us one of the cheesiest attempted explanations for monsters that I think I've ever come across. I can't even begin to wrap my head around how genetic modification of plant crops was meant to eventually connect up with spider monsters. Or the blood of the deaf. Or telepathy. Or abrupt climate change. I would go so far as to say that the explanation of the monsters undermined their terror for me (and considering how I feel about spiders, that's saying a lot). The book went from being a thought experiment about something horrible to being a commercial for whole foods. It was jarring, to say the least. But more than that, it failed utterly to do the monsters justice.

I started the post by mentioning the characters. Ignoring the protagonist for the moment, just about every character is an archtype that can be described in a few words. The wise old man. The petite spunky girl. The creepy businessman. The friendly drunk. The wacky scientist. The withdrawn child. Some of them can best be described as non-descript (Dan. Mike. Jeff. I'll be honest, more than once I lost track who was who). Most of the characters never really rise above the conventions we expect from them. Nigel is consistently whiny and self important. George never loses his temper and always knows what to do.

The narrator was a major issue for me, as a voice and as a character. His responses to the situations he found himself in were immediate, but short-lived. Within days of his wife's death he has the hots for Katie. Within days of her suicide, he moves into bed with Rebecca. Minutes - literally minutes - after fleeing his former home, dead family, and the realization that spider monsters have killed nearly everyone else world wide, he sits down to "fresh coffee and a fry up."  The next line just sums up his whole character for me -  "If there was a morning for spoiling myself, then this was it." That's not just a guy being shallow - that's poor writing.

I've had a lot of negative things to say about this book (and I haven't even started in yet on the end of chapter sixteen, where for some reason the horror novel got mixed up with the penthouse forum). But in spite of these issues there was something about it that made me keep reading. I'm not sure if it was because of my arachnophobia, but I was frightened by these monsters. They were compelling, and the pacing of the novel made me want to finish reading it, in spite of how annoying parts of it became.