Deep in the jungle of Peru, a black, skittering mass devours an American tourist party whole. FBI agent Mike Rich investigates a fatal plane crash in Minneapolis and makes a gruesome discovery. Unusual seismic patterns register in a Indian earthquake lab, confounding the scientists there. The Chinese government "accidentally" drops a nuclear bomb in an isolated region of its own country. The first female president of the United States is summoned to an emergency briefing. And all of these events are connected.
As panic begins to sweep the globe, a mysterious package from South America arrives at Melanie Guyer's Washington laboratory. The unusual egg inside begins to crack. A virulent ancient species, long dormant, is now very much awake. But this is only the beginning of our end...
***
In recent years, apocalyptic fiction has gotten pretty political. Where once it was the preserve of the firmly fantastical or the nominally natural, like the rampaging rats of James Herbert's unforgettable first novel, or Michael Crichton's reconditioned dinosaurs, such stories have since taken a turn for the topical. Now we have nuclear winters to worry about, a cache of climate catastrophes, and the release of diseases genetically engineered to "solve" the planet's overpopulation problems. For those of us who read to escape the devastation of the day-to-day, it's all gotten uncomfortably current.
Happily, The Hatching hearkens back to the detached disasters of yesteryear. The end of the world as we know it isn't even our own fault in Ezekiel Boone's book—it comes about because of some damned spiders:
But we're getting ahead of ourselves—a lesson Boone would do well to learn, because before the inevitable rise of the spiders, he gets bogged down in setting up a situation for them to chew through, and sadly, it isn't up to snuff, largely because it relies on a cast of conspicuously cartoonish characters.
Of these, there are those whose only role in the whole is to be summarily dispatched so as to show that the aforementioned arachnids are the real deal. That's clear—and effective, yes—the first time a spider eats its way out of one of their forgettable faces; by the fifth time someone is dispatched in that fashion, it's gotten a bit boring, and alas, The Hatching has hardly started.
Happily, The Hatching hearkens back to the detached disasters of yesteryear. The end of the world as we know it isn't even our own fault in Ezekiel Boone's book—it comes about because of some damned spiders:
There are thirty-five thousand species of spiders and they've been on earth for at least three hundred million years. From the very origin of humanity, spiders have been out there, scuttling along the edges of firelight, spinning webs in the woods, and scaring the hell out of us, even though, with a few rare exceptions, they are no real threat. But these were something different.These spiders are more like ants, in fact, in that they're essentially social: what they do, they do for the good of the group as opposed to their own individual ends, which means they can set their collective sights on bigger and better prey than bluebottles. Creepy as one arachnid is, in other words, it's got nothing on a sea of the beasties with an appetite for people.
But we're getting ahead of ourselves—a lesson Boone would do well to learn, because before the inevitable rise of the spiders, he gets bogged down in setting up a situation for them to chew through, and sadly, it isn't up to snuff, largely because it relies on a cast of conspicuously cartoonish characters.
Of these, there are those whose only role in the whole is to be summarily dispatched so as to show that the aforementioned arachnids are the real deal. That's clear—and effective, yes—the first time a spider eats its way out of one of their forgettable faces; by the fifth time someone is dispatched in that fashion, it's gotten a bit boring, and alas, The Hatching has hardly started.