Book Review: The Hatching, by Ezekiel Boone

This book immediately caught my eye at the bookstore.  I haven't read a horror book in a while, and this sounded a bit different.  I loved the movie Arachnophobia, and this book involves an ancient race of spiders, so I was interested, and this story sounded darker than that film.  This is a new book by a new author, so I took a chance on it.  I wasn't sure I was going to like it when I first started reading, but it quickly grabbed my interest.

This is a very different story from Arachnophobia, which involves a South American spider which ends up being transported to a small, rural town in the United States, which ends up producing offspring which are extremely poisonous - if you are bitten, you die in something like 10 seconds.  But the action is restricted to this small town, with the threat of the spiders territory expanding and dominating the country.

The Hatching involves an ancient race of spiders which seems to appear in several parts of the world simultaneously.  They are about the size of tarantulas, move in swarms, and have a very different way of killing their victims.  I was reminded very much of the Arachnids in the movie Starship Troopers (though, the Arachnids are the size of a cow).  The life cycle of these spiders is more horrifying than the spiders in Arachnophobia - it is somewhat reminiscent of the movie Alien, but definitely different.  These spiders are unlike anything you've seen before, and do things that are unlike real spiders.  The book ends with the tension of the scientists starting to glimpse how the life cycle of the spiders works, and the horror of not knowing what is coming next, but knowing that it will definitely be worse than what has already been seen.

The story follows several different characters in different parts of the United States:  The President and her staff (yes, it is a female President), a spider expert at a University laboratory, a special agent who works for The Agency (I don't recall if this was every revealed to be the FBI or some other organization), a few Marines, and some survival fanatics who are prepared for a zombie outbreak or nuclear war.  As the story progresses, some of these characters meet due to relationships between various other characters.  I feel that the characters are all portrayed very realistically, as are the relationships and problems of some of the characters.

The story moves at a good pace, always keeping the potential threat of the spiders within view.  I feel that this was an excellent first effort from a new author, and I would recommend this to anyone interested in a solid read with an entirely new treatment of spiders.