‘Mandibles’ – Jeff Strand

After a pretty rough few days at work, it was the best feeling ever to finally find my Kindle charger and be able to get my hands on all the pulp horror goodness that lies within. There was one title in particular that I was really keen to re-read, Jeff Strand’s ‘Mandibles’ (that just reads wrong so to clarify, to the best of my knowledge, Jeff Strand does not have mandibles…)

I’ve been really getting a buzz off the energy of any film or book that has giant creatures wreaking havoc (it’s not as good as coffee but it will do) so a re-read of ‘Mandibles’ was always inevitable. It’s been a couple of years since I read it last so am very pleased to report that it’s just as good as I remember…

Fire ants. Even when they're normal sized, they're horrible, wretched insects whose sting causes burning pain. 

But these ants are far from normal. And the city of Tampa, Florida has become infested with the oversized creatures.

As the city descends into pure chaos on a hot summer afternoon before the Fourth of July weekend, four groups of survivors must make their way to safety, past thousands of hyper-aggressive ants that can finish you off with just one searing sting.

Dustin, an entomologist, may have the secret to what is happening. Unfortunately, he's being held hostage by a pair of psychopathic convenience store robbers who are just as happy to let the city burn.

If you’re after a book where ants of varying size (and some butterflies with special dietary requirements) raise sheer hell then allow me to point you in the direction of ‘Mandibles’, a book with everything that you’re after, it’s that simple.

‘Mandibles’ makes no attempts to be anything other than what it is, a ‘big dumb monster book’, and as a result opens up large chunks of the book to have the kind of fun that you would expect to see in a book like this. And it is a lot of fun; well, unless you’re one of the poor people who get bitten that is. Strand fills his book with b-movie spectacle and this drives the plot forward just as quickly as the ants that are scurrying to attack, driving our protagonists to make quick decisions before they get swarmed. Desperate times call for desperate measures and this leads to yet more spectacle that continues to drive the plot forward. When you set something up to run like this, the danger is that you can’t keep it up indefinitely. Well, Jeff Strand does and it is so much fun to watch our heroes (and others) get really inventive in order to survive.

If this wasn’t enough, Strand has a nasty habit of letting you really get to know what you think will be the main character, only to wipe them out when it suits him (which is invariably when you least expect it). This gives you a little jolt at just the right time and again, gives the plot a little injection of pace.

What I also enjoyed is Strand’s recognition of the fact that while killer ants are always terrifying (especially when they’re the size of a fridge…) it’s humans who have the real capacity for evil and generally messing up the best laid plans. Enter Hack and Slash, two convenience store robbers with the uncanny ability to turn the plot on it’s head, just when you think that you finally know what’s going on. What the reader is left with is a book where literally anything can happen and you have every reason to keep reading.

‘Mandibles’ is classic, pulp, b-movie horror at it’s most, erm… pulpy and horrifying. Just what I needed and just what you need as well, read it.