'Dawn of the Spiders' – Brian O' Gorman

Very much like the huge spider that lives in my bathroom, Brian O' Gorman's 'Spiders' books have a habit of jumping out at me (in my 'Amazon Recommendations') when I least expect it. I would have eventually got round to reading them anyway (because, well... giant spiders) but it was Alex' great post on 'self published SFF' that gave me the nudge to finally get on and do it.

And I'm really glad I did. I'll get on with the 'why', in a minute, but having finished 'Dawn of the Spiders', I went straight out and grabbed 'Day of the Spiders' and 'Night of the Spiders' too. That should tell you something, now let me tell you about 'Dawn of the Spiders'...

A virus designed to control the burgeoning spider population causes them to mutate into overgrown, venomous killers. A large horde of the spiders take over the small village of Newtown, killing all but two of its residents. Laurence Johnson and Chloe Jones have only been together one night after Laurence parted ways with his wife. They find themselves trapped in the house with no way of escaping. Their only hope is to try and stay alive long enough for the army to intervene. Lorna Johnson is on the outskirts of town with nowhere to go and the spider invasion taking control. Her only hope of survival lies with a team headed up by Doctor Michael Briggs. He has a plan to stop the invasion before it gets out of hand. But he is running out of time and he is running out of allies. If he doesn't move quickly then mankind will face the darkest day it has ever known.

This will be a fairly short review as we're looking at a fairly short book here ;o) 'Dawn of the Spiders' weighs in at a very slender one hundred and seventeen pages (in eBook format) but you wouldn't think it though as the depth of characterisation and spider action (of course) combine to give us a book that I lost a couple of hours to without even realising. Easy to get into but very difficult to put down.

This is in part down to the way that Brian O'Gorman mixes his influences together to give us a story that is very much it's own thing. We have Guy N. Smith's brand of 'eco-pulp' horror (and I'm thinking of 'Abomination' in particular) mixing it up with the 'siege horror' of 'Night of the Living Dead' and if that wasn't enough, O'Gorman finds time to give us a little body horror (just like in 'The Thing') at just the right time. It's all handled extremely well (very much part of the story rather than paying homage...) and drives the pace of the plot with an energy appropriate to having your town invaded by giant spiders... and jump scares in all the right places.

And we're given a good cast of characters to experience the 'spider-pocalypse' with. To be honest, the spiders could have just waited a couple of days and taken the town with no fuss, or loss of spider life, given the flaws some of the players are sporting. And I like that... One of the whole points of horror, for me, is that we get to see how people hold up under the pressure so the more flawed they are, the better. And they are certainly flawed... In the best spirits of 'Night of the Living Dead', these flaws stop them working together and that's what makes the story so interesting to follow.

Normally, I'd have a few words to say about 'what didn't work' for me but not today. 'Dawn of the Spiders' doesn't hang around; it just goes in, does the job and gets out; it does this very well and there literally isn't the space left for it to screw up, so it doesn't ;o) 'Dawn of the Spiders' knows exactly what it is and revels in the resulting fun and carnage, just what I needed after a shitty weekend and I'm looking forward to more of the same with 'Day of the Spiders'.

I wouldn't normally do this but I had a lot of fun with 'Dawn of the Spiders' and want to pay it forward a bit. I'm making nothing out of this, 'Dawn of the Spiders' is only 79p (on Kindle) and you can pick it up over Here. There you go, now go and buy it.