'Day of the Spiders' – Brian O' Gorman


After having such a great time with 'Dawn of the Spiders' (Click Here for the review or just, you know, scroll down a bit...), I didn't hang around with getting started on 'Day of the Spiders'. Which proved to be a little awkward seeing as I had a whole day of work to get through at the same time. I was desperate to see how it all continued though so I managed with the help of my lunch break and a large chunk of yesterday evening ;o) How did it continue though and did it all work? Keep reading and I'll get to it.

Five years after Newtown went up in flames, everything has returned to an uneasy calm, until a little girl by the name of Lottie Richmond is killed in her back garden.

Braden Benson has been on the frontline of journalism for most of his adult life. He has enjoyed some success, but that one big headline payoff has always eluded him. He decides to hang up his notepad in favour of spending more time with his neglected family, that is until a spate of grisly events in the nearby town of Layton makes him suspect that there is something fundamentally wrong.
The events unfolding in Layton attract the attention of D.C.I Gerald Thompson and his partner John Wells. Their investigation takes them to a house on Corsica Road and the terrible certainty that what happened in Newtown is far from over.

I thought that the ending of 'Dawn of the Spiders' was fairly definite so buying myself a copy of 'Day of the Spiders' was as much about finding out how the story could continue as much as it was about having another slice of 'spider horror'. The good news (well, for readers, not the characters here) is that 'life found a way' and the route into the events of 'Day' may feel a little familiar but it deposits us straight into 'spider horror' that's every bit as effective as it was in 'Dawn'. Actually, it's much more effective than that with the balance shifting from 'creepy skittering horror' to 'full on body horror'. Don't get me wrong, there's still plenty of 'creepy stuff' although what I'd say here is that I found it was sometimes drawn out a little too far and lost something in the telling. Not often though. There's more of a focus on 'gross out body horror' here and I have to say that it's brilliantly done :o) There were actually bits where I had to look away from the page, or skim a paragraph, because O'Gorman just doesn't hold back when the situation demands that the reader feel a little queasy. I did but it was worth it ;o)

And what O'Gorman does with his characters... It's a tried and tested horror staple that people will die because they just can't work together as a team. There were times when I just felt like saying to the spiders, “Look, just wait a couple of days and the humans will have killed themselves. Then you can just march into the city without having to worry about flamethrowers...” Yep, there are flamethrowers here and the 'spider death count' must be in the hundreds of thousands, just in a couple of pages. If you hate spiders, you are going to love that bit ;o)

But I was talking about the characters, wasn't I? O'Gorman really takes the time to let us get to know the main players and see how the unfolding horror affects them, what it drives them to do. It's great because what it drives people to do throw a whole load of surprises at the reader which ends up meaning that no-one is guaranteed to make it to the end and we get to see loads of little moments where people use the 'spider apocalypse' to settle old (and sometimes brand new) scores. The people we start out with are not the people we end with and it's not a change for the better. And that's ok because the plot just ends up becoming even more compelling.

Once I finish posting this, I'll be straight into 'Night of the Spiders'; that's how much I enjoyed reading 'Day of the Spiders'. Maybe a few tense moments could have been tightened up a little but that's a small complaint when there is more than enough horror that works incredibly well and left me feeling just a little bit sick. Bring on 'Night of the Spiders'...

(Again, I don't normally do this but 'Day of the Spiders' is only 79p on Kindle. It's not an affiliate link, I just think you should be reading these books...)

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