'Night of the Spiders' – Brian O'Gorman

If you've seen my posts, over the last couple of days, you already know that I've been enjoying the absolute hell out of Brian O'Gorman's 'Spiders' series, 'giant creature' books that just revel in what they are and are all the more fun for it. If you haven't seen my posts, I've got you covered ;o) Here are my reviews for 'Dawn of the Spiders' and 'Day of the Spiders'. Again, I was in no mood to hang about, after finishing 'Day', so jumped straight into 'Night of the Spiders' and polished it off yesterday, in between bouts of trying to get work done (working from home is great but difficult, all at the same time...)

One thing that I didn't mention about 'Day of the Spiders' is that two things happened, towards the end, that really set things up to go either way in 'Night'. It was so finely balanced that I was desperate to see how it all concluded. And now I have, and it was awesome.

The city of Hemmington has fallen to the army of spiders. Becky Willis is trapped inside the Hurst Centre, imprisoned by the spiders with only one method of escape, but she wouldn’t wish it on her worst enemy. Johnny Lambert is right in the middle of ground zero, one of the last residents of Suicide Towers. He has two options, starve to death, or risk it all to make his escape while he still has the strength to do so. Meanwhile, hundreds of miles away, on the south coast of England, Mary Benson and her daughter Jax are refugees in a seaside town after escaping the spider invasion. Mary and Jax settle into their new life when Mary meets the mysterious Sylvia. She gives Mary a stark warning. The spiders will break free of Hemmington and she needs to be ready. The night will soon be upon them and what started in Newtown will finally come to an end one way or the other.

While 'Dawn of the Spiders' wears all of it's influences proudly on it's sleeve, and 'Day of the Spiders' puts more emphasis on one of these in order to make you fight to keep hold of your breakfast, 'Night of the Spiders' takes its lead from 'World War Z' and 'Alien' using a mixture of epic brushstrokes, and more personal ones, in order to show us just what humanity is up against. Of course it works. O'Gorman has already shown us that he is in control of his plot and it's no different here; everything does what he needs it to, whether that's full on pitched battles or hunting down 'who knows what' through darkened laboratories. 'Night of the Spiders' is the bit where everything goes 'widescreen' which is the only way you can do it when one of the opposing armies is literally millions strong. If I'd had popcorn in the house, I'd have been eating popcorn while reading this. It's blockbuster material but on the page instead of the big screen. O'Gorman plays to the strengths of this and the upshot is another book that you can't help but read.

Without giving too much away, the science behind it all went over my head at exactly the wrong time (although to be fair, this was all on me rather than the book itself) so there were important bits where I wondered to myself why things had to happen the way that they did. What balanced it out for me though were the characters seeing it through. We've got some returning characters, from the first two books, as well as various soldiers determined to do the right thing even as everything goes to hell around them. We even have a serial killer who may not have a shot at redemption but does have the chance to draw a line under his past. You can guess what happens to some of them but O'Gorman keeps you wondering until it does and that uncertainty really works for the book in a positive way. It's good to see those returning faces though as they have stories that need to be told and polished off (and they are).

This has probably been the hardest review to write, as a I don't want to give anything away, but what I can say is that if you enjoyed 'Dawn of the Spiders' and 'Day of the Spiders', 'Night of the Spiders' is a slightly different beast but there is still a lot to love and enjoy here. I certainly did and come payday, I'll be reading more of Brian O'Gorman's work. You should too.

P.S. Same deal as before, I think you should be reading these books so I'm pointing you in the direction of the Kindle edition. I don't get paid anything for this, I'm just trying to point you at some cool books... ;o)