‘The Spider’ – Basil Copper (From ‘The Fifth Pan Book of Horror Stories)


I’ve got a couple of Basil Copper’s books waiting to be read (‘The Great White Space’ and ‘Necropolis’, in case you were wondering), but I saw ‘The Fifth Pan Book of Horror Stories’, in Crofton Books, and ‘The Spider’ is Copper’s first published work so where better a place to start reading…? Nope, me neither, the decision pretty much made itself ;o)

Monsieur Pinet has had a good days business, but a long one, and decides to break up his journey home with a night in a nearby hotel. When Pinet encounters his greatest fear, in his hotel room, the night will be a long one and he may not live to see the sun rise in the morning…

‘The Spider’ is only seven pages long so was just the right length of tale to cap off a Wednesday that could have gone a lot better than it did. I’m not a huge fan of spiders (not a fan at all in fact…) so I knew, before I picked the book up, that ‘The Spider’ would do it’s job on me. I guess I just wasn’t expecting it to do that job as well as it did, I was well and truly creeped out and that was before a finale which upped the horror even more.

Copper strikes a good balance between setting the scene and slowly introducing unsettling elements of plot that hint at far worse to come. As someone with a spider haunted bathroom of his own, I really felt for Pinet’s encounter in the restaurant toilets and couldn’t help but squirm a little as he dealt with one of the intruders. And then it gets even worse for Pinet as his night is interrupted in the worst way… I loved the way that Copper drew out the tension in those final stages. You know what’s coming, the fun (or not) lies in watching it play out…

Most of all though, I loved the way that certain questions were very deliberately not answered. Sometimes the reader doesn’t have to know everything, it’s more than enough to know that something is happening right now and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop it. That, I think, is what ultimately makes ‘The Spider’ such an effective tale. You don’t know the full story and that disconnect really emphasises the horror of what is happening right now.

Not a bad read then, not a bad read at all. If ‘The Great White Space’ and ‘Necropolis’ match up to ‘The Spider’, I’ve got some good reading ahead of me. I’ll let you know how that goes...

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