Ezekiel Boon - The Hatching

You know that feeling when you go on holiday that you haven’t brought enough books with you? Well this was the reason I bought The Hatching. I hadn’t read a decent horror book for a while and this one seemed to promise to fill the gap. However it turned out that The Hatching is closer to Scary Movie than Scream in terms of a horror offering.

The Hatching is a multi-perspective story told from I can’t remember how many viewpoints. It’s about spiders who want to eat everybody and how various parts of the world react to it. In general, it was a quick and relatively enjoyable bubblegum read that was in no way scary but there were several things that screamed at me throughout the story.

The first thing I found striking was that it’s an end of the world survival horror but I found myself not really caring about any of the characters and here’s why. Firstly there are too many viewpoints. The book is only 351 pages long and the words are well spaced out. Due to the vast array of characters, this didn’t give me enough time to emotionally invest in any of them. Sad to say, I didn’t care whether any of them lived or died.

All of the viewpoints have one thing in common. Sex. And Objectivity. All of characters constantly make sexual narrative towards their preferred gender and also objectify everyone. At first I was like, what, but after the third one did it, it started to become hilarious.

In addition to this, a lot of character types are clichéd. There is the scientist, the simple cop (who is also the divorcee with a child to protect), the president, the president’s aide, an author, the soldier. It’s all blah but I understand the purpose they are serving, it’s all just a bit too thin and doesn’t pull it off.

My final point is one that would have me shot in certain circles so I will to do this without attracting too much ire. All of the roles are filled by female protagonists. The scientist is female, the president is female and the solider is female. The solider is even narratively described as being massively superior to the men. Now, I don’t have a problem with this in the slightest. I watched Battlestar Galactica and I thought Mary McDonnell made a cracking president. But in this book, it feels that the women are effectively forced into this roles just because they are opposite typecasts. If more work had been put into the narrative and padded to develop the characters more, I probably would have been able to buy in to the characters and not noticed this at all.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that The Hatching feels very hastily written. The concept is great, don’t get me wrong but I feel that the idea is what drove the novel and the characters are just there to plod until the conclusion. This can sometimes work in movies but not so much in books.

The Hatching by Ezekiel Boone was published by Gollancz in 2016. RRP £12.99 (Paperback)