Back in July, my books for the semester arrived, and I looked at the cover of Sarah Pinborough’s Breeding Ground with a sinking feeling. Then I read the description on the back. I reached the line about the “spidery nightmares.” I reacted as calmly as you might expect from someone with arachnophobia.

I hid the book beneath the rest and pretended it didn’t exist until I saw its name on the schedule and realized I’d have to face it.

The first few chapters were as creepy as I feared, and that was before the widows (that is, the horrible spider monsters, as I thought of them) were born. Chloe’s mutations and changes as the widow grew inside of her, all witnessed by her horrified boyfriend Matt, were freaky as heck. I thought it would have benefited from a little more subtlety, rather than spiraling out of control as quickly as it did, but that’s just my preference. It was scary, it was creepy, and it set me up to expect my time with this book to be as horrible as I feared when I first read its description.

But by the time I finished Breeding Ground, I did not hide in the corner and sob. My reaction was, “Eh.” I can’t explain why without getting into some spoilers, so reader beware!

This is a horror book, so let’s start with the horror. The first few chapters were brilliant in that regard. Near the end, I also found it very creepy and disturbing. That leaves about 200 pages in between that didn’t do it for me at all.

Part of the problem was Matt. I didn’t feel anything for him. To me, his only function was to show the story through his eyes. That kind of narrator can work for me, especially in horror, but there wasn’t enough horror in the middle of the book for that to work. I tried to focus on the survivors and their interactions, but he came across to me as too bland. I wasn’t very attached to any of the other characters, either–except possibly to Jane, but that’s because I kept drawing comparisons to a different apocalyptic survival story. Her role as a little girl in the group of survivors reminded me of Clementine, and Telltale’s take on The Walking Dead was far better at making me attached to characters than this book was.

And why was everyone oblivious to the impending Apocalypse? Matt noticed the changes in Chloe, but in no one else, and the book suggests that everyone was like that–aware of an issue with their immediate loved ones, but that’s it. Wouldn’t people be more likely to notice half the town showing the same weird symptoms? Oh, right, the doctors knew. They just didn’t do anything. In face of a pandemic, the world’s doctors decided to “wait and see” (Pinborough 25). What??

Then there was the romance. Katie arrived in the story, and immediately Matt “tried not to notice how pretty she was” (86), which signaled the start of his romantic goals for a good portion of the book. I have no problem with romance in novels. I try to add some myself. And I’ve seen far worse cases than this–one book shoehorned in romance so badly that when the characters started kissing, I flipped back to see if I had somehow skipped a few pages–but the immediacy jarred me. Even Robert Neville had more justification than this. Matt flees his mutated girlfriend, learns that women everywhere became breeders for the widows, and is instantly attracted to the first woman he sees? Hey, maybe it would work that way. I haven’t been in that position, so I can’t say for sure. But it felt too soon to me, and in general, his flirting and romantic concerns (accompanied by the occasional flicker of guilt that he didn’t feel more guilty) in the middle of the Apocalypse bugged me. Their eventual sex scene read like it got shuffled in from a different book–particularly since the prologue set the book up as an apocalyptic log for other survivors to have a record of events. Matt acknowledged the reader again in that section and added some justifications for his actions, so I can’t pretend the author forgot the premise, which just leaves me with…why?

Beyond those, there were just some things that threw me out of the reading. For example, the deaf survivor, Rebecca, can read lips. The narration mentioned this…three pages after Matt talked to her out loud and she wrote her replies. I probably should have assumed lip-reading, but instead I stopped in confusion and wondered how she could hear him. At one point in the book, I encountered three different tenses in the same sentence. I’m still not sure exactly what that was about. And then there’s an issue that came up with I Am Legend as well…

Science.

Although the prologue of Breeding Ground offers many possibilities as to what caused the widows, a scientist reveals late in the book that the most probable cause is genetically modified food. It’s actually a cool explanation: he suggests that after the creation of genetic hybrids, modifications to make plants and animals larger, and the development of insect-repellent plants, “a little bit of the experiment floats away on the wind, meets up with a little bit of another experiment, and then who knows what could happen” (220). What could happen, apparently, is giant spider creatures that breed inside humans.

My willing suspension of disbelief can go pretty far, and I’ve heard enough about companies like Monsanto to accept this as a cool idea. Pinborough took an existing issue with real concerns and controversies, and stretched it beyond the realms of possibility (we hope) for a horror story. That’s a great way to do horror! Genetically modified food goes horribly wrong and creates telepathic spider monsters? All right, I’ll go with that! The problem is that it raised too many questions. Why wasn’t this foreshadowed earlier, or at least hinted at (aside from the prologue)? I love it when horror has a mystery to piece together, but this had no pieces, just a sudden revelation. How did this genetic mutation affect people? Why did it only affect women? Why did it affect almost all the world’s women at exactly the same time? Why were other women affected later? How did it evolve to affect men? And why does the blood of deaf people stop it?

I have one final complaint. In an echo of Robert Neville’s thoughts in I Am Legend, near the end of Breeding Ground, Matt realizes that “a new order had taken hold and our old laws no longer applied” (315). They let Nigel die in agony from his widow bite, instead of giving him a quick death, as punishment for the horrible things he did. I could debate the morality of their actions, but instead I’m going to address the practicality. What does that have to do with the “new order”? It’s meant to imply a coldhearted, ruthless law necessary for their new existence, but that has nothing to do with survival unless it’s meant as a message to Nigel’s cronies–and since they let him die from something that would kill him anyway, instead of killing him, I’m not sure it works as that sort of message. And I’m sure Nigel would have argued that he was the one enforcing the laws of a ruthless, necessary new order. But I’m being picky now, so I’ll stop.

There were parts of this book I really did like and there were parts I found genuinely scary. I never felt like throwing it against the wall. It was interesting enough for me to keep turning the pages, despite my complaints, but not much more. The sequel apparently has crack addict spider monsters, which sounds bizarre enough to make me curious, but I think I’ll pass. In the end, Arachnophobia + Breeding Ground = “Eh.”

Pinborough, Sarah. Breeding Ground. New York: Dorchester, 2006. Print.

Update: Every time I think about this book now, I don’t think about the creepy spider monsters but about Linkara’s “Of course! Don’t you know anything about science?!” clip.