While on vacation in Peru, American tourists and their guide get eaten alive by something. In India, two earthquake scientists notice light, confusing seismic patterns. And in Minneapolis, an FBI agent investigating a plane crash makes a shocking discovery. And at a university in Washington, DC, a mysterious package arrives from…Peru.

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Why this book?: I’m terrified of spiders, and was really looking to have my socks knocked off.

I have two very contrasting opinions about this book. On one hand, there were terrifying scenes: spiders crawling out of faces of corpses, spiders burrowing into people’s flesh, basically whenever Boone went in and described the spiders doing gross, spider-y shit. On the other hand, though, this whole entire 330 page novel was all exposition. Literally all of it was exposition, and I was bored out of my mind. As you read further and further into this book, you could feel the suspense slowly building, and you couldn’t help but get excited for the bomb to finally blow–after awhile, you wanted all of the suspense to go into something. But it never did.

When I started this book, I really struggled with keeping my interest in it. I had a physical copy, but could barely get past the first ten pages. The writing was dense, meandering and unfocused. As an audiobook, it worked well, almost conversational, but as a book, it was impossible. I was constantly losing interest, and subsequently dropped the physical in favor of the audio. And while the audiobook was catching, that was really all it was.

Boone’s writing also made it difficult to become attached to characters. At first, it was just jumping from one new character to another, never going back to old characters. This went on for a good 25%-35% of the audiobook before it jumped back to old characters, finally settling on five or six people, but their chapters were relatively short and random characters that only got one chapter were still shoved in between. It was annoying as hell, because you only got to settle on two or three characteristics before the characters were left behind.

The ending was also fairly disappointing. I was hoping for some big rescue effort or surprise or something, but instead? Nothing. It just fucking ending with literally nothing happening. I don’t want to spoil it but I was just so mad about the ending, because it just wasted the entire book.

Final Rating: ★★★☆☆

Overall?

I was expecting to be terrified, because I’m already terrified of spiders. Instead, I was just kind of bored and ended up felt cheated out of a decent ending. There were specific scenes that really shook me, but otherwise I really wasn’t impressed.

Would I Recommend?

Maybe someone else would enjoy this more than I did, but I really, really disliked the ending. I was also just bored out of my mind with the writing style, and since I never connected with the characters, I really felt no remorse when one died or something else happened. The book wasn’t bad though, just frustrating.

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Additional Information:

Published: July 5th, 2016

Publisher: Atria/Emily Bestler Books

Page Count: 334

Genre: Horror/Thriller/Science Fiction

Synopsis: via Goodreads

Deep in the jungle of Peru, where so much remains unknown, a black, skittering mass devours an American tourist whole. Thousands of miles away, an FBI agent investigates a fatal plane crash in Minneapolis and makes a gruesome discovery. Unusual seismic patterns register in a Kanpur, India earthquake lab, confounding the scientists there. During the same week, the Chinese government “accidentally” drops a nuclear bomb in an isolated region of its own country. As these incidents begin to sweep the globe, a mysterious package from South America arrives at a Washington, D.C. laboratory. Something wants out.

The world is on the brink of an apocalyptic disaster. An ancient species, long dormant, is now very much awake.