Week Three: Breeding Ground

I don't scare easily, but I do have a list of things that terrify me. Relatively high on that list is spiders. It was only after being trapped in a car with one, almost swerving into oncoming traffic, and making pathetic, animal-like whimpers that made me realize my fear of spiders might be more akin to a phobia.

Far lower on my list of fears are pregnancy and giving birth. So many women say it’s wonderful experiencing the miracle of life. Maybe it’s because I watched my mother have a rough time being pregnant, maybe I’ve seen too many episodes of Call the Midwife, but I’m not anxious to conceive and carry a child to term. I find the entire business of being pregnant and giving birth unsettling.

So what does Sarah Pinborough do in her novel Breeding Ground? Combine two of my fears into one convenient package: women become pregnant with mutant spiders which then rip free from the living women’s body.

What fun.

The first third of the book made me uncomfortable. The symptoms of the freak-spider pregnancies are wonderfully disgusting and so very disturbing if you fear both spiders and pregnancies. I haven’t read much that’s truly grossed me out the way Breeding Ground did. Other than that, though, I have major problems with this book.

First is with the treatment of women throughout the story. This surprised me coming from a woman author. All the female characters are flat and one-dimensional. Chloe, the first female character the reader meets, serves one purpose: to host to a parasitic mutant spider, or Widows as they’re called. The narrator Matt, Chloe’s boyfriend, tells the reader that she used to be a lovely girl. Yet all the reader really sees of Chloe is her complaining about how much weight she’s gained before the spider takes over her brain and gives her telepathy and the ability to physically immobilize Matt.

This is the same pattern with most of the female characters throughout the book. At first I thought it was Pinborough’s way of illustrating how women are merely incubators for the Widows and serve no other purpose to them. Yet there are three female characters who aren't immediately living incubators: Katie, Jane, and Rebecca. But they’re not given much personality either.

Jane is a child, and besides showing how the mutant spider pandemic has warped the mind of a male survivor Nigel and being eaten by a Widow, she doesn't do much. She more or less just takes up space on the page. Her older sister Katie also doesn't serve much purpose than to be Matt’s new fling. She becomes impregnated with one a Widow and chooses to kill herself rather than be eaten from the inside out. Finally, there’s Rebecca. She’s deaf, and since she’s deaf her blood is like acid to the Widows (more on that later). She’s another one of Matt’s flings.

Which brings me to my next issue: Matt. I found him to be more of a pig than Robert Neville from I Am Legend. Matt tells the reader in the prologue that the events of his story happened last year. In this time, Matt begins with his girlfriend Chloe. He’s happily living with her and awaiting the birth of their first child when the book opens. She’s taken over and eaten by Widows, but Matt doesn't stay long enough to see her death. He doesn't seem too remorseful—the entire time Chloe’s been pregnant, he’s been disgusted by the weight she’s gained.

Matt leaves town and meets up with other surviving men, all of whom have lost the women in their lives to the Widow pandemic. Two surviving and Widow-free females join the group, Katie and her little sister Jane. From the moment Katie joins the group, Matt is sexually attracted to her. They consummate their relationship, because what’s an apocalypse without sex? Matt acknowledges that he and Katie start their relationship pretty soon after Chloe, but it’s a purely sexual relationship. I understand that grief manifests in many ways, including the all-consuming need to be as close to another person as possible. But Matt’s justification of his relationship with Katie so soon after Chloe makes him seem sex-obsessed. In fact, Chloe pretty much drifts off to the back of Matt’s mind rather quickly after he leaves her.

Not long after Matt and Katie have sex, Katie becomes pregnant with a Widow, but doesn't live long enough to let it kill her. About thirty pages later, Matt is sleeping with Rebecca. She too becomes pregnant. But because her blood is acidic to the Widows, there’s hope that her baby is actually a baby and not a Widow. In less than a year, Matt has gotten three different women pregnant.

I feel like other things should be in the forefront of the mind during an apocalypse instead of sex, but that’s just me.

Which brings me to my final gripe with this novel: Pinborough’s explanation of the origin of the Widows. For some reason, I thought the widows were aliens. I was completely wrong about that, they’re the result of genetically spliced food and animal genes….

Wait, what?

I must have read the explanation about five times to make sure I didn’t misunderstand. Pinborough’s explanation for the Widows was genetic experiments gone wrong, and these experiments carried away on the breeze….

I like my original alien spider theory.

For a while, I was convinced Matt was some kind of Widow carrier. After all, two of the three girls he impregnated conceived Widows along with babies. How men became carriers of the male Widows was never explained, and neither was why the blood of deaf Rebecca and a deaf dog were toxic to the spiders. I feel like Pinborough either needed to explain her monsters better or not explain them at all and leave them completely shrouded in mystery. The rushed, incomplete explanation Pinborough used felt like a cop out. I felt gypped, like Pinborough ran out of steam and just slapped an ending together, which is extremely frustrating after dedicating the time to read any book.

I wanted a better apocalypse, spiders or not.

(Preferably not.)