Synopsis
A middle school spin on Arachnophobia that is perfect for fans of K.R. Alexander and Mary Downing Hahn.
Can you outrun eight legs?
Andi is not afraid of spiders. They have cool fangs. They hunt using vibrations. They can even create silk on demand to make amazing homes. So when Andi learns about a spider collection at a classmate’s farm, she’s willing to do anything to see it. Even attend a blowout Halloween party she’d normally run screaming from.
At the party with her friends Devon and Carly, Andi is delighted to find a new-to-her species. This spider is nothing like she’s ever seen: huge, red-eyed, and strangely hypnotic. But when the spider escapes and starts causing havoc, Andi has a strange realization: for the first time in her life, she’s scared to death of spiders.
Review
Thanks to Scholastic for the physical ARC! The matte and gloss mixed together on the cover really makes it that much cooler.
This is kind of Arachnophobia (the movie) but in a middle grade style. There is a sort of Chamber of Secrets thread with its “follow the spiders” comments dropped in, but also, how could you not? Otherwise, it is a mashup of horror and scifi actually, and kind of had me thinking of Eight Legged Freaks too.
Best friends Andi, Carly, and Devon, have decided to ditch what very well may have been their last Halloween trick or treating in order to go to Clementine’s—an eighth grade girl—for a huge party. A cool one. Andi, who’s still clinging on to being a kid, is only tempted out of her stubbornness when Carly tells her that Clementine’s dad, the science teacher, has a serious spider collection. Living, breathing specimen for her entertainment. After that, she couldn’t agree fast enough. At the party though, right as her dad is about to bring Andi upstairs, a fight breaks out, pulling him away and leaving her without a chaperone. When Andi convinces Carly and Devon to bring her upstairs anyway, things get a bit weird… and maybe she let something out?
The farm setting with the partying kids going out to the barn and fields also brought to mind Clown in a Cornfield. Instead of clowns terrorizing young adults though, it’s thousands of spiders after middle schoolers. And for a book filled with so many creepy crawlies, this really did a good job of not demonizing them. Andi reminds her friends multiple times that spiders are most often more afraid of us than we are of them. And while there is plenty of things that made my skin crawl (and the cast of characters sprint around checking their skin and hair) there’s not actual arachnophobia on display here.
I liked how this brought in some newer discoveries and theories as well, each of which caught my eye. The different species of spiders coexisting in a giant web. The theory that spiders outnumber humans to the point that if they teamed up together, they could devour us all…and it wouldn’t even take long. The stuff you see while doomscrolling, right?
What hurt it overall for me, was that the climax kind of fizzled. Not even in the middle grade sense of everyone being alright in the end, which would have been fine for me. This just kind of felt like setup with little payoff. Now if there’s a sequel, that would make sense, and I would be interested in reading it still, but I don’t want to finish a book and feel like it solely exists for there to be another one. Otherwise, strong characterization, creepy conflict, and a well done setup for some spooky horror.
Leave a Reply