Breeding Ground by Sarah Pinborough

Everybody groaned. I could hear them, spread about the continental United States like Cold War sleeper agents. But instead of spies, they were students. Students of popular fiction. Of writing popular fiction. Of looking at what makes a book marketable and engaging (the two aren’t necessarily intertwined, as one would hope). The assignments had been handed out. The dice were cast.

One such die landed on Sarah Pinborough’s Breeding Ground. A book about giant spiders. The premise alone was enough to draw out moans boredom and squeals of self-righteous indignation. I read the one-line quips on Facebook: “The shittiest book ever,” “It’s hard to find because it’s so awful,” “It was a hard one for me to get through.”

I added my own voice to the chorus after only a few pages, even so much as to decry why such a folly had been wrought against us by our class professor. I even debated throwing the book into a campfire just to take pictures and post about how awful it was and how awesome I was.

In the end, I abandoned my Fahrenheit 451 daydreams. And then it happened. I set aside my self-pity and engaged myself in the book. I surrendered to it.

It wasn’t terrible.

In the beginning, I hated the way Pinborough writes. But you know what? The “mistakes” I saw in her were mistakes I myself have been corrected on. Participial phrases, semicolons, poor characterization. I began to see myself in Pinborough, and draw parallels to my own writing. She’s a woman writing about a man. I’m a man writing a woman. She writes men horribly. I write women… subpar.

There’s nothing fantastic in this book. There are no earth-shattering insights or amazing characters. In fact, I’d argue the characters end the book as two-dimensional as they begin. None of them are extremely likeable, especially the protagonist. We’re introduced to this man who loves loves loves his wife. She’s the center of his universe, the light of his life, the apple in his eyes.

Within a week after his wife turns into a giant spider, he’s sleeping with a random woman who survived the arachnid apocalypse. And by the end, he’s running off with another rare woman.

No, I am not a fan of Matthew Edge.

I’m not really a fan of any of the characters in the book. They’re whiny or mean or paper thin. They are not characters that I, as a writer, would ever want to create. They were just there, created to provide eyes though which to tell a story. Near the end of the book, when there’s talk of other pockets of survivors, I so desperately wished the book had been written from any of their points of view.

Pinborough’s apocalypse unwinds too quickly. Not the spiders themselves, but the characters. They abandon hope too quickly and ride away from their nice, safe house the first day. They put themselves in danger for no solid reason except to move the story forward. It wasn’t natural, and it felt forced. As a reader, I don’t want to be forced to believe or feel something, I just want to experience it and let those emotions come naturally. As a writer, I want to do the same thing.

So why did I end up enjoying it?

It wasn’t pretentious. I didn’t have a grand message (except maybe don’t mess GMOs, but I think even that was a false belief held by the sole scientist in the story). I didn’t feel like what I was reading took any effort. It was, in short, a summer read. It took me nearly a month to read. In the meantime, I wrote a lot, read some other things, and just went about my life. But each time I picked it up, it was where I left off. I didn’t need to go back, or put myself in a “mood” to read it. It was simple.

The book’s cover has the following inscription: “Fans of Bentley Little, Richard Laymon and Dean Koontz will be pleased.”

The joke? That’s for an entirely different book! I’m a huge fan of Little and Laymon (my bookshelf will corroborate that), and I enjoy a little Koontz as much as the next person, but I saw no similarities to them in Breeding Ground. There was none of Koontz’s amazing characterization. None of Laymon’s animalistic over-sexualization (okay, there was one passage…) and I turned the book upside down and sideways and couldn’t find any of Little’s hyper-reality.

No, friends, Breeding Ground is not a great book. It’s barely a mediocre one. But, it’s a quick, unassuming read with a fun monster (the ones at the end are even worse!), that taught me a thing or two about myself and my writing.

There’s a sequel, but I don’t think I’ll pick it up. I’d hate to lose any more respect for somebody who has been lauded of late for her brilliant writing.