Breeding Ground

by Sarah Pinborough

The best thing I can say about Breeding Ground is that it held my interest and kept me turning the pages. While the plot was solid (except for the ending), the monsters and characters were adequate, no more.

The story begins with the protagonist, Matt, experiencing the kind of nervousness that many men have undoubtedly felt when dealing with their pregnant partners' volatile emotions. He tries his best to tiptoe around Chloe's irritability, and he's non-judgemental when it comes to her weight gain. He loves her, he tells us. 

But I call bullshit. The first time Matt meets another female, he turns into a lovestruck schoolboy around her, flirting and hoping for crumbs of affection within a day of losing Chloe. Where is his grief? I realize it’s possible to hold an attraction toward someone despite the timing of that person's entering one’s life. But this seemed beyond credible and made Matt seem shallow and unreliable (given his profession of love towards the just-departed Chloe.)

Another thing that irritated me about the characters was the lack of women in the book who were not young and nubile and "beautiful." We had some older men. Where were the older women? Instead, the author thought it better to keep Matt supplied with pretty young things to sleep with and impregnate. 

I was appalled by the sexist line that is the third one in this quote: "…it seemed that maybe they weren't party to that communal mind thing that the women had. That didn't surprise me. As a species we'd never really known what was going on in women's heads and I figured that Mother Nature wasn't going to change that now." Huh? "As a species"? Does the author mean to say that our species is male, and it doesn't understand women? I find it difficult to believe that a woman would write this line, and because of this and the female characters in the novel, I've concluded that Sarah Pinborough is a pseudonym for a male author.

On to the monsters. They are spiderlike, translucent, and whitish, and they have red eyes. Not many people like spiders and these monsters derive their horrifying qualities from that fact. Beyond creeping out the spider-averse, they aren't that scary. Their eyes are "angry," but we're never told why Matt thinks that. The expressions of eyes come from the muscle movements that control eyebrows and squinting. Eyes, in and of themselves, can't express anything unless it's through telepathy. So I wasn't convinced. Compare these eyes with the monster's eyes in Rawhead Rex, also reviewed on this blog. Now there are some scary eyes.

The novel ends with Matt and George leaving the compound in two cars. I didn't understand why no spiders attacked them as they went. The group has had to sequester themselves behind electrically-charged fencing. So why is it suddenly okay for them to travel through open country?

Breeding Ground was a page-turner that was not, ultimately, satisfying.