Breeding Ground - Sarah Pinborough

            Firstly, I want to thank Pinborough for the image of the partially eaten aborted three month fetus on the kitchen tile, I will never be able to scrub it from my brain. I'm not afraid of spiders, but I am afraid of parasites, and just the thought of pregnancy makes me nauseous (both the normal and evil spider-baby varieties) so Breeding Ground definitely had me squirming at parts. In the category of queasy images, Breeding Ground takes the gold.

            Breeding Ground, unlike I Am Legend, also had the characters going for it. They weren’t particularly deep, but they weren’t alarmingly terrible. They were comfortable, like most archetypes, and they moved the story forward. Katie was annoying, but she was also like twenty one, so I tolerated her existence. Unlike with Robert Neville, I was comfortable with Matt as a POV character and main protagonist, I'm not going to espouse love for him, but he got the job done, and I hurt for the guy in most of the right places.  

            However, there is a rant coming.

            What the hell is up with the hack scientists?! The one thing that will get me every time in anything with a science fiction element, is science that does not hold water. I get that it is science fiction, but if you are going to spit in the face of every natural law we know, your characters at least need to have a “holy crap, this is physically impossible!” moment, or else I think the characters, or worse, the writer is just stupid. Chloe doesn’t eat for a week and continues to gain an incredible amount of weight. You can’t make matter from nothing folks! Someone, anyone, in the novel, please be as alarmed as I am at this violation of the law of conservation of mass! When she stops eating, she becomes a closed system. Nothing is being added. That can’t come out of nowhere. And if it does, because fiction is awesome like that, someone please recognize this law and freak out a little!

            Then as the apocalypse grows in the vast majority of women all over the world, I am asked to believe that all of the doctors, scientists, and even the Joe’s in the world simply throw up their hands at this phenomenon and decide to wait and see. Everyone in the world, unanimously, decides to wait and see. WHAT? Someone put that chick in an MRI! Does her weird budding powers cause the electronics to malfunction? Exploratory surgery baby! We find out from Chris’s autopsy of Katie that the fatty lumps are different parts of the spiders developing around the body, which will contract and assemble in the womb shortly before birth. How hard could it be for a doctor to slice open one of those lumps, pull out a partially developed arachnid limb, and conclude Houston, we have a problem.

And speaking of Chris. Ah Chris. I am not a geneticist, nor am I a doctor, but I am confident anyone infected with a horrifying spider baby would fare better in my care, than in the care of Chris, the brilliant geneticist. When John discovers he has developed the telltale lumps of a widow infection, brilliant Dr. Chris fist suggests that they might just go away. Right. Because we have every reason to believe now, of all times that massive sporadically appearing lumps are more likely to go away than turn into a horrible spider baby. When John refuses to accept the all to prevalent “wait and see” policy of the many hack scientists who caused the apocalypse, Chris’s only other suggestion is to drink a pint of the deaf girl’s blood.

By the way, deaf people’s blood kills the spider things.

Moving on. Drink the deaf girl’s blood. Why would a geneticist suggest he drink the miracle blood? Does he not know what human stomach acid does to DNA and proteins? Inject that stuff! How about right into the lumps! If they’re not the same blood type, don’t inject enough to kill him! But no. Drink the blood and then we’re done. Shockingly, this does not work and an evil black boy spider bursts out of John’s head and kills him. And I liked John too.

Perhaps more motivation was needed to spark the creativity of this doctor. Nearly every other man in the group develops the lumps shortly after. Though I am assured Chris is doing everything he can to save himself and his comrades, I'm fairly certain he just decides to roll over and die, because I can come up with a bucket of things to try that do hold some logic. More logic than drinking the deaf girl’s blood.

And here are the reasons why I am a better post spider apocalypse doctor than Dr. Chris, with logic to boot.

              1.      When John killed his mother by bludgeoning her to death, just a few hours or maybe even moments before the completed gestation of her monster spider baby, it also killed the spider baby in question. Ergo, we could try to stop the heart, and then resuscitate the host to see if it would be enough to kill the developing spider baby.

              2.      The environment is becoming increasingly tropical. It is even postulated that the widows are somehow controlling the weather. Ergo, the widows need a higher temperature to survive. Most organisms in fact, need a stable environment to incubate their young. Ergo, we could try to lower the core temperature of the host in an ice bath, to make the body unfavorable for incubating the young, and kill the developing spider baby.

               3.      Electricity does kill the suckers. Yes, the high voltage fence packs a lot more punch than what a human body can survive, but when the alternative is dying horribly as a spider baby erupts from your body, why not hit the host with a defibrillator a few times? Who knows, usually embryonic life forms are significantly more fragile than adults. Maybe it will kill the developing spider baby.

               4.      Hit that sucker with some Chemo. Chris even suggested the spiders were made from all of the genetically modified food messing with peoples’ bodies, causing them to grow these monsters. That sounds a lot like cancer. Wriggling, sentient, spider-cancer. If you kill enough cells from anything, it will die. Here’s hoping we nuke the developing spider parts before the host.

a.       Oh, don’t have any Chemo or enough medical equipment on site? Well the spiders don’t attack people who are carrying future spiders. You all have a shield of invulnerability. Go out, get the stuff, come back, and fix yourself people. Go now. Chop chop.

                5.      And last, but not least, good old fashioned surgery. Especially in the male hosts, the lumps of developing spider baby are centralized under the skin in their chest. Just under the skin. So close you can see it moving in fact. Get a scalpel and have at it! Even if you miss parts, if you pull enough limbs and organs out of anything, especially prenatal things, they will probably die. After all, the last amateur surgery, the amputation of an entire arm from the shoulder in a vet clinic, actually worked! Add a doctor and supplies, and I like those odds!

Yes, all of these measures are incredibly risky, but look at the alternative. Two characters even waste themselves. If you're going to waste yourself, waste yourself for science. Let us electrocute you a little first or chill you in an ice bath. Who knows, you could save lives.

One more thing and I’ll stop. What is up with that genius freakin dog? The dog waits in front of the gate for hours like it knows it’s going to be let in, makes best friends with the deaf girl like it knows they’re both deaf, and then in the end exercises an incredibly advanced form of morality when it decides that Nigel isn’t good enough for a bullet after what he’s done, and stops the others from shooting him so he can die slowly from a widow bite. The dog voted for vengeful punishment. Was the dog some new evolution in the canine species? Brought on by the same phenomenon that caused the widows? Were the widows somehow controlling it to use as an undercover agent? No, it’s just a deaf dog. What the hell!? You can’t have a genius dog, then not explain it! You can’t! It even decides to go with George to find his grandson in the end, because the genius dog knows he won’t make it on his own. What?! Why is no one alarmed by this?!

Some great images, some great moments, but a very sloppy apocalypse.