Breeding Ground by Sarah Pinborough

Matt and Chloe live in a small town in the English countryside. It is there where they lived and loved, and prepared to bring a new life into the world. However, Chloe starts changing – and it isn’t regular pregnancy changes. When Matt realizes that Chloe is not the only woman acting strange he starts to worry, but even his girlfriends altered behavior and appearance doesn’t prepare him for what comes next. In one sentence, spider-like parasites that use human women to breed and any human to feed on.

I have mentioned here before that every now and again I like to read a good horror novel, the kind that keeps me awake all night because it was just so creepy. When I found a copy of this book tucked away in the horror section of a local used book store that’s what I was hoping for. However, I must say that it didn’t really live up to the scariness I was looking for. That being said, it wasn’t a bad book.

Breeding Ground, while not being really scary, still had a couple creepy and uncomfortable moments. If I had to compare this book to something, I would say it is much more The Faculty ‘figure out what’s going on as you stumble around freaked out’ and far less Rob Zombie’s Halloween ‘mind fuck’ (excuse my language).

The characters we’re a mixed bag. The main character Matt is easy to like, but some of the other characters were a downright pain to put up with. In all honesty, I was glad to see some of them go. There is a lot of conflict between some of the characters, while the rest just want to band together and find a way to survive. Needless to say, there is never a dull moment between the players.

As for the book as a whole, once it starts moving, it moves and is really easy to read. I say this having read the book in just a few hours. I kept reading because I wanted to know what the characters were going to have to face next and what they were going to learn. Pinborough was rather creative in finding ways to raise the shock factor, gruesome as they may have been, and also finding things that would benefit the characters in their quest to survive amongst this new species.

I recommend this book if you’re looking for something to read that’s on the creepy side, though I warn anyone who is quick to cringe to brace yourself for some of the more grisly parts. Personally, I will be keeping an eye out for some of her other works as well as the follow up to this book, Feeding Ground.