Richard Lewis - The Web

[dem]

Richard Lewis - The Web (Hamlyn, 1981)

It is six years since Britain was crippled by a monstrous onslaught of flesh-eating spiders. Now at last, life is back to normal - more or less - but Alan Mason's recurring nightmare is that the spiders will return ...

Angus McInnes's grisly death is the first sign of a fresh tide of horror. For the spiders are on the move again, infecting their victims with a deadly poison.

AND NO ONE KNOWS WHERE THEY WILL STRIKE NEXT ...

The Crabs. But with spiders.

The gang come in all sizes, from tiny, through "human fist" to enormous, and they're having a brill time of it so far (I'm on p. 62), webbing up their helpless victims and lugging them off to their spider parlour. Unlike LJ's *ahem* 'documentary' approach to his killer pig novels, these are all set-piece set-piece set-piece, attack attack attack and not much by way of plot. It begins with the death of a luckless tramp after he dosses down for the night in a derelict cottage on a Lincoln farm. Then it's the turn of some thoroughbreds, ruining their owner, Jack Dawson, and sending him mad. Next, newly weds Cathy and Mike go looking in the cellar of their new home....

I've not got/ read the first book in the series, Spiders, but I'd be surprised if it varies too much in terms of style or content.

****

"Without realising it, his inborn fear of spiders made him see the innocent nurses teeth as fangs at the end of biting jaws, and her eyes as one of the pairs of eight which spiders can have."

The eight legged fiends are in their element now, zipping up and down the length of Sherwood forest and taking out the inmates of Holmdale Prison and the cops investigating the murder at Clarke's Stud Farm. There have been spider-related atrocities in Lincoln, Nottingham and Derby: where will they show up next? The worst of it is, even should you survive the onslaught, one bite from the little brown devils drives you into a murderous frenzy, so we've had a spinsterly teacher massacre most of her pupils and a policeman run amok through the operating theatre while some poor guy was having his body sewn back together. Squelchy.

Plot wise, the good news is that there almost is one now. Journalist John Lever is shaping up as the hero of the piece as he's the first to realise that the mutant spiders are back. He's been having marital difficulties ever since he walked in unexpectedly on his wife, Sandra, while she was having it off with some geezer on the floor to the strains of an Elton John record. They're considering a divorce. Now Sandra has taken the kids away for a couple of days to mull things over. In her note she explains to John that they'll be staying at a place where there are no radios, TV's or newspapers!

Meanwhile, Lever's old schoolfriend, Chief Inspector Graham Murray, has been put in charge of the case and the boys from Biowatch are doing forensics and other scientific business. I've given up on establishing an exact body count, but it's plenty.

Fifty pages of sheer Hell to go ...

****

Perhaps I'm getting old or something, but I'm not sure how much more of this "unprecedented terror" I can take. The spiders are much harder than they were in the first book, and they've become immune to whatever it is Alan Mason wiped them out with. He saunters in on p. 163 - in your own time, Alan - because Prime Minister William Hawkins demands action. Alan flukily comes up with a new serum and Lever and co descend into the caves to wipe out the spiders, including a fantastic bloated thirty foot wide abomination that is too obese to run off. In the inevitable epilogue, we learn that the one that got away has settled in North Wales ...

[fullbreakfast]

I read both of these as a young teenager (I think they were rapidly remaindered so suited my pocket...). Despite my being a real-life arachnophobe they made little impression and I can't remember a lot about them except that the sex was not up to James Herbert standards

[erebus]

Well I just had to read The Web again after going through Spiders last week or so.
Yes as Dem has said and summed up correctly they are far more harder in this book. In fact they don't just eat you now. The black ones do. But the Brown ones spin you up and drag your down holes to drink on later. This horrific demise befalls a tramp in the very first chapter. A truly grisly and awful death is told in great detail by Lewis here.
In Spiders we only get one webby related showpiece. But here ( hence the title ) theres an abundance of web related atrocities. The best being the woman who is trapped in the phone box as its cocooned up. To her horror a little window is visable for her to see her two young children torn apart by the spiders.
The bitten survivors go bonkers. A teacher gets her own back on the kids with her pointer stick. One luckless PE teacher gets his eye gouged out for good matter too. She then takes the plunge out the window. Meanwhile a PC ( Policeman not Computer ) wakens in the hospital and causes havoc. He makes it to the operating theatre and scapels the surgeons to shreds. The poor sod on the operating table gets thrown to the deck and his innards empty across the floor, reminded me of the bit in Day of the Dead.
Anyway yes the spiders commupance is flukey. And the conclusion is all but a few pages in a kind of lets get this book over with kind of way. Still its a great read and essential for Animals/bugs attack fans like me. It beats the original to and that was a great book. Sadly they never returned for round three. Damn Shame.