When glancing over the shelves at the bookstore, my eye generally skips over the names of authors I don’t recognize. I know: stupid, right? I read new authors all the time, but I tend to find them in ways other than cover art leading to impulse buying. I learned that lesson browsing in comic-book shops.
What I’m saying is that I had never heard of Sarah Pinborough before FEEDING GROUND. And while we’re sort of talking about the book’s cover, I’ll point out that nowhere thereon will you find the information that this volume is a sequel. We are told that Ms. Pinborough is the author of BREEDING GROUND, which is an obvious hint, but I can imagine some readers being miffed when they find out that something preceded the action in this book. (Watch for volume three, set in a bakery, called KNEADING GROUND. Okay, that’s a joke.)
Actually, the sequel thing is no big deal, because the action of FEEDING GROUND is self-contained. Some of these characters may have appeared in the earlier novel, but Pinborough tells us everything we need to know about them to follow their thought processes. Unlike some writers, who hit us over the head with What Happened Before This, she works backstory into the flow without causing any ripples. There’s a term we reviewers use to designate an author who can do this: It’s “Good Writer.” There’s a similar term for the former kind, as well.
As FEEDING GROUND opens, Blane Gentle-King is in jail. He’s the anything-but-gentle king of his turf, running drugs and prostitutes, and generally smacking down anyone who gets in his way. His lieutenant is Charlie Nash, and the two men have been best pals all their lives. Something has gone terribly wrong in London, and when Charlie comes to the lock-up to spring his mate, it’s all too easy. The two men leave the rest of the inmates behind, despite the fact that none of the prisoners have been fed in more than 24 hours. Blane and Charlie are not nice lads.
We find out quickly that mutant or alien spiders — we never learn which, but that may have been covered in the previous novel — have taken over the city. They’ve reduced life to its core. If they see you, they eat you. They may drag you off first to store you for later, but you’re as good as munched already.
Most sane people just want to flee the city in hopes of escaping the monsters.
Blane, not too sane to begin with and rapidly losing what sense he has, turns into a cross between Caligula and Dennis Hopper in LAND OF THE DEAD. He plans to hole up in a towered fortress. When he discovers that one strain of spiders — Squealers — sprang from the body of his former girlfriend and are drug-addicted, he learns to control them by giving or withholding cocaine.
A second group of survivors is comprised of schoolboys and their teacher, who were in London on a field trip. They are your regular kids, not tough guys with drugs and guns. A third team is all neighborhood guys who need to avoid running into Blane. One of them peached on the local gangsta and sent him to jail. Now it’s a vengeance thing.
The story will bring all three groups closer together, with some changing allegiances, until everyone meets up in an explosive finale.
Pinborough is at her best with the average kids learning to, in the words of Tallahassee in ZOMBIELAND, nut up or shut up. The bad boys come across a little too much like movie clichés, but the others are real people who have to struggle with survivor’s guilt and pessimism, because when the world turns to shit, being fearful and selfish is what keeps you alive. A darkness settles in that is, like Raymond Chandler’s mean streets, dark with something more than night.
“A solitary handbag sat discarded in the middle of the floor … as if its owner had just dropped it and walked away. Maybe she had. He’d seen the state of half the world’s population just before they changed. Fat and stupid and mean summed it up. Whoever had owned that bag had started disappearing long before she died.”
Who would have thought that the end of civilization as we know it would be such a downer?
So this isn’t just another disposable horror story, read today and traded in at the used bookstore tomorrow. It’s a real novel, with characters you care about and grieve for if they come to a bad end. I like it and I definitely won’t skim over Pinborough’s name in the future. —Doug Bentin
OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF THIS AUTHOR:
• THE TAKEN by Sarah Pinborough
• TOWER HILL by Sarah Pinborough
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I was disappointed to find out Feeding Ground was a sequel (after I bought it). Oh well. I don’t mind going back to the store and picking up a copy of Breeding Ground. And I look forward to all the subsequent books: Bleeding Ground, Pleading Ground, Speeding Ground and, my favorite, Misleading Ground.