I really enjoyed this novel and pleased to see it has a sequel or is the beginning of a series. My only complaint is that it took so long to get to the creatures featured on the cover. The beginning started as sort of an info dump. Still highly recommended as a fun read.

DNF @ 29%

“quelling the urge to write B+ on her spine in lipstick.” I’m sorry. What???

I was interested in this book because of the arachnosaurs! I thought this would be a lot of fun. However, I have zero interest in getting to know this misogynist sidekick loser.

Thank you to NetGalley and Lyrical Undergound, an imprint of Kensington Books, for the opportunity to read this book.

To be perfectly honest, I requested this book based solely on the front cover and the title, because why wouldn't I?! Giant prehistoric spiders, yes please!
Unfortunately this book doesn't quite live up to it the awesome title and cover. The writing is clunky and I honestly couldn't differentiate between the vast of the characters as they all had the same personality and similar descriptions, and the chauvinistic and misogynistic aspect to the entire book was, quite frankly, fucking appalling. I almost abandoned it about a third of the way through.
For a book that I was hoping would be the literary equivalent of a B-Movie (one of my favourite genres), there really wasn't enough spider action and far too much focus on the awful characters. The spider action doesn't really start until after the half way point, and by that point I wanted everyone to die.
Far too much focus on military movements, terribly written characters (seriously, they're all knobs), the most unerotic sex scene I've read, and not enough spidey action.
I would watch this as a film (and I suspect it would be a poor film, not like the fantastic Lavalantula - yes, that is a film), but the book has fell completely flat for me.

2 Stars

I am a sucker for ancient evils or monsters from the past. Even modern monsters are more than enough for me to pick up a book. When I saw Arachosaur by Richard Jeffries, I was hooked by the title alone. I knew nothing about what to expect in the novel but was eager to give it a read and be surprised by the story that lay within.

Corporal Josiah Key never expected to be in charge and did not really know if he was ready to lead. When his commanding officers were killed, he found himself thrust into the leadership role. Leading the Marine Raiders would have been hard enough if they only had to face the human adversaries in the small Yemen town. Unfortunately for the team, there is something much worse in store for them. Josiah and the rest of the 3rd Battalion are soon to learn that there is an ancient evil lying beneath the sand of this small desert town and this evil is looking to water the ground with blood.

The creatures that lie beneath the sands are an ancient race of spiders. The giant spiders had been dormant for centuries after being the dominant predators in the prehistoric world. Now they have been awakened by the actions of the terrorists rocking their resting place and they are looking for blood. The Arachosaurs were loose in the world again and were poised to reclaim the top spot on the food chain once more.

A book that features spiders cannot be a bad thing. There is just something about spiders that makes it easy for them to work their way into our nightmares even if we are not afraid of the real thing. The spiders in this book were cool and the story shined when they were present. The problem is that they are not in the story enough. The story seemed to be a monster story of prehistoric spiders running amok on the Earth but was in fact more of a military thriller than anything. The war between the humans in the Middle East took center stage through most of the book with the spiders relegated to the background. This was unexpected but not necessarily a bad thing as I enjoy a good military thriller as well. It was a surprising turn of events to find a military thriller in what I thought would be a monster novel but I was game and continued reading.

The problem is that the military thriller aspect of the novel never fully develops through the course of the story. The characters in the story were one-dimensional and too American-centric to allow me to really begin to care about them. There was an anti-Middle East bias that seemed to fill the pages in the novel and kept me at arms length for the action. The action, also, seemed to be too scripted to seem real and this also presented a blockade for fully enjoying the story. Overall, there was some entertaining passages in the story that provided some thought-free diversion but it never really came together. The spiders are almost non-present and the thiller mostly lacked thrills leaving the novel to fall flat. Some readers may enjoy the novel but it was just not for me.

I would like to thank Kensington Books and NetGalley for this review copy. Arachnosaur is available now.

Where are all the spiders? It seems they all got used up on the book cover instead of appearing in the actual story.

I have a weakness for monster stories. They are a guilty pleasure of mine. For example, I went (by myself) to see Godzilla in the theatre. Come on, giant monsters stomping cities? Definitely a fun couple of hours, despite the plot holes, because I really like the characters.

So, when I saw Arachnosaur on NetGalley, I thought that would be right up my alley. Unfortunately, some guilty pleasures turn out not to be pleasures, and this was one of those.

Basically, two soldiers are the only survivors in an attempt to take out a terrorist group in the middle east. They are recruited to figure out how the terrorist group became so dangerous, especially since the senior survivor swears he saw another soldier blow up from the inside out.

The answer, of course, is giant primordial spiders found by the terrorists, who are trying to turn the effects of the spider webs (that's what makes people go boom) into a weapon that they apparently want to sell for reasons never stated.

Along the way, the two soldiers pick up a pilot named 'Speedy' Gonzales, a doctor who is both female and Arab (and can whip up a serum that does something pretty ridiculous to save the lead at the end), a prostitute who name keeps changing from Lailani to Leilani and back (sloppy editing there). There's also a captain who is a good guy but turns into an antagonist later, and a retired general who recruits them in the end for a 'we fight the monsters no one believes in' type organization. (preview chapters from the sequel appear at the end of the book)

I could have taken the plot falling apart and the ridiculous science at the end if the characters were likeable, but unfortunately, Daniels made me want to throw my ereader at a wall. He's crude and sex-obsessed, likes to sleep with lots of prostitutes around the world (not sure why he isn't in palliative care from all the STIs he must have), and his idea of good sex is being a jackhammer (seriously, no foreplay at all?). He also uses drugged condoms to take out a woman twice in the books (seriously?).

Then there's the prostitute whose name keeps changing spelling. Supposedly, she finds Daniels' confidence appealing, and his jackhammer imitation to be good. When the whorehouse is attacked (for no apparent reason), she jumps on his back, and he just runs around with her, and when confronting attackers without a weapon of his own, he plucks her off his back and throws her at the attacker like an angry cat. Sigh. And after that, she comes with them and helps? Oh yeah, and it turns out that one of her jobs is going to Abu Dhabi and working as a dominatrix. I kid you not.

Add all of this to soldiers in the middle east who have never heard of The Empty Quarter (hell, even *I* know what that is, at least in general).

Finally, the climactic scene had me going 'ew', and not in a good way.

All in all, I really can't recommend this book to just about anybody. And yet, the preview chapters for the next book in the series kind of appealed. But only if there's nothing better to read at the time.

This sounded like such a fun read, and all I was really looking for was b-grade schlock, but it was still a disappointment.

The characters all fell flat, with nothing to distinguish them, to the point where I just stopped trying to match names to personalities and just assumed they were all soldier clones. The writing itself was uneven, sloppy and lazy in places, but strong enough in others to trick me into continuing with the read.

My two biggest issues, though, were the locker room sexuality and the lack of spiders.

Let's start with the sexuality. Take, for example, Second Lieutenant Barbara Strenkofski, who is described as "five-seven, a hundred and twenty pounds; thirty-six, twenty-five, thirty-six," and whose "one-inch black pumps looked tailored to her with a laser measuring device." Not offensive, but embarrassingly juvenile.

Take, also, Private Terri Nichols, who "could have been anything: a ballerina, a gymnast, a nurse, a cheerleader" (reach high for those career goal, ladies!), but who chose to be a marine. Okay, that's a little more offensive, but where it gets really offensive is with the prolonged musing on hookers in Chapter 11 (which is where I stopped reading and started skimming).

In the same way every good soldier was ready to fight 24/7, a streetwalker was always sexually available, always on the make, always willing.

And later in that same chapter.

“How do you know if a hooker is lying? Her eyes are open.”

At least our hero is capable of "quelling the urge to write B+ on her spine in lipstick." Such admirable chivalry . . . at least, that is, until he throws her at a terrorist like "a screeching, wet, terrified cat." It all makes for cliched character building from Richard Jeffries, with men who are cartoon stereotypes of the worst sort, and hardly heroes.

Now, to get back to the spiders, they get a great opening (prehistoric) scene where they are glimpsed, but never truly seen, and a fantastic moment in a cave with the marine who could have been a cheerleader, but after that we wait until about 42% of the way through the book to see them again. Even they, they don't really do much, and certainly don't factor into the kind of action-packed madness you'd expect from a book called Arachnosaur.

Okay, so when I saw this book on Netgalley, I was super excited because giant man-eating spiders. I love me some giant man-eating spiders. I even engaged in some light-hearted teasing with the publisher, because I was so pumped to get my hands on this book. I just knew it was going to be awesome and I was going to love it!

You know what I don't love? Spending 75 percent of the book wondering where the pedipalps my giant man-eating spiders are!

Unfortunately, that's only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to things I don't like about Arachnosaur.


This was, to put it bluntly, the most annoying, ill-written piece of Prejudiced Male Ego Stroking that I have ever read.

It's fairly hard to offend me when I'm reading a book. I mean, yeah, I'll yell at people for using weak writing props, but I rarely actually get offended. I'm able to put aside a lot in my search for an entertaining story. So, you know, I shrugged off lines like the below simply because buttholes are buttholes, and buttholes exist even in the written word.

"Oh, the things I do for my country, he thought, quelling the urge to write B+ on her spine in lipstick."

(This was after the guy had just got done getting his rocks off with a prostitute.)

This was pretty par-for-course for the main character's partner. I figure the author wrote him as a deliberate foil to Key's Captain America type goodness. Keeping that in mind meant that I was actually able to make it to about the 60 percent point before I had had enough.

This was the 'beauty' that did me in.

"Wouldn't be prudent at this late date to have a migrant worker swim behind them with an ever-ready machete."

I mean, yeah, that line is offensive, but it's not even necessarily that that line was that bad as there had been so much mysogony, racism, and general bigotry pumped into Arachnosaur that the book seemed less like an exercise in fun monster-killing fiction and more like an escape valve for every rude, crude, and completely unacceptable thought that dominates white male culture right now because "Its just a story".

Now, putting aside the sheer "Ha-hah look at my funnies that are not funny at all" portion of things, it's also just awkwardly written! There were several paragraphs I had to re-read just because they were written so badly. There was more than one occasion where I was wondering if I just missed something or if it really just didn't make sense / was a plot hole. I'm going to have to forgive a lot of of it, because I was reading an ARC and I have to assume that at least half of it was cleared up in the final copy. But it did not make Arachnosaur a pleasant, easy read.

And then...there was the soiled va-jay-jay remark. They are going to where the spiders are, and (parsed down to its bare bits so I don't provide spoilers), the line is:
"[name redacted] used the barrel of the SAW as a syringe directly in the center of the soiled va-jay-jay, then followed it."

Why? Just WHY?

But! Let us end on a positive note! Because there were a few.

Arachnosaur was fast-paced. There was lots of explosions (those always make me happy). There were a few lines in it that genuinely had me snickering (including an homage to Starship Troopers near the end). It's a rocky start for the author, I've made that clear, but hopefully with time, he will refine his ideas and his writing until it transforms into what it has the possibility to be.

When Corporal Joe Key’s Marine battalion is all but wiped out in Yemen, he is enlisted by an elite unit to go back and find out what happened. What he discovers is only the tip of an iceberg that spans millennia.

Prefacing this review by saying that I saw the giant spiders and gaudy green title on the cover of Arachnosaur and knew I had to read this book. I love b-grade natural horror films so I was hoping for was the literary equivalent of Arachnoquake or Dinoshark. Something fun and silly involving giant man-eating beasties.

Instead, I found a military thriller that did feature giant, prehistoric spiders but nowhere near as prolifically as one would hope and with the real villains being the humans who were weaponising the spiders. The story itself was quite convoluted and felt like it went on for far too long.

The main protagonists in Arachnosaur were utterly unlikeable. The two male leads’ personalities bounce around inconsistently without clear reason. None of the heroes give you any reason to be on their side. And I couldn’t bring myself to be on Team Arachnid, so I just didn’t care one way or another.

The main hero’s sidekick has no redeeming qualities and to say he is a pig towards women would be a huge understatement. In one scene, a woman is holding onto his back as they flee an attack and he throws her by her hair and arm towards an attacker. This is after having sex with her, drugging her and considering writing “B+” on her back in lipstick while she is unconscious.

I’m all for some good, macho action stories filled with testosterone, explosions and one-liners, but Arachnosaur takes macho a bit too close to misogyny for comfort. Flawed characters can be awesome characters but the heroes in Arachnosaur are irredeemable and the villains are forgettable.

Overall, I didn’t find Arachnosaur to be an enjoyable read and will likely not continue with the next book in the series.

Merry effing Christmas

So I decided to read this book on Christmas because I really love monster books. Mistake.

This ended up being a military "thriller" with a few giant spiders thrown in. Out of 300+ pages, I'll bet less than 10% of them had anything about the title spiders on them. I could be wrong but I don't think so.

Oh, and misogyny...this book takes place in the Middle East including Yemen and Dubai - not areas known for female enlightenment. But a good portion of the ill treatment of women in this book comes from a U.S. Marine - who is never called on it.

I wanted much more of the arachnosaurs - descriptions, habits, action, okay, yes, blood and guts. Instead I got page after page of dysfunctional Marines, out of the blue coincidences, unexplained pseudoscience (I don't have to have everything make sense but some things should).

So, all in all, a disappointing story. And it sounds like this is the first in a series. Reminder to self: don't read.

I did like the concept of the Cerberus unit. I just didn't like how most of the details of it were presented. That's what got this a two star rating rather than a one.

I received this book from Kensington Books through Net Galley in the hopes that I would read the book and leave an unbiased review.

Arachnosaur by Richard Jeffries, was received direct from the publisher. Monster mashups, as seen on some cable television channels, are always entertaining and a person cannot go wrong watching them, as long as you ignore cheap special effects.. This is the first time, in many years, that I have read of a mixed creature, as they prefer to be called, in book form. Further, the special effects were as high budget as my brain could make them. The authors writing flows along and rarely, if ever, bogs down in inane dialogue as action and horror is what the book is about and delivers. If you or someone you know needs to read a quick horror book in that week between the holidays, this is one you should grab up and devour.

5 Stars

I received an advance copy of this book from the publisher through Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

I confess…I was there for the spiders. I thoroughly enjoyed Sarah Pinborough’s spider saga (Breeding Ground and Feeding Ground) and am also following the more recent current series by Ezekiel Boone (The Hatching and Skitter, with the third in the series coming out soon). I even watch cheezy “only seen on Netflix” spider monster romps and with enough beer even like those. I was supposed to like this one.

But I didn’t.

The spiders were pretty cool but I just couldn’t stand the rest of the characters. It felt more like a military campaign book than a creature feature. I wanted either regular folks or maybe scientists (….we can’t kill them! We must preserve them for science! CHOMP!) but these misogynistic testosterone overdriven robots (whether good guys or terrorists) made me sick eventually. I like Jack Reacher as much as the next guy but these characters were completely unrealistic beyond the point where it was even unintentionally funny. I wanted them all to get wiped out. As awful as they were, the spiders were the most interesting and appealing yet the relentless battle scenes between the military and the terrorists as well as the constant info-dumps about life in the middle east in the age of ISIS just wore me out.

As usual, mileage may vary and different tastes may enjoy this novel. I didn’t.

37% in and I am calling it quits. There's just too much puerile machismo chauvinism for me after the last couple chapters involved Daniels, one of the alpha-male leads, having sex with a hooker, who he then drugged and debated writing a score of B+ on her back in lipstick, before randomly attacking a whole bunch of other hookers just because. A short time later, she's woken up in the middle of a terrorist attack, prompting Daniels to use her as a weapon by throwing her at a terrorist like “a screeching, wet, terrified cat.” Oh, and then he notices that palm trees look a lot like a hairy man's erection. Jesus Christ, this fucking book.

The writing is all over the place, with nary a connective thread linking scenes. Action scenes happen in spite of any logical necessity, kind of like a lesser Michael Bay movie. There's lot of frenetic mayhem for no real reason, with the characters all randomly finding themselves thrust into one violent scenario after another just to satisfy Richard Jeffries need to write an action scene with clockwork regularity. It's all so coincidental as to be laughable. In one instance, Key goes to recruit a college professor, who has a meeting with a student. A chapter later, the student ends up being a suicide bomber intent on killing Key, even though there's no reason at all for this student to have expected Key to have arrived when he did. Ditto an attack on a nightclub where Daniels goes to bang and beat on prostitutes. It all just happens just because. There's a lot of mental wrangling necessary to create a justifiable off-page scenario for why these things are happening, and even that involves creating an ISIS uber-supervillian with NSA-level surveillance and logistics, with a dash of high-octane conspiracy theorizing to make it all work. And frankly, that feels like way too much fucking effort, and certainly more than Jeffries has put in here.

I've also had to stop a few times to make sure I'm reading the right book, because Arachnosaur is supposed to be about giant pre-historic spiders mauling everybody in sight. 37% in there's not been a single real spider attack. OK, there was a prologue set way back when in the prehistoric era, which seems even more superfluous a third of the way into the book then it did even at the very beginning. Oh, and there was something in the shadows in chapter two. Whoopie. Instead, the main focus has been on some kind of bioweapon making people explode. That might have been cool if the writing and plotting weren't so freaking bad, and if this book weren't being marketed as a massive arachnid horror title. Seriously, if you're writing spider horror, put some fucking spiders in your fucking book! Jesus Christ, this book.

A some what different take on us vs monsters, and who would come out on top, while I have read other books that kind of deal with a similar situation , it's still a little bit different , and while I did like it and enjoy it ,I just didn't love it which is why it just gets 4 stars from me. With that said I would like to think NetGalley for giving me the opportunity to read it and see what it was about in a change for my honest opinion

2 stars

I agree with another reviewer in that this book is not what I expected. I wanted a novel set not in a foreign country, but in a city. There was too much military and not enough frightened citizens running around trying to survive.

I want to thank NetGalley and Lyrical Underground for forwarding to me a copy of this book to read.

Giant prehistoric spiders are discovered in a long-sealed cave, and terrorists think they're the greatest weapon ever. American Marines find themselves on a terrestrial bug hunt for both spiders and terrorists, trying to avert the disaster that would be caused if these things went global.

It's great military fiction as well as great science fiction, and those who like the Monster Hunter International books will dig this. I like it, but I need to go to the store now and buy a case of Raid.

Review: ARACHNOSAUR by Richard Jeffries

I totally loved this suspenseful, adventure-rich, horror-thriller, and this is fantastic praise from a lifelong Arachnophobe! This novel has everything for the discerning reader seeking a heart-pounding ploy, implacable horror, lots of scares, and well-delineated character!

Lest you expect yet another terrorism battled by sterling and stalwart Americans, 2-dimensional good-guys vs. Evil, please do think again! This story has Nature vs. Humanity, Apocalypse potential, death, Gore, good guys, really evil guys--and fully-fleshed characters I really hope return {well, not the bad guys}. The author is a writer of excellence, and he knows his stuff. I so hope ARACHNOSAUR will be the first of many more novels.