Valley of Spiders [collection]

This book is a collection of 13 short stories which have largely been forgotten and probably with good reason. Most are around 15 pages long.

Now there is a mixture of tales from flesh eating creatures and plants,voodoo type practices and ghosts to name a few which are ideas which have gone on to grace various novels. The title story itself is flesh eating spiders. Three men are in pursuit of a runaway woman and her companions when they come across a valley with a strange mist within it. That mist turns out to be spiders travelling on the wind on spores (which really does happen in nature) attacking and eating that they alight on. Unfortunately it is not overly obvious why the woman ran away or just why the men and in particular the show more leader is so keen to catch them. Then all the men turn out to be something of cowards with the leader killing one of his companions which makes none of the characters particularily likeable.

Spiders are often seen as sinister so it is an easy sell to make the flesh crawl a little and many of the tales are pretty creepy but for me they lacked any real depth and the endings were on the whole fairly predictable to really stick in the memory for very long.

For the record my favourite story was probably 'The Inexperienced Ghost' which made me smirk but this book is really only for H.G.Wells most ardent fans. show less