Customer Reviews

Crawlers

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

:Wraps wings protectively around self and shivers:
Dude, I grew up reading horror novels and adored horror flicks. It's been well over 15 years since something has had the power to goose my bumps. John Shirley's Crawlers is it. Fifty pages into the book and it scared me so bad I had to walk away and call a friend, so what if it was 3 am? At least my friend is still human... or so I pray. Our story begins in a super secret (aren't they all?) government lab where all that is good and wholesome has gone awry. Crawlers have taken over the lab and are harvesting the remaining living scientists for *scrap* body parts. Their goal is complete assimilation. Yup, the Borg on crack,

True to form the government annihilates the lab in an effort to cover up the failed experiment. Unfortunately for the small Californian town of Quiebra, things suddenly don't seem quite so normal. It appears the mighty establishment didn't do to good of a job. People are acting oddly and in some cases disappearing. The adults of the town are being assimilated one by one and it's up to the children of the town and a few rag-tag straggler adults to discover what is going on in time to stop the travesty that is brewing. Even if they do succeed the authorities don't plan to leave any survivors. All hail civilization!

Through out the entire novel the message most prevalent is to think for yourself. Don't let anyone, most especially those in charge, think for you. All else leads to the unthinkable.

Crawlers is an excellent novel. Despite the fact that it scared me away for at least an hour I couldn't stay away. This to me means John Shirley is a force to be reckoned with. :leaves behind a Faery Queen rating before jumping into bed and hiding under the covers:

If Mr. Shirley had cut out about one-third of the words, it might have been a reasonable read. The action would have been sustained. Ngaio Marsh, Charles Dickens used lots of words; but then Mr. Shirley is not in their class.

Once you realize what is happening, the author repeats and repeats the action in different situations. But it's not suspense from here on out, it's just repetition. He makes a good point about technology, but it's necessary to wade through too many useless words to discover the point.

In many a story - whether written, filmed, sung or otherwise - there comes a moment when the relevance of the story's title is revealed. It is often a thrilling, unexpected moment when that piece of the puzzle falls into place. In this 1st edition of John Shirley's CRAWLERS that moment occurs in the 1st sentence of the 4th paragraph on page 51. Lying in bed beside my fever-sick wife in our darkened Chicago loft I read that line & I shivered.

I don't read the backs of books b4 I read the books. The only thing I knew about CRAWLERS going-in was that it was about nanotechnology run amok. It wasn't until area - I mean page 51 that I realized and accepted that yes, this is a horror story. A John Shirley horror story. And I was scared.

CRAWLERS uses the Invasion of the Body Snatchers mold to examine issues of nature vs technology, young vs old, chaos vs order, paranoia vs they're-really-after-you, & kinship vs survival.

The nano-machines are countless microscopic Frankensteins set loose in suburban San Francisco through blunders by the U.S. government. The "breakouts" attempt to assimilate every animal & person in the town of Quiebra in order to amass a force with which to build & deploy an instrument of global dissemination.

But first they must learn. And experiment. They enhance living bodies with mechanical & electronic parts. They disassemble & reassemble bodies, trying combinations of parts & species, seeking efficiency & strength of form, all the while communicating with a central "brain" through which all successes & failures are processed, & from which directives are taken.

One scheme of efficiency is to first take over the bodies & minds of people pre-disposed to being easily influenced. Most of those people are the adults in town. It is explained that the pre-disposition is not genetic or biological at all but a mind-set... This suggests that the volatility of the youthful mind has a strength beyond the wisdom (or apathy?) of maturity. The adults who don't easily succumb are inquisitive, creative, & young at heart - or forewarned of the danger. The fate of life on Earth finally rests in the hands of half a dozen adults & a couple hundred children & teens.

The promises of order, vitality, comfort & longevity through assimilation by the breakouts is shunned. Instinctively the pain & conflict of life-as-we-know-it is chosen over world peace. War, decay, death, & differences of opinion all contribute to define humanity, not to destroy it.

And, it's funny, that in John Shirley's CRAWLERS, inexplicably, cats, of all the animals out there, also hold these notions as true.

CRAWLERS is John Shirley's 1st true sci-fi/horror hybrid novel. Yes, it scared me because - like all good "hard" sci-fi - this could happen. And I'd hope that I would be one of the adults that would resist it. I hope I never become a crawler...

I read a *ton* of horror books, from pulp to classic, and most are a quick good read and soon forgotten. This book, however, got inside me and left me musing for days. The story is classic pulp horror: Some type of alien takes over mankind and converts us into their tools. In Shirley's story, these aliens are actually nanobots that were originally created by man in a secure environment (space) to help us medically by speeding up tissue reparation. The bots were designed to reproduce and work independently in cell renewal. And, of course, they got out of control, wound up on earth, and began taking over a small town until, a la John Saul, the kids save the day.

But there is an underlying theme throughout the book that far transcends the simple scary story. Shirley states it clearly towards the end of the book when he says that "Water is good for you, but too much can kill you. How do we know when we've had too much technology?" This idea is presented over and over again: when the kids are walking through their neighborhood at night and can see in their neighbors' windows and everyone is watching TV... When the story is told of people at a museum with video cameras viewing art through a lens... When over and over the characters are presented in front of their TV's, computers, phones - eerily just like us.

One of the best parts of the whole book is a simple dinner scene with a family talking about the kids' day at school: "Bert thought, They're so caught up in technology. Computers, MP3s, CD burners, downloading whole movies, laptops, augmenting their own videogame platforms with chips ordered on-line, doing most of their homework research on-line, spending hours in chat rooms and instant messaging - he'd heard kids talk about all that and more. He wanted to quote Thoreau. 'We are conscious of an animal in us, which awakens in proportion as our higher nature slumbers. It is reptile and sensual, and perhaps cannot be wholly expelled.' He wanted to ask them when they'd last looked beyond the digital landscape; when they'd really opened up to the sky and the sea and the forests, and to one another - and ask if it were possible that their obsession with the technology of distraction was deafening them to the message of God's creation. But Bert kept quiet. He kept his mouth shut because he knew he'd just come off as pompous, and because teenagers justly despised self-righteous lecturers. Too, teenagers knew that if they were addicted to all these things, it was because they'd been conditioned to them by adults who were just as bad; who reduced them to a consumer demographic. So Bert just smiled and nodded and said they did well to hone their skills."

This is my first John Shirley book and I agree with other reviewers who feel it's comparable to some of King's and Koontz's earlier works. I admit that the book held my interest and I was impressed with Shirley's narrative flow. Seems there might have been too many characters to focus on, so there tended to be some redundant and superfluous scenes. Shirley etches his characters fairly well, and there are no "safe" characters in this one (which is also reminiscent of John Saul and King).
CRAWLERS is basically a "Body Snatchers" with a cruel metallic twist. These nanotechnological horrors are using human bodies to regenerate into killing machines and threaten to take over the world. The imagery Shirley conveys in these transmutations is spellbinding, and would work very well cinematically. There are some tightly suspenseful scenes, and some good dialogue between the teens and their adult counterparts.
A good novel, nothing highly original, but worth a read.

CRAWLERS is certainly more conventional than what Shirley's fans are used to, echoing familiar horror hits like Koontz' MIDNIGHT and King's TOMMYKNOCKERS, yet CRAWLERS has its own thing shaking, and I for one really enjoyed it.

The All of Us and its spawn are certainly disturbing ("Certainly!") and Shirley culls totally believable and likeable young characters from his knowledge of modern teen culture; I actually had to wake myself up early and finish the book because I was getting too worried about what was going to happen to them.

Plus, CRAWLERS has enough off-the-hook mayhem going on, as things start getting out of hand, to take loyal readers back to wild early Shirley books like IN DARKNESS WAITING (imagine a cyperpunk version of that one, and you've pretty much got the picture).

When I saw John Shirley released "Crawlers," a new horror novel, I rushed out to get a copy. I had the wonderful experience of reading "Wetbones" and "Black Butterflies" a couple of years ago, so I figured I couldn't go wrong with this book. Remember the themes of addiction in "Wetbones"? Remember the over the top gore in that book? Remember the Lovecraftian menace that haunted the pages of that immensely scary and enjoyable novel? It's sad to say, but "Crawlers" is not Lovecraftian. It doesn't deal with a personal theme like addiction. It is not scary. And it doesn't have anywhere near the levels of imaginative gore Shirley lovingly sprinkled across the pages of "Wetbones." Still, that's perfectly acceptable. Not all authors wish to stick to tried and true formulas. I don't think I would if I ever decided to write books and short stories. While "Crawlers" doesn't employ the awesome components that made up "Wetbones," it is still an entertaining novel in its own right.

Quiebra, California is a small town situated in the San Francisco Bay Area, a town with low rents and a diverse population that enjoys living near a large metropolis but without the noise and high crime rates. That's not to say there aren't problems in the town, that there aren't kids giving their parents and the local police fits by raising trouble on the weekends. Still, most of the people in town are well behaved, with the only problems occurring when the local teens race cars and party on occasion. What no one knows is that the peaceful atmosphere of Quiebra is about to change forever after a mysterious satellite crashes on the outskirts of town. A local salvage diver by the name of Nick Leverton, figuring on getting a big paycheck from the government, turns up at the site and tricks the soldiers there into letting him bring up the wreckage. With his son Cal helping him, Nick indeed finds a satellite in the water. What happens next, as he attempts to drag it up, guarantees that the town of Quiebra will never, ever, be the same again. The problems start in the Leverton household, with Nick, his wife, his daughter Adair, and his son Cal. Soon, Adair's boyfriend Waylon, a conspiracy nut with a knack for electronics, enters the picture, as does Adair's Aunt Lacey, a local college professor, a federal agent named Stanner, and about a dozen other characters both major and minor. A nightmare is coming, one that involves a lot more than a harmless satellite sitting on the bottom of a bay.

It turns out that the government, specifically an ultra-secret Pentagon research lab called The Facility, has been mucking around with a dangerous new high tech weapon system. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the federal government wants to insure that they have a leg up on any potential foes. It's a noble goal, and probably a necessary one, but new weapon systems sometimes have the irritating tendency to not do what the creators want. That's exactly what happened in this instance, as evidenced in the first chapter when the experiment got out of control at an isolated lab, requiring a rather violent response from the military to keep the whole thing from spreading into the larger population. Then someone high up got a bright idea: why not launch the whole mess into space, where the experiment can continue away from human population centers? Just get NASA to build a big enough box, reason the military brass, and the United States can still have their new weapon floating around the heavens. Predictably, what goes up must inevitably come down, and when it does the whole world faces annihilation. Why? Because this weapon system is highly intelligent, works diligently on its own with little supervision from humans, and can replicate itself in a short period of time. I won't spoil the book by chattering about specifics, but it's called nanotechnology and it's a nasty bugger that won't take no for an answer. Suffice it say that the whole town rapidly turns into a population of human machines that cause endless mayhem.

"Crawlers" works despite its derivative qualities. The book's strongest elements are the characters. Shirley spends an enormous amount of time fleshing these figures out, placing special emphasis on the teenage residents of Quiebra. It seems the author spent some time researching the lingo used by today's muddled youth, which he then put to good effect in the novel. At first, the constant uses of "like" and "tight," along with other slang terms particular to America's youth, grated on my nerves. It grows on you after awhile, as do the young characters. Even Waylon, a morose kid with blue hair and an attitude problem, assumes a likeable dimension as the story progresses. The adults receive less attention from Shirley with the exception of Stanner, the Air Force operative who undergoes a crisis of conscience about the unfolding horrors in Quiebra.

A central problem with "Crawlers," aside from a lack of over the top gore I expected from this author, was the conclusion. Readers of horror novels, or at least this reader, sort of anticipate an ending charged with frenetic activity. In short, we look for something over the top to wrap up a long story. Regrettably, Shirley cops out with an ending that is pat and over too quickly. The denouement of "Crawlers" doesn't approach the banality of a Bentley Little finale, but it does leave a lot to be desired. If I had to recommend a John Shirley book at this point, I would probably point a reader to "Wetbones" rather than "Crawlers." The novel isn't an original work, but it is an entertaining one nonetheless. Give it a shot.

Mr. Shirley does know how to tell a story and he manages to maintain suspense through out, but I found his characters to be somewhat cookie cutter (and too many of them, I couldn't keep easy track) although he certainly has a good ear for dialogue.

Crawlers has an interesting enough plot, but it is executed over too many pages. It starts with a boom and we barely hear an echo for a hundred pages after. Four hundred pages later, I found myself wondering when it was going to end.

I will read Mr. Shirley's other works but for the moment, I find myself not trusting his work completely.

THIS WAS A GREAT BOOK TO READ. SLOW TO START WHERE YOU THINK OF JUST GIVING UP. DON'T! THE BOOK GETS MUCH BETTER. IT;S A GREAT BOOK AND YOU THINK HOW DOES SOMEONE THINK THIS STUFF UP? WHAT AN IMAGANATION!

This novel was a fun little read. For me, it was the first novel I have come across that was a mix of hard science fiction/horror with a strong flavor of cyberpunk thrown in. Now granted, reading this novel now, 4 years after it came out, it seems a little dated, but mostly holds up well. Yes, there are more than a few characters, wow, the author expects you to keep track, boo hoo.

As for the King/Koontz comments, I just don't get the King comments. Granted, a lot of the novel involves the characters and their lives, but that is it as most I can see about King. Shirley, as with most of his other works, at times really throws the novel into gear with the suspense, and the violence, 2 things I always love. Add to that, he works them into the story quite well, so on the whole, the novel works quite well.

If you enjoy science fiction, or horror, you will get a big kick from this work.