Written by Ty Greenwood
Published by HellBound Books
Book review by Hunter Bush
I hate spiders, gang. I don't have any specific genesis moment for this aversion. I'm fairly sure it started before I ever saw Arachnophobia (1990) but that... didn't help. As I've grown I've gotten used to them somewhat - and as a taller person I'm frequently the one tasked to capture them - but I've also learned quite a lot about them. Perhaps it's the same impulse that draws me to horror as a genre, that innate desire to approach what scares me, or maybe it's as simple as a desire to know my enemy? Regardless, I've read a lot about spiders. For instance, did you know that Philadelphia, where I live, is the only place you can find the Pennsylvania purseweb spider? To be fair, this information also falls into the category of "Interesting Philadelphia Trivia" which is another big one for me, but my point remains: I know from spiders. And one thing I can tell you is - spiders do not blink.
We'll get there, but let me set the stage a little. Ty Greenwood's debut novel Mother Legs, revolves around several residents of the dead-end Canadian town of Hope, British Columbia. People go missing around Hope, that's just kinda the way things are. It could be the town's drug epidemic, or it could be the work of an enormous, telepathic spider hiding in the woods, kidnapping unsuspecting townsfolk (and hikers) and either turning them into puppets for its playhouse fantasy life or mutating them into cannibalistic multi-limbed monstrosities. When put-upon teenager Blake's mother goes missing (again), leaving him responsible for his young sister Sarah (again) he first thinks she's just on a bender (again) until he bumps into pothead park ranger Hal who's looking for a missing co-worker. In the woods just outside of town they find a mass grave of sorts, with numerous corpses hanging in the trees. Their investigation puts them on the trail of impossible creature and on the radar of a governmental conspiracy to keep its actions quiet.
All these pieces - the characters, setting and world building - are a bit of a mixed bag for me. On one hand, using Hope's drug crisis to hide the Spider's body count is extremely good as is the idea that something about the spider's bite chemically lobotomizes its victims (à la Jeffrey Dahmer), but Greenwood starts to push the boundaries of what makes any kind of real sense in some very unsatisfying ways.
Sometime around halfway through Mother Legs my reading took on a side-quest: I wanted to see if there would be any kind of real explanation for the Spider. I wanted to know the What and How of her. Up to that point I had been bopping along at a decent pace, reading about Hal and his reporter cousin Bobbi, about the dutiful and competent Dr. Nand when some paragraph or other mentioned the spider blinking its eyes. Caught up as I was in whatever was specifically happening in that moment, I ignored it, but by the second and third mention of this occular impossibility, the little voice in my head piped up: "Spiders do not blink".
Granted, the spider in question is not average. It is long-lived, large enough to potentially bite a human head off and telepathic, for starters. We will come to find out that it was one of many subjects of some unspecified scientific experiment but ...that's about all the explanation you get. Frustratingly, when a character who would actually know does explain the spider's origin, this explanation isn't actually given to us, just described by another character: "Dr. Nand had tuned him out. While his explanations of the scientific phenomena that had lead to a giant, telepathic, zombie-creating spider were fascinating, they were quite distracting."
If Mother Legs were expressly a comedy, that might actually be hilarious. But it isn't. I honestly said "Fuck you" out loud when I read that. I can only speculate at the intent but in execution it just feels cheap; a quick patch to cover shoddy bunk science. I mentioned the spider's longevity, size & telepathy earlier, all of which work for me because they make an inherent kind of sense; they are just exaggerated aspects of any spider. To that point, the spider venom semi-lobotomies also make a kind of sense, but the spider blinking just makes no sense without some further explanation. As arachnids, spiders don't have eyelids or anything like the nictitating membrane that many animal species have so they just do not blink.
I know this may seem like an oddly nitpicky detail to get hung up on but it's weirdly important. By not feeling the need to explain this truly bizarre mutation, Greenwood has given himself permission to just write any damn thing and explain it by waving a magic wand that says "science" on it. And that's just lazy.
It's also, kind of, what happens. As it turns out, the spider's bite doesn't just make people pliable, it can mutate them into the aforementioned multi-limbed cannibal creeps. They're basically a kind of zombie that would fit right into the world of the Resident Evil games, except those have bothered laying quite a bit of track as far as what kind(s) of fringe science they were getting into. All we get from Greenwood to explain out and out biological mutation is some mention of the spider's neurotoxins making "incredible changes to the internal structures of the body". Here's the thing though: That isn't what neurotoxins do. If neurotoxins weren't actually a thing, I would swallow that hook, line and sinker as they say. But they are and as such they have actual properties that make them neurotoxins.
Google "neurotoxin". They're poisons that affect the nervous system. Nothing about that would cause the effects ascribed to them. It just rings so false that it almost pulled me out of the whole book. Luckily, coincidentally, this happened right around the time Mother Legs shifted into high gear. A bunch of people had died, a small army of cannibal spider creeps had laid siege to the Hope Police HQ and our ragtag group of main characters had formulated a plan to track the spider to its lair and kill it.
The finale is genuinely a lot of fun. I know it may sound like I hated Mother Legs but I sincerely did not, I'm just a strong proponent for good world building, which this just doesn't have. Whats actually more frustrating is that it almost has it. With a few rewrites and couple of smart tweaks to what's already here, Mother Legs would really scratch that itch for me but even as is there's a lot to enjoy. The characters all read well and don't blur together; they're often more defined by a specific trait rather than differences in their speech or thoughts but it works. The writing is brisk and decently evocative with some very good detail - when describing drunks at a bar, Greenwood writes "Sammy was fumbling in his pants for a pack of smokes hiding in his shirt pocket" which is not only well written but well observed.
Above all, there are great concepts at play here. The gargantuan psychic spider is actually a really well-crafted character, maybe even one of the strongest in the book. Her story largely unfolds via interstitial flashback scenes, explaining how she came to meet her human familiar / surrogate son / lover (yup) (eww) and giving insight into the reasoning behind her goals.
While there are some elements that just never add up for me (the spider also has a skeleton btw, another thing spiders just do not have) the biggest take away from Mother Legs is the fun of it. Yes it's a specific kind of spook house, splattery fun but as long as you're not as big a stickler as I am about worldbuilding and internal logic, this should do the trick.
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