Radioactive Creepy Crawlies

 

Ever since I was a kid, I had a thing for bug books and movies. Giant ones, hordes of little ones, and everything in between. So when I stumbled upon Neil Hunter's Scorpion, I just had to read it.

Scorpion takes place in England, a place you don't really think of when you think of these little critters, in the small town of Long Point.

When the book opens, a reporter (Les Mason) is covering the protest outside the Long Point Nuclear Plant, so right away you know where this is going. Les also happens to be the first victim of the titular creatures, and it's in Les that we see how potent and quick-acting the scorpions' venom is. The doctors treating Les are at a loss. They acknowledge the fact that Les is suffering an extreme reaction to some sort of bite, but they are unable to identify just what it is that bit him. Enter Dr. Allan Brady, a young research assistant assigned to run a toxicology report on Les's blood, the results of which are inconclusive. But even though he's hit a brick wall, he's determined to uncover what is responsible for the growing number of bodies turning up around Long Point.

Reading Scorpion, I was taken back to the days of my youth, when movies like Kingdom of the Spider, The Swarm (1987), It Happened at Lakewood Manor, The Deadly Bees, etc., were popular. There's a large cast of characters, many of whom are introduced and killed off in the same chapter, but Hunter breathes enough life into the cannon-fodder characters that you're on the edge of your seat wondering if they're going to live or die. The problem, though, with giving us a backstory on every character, even the minor ones, is that sometimes the pacing suffers. When you want to turn the page to find out what happens next, and instead of a face-off with the deadly creatures, we get bogged down with two pages of details about the character that's going to die on the next page, but once we get past that and into the meat of the matter, so to speak, the story moves along at a faster clip. There are, as in any book (or movie) of this type, some unanswered questions. There are also questions that are answered in a manner that makes you go, "Huh?", but that's par for the course with this eco-horror. But these are easily overlooked as you get caught up in the events of the book, and it isn't until you're finished that you begin to wonder about those questions.

I'm not gonna say Scorpion is a great book, because it isn't, but it definitely is a fun read, and if you, like me, enjoyed all those B eco-movies as a kid (or even as an adult), it's definitely worth it. And I enjoyed it enough to pick up the sequel, Scorpion: Second Generation.