Book Review: The Hatching by Ezekiel Boone

The Hatching (Book 1)

By Ezekiel Boone
Hardcover: 352 pages
Publisher: Atria/Emily Bestler Books (July 5, 2016)

 

Heart racing, & terrifyingly scary! If you’re not arachnophobic now, you will be after finishing The Hatching. Imagine black hordes of meat eating spiders engulfing and overtaking crowds and buildings. Some eat their prey, some just lay eggs and leave the person living for the hatchlings to feed on.

In this epic story, a cast of well-developed characters are chased and driven to escape the black horde that has been unleashed on planet earth. An ancient species of spider has been lurking and waiting for a thousand years under the surface and is now loose on several continents.

Peruvian Jungle: A wildly rich man, his entourage of three model type escorts, and a tour guide are chased and some eaten by a black wave of spiders.

 

India: What seems to be seismic tremors are plaguing the area. The only problem is they have a pattern and are getting stronger.

Washington DC: A mysterious package arrives at a laboratory.

Minneapolis: The FBI investigates a plane crash site.

China: A nuclear bomb is detonated in a rural area.

Combine all these events with great writing, a real setting, great characters and a terrifying idea – you have one hell of a roller coaster ride in The Hatching.

I really enjoyed Boone’s writing and this breakout novel. He will be one to contend with. I’ve included a short interview so we can come to know what drives him to write.

Me: Which writers inspire you?

Boone: I read very widely, so any list of writers that inspire me will be necessarily incomplete. I don’t care a ton about genre. Thrillers, horror, literary fiction, graphic novels, mysteries, Y.A., science fiction, fantasy, whatever shelf it’s on, if it’s good, I’ll read it. So how about the authors that inspired me growing up?  I burned through the science fiction and fantasy sections in the library, but at home, I ended up with my parents’ leftovers: Clive Cussler, Tom Clancy, Robert Ludlum, John Le Carre from my dad, and Danielle Steel, James Michener, Anne Rice, Scott Turow from my mom.

 

Me: What are you working on at the moment?

Boone: Right this minute, I’m working on Skitter, which is book two in The Hatching series.

 

Me: What’s it about?

Boone: Let’s just say that The Hatching was only the beginning.

 

Me: How much research do you do?

Boone: Research always depends on the book. There’s a certain freedom to fiction, in that you are making certain things up. I’m sure that when Stephen King wrote Under the Dome he didn’t spend a lot of time researching alien force fields. That being said, it’s really important to get details right. For The Hatching, while the species of spiders are fictional, there’s real science behind a lot of it. Of course, none of it matters if the reader doesn’t believe it. If your facts are 100% correct but the reader doesn’t buy in, it doesn’t matter. 

 

Me: Do you write full-time or part-time?

Boone: I write more-or-less full time. Didn’t used to be the case. When I first started writing, I was a stay-at-home dad, and I’ve held a bunch of jobs. Writing used to be something I snuck in during cracks in the day.

 

Me: Do you write every day?

Boone: I usually write five or six days a week. Ideally, I’d write every day, but that’s just not a realistic fit with my life. I head to my desk as soon as my kids are on the bus and work most of the day. 

 

Me: Do you aim for a set amount of words or pages per day?

Boone: I do try to hit a certain word count every day, but there are somedays that go better than others. I think a great way for beginning writers to think about it is to shoot for a page a day. A page isn’t that much, is it? But a page every day is a book a year. 

 

Me: Where do you get your ideas?

Boone: Ideas just come from paying attention. I keep a notebook and lists all over the place. The problem is that only some of the ideas are worth keeping. For me, it’s the ideas that I can’t shake. I wrote The Hatching partly because I kept waking up from spider nightmares. 

 

Me: Do you work off an outline or do you prefer just see where an idea takes you?

Boone: In the past, I’ve often just tried to see where the idea takes me. For the last little while, however, I’ve been working off loose outlines, and that’s been helpful. Plot matters. 

There you have it readers. Buy it. Read it. Enjoy it. I did!