Came a Spider

Edward Levy

This is the third time in recent memory I've reviewed Came a Spider, actually (once in the late eighties and once in 1999 upon re-reading it), this one occasioned by Levy's re-releasing his long out-of-print books through iUniverse.com. And it's about bloody time. (Hint to other eighties horror authors: this is a very, very good idea, especially when some of us can't afford the $150 rare bookstores are asking for your books [he said, casting a cold eye at Patrick Whalen and Jack Ketchum].)

Edward Levy was actually a seventies horror author rather than an eighties horror author, but Came a Spider was one of the first books to chart the course that more recent horror novels would take, scaling down the supermonsters of fifties and sixties “atomic cinema” and switching the focus from Robert Oppenheimer to Rachel Carson. (That Rachel Carson doctored her data does not in any way invalidate the sheer creepiness of a good deal of ecohorror.) Came a Spider was his first novel, of only two I could ever find that he wrote, and while it's the lesser of the two, it's still a barnburner of a read. Levy hits you early on; in the opening scene, a large, nasty-looking spider bites a teenager, who gets progressively sicker over the next week, then dies, his purpose fulfilled—a cocoon for the spiders' eggs. From there, the babies of this mutant beast do what comes naturally to mutant monsters in horror novels. They launch a campaign to take over Los Angeles.

Came a Spider, for all the genre-writing silliness, was an insanely influential novel. Very little of what has come since has remained uninfluenced by it (the climactic hunt for the spiders' nest in the sewers of Los Angeles, especially, should be very familiar to fans of eighties mutant monster movies, starting with 1980's Alligator). It helps that Levy has a wonderfully readable style, causing the reader to want to forgive some of the deadwood in the dialogue (e.g., one of the scientists on the team trying to kill the spiders off has a tendency to use the term “personally,” as in “I personally know…” and the like, way, way too much). The pages certainly keep turning quickly enough, so that if you've got an afternoon free you can probably plow through the whole book.

Levy's work has been re-released, and can now be discovered by a new generation of fans. Allilujah.