Book Review: Crawlers

Reviewed By: Harriet Klausner

Crawlers     Amazon US PB Amazon Canada PB
John Shirley
Class/Genre:   Science Fiction   Military   Horror
Del Rey, Nov 2003, $14.95, 400 pp.

In the town of Quiebra, not far from San Francisco, a man-made satellite falls from the sky and lands in Suisan Bay. Adair Leverton and her friend Waylon saw what happened. She rushes over to her home to tell her father, the owner of a salvage operation, so he can try to land the job to recover the object. When Nick Leverton arrives at the site, he persuades the military into letting him retrieve the satellite.

A sense of urgency forces the military to allow Nick to recover it, but the person who comes back from the water is no longer the human being who dived. Something in the satellite changed and took over Nick and whatever happened is spreading. Residents of the town are being taken over and turned into a combination of human, machine and animals. It is a hive entity and it is planning to seed the rest of the world so it will be one big organism unless someone can come up with plan to stop it.

CRAWLERS is a horror story on a par with Dean Koontz, Stephen King and Clive Barker. It is a story of science gone amuck and what the consequences are when not enough safeguards are placed on a scientific black-ops experiment. The novel is fast paced and the action never lets up yet the author doesn’t ignore character development. The people who populate the pages of this book are rugged individuals who try to fight the enemy and endear themselves to the audience in the process.

Harriet Klausner

Reprinted with permission. Do Not repost without permission from the author, Harriet Klausner