8/25/26

I know there were no updates here since last Friday, but as previously said, my ex-wife and I took our son to college over the weekend. I was off line. Didn’t even take a laptop or a Moleskine along with me. Only thing that got updated was Patreon, but those were all autoposts that were pre-programmed.

Sunday’s newsletter (which I also wrote early) went out on schedule, as usual. You can read it here.

Back on the road again tomorrow, so updates will continue to be sporadic until September.

With that missing block of days to make up for, let’s do a two-fer today for our regularly scheduled feature.

(And a reminder, you can find all of the previous Women In Horror year entries indexed here).

~

Women In Horror Year: Days 109 and 110

Breeding Ground and Feeding Ground by Sarah Pinborough

eBook - Audiobook

Life was good for Matt and Chloe. They were in love and looking forward to their new baby.

But what Chloe gave birth to isn't a baby.

It isn't even human.

It's an entirely new species that uses humans only for food and as hosts for their young.

As Matt soon learns, he isn't alone in his terror. Women all over town have begun to give birth to these hideous creatures, spidery nightmares that live to kill and feed. As the infestation spreads and the countryside is reduced to a series of web-shrouded ghost towns, will the survivors find a way to fight back? Or is it only a matter of time before all of mankind is reduced to a Breeding Ground.

and

London is dead.

Streets that were once crowded with people are now clogged with thick webs, and corpses. Spidery creatures straight out of nightmares infest the city, hunting the few humans still left.

The desperate survivors have banded together, and realise their only hope is to flee the city. But their only route puts them in the wrecked streets and into the underground network, which has become the heart of the feeding ground.

For a solid decade, Leisure Books kept American audiences sated with two new horror paperbacks released every month — a mix of veteran authors such as Richard Laymon, Jack Ketchum, and Hugh B. Cave and new authors such as J.F. Gonzalez, Wrath James White, and Mary SanGiovanni. There were some duds in the mix, to be sure. If you’re publishing that many horror novels on that tight a schedule, not every one of those books is going to be a winner. But there were also a lot of great books, and novels that went on to become recognized classics of the genre. Readers have their own individual favorites. Reprints like The Girl Next Door, Island, and City Infernal get mentioned a lot, as do then-new books such as Survivor, A Lower Deep, or my own The Rising.

Personally, two of my all-time favorites from that era were Breeding Ground and its sequel Feeding Ground, both by Sarah Pinborough. And in talking to readers over the yers, i know I am not alone in that regard.

Spiritual successors to works like the seminal Rats series by James Herbert and movies like the It’s Alive franchise, these two novels tell of a civilizational collapse not due to zombies or pandemics or giant carnivorous worms… but from women all over the world suddenly giving birth to monstrous hybrid carnivorous spiders. In the hands of anyone else, this would be a glorious two-book pulp monster mash, but Sarah turns it into something more — transcending the B-moie trappings and delivering two darkly horrific and absolutely unsettling reads. Her pacing is deft, his characterization engrossing, and her building of suspense is perfect. You can see the Sarah who, decades later, would write bestsellers like Behind Her Eyes here in these pages, honing her craft. But while those later novels were all clearly written for a wide audience — a mainstream audience (and there’s nothing wrong with that… every author wants as big an audience as possible), I suspect Breeding Ground was written for an audience of one, and that audience was Sarah herself. She wrote a novel she wanted to read, submitted it, and was surprised to find there were a lot of horror fans out there that wanted to read it to. Enough so that it spawned a sequel in Feeding Ground.

Those old Leisure paperback editions are long out of print, and go for as much as $200 on the secondary and collector markets (depending on condition). Thunderstorm books did a nice signed limited edition omnibus a few years back, but that too, is long out of print. But there is good news… for some of you, at least. Gollancz are bringing both books back into print in just a little over a month from now — October 1, specifically — in new eBook and audiobook editions. At least in the U.K. that is. No word yet on whether or not those new editions will be available for purchase to readers based in the U.S., not is there word if there will be a new paperback or trade paperback to go along with them. If anyone from Gollancz is reading this (and I know you are), I encourage you to consider doing so. Don’t underestimate the audience for these two titles. There is a rabid part of the fanbase out here desperate to obtain copies without having to forego paying the mortgage or buying food for their kids this month.

Here’s the covers for the new editions.