Crawlers

Rating:
Summary: Creepy Crawlers
Review:
:Wraps wings protectively around self and shivers:
Dude, I grew up reading horror novels and adored horror flicks. It's been well over 15 years since something has had the power to goose my bumps. John Shirley's Crawlers is it. Fifty pages into the book and it scared me so bad I had to walk away and call a friend, so what if it was 3 am? At least my friend is still human... or so I pray. Our story begins in a super secret (aren't they all?) government lab where all that is good and wholesome has gone awry. Crawlers have taken over the lab and are harvesting the remaining living scientists for *scrap* body parts. Their goal is complete assimilation. Yup, the Borg on crack,

True to form the government annihilates the lab in an effort to cover up the failed experiment. Unfortunately for the small Californian town of Quiebra, things suddenly don't seem quite so normal. It appears the mighty establishment didn't do to good of a job. People are acting oddly and in some cases disappearing. The adults of the town are being assimilated one by one and it's up to the children of the town and a few rag-tag straggler adults to discover what is going on in time to stop the travesty that is brewing. Even if they do succeed the authorities don't plan to leave any survivors. All hail civilization!

Through out the entire novel the message most prevalent is to think for yourself. Don't let anyone, most especially those in charge, think for you. All else leads to the unthinkable.

Crawlers is an excellent novel. Despite the fact that it scared me away for at least an hour I couldn't stay away. This to me means John Shirley is a force to be reckoned with. :leaves behind a Faery Queen rating before jumping into bed and hiding under the covers:


Rating:
Summary: A 'Breakout' Novel
Review: CRAWLERS is certainly more conventional than what Shirley's fans are used to, echoing familiar horror hits like Koontz' MIDNIGHT and King's TOMMYKNOCKERS, yet CRAWLERS has its own thing shaking, and I for one really enjoyed it.

The All of Us and its spawn are certainly disturbing ("Certainly!") and Shirley culls totally believable and likeable young characters from his knowledge of modern teen culture; I actually had to wake myself up early and finish the book because I was getting too worried about what was going to happen to them.

Plus, CRAWLERS has enough off-the-hook mayhem going on, as things start getting out of hand, to take loyal readers back to wild early Shirley books like IN DARKNESS WAITING (imagine a cyperpunk version of that one, and you've pretty much got the picture).

Rating:
Summary: Shirley's worst
Review: Crawlers is little more than Shirley recycling bad Dean Koontz novels from the late 80s. Compared to Demons, The Song Called Youth cycle and the rest of Shirley's terrific work, Crawlers is at best disappointing. Anything else from Shirley's work is better than this.

Rating:
Summary: CRAWLERS freakin rocks!
Review: In many a story - whether written, filmed, sung or otherwise - there comes a moment when the relevance of the story's title is revealed. It is often a thrilling, unexpected moment when that piece of the puzzle falls into place. In this 1st edition of John Shirley's CRAWLERS that moment occurs in the 1st sentence of the 4th paragraph on page 51. Lying in bed beside my fever-sick wife in our darkened Chicago loft I read that line & I shivered.

I don't read the backs of books b4 I read the books. The only thing I knew about CRAWLERS going-in was that it was about nanotechnology run amok. It wasn't until area - I mean page 51 that I realized and accepted that yes, this is a horror story. A John Shirley horror story. And I was scared.

CRAWLERS uses the Invasion of the Body Snatchers mold to examine issues of nature vs technology, young vs old, chaos vs order, paranoia vs they're-really-after-you, & kinship vs survival.

The nano-machines are countless microscopic Frankensteins set loose in suburban San Francisco through blunders by the U.S. government. The "breakouts" attempt to assimilate every animal & person in the town of Quiebra in order to amass a force with which to build & deploy an instrument of global dissemination.

But first they must learn. And experiment. They enhance living bodies with mechanical & electronic parts. They disassemble & reassemble bodies, trying combinations of parts & species, seeking efficiency & strength of form, all the while communicating with a central "brain" through which all successes & failures are processed, & from which directives are taken.

One scheme of efficiency is to first take over the bodies & minds of people pre-disposed to being easily influenced. Most of those people are the adults in town. It is explained that the pre-disposition is not genetic or biological at all but a mind-set... This suggests that the volatility of the youthful mind has a strength beyond the wisdom (or apathy?) of maturity. The adults who don't easily succumb are inquisitive, creative, & young at heart - or forewarned of the danger. The fate of life on Earth finally rests in the hands of half a dozen adults & a couple hundred children & teens.

The promises of order, vitality, comfort & longevity through assimilation by the breakouts is shunned. Instinctively the pain & conflict of life-as-we-know-it is chosen over world peace. War, decay, death, & differences of opinion all contribute to define humanity, not to destroy it.

And, it's funny, that in John Shirley's CRAWLERS, inexplicably, cats, of all the animals out there, also hold these notions as true.

CRAWLERS is John Shirley's 1st true sci-fi/horror hybrid novel. Yes, it scared me because - like all good "hard" sci-fi - this could happen. And I'd hope that I would be one of the adults that would resist it. I hope I never become a crawler...

Rating:
Summary: fine science gone amuck tale
Review: 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

Rating:
Summary: fine science gone amuck tale
Review: 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

Rating:
Summary: Crawlers is ok.
Review: Mr. Shirley does know how to tell a story and he manages to maintain suspense through out, but I found his characters to be somewhat cookie cutter (and too many of them, I couldn't keep easy track) although he certainly has a good ear for dialogue.

Crawlers has an interesting enough plot, but it is executed over too many pages. It starts with a boom and we barely hear an echo for a hundred pages after. Four hundred pages later, I found myself wondering when it was going to end.

I will read Mr. Shirley's other works but for the moment, I find myself not trusting his work completely.

Rating:
Summary: PIECES OF METAL
Review: This is my first John Shirley book and I agree with other reviewers who feel it's comparable to some of King's and Koontz's earlier works. I admit that the book held my interest and I was impressed with Shirley's narrative flow. Seems there might have been too many characters to focus on, so there tended to be some redundant and superfluous scenes. Shirley etches his characters fairly well, and there are no "safe" characters in this one (which is also reminiscent of John Saul and King).
CRAWLERS is basically a "Body Snatchers" with a cruel metallic twist. These nanotechnological horrors are using human bodies to regenerate into killing machines and threaten to take over the world. The imagery Shirley conveys in these transmutations is spellbinding, and would work very well cinematically. There are some tightly suspenseful scenes, and some good dialogue between the teens and their adult counterparts.
A good novel, nothing highly original, but worth a read.

Rating:
Summary: PIECES OF METAL
Review: This is my first John Shirley book and I agree with other reviewers who feel it's comparable to some of King's and Koontz's earlier works. I admit that the book held my interest and I was impressed with Shirley's narrative flow. Seems there might have been too many characters to focus on, so there tended to be some redundant and superfluous scenes. Shirley etches his characters fairly well, and there are no "safe" characters in this one (which is also reminiscent of John Saul and King).
CRAWLERS is basically a "Body Snatchers" with a cruel metallic twist. These nanotechnological horrors are using human bodies to regenerate into killing machines and threaten to take over the world. The imagery Shirley conveys in these transmutations is spellbinding, and would work very well cinematically. There are some tightly suspenseful scenes, and some good dialogue between the teens and their adult counterparts.
A good novel, nothing highly original, but worth a read.

Rating:
Summary: Wet Bones was awesome
Review: Well, I'm just going to confirm what you probably have already heard: This is John Shirley attempting a "mainstream" horror/sci-fi novel. This one would fit snug between a King or Koontz novel. But, that doesn't make it totally worthless. As such, it does have it's moments.

Shirley has a plot that could have spawned an incredible novel. The nature of the antagonist should have inspired Shirley to create scenes and images worthy of or surpassing "Wet Bones". Instead he seems intent on telling a more "mainstream" story. Does this sound familiar: numerous character that we learn everything about, meeting at the end to make their final "stand"? There is even a mentally challenged character (what was the name of the dude in that King novel?).

Don't get me wrong, there are some pretty neat scenes and images. In the end, however, it didn't seem worth all that time (oh, did I mention that Shirley even makes this one as long as a King novel- at least it seemed that way).

The plot? It's a combination of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers", "The Terminator" and Ray Bradbury's short story: "Zero Hour" if you reverse the roles for parent and child.