Tub of Spiders

Tub of Spiders by Jennifer Patterson and David Rowell Workman   237 pages

Heavy sigh. I was really looking forward to this reading this book; the back cover makes it sound scary and the cover lends itself to nightmares. I haven’t come across a really scary book I quite sometime.

From the back cover: “What do you feat most? That is the question Sara Doyle is asked when she wakes up chained to a dirty toilet after a night out with her girlfriend. But what is her sociopathic captor, Russ St. Cloud really after and can she make it out alive?”

So, I turned on all the lights and opened the cover.  It was a horror alright. The illustration of a spider web---on. every. page.—was annoying and got in the way of the story. It even crossed over the text, making it sometimes hard to read. It should have been ghosted. The spider at the beginning of every chapter was fine and worked. However, the funky font used at the top of each page for the title was also way overboard. I realize that the authors are desperately trying to set themselves apart, but their desperation is too obvious.

Then I tried to read the story. It’s all tell and no show---the basic---and first---rule of fiction writing. Rules are made to break, but not that one. It makes the story stilted.  Sara’s diary also presents a problem. Who keeps a diary with full, complete sentences?  It was also stilted and felt contrived.

I have to give Tub of Spiders one out of five stars.