Crawlers

By John Shirley

Book Overview

In a secret government lab, a scientist cowers in darkness - waiting, listening and calculating his chances of surviving the carnage that has left him trapped and alone. Or almost alone. Soon after, a covert military operation cleanses' all traces of a nanotechnology project gone horrifically wrong. Yet three years later, the quiet of a sleepy town is shattered by a streak of light, the thunder of impact, and the unleashing of something insidious. Spreading and transforming everything in its path, this diabolical intelligence won't stop until all living things are conquered... and crawling.'

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0345446526
• ISBN13: 9780345446527
• Release Date: November 2003
• Publisher: Del Rey Books
• Length: 400 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.5" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

The Price we Pay

I read a *ton* of horror books, from pulp to classic, and most are a quick good read and soon forgotten. This book, however, got inside me and left me musing for days. The story is classic pulp horror: Some type of alien takes over mankind and converts us into their tools. In Shirley's story, these aliens are actually nanobots that were originally created by man in a secure environment (space) to help us medically by speeding up tissue reparation. The bots were designed to reproduce and work independently in cell renewal. And, of course, they got out of control, wound up on earth, and began taking over a small town until, a la John Saul, the kids save the day. But there is an underlying theme throughout the book that far transcends the simple scary story. Shirley states it clearly towards the end of the book when he says that "Water is good for you, but too much can kill you. How do we know when we've had too much technology?" This idea is presented over and over again: when the kids are walking through their neighborhood at night and can see in their neighbors' windows and everyone is watching TV... When the story is told of people at a museum with video cameras viewing art through a lens... When over and over the characters are presented in front of their TV's, computers, phones - eerily just like us. One of the best parts of the whole book is a simple dinner scene with a family talking about the kids' day at school: "Bert thought, They're so caught up in technology. Computers, MP3s, CD burners, downloading whole movies, laptops, augmenting their own videogame platforms with chips ordered on-line, doing most of their homework research on-line, spending hours in chat rooms and instant messaging - he'd heard kids talk about all that and more. He wanted to quote Thoreau. 'We are conscious of an animal in us, which awakens in proportion as our higher nature slumbers. It is reptile and sensual, and perhaps cannot be wholly expelled.' He wanted to ask them when they'd last looked beyond the digital landscape; when they'd really opened up to the sky and the sea and the forests, and to one another - and ask if it were possible that their obsession with the technology of distraction was deafening them to the message of God's creation. But Bert kept quiet. He kept his mouth shut because he knew he'd just come off as pompous, and because teenagers justly despised self-righteous lecturers. Too, teenagers knew that if they were addicted to all these things, it was because they'd been conditioned to them by adults who were just as bad; who reduced them to a consumer demographic. So Bert just smiled and nodded and said they did well to hone their skills."

Creepy Crawlers

: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:

A good, not great, read

When I saw John Shirley released "Crawlers," a new horror novel, I rushed out to get a copy. I had the wonderful experience of reading "Wetbones" and "Black Butterflies" a couple of years ago, so I figured I couldn't go wrong with this book. Remember the themes of addiction in "Wetbones"? Remember the over the top gore in that book? Remember the Lovecraftian menace that haunted the pages of that immensely scary and enjoyable novel? It's sad to say, but "Crawlers" is not Lovecraftian. It doesn't deal with a personal theme like addiction. It is not scary. And it doesn't have anywhere near the levels of imaginative gore Shirley lovingly sprinkled across the pages of "Wetbones." Still, that's perfectly acceptable. Not all authors wish to stick to tried and true formulas. I don't think I would if I ever decided to write books and short stories. While "Crawlers" doesn't employ the awesome components that made up "Wetbones," it is still an entertaining novel in its own right.Quiebra, California is a small town situated in the San Francisco Bay Area, a town with low rents and a diverse population that enjoys living near a large metropolis but without the noise and high crime rates. That's not to say there aren't problems in the town, that there aren't kids giving their parents and the local police fits by raising trouble on the weekends. Still, most of the people in town are well behaved, with the only problems occurring when the local teens race cars and party on occasion. What no one knows is that the peaceful atmosphere of Quiebra is about to change forever after a mysterious satellite crashes on the outskirts of town. A local salvage diver by the name of Nick Leverton, figuring on getting a big paycheck from the government, turns up at the site and tricks the soldiers there into letting him bring up the wreckage. With his son Cal helping him, Nick indeed finds a satellite in the water. What happens next, as he attempts to drag it up, guarantees that the town of Quiebra will never, ever, be the same again. The problems start in the Leverton household, with Nick, his wife, his daughter Adair, and his son Cal. Soon, Adair's boyfriend Waylon, a conspiracy nut with a knack for electronics, enters the picture, as does Adair's Aunt Lacey, a local college professor, a federal agent named Stanner, and about a dozen other characters both major and minor. A nightmare is coming, one that involves a lot more than a harmless satellite sitting on the bottom of a bay.It turns out that the government, specifically an ultra-secret Pentagon research lab called The Facility, has been mucking around with a dangerous new high tech weapon system. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the federal government wants to insure that they have a leg up on any potential foes. It's a noble goal, and probably a necessary one, but new weapon systems sometimes have the irritating tendency to not do what the creators want. That's exactly what happened in this instance, as

CRAWLERS freakin rocks!

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...

fine science gone amuck tale

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