KINGDOM OF THE SPIDERS by Bernhardt J. Hurwood
It took four writers to craft the screenplay for the 1977 “nature run amok” horror movie Kingdom of the Spiders (they were Jeffrey M. Sneller, Stephen Lodge, Richard Robinson, and Alan Caillou), but when a novelization was commissioned for the John "Bud" Cardos-directed film, Bernhardt J. Hurwood was the writer hired to turn the scenarios Sneller, Lodge, Robinson, and Caillou into a story told in prose. Hurwood did a good job of, too... as long as you can brush off the passages where he refers to the spiders in the story as “insects” and claims they have antennae.
Obviously inspired by the financial success enjoyed by the shark thriller Jaws (with a bit of Night of the Living Dead dropped in toward the end for good measure), Kingdom of the Spiders is about an outbreak of tarantulas in Verde Valley, Arizona. These spiders are on the run from pesticides, they’re aggressively hungry, and they have venom five times more toxic than normal, so they cause a whole lot of trouble in this little town. They start off by killing animals, but soon enough they’re claiming human victims, cocooning corpses, causing car smash-ups, and bringing a pesticide plane down in a fiery crash.
Local veterinarian Robert Hansen, a.k.a. "Rack," and Diane Ashley of the Department of Entomology at Arizona State University are the lead characters we follow through this story – but they are so many spiders wreaking havoc in this town, we can’t really expect them to be able to do much about them.
If you’re a fan of the Cardos film, you’ll have a good time with the novelization, because Hurwood did a good job of sticking close to what was shown on the screen and fleshing it out into novel form. You might also be able to get through the book almost as quickly as it takes to watch the movie, because it only has a page count of 128.
I wouldn’t recommend paying the high prices some people online are charging for this book even if you’re a Kingdom of the Spiders mega-fan, but if you can find it for a reasonable price (or just listen to an audiobook version for free on YouTube), it’s worth checking out. The novelization can't live up to the movie simply because the movie stars William Shatner and nothing read on the page can match a Shatner performance, but it's fun anyway.
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