Breeding Ground by Sarah Pinborough

Sarah Pinborough’s Breeding Ground starts off with a fabulous premise of monsters that come from the wombs of the women that men love. The origin of the creatures preys on the paternal and maternal fear of something being wrong with their baby, as well as the feeling in a man that since they can’t get pregnant they don’t know what it’s like. All the baby books and fake pregnancy bellies in the world can’t give the feeling of another person being born from you. There’s a wonderful element of body horror in the story, and the fact that probably all the characters will at some point birth creatures of their own, despite surviving is chilling.
Matt attributes Chloe’s changes in mood and attitude to her being pregnant, until everything starts to go horribly wrong. The horror is compounded when the doctor that Matt takes Chloe to see says that it’s happening all over the country, there’s no way to stop it, and it’s better if she just doesn’t know.
Once the creature’s loose, and it’s a big, nasty spiderish thing, the horror kind of takes a downturn. While I’m not opposed to spider-monsters in particular, Pinborough doesn’t really give them a lot to do beyond terrorizing people for a little while and breaking up cars. It’s as if the creatures just ran out of motivation to kill anyone after a while. They also could have benefitted from some kind of intelligence beyond a normal spider’s. While there may be some incidents, such as the car smashing, that point to their being more than normal creatures, they don’t really get to do much.
The story becomes a zombie movie in some way, because the creatures don’t act with any malevolence. That’s where the book’s main failing came from. Pinborough created a monster, that while not wholly original, was creepy and interesting enough to carry an entire story, but somehow one just never developed. The Widows did have some interesting qualities to them. I particularly like the web creation effect of their bites, and the fact that the males eventually started to birth monsters as well.
I wanted to see the Widows do something! Sure, they didn’t necessarily have to, since they “win” in the end, but there could’ve been a lot more horror if Chloe’s consciousness had stayed in the Widow and followed Matt for a final confrontation.
Every good monster story has an explanation of where the creature comes from, even if that answer is “Somewhere Out There.” The only “answer” for the Widows is genetically altered food, and even that is a guess. I’d have liked to see Matt decide that he wants to get to the bottom of what happened to Chloe and look for some damn answers. I was excited when the scientist guy mentioned capturing a live Widow for study. I wanted to see what they’d discover about the creatures and get perhaps another idea of where they might be from.
The fact that they were harmed by deaf people’s blood was kind of an odd thing, but I was willing to go along with it for the sake of the story and to see what Pinborough would make out of it. And then she really did nothing with it, though I did wonder where exactly those men were getting enough blood to paint the streets red.
The environmental changes were a nice touch, but I really wanted the creatures to have some sort of overriding motivation. It hurt the story that nothing ever materialized along that vein.
I’m kind of wondering if another POV might have helped explain the widows more. If we had an idea of what was going through Chloe’s mind as the thing developed within her, would that have made a difference to our understanding of the Widow by the end of the story?