Webs by Scott Baker

by Scott Baker

Staying in a dilapidated old Florida mansion, Brian Gerard a teacher, notices that the strange golden spiders that infest the property seem to be growing larger.

Genres: Horror

Paperback

First published January 1, 1989

About the author

Scott Baker discovered his love of reading in grade school when his mother bet him he couldn't stay up until midnight every night reading Dracula. He finished the book, won 50 cents, slept with the lights on for the next four years, and was hooked for life on science fiction, fantasy, and horror.
Scott first attempted a novel in third grade. It was a page long and featured a rocket ship that ran on liquid copper.
In college, Scott drifted away from SF, but he was driven back to it by the deadly dullness of U.C. Irvine's Ph.D. program. Abandoning academia, he devoted himself to chemically-assisted hedonism in the Los Padres National Forest. During this time, Scott made several attempts at novels, but it was only after his van was stolen, he lost his job, his girlfriend left, and his roommate stole his rent money that he decided a life devoted to the joys of the moment wasn't all that much fun, so it was time to get serious about writing.
Scott wrote four novels-Nightchild, Dhampire, and Symbiote's Crown--before selling Symbiote's Crown. By the time it was published, Scott and his wife were living in the archetypical writer's garret, a cramped fifth-floor walk-up in Paris. Symbiote's Crown won the 1982 Prix Apollo for best French science fiction novel of the year.
Scott stayed in Paris for twenty years, working as translator and publisher's reader. He collaborated on several film scripts, working with directors such as Raoul Ruiz, Chile's former Minister of Culture. One film, Litan, won the Critic's prize at the Avoriaz Film Festival.
He also began writing shorter fiction. Four of Scott's stories were World Fantasy Award finalists and Still Life with Scorpion won the World Fantasy Award. He has three short story collections published in France.
Scott's next two novels, Drink the Fire from the Flames and Firedance, were fantasies set in the world of Ashlu. Inscrutable editorial imperatives meant that Firedance, second in the series, was published first, creating some confusion. The Ashlu books were followed by Webs, a psychological thriller with rather large spiders. Dissatisfied with Dhampire, he rewrote it from scratch. The vastly improved version was published as Ancestral Hungers.
After moving back to California, Scott created websites for the on-line tie-in for Steven Spielberg's film, AI, including one written in pseudo-Boolean code. The tie-in, AI: Who Killed Evan Chang was the first Alternate Reality Game. It was ranked Entertainment Weekly's number one website for 2002 and one of the New York Times' "Cool Ideas of the Year."
Scott's work has been published in England, France, Japan, Italy, Spain, and Finland. He has been a judge for the World Fantasy Awards, and is currently chairman of the judge's panel for the 2011 Philip K. Dick award.
After a long hiatus, Scott is currently working on an alternate history novel revolving around ethnopsychiatry, dire leopards, ancient Nubian medicine, traumatic brain injury, behavior-modifying parasites, and Napoleon's attempted conquest of Egypt.
AWARDS AND ACCOLADES
2002 Entertainment Weekly's number one website (AI: Who Killed Evan Chang?)
2002 A New York Times' "Cool Idea of the Year" (AI: Who Killed Evan Chang?)
1990 World Fantasy Award Finalist (Varicose Worms)
1990 Chosen for The Year's Fantasy and Horror (Varicose Worms)
1987 World Fantasy Award Finalist (Nesting Instinct)
1987 Chosen for The Year's Best Science Fiction (Sea Change)
1985 World Fantasy Award Winner (Still Life with Scorpion)
1983 World Fantasy Award Finalist (The Lurking Duck)
1982 Critic's Prize, Avoriaz Fantastic Film Festival (Litan)
1982 Prix Apollo for best science fiction novel published in France (Symbiote's Crown)
NOVELS
Symbiote's Crown (1978)
Nightchild (1983)
Drink the Fire from the Flames (1987)
Firedance (1985)
Webs (1989)
Ancestral Hungers (1995)
SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS (French)
Nouvelle Recette Pour Canard Au Sang (1983)
Fringales (1985).
Aléas (1997).
FILM SCRIPT

Reviews

[Jack Tripper · Rating 3 out of 5]

This came pretty close to 4 star territory for me, and after reading the first half or so I wondered if the reason for the 2.7 average rating here was due to readers expecting a nasty “giant spiders attack” pulpfest as opposed to slow-burn psychological horror. There’s such an intriguing mystery, as main character Brian is a new professor at a small Florida college, and the huge estate he’s given by the school to stay at is surrounded by jungle that’s infested with larger-than-normal orb weaving spiders that ensnare all sorts of birds and rodents in their giant webs. To add to this, Brian’s a bit of a weirdo who hypnotizes himself in order to complete mundane tasks while in a sort of “robot mode” so that he doesn’t have to be conscious, which sounds awesome. He also goes into trances to communicate telepathically with his wife, who’s locked up in a mental institute. You’ll soon wonder if Brian is the one who should be locked up.

So right away we the reader know that Brian’s version of events that follow is not to be trusted, especially once we learn he can alter his memories while under hypnosis, which sets up a rather fascinating puzzle when strange shit (stranger than ESP trances and self-hypnotism) starts to go down, like him finding vivisected bugs and spiders laid out on the kitchen table, neatly arranged by size even though he’s afraid of them, and a fellow professor going missing while visiting his grounds. Did the spiders get her, or did his arachnid-obsessed student Karen — who’s staying there to study the spiders as well as have sex with Brian despite her being like 16 — have something to do with it?

I don’t always need to have answers to everything, especially with weird fiction, and can enjoy weirdness for weirdness’s sake, but when so much of the intrigue in the story hinges on all these mysteries being set up, I’d like to know that it was at least leading somewhere. A lot of the fun was trying to figure out “how the hell is Scott Baker gonna tie all this together into a nice tidy bow by the end?” Well, he doesn’t. It’s pretty much left up to the reader to decide what really happened. It was all just a little too vague for me, and I’m not entirely sure what actually went down.

Still, I enjoyed the journey and the eerie hallucinatory atmosphere enough to check out more Scott Baker in the future, especially since I already own a few of his novels.* Plus, like my GR buddy Mike mentioned, Baker might just be crazy, and I have a thing for crazy authors.

3.5 Stars.

*It’s too bad his collections are only available in French, as the few stories I’ve come across in various horror anthos over the years were always highlights for me, if every bit as baffling.

[Phil · Rating 3 out of 5]

A decidedly odd, eclectic book by Baker, who is known primarily for his fantasy works. Just looking at the cover and the back blurb, I expected a spider creature feature here, but the spiders are primarily just a backdrop to the tale. Our main protagonist, Brian, starts the novel driving to a house on a Key south of Sarasota; turns out the house is a 'freebie' for Brian to stay in while he starts his new job at a liberal arts college nearby.

Brian recently left Kenya with his wife Julie after she went batshit crazy and tried to kill herself; now she is in a private clinic in Michigan and he managed to find a teaching gig on the fly in Florida. Brian's new house is an old estate with a private beach and we settle in with Brian as he cleans up the place and gets ready for the upcoming semester. He is still working on his dissertation and spent the last three years teaching in Kenya at a missionary school there. What Brian does best, however, revolves around self-hypnosis, where he achieves a trancelike state. In his 'trances', Brian can prep for classes and in his 'happy-idiot' trance, can program himself to do scut work, like clean the house.

The trances are the real focus of the novel as in a deep trance, Brian can 'journey' places, basically creating his own reality. So, is what happens in the novel 'real' or a product of his trances? Baker keeps us guessing throughout the novel. Is Julie (for example) really crazy, or is Brian the crazy one? They used to engage in trances together, creating their own reality, but obviously something slipped along the way.

The spider angle pops up when one day Brian discovers huge golden webs with spiders on the estate; about the same time a bunch of bananas washed up on his beach. Did the bananas bring some friends from some tropical place? One of his students, a young gal named Karen, just so happens to have a masters degree in arachnology so he brings her to the house to check out the spiders. Yes, they are unusually large, but she tells Brian they are basically harmless; a relative of orb weavers. Well, one thing leads to another and soon Brian and Karen are engaged in a hot romantic affair, despite her being 16 (she is something of a genus, as well as a hottie).

We spend lots of time on campus politics here and Brian's trials and tribulations in the classroom, but the spiders? Don't hold your breath. Brian soon teaches Karen self-hypnosis techniques and soon they are trancing together. Again, is what is happening real or a created reality. Did the prior owner of the house, a professor who did genetic experiments, create something that got loose? Did Brian bring back some spider eggs from Kenya? Did Karen herself plant the spiders? Questions, questions!

Not sure who the intended audience was here. Baker definitely knows campus politics (I can say that first hand as I teach at a liberal arts college in Florida!) and much of the novel revolves around that aspect. Brian's mental stability, along with his self-hypnosis, features large in the novel, however, and to me, is really the focus. Webs, as in spider webs, or webs of reality. You pick. Pretty intriguing novel, but do not expect crazy spider foo! It that is what you are looking for, try Spiders and the sequel The Web 2.5 buggy stars!

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

As one of the few members of Goodreads to have read this book, I can't help feeling the weight of responsibility as I anticipate potential readers' inevitable questions. Is Webs (1989) a genuinely creepy October read? Does the story deliver on the cover artwork, which seems to promise something like Jaws with spiders? Can you read it if you have arachnophobia?

I don't know if there are easy answers to those questions, however. I mostly feel confident in saying this is a weirder book than it looks like at first glance. Meaning I guess that it’s pretty weird.

To sketch things briefly, main character Brian takes a teaching job at a college in southern Florida, hoping to pay his wife Julie's medical bills. Julie's in a mental institution up in Michigan, apparently having lost her mind while the two of them were teaching together in Kenya. The Florida college sets Brian up on the expansive estate of a recently-deceased genetics professor (nothing ominous about that, right?) that even includes a private beach, and Brian immediately goes about fixing the place up by...calling upon his apparent long-standing and esoteric practice of self-hypnosis of course, through which he can direct himself to do all the cleaning without actually having to consciously experience it (some of us just go with a beer and music, but to each his own).

Brian, however, starts to notice unsettling things upon coming out of his self-induced trances. Things such as the severed heads of insects, including that of a black widow spider, laid out on the kitchen table in mysterious patterns, with what seems to be geometric precision.

Aside from that deepening mystery, Brian's mostly preoccupied with writing letters to Julie (letters which curiously never seem to be answered), and with their shared "trancescape"- the mutual psychic space that they used to travel to together, having hypnotized each other. A space that's apparently still out there in the psychic ether somehow, accessible to both of them- a source of both comfort and terror for Brian, as he alternates between missing Julie and worrying that she's malevolently reaching out across the trancescape towards him, influencing him in ways he might not be aware of and might not remember afterwards.

As if all these strange goings-on weren’t enough to keep him occupied, Brian is also teaching a baffling class at the college called Mass Communications in Kenya, which mostly seems to consist of him making up personal anecdotes to illustrate his theories on, well, mass communications in Kenya. Once he finishes the made-up anecdote, he asks if there are any questions, holds his breath, and waits for his very adversarial (but perhaps justifiably so) students to tear him to shreds. As a teacher myself, the thought of running a class like Brian does gave me almost as much agita as the spiders eventually did.

I guess I haven't mentioned the spiders yet. The orb-weaving golden nephila spiders, that is, which Brian slowly realizes are ubiquitous on the estate, and which seem to be growing larger all the time. Luckily, he starts hooking up with a cute student (it was the 80s), Karen, who also just happens to be an expert on spiders, and who ends up moving in with Brian so she can better observe and study these creatures who seem to be exhibiting tendencies (the male eating the female rather than the other way around, for example) that should be impossible in nature. But also so she can reassure Brian that they don't pose any real threat to him. Those at least are the surface reasons.

Brian, of course, can't help but start teaching Karen his esoteric practice of mutual hypnosis. Before you can say om mani padme om, they're sitting nightly in the lotus position, journeying to psychic realms unknown. Things grow progressively more off-kilter and ominous, however, every time they return to reality. Or what seems to be reality.

How to classify Webs? Well, you'll have to search elsewhere if you're looking for psychotic spiders on a killing spree.

I think it qualifies as a horror novel, but I probably have a pretty broad definition of that term.

I can understand people not being into it, even aside from the misunderstanding the cover might engender. For a 310-page novel, it tries to pack in a lot. The meticulously-detailed classroom scenes seemed to me pretty superfluous, occasionally irritating, and illustrative of the fact that a writer can sometimes draw too closely from personal experience (I can only assume that Scott Baker spent some time in Kenya, or had some special interest in the country, and felt the need to shoehorn it into the story). Above all, and it’d be difficult to overstate this, the main character Brian is a tough hang. I think that he's intended to be, that the rhythms of Brian’s circular and neurotic and increasingly paranoid thoughts are supposed to mirror the struggles of an animal trapped in a web, but it nevertheless really started to test my patience.

On the other hand, I think the way Baker describes the trancescape is pretty fascinating. I think he depicts intimacy in a very unsettling but also beautiful way that you would never be able to get to through the more polite and "realism"-beholden avenues of a New Yorker short story. I also enjoyed the slow-burn menacing atmosphere, especially after Karen moves to the estate, as Baker keeps the reader off-balance about who (or what) in this scenario really needs to be feared.

Whether all that tension resolved in a coherent or even satisfying conclusion is something that I've honestly been wrestling with since I finished the book. I'm left with a few inspired and memorably horrific images, though I couldn't tell you for sure what they meant in the context of the story, nor could I answer many of the plot's lingering questions. What exactly was Karen's connection with the spiders? What happened to the teacher at the college, the co-worker of Brian's who disappeared on the estate? Was Brian dreaming or in trance when he saw what he seemed to see in Karen's basement laboratory, the one she's warned him never to visit on his own? Or was it reality? And what was really the deal with Julie?

Lots of unanswered questions. But the simple fact that I keep turning the story over in my head means that it probably did something right, as most books don't linger with me like this.

So do I ultimately recommend Webs?

Yes, but I have ulterior motives. Namely that I'd like more people to read this weird-ass book, so I can talk to them about it.