Occasionally I pick up books by indie writers who are getting solid reviews. I find this helps me stay a bit more tuned to the era I actually live in, but I also like supporting people with my reviews who have a vision, the compulsion to write the story of what they can see, and the discipline to jump through all the many challenges thrown up for writers who want to self-publish or publish through an indie press. This book is an excellent example of this kind of ambitious, vision-driven work.
Synopsis
Itsy Bitsy Spyder: Evolution opens as a fog-choked Marin County procedural—a burned-out detective, a string of impossible murders, a witness who is deaf and blind and somehow the only one who saw anything true—before it sheds its genre skin entirely and reveals a cosmology of buried gods, inherited guilt, and a war being fought in the space between what people believe is real and what horrors actually moved through their house last night. As it turns out, Larriba isn’t interested in a clean mystery; he’s interested in what happens when grief discovers its monster wearing a face that is shockingly familiar. Readers who want their horror operatic, myth-soaked, and ambivalent about protecting the expected procedural scaffolding will find a book built for them.
Technical Assessment
The plot’s ambition is real: fusing a Bay Area crime lab story with Mesopotamian and Mesoamerican myth, and folding a 1100 AD timeline into a 2025 one via a shared cursed artifact, is an infrequently-seen combination, and the two threads do converge with believability rather than gesture.
Thematically the book is strongest where it’s most specific—Sofia’s arc, in which a supernaturally restored sense of sight becomes something to mourn rather than celebrate, is the novel’s best idea and reveals some true character interiority. I found it compelling. Other character work is uneven: Krill’s grief is carried by consistent, recurring imagery (the coin, the sycamores, the cat) rather than stated clearly and dropped, which creates a gravity that is heavily leaned on. Ortega and Dex are comparatively thin, useful mostly for exposition and banter, though Dex’s parallel-hell backstory surprises the character himself and retroactively earns him more sympathy than the middle chapters suggest he deserves. Pacing sags in the middle third, where set-piece horror sequences (the owl nest, the deer-pit ambush) accumulate faster than the plot advances, and the late-book pivot—turning two characters, previously sympathetic, into instruments of the antagonist—will read as either a bold genre swing or a bait-and-switch depending on how closely a reader was tracking the foreshadowing: it doesn’t come across as cheating, but it isn’t gentle either.
Comparisons
Larriba’s work is hard to describe—his prose consists of stacked fragments and em-dash driven accumulations of short bursts of information. Sometimes it flows brilliantly. The novel also explores how actions from the distant past directly influence the present-day “crime noir” story that the novel presents itself as initially. Reconsidering how Larriba pulls this off is a worthwhile and enjoyable activity.
Perhaps surprisingly, the reading eventually brought to mind one of my favorite works of Faulkner—Absalom, Absalom!—and surfaced some solid comparisons and contrasts.
Absalom, Absalom! is at its fundamental core all about buried ancestral influence—Sutpen’s sin that was planted generations back that reaches forward in time and destroys everyone downstream, even those with no knowledge of their poisonous inheritance. Larriba is structurally taking this approach too: Sofia’s line, Krill’s family, Dex, and indeed the whole valley are caught up in something planted long before any of them existed—so long, in fact, that it extends in part back to the Sumerian empire and the Tower of Babel. The horror that Larriba unveils is not really the murders—they’re shocking at first, but are quickly exceeded by the knowledge that the present is not free from the evil of the past. Both Faulkner and Larriba make good use of their unique landscapes as a holder of that buried history: the darkness of the rotting Sutpen’s Hundred homestead and the fog-choked valley are working this narrative relentlessly. This is the Gothic ideal coming out in both writers—making the place complicit in the darkness.
Larriba’s prose density accomplishes something different than Faulkner, however. Faulkner’s goal in Absalom is to use a rambling maximalist syntax to make the past sins unknowable and the varied recountings of them unreliable—yet progressively revealing what can actually be known. Larriba uses a similar style in dense description, instead, to make the present known but unbearable. Two very different distinctions. Both writers are swimming in the Gothic tradition of ancestral curse and haunted terrain, but Faulkner wrote an epistemological novel that appeared Gothic while Larriba’s is a sensory-horror novel borrowing Gothic’s primary premise—the sins of the fathers.
Conclusion
I spent some time and energy with this novel trying to categorize it into a box I that I could articulate. First it was crime noir, then mass murderer, then conspiracy, then human-augmentation. All of these themes are present and the reader is led carefully by the hand to the categorization attempt—but eventually I stopped trying to find the book’s niche and settled on what I wrote above—sensory horror with strong Gothic flair.
There are places where the prose takes on too heavy a shade of purple and disrupts flow. And often there are unusual words that get over-leveraged (“glyph” and “rune”, among others). But it always seemed that at the point I noticed the breaking of flow, if I pushed through it for a few more sentences it could be regained. Just the same as with Faulkner.
Did Larriba write a novel worthy of his Gothic predecessors? I think they would have recognized him as a neighbor working in the same beloved fields. Does it have the greatness of Faulkner’s best works? No, not yet, but perhaps someday.
Other Links of Interest
MORE BOOK REVIEWS by Tod Newman
POSTS ABOUT SELF PUBLISHING by Tod Newman
If you liked this review, you might LOVE the Many Novels authored by W. Tod Newman.