I did not finish ZERO DAY in one sitting. That is because I refused to read it at night. I had to steal some time here and a few minutes there to read it in daylight and with the lights on.

This is the final installment of a trilogy written by a talented but apparently demented author named Ezekiel Boone. Only someone truly and badly damaged could think of a plot like this and execute it so well. The plot? Let me put it this way. In one of those incidents of happenstance that authors and publishers frequently wish for but very rarely happens, a news article appeared shortly before ZERO DAY was published. The story put forth the proposition that if spiders were to suddenly acquire a taste for human flesh, it would take less than a year for the buffet table, if you will, to get wiped out.

That is the basic premise of this book and its predecessors, THE HATCHING and SKITTER. The more advanced premise deals with the fact that, unlike the stuffed potatoes at your local Golden Corral, humans aren’t going to just sit there and let the spiders feast. We’re going to fight back.

"ZERO DAY is a thriller in every sense of the word. But Boone never lets the reader forget that the primary driving force behind everything that happens isn’t the spiders, but rather the people."

So how well does this play out over the course of three novels? Well enough that ZERO DAY never runs out of steam. The narrative just barrels along, jumping from the manner in which civilians deal with the invasion to the repercussions of the U.S. President’s plan of attack while a group of techies and research scientists, working independently (well, at least kind of) come up with a last-ditch technique to discover where the spiders are coming from and take them down for good.

As a result, ZERO DAY is a thriller in every sense of the word. But Boone never lets the reader forget that the primary driving force behind everything that happens isn’t the spiders, but rather the people. Some characters are only present for a few pages and then disappear, never to be seen again. Others have been hopping on and off the page since THE HATCHING. All are memorable in their own way. Boone also develops a couple of biological mysteries with respect to the spiders’ behavior, the solutions of which ultimately provide the potential key to getting rid of these creatures for good, or at least a reasonable facsimile thereof.

ZERO DAY doesn’t have numbered chapters. Instead it jumps from place to place, with each location so noted at the beginning of each section. My favorite part of the book occurs in Nazca, Peru, where a group of graduate students on a field study with a wannabe Indiana Jones are having dinner in an open-air restaurant when they notice people running by. Dinner is over for them but is just beginning for the spiders. It’s literary horror at its finest, told from the third-person perspective of a student who was among the first to discover one of the large spider eggs that he shipped back to the United States for research purposes.

I’m not telling you anymore. I’m getting creeped out just discussing the novel, which I think has permanently raised my hackles. And yes, I loved every word of every book in the trilogy.