Review: Breeding Ground

At the end of the day, the best I might be able to say of Sarah Pinborough's Breeding Ground was that it kept me turning pages. It's a little baffling, really, given how much of the story didn't work for me—I didn't find the protagonist, Matt, particularly sympathetic, the "widows" weren't described in a way that frightened me, and narrative style put too much distance between me and the horror—but still, I kept reading, right through to the very end. So what on earth about this story worked?

If I could articulate my answer, I would probably be a much better writer. But I think this week's chapter of Writers Workshop of Horror, "Middles: The Meat of the Matter," provides an excellent frame for trying to pull apart the threads that kept me hooked to the story like so much spider's silk.

The answer I've come to is this: the middle of Breeding Ground reads like a primer on how to write well-paced action. Pinborough's writing builds and releases tension at the perfect moments, smoothly transitioning from moments of tenderness to moments of horror to bursts of action and back again. Despite feeling like I wanted to be closer to the action in some of those scenes (show us Dave's amputation, damnit!), I felt myself hooked along, unable to set down the book between chapters, with that excited bubble of tension in my chest that comes when you know sh*t's about to hit the fan.

I could nit-pick some of the details that frustrated me about the book (if you're going to try to explain the widows with science, I'm going to need a hell of a lot more information than just a shrugged, "GMO's?"), but what really left me feeling unsatisfied by the book was the ending. In fact, I'm not even sure you could really say there was an ending. The book just ends, right at the end of the middle.

It's hard to articulate, honestly, because I actually put down the book smiling. The ending's warm, it's fuzzy, it's hopeful—despite some of my lingering questions about the widows (seriously, if they need human males in order to spawn their mates, why the f*** did they just spend 90% of the book trying to eradicate the last remaining human males?!). But as I glanced back through "Middles," it struck me that, for all Pinborough's masterful weaving of tension, Matt never actually manages to "defeat his demons" (Laimo 16). Sure, he gets a new wife and baby to replace those he lost at the start, but what does he really accomplish besides survival? What has he even been fighting for this whole time, besides survival?

I don't know if Breeding Ground needed an entire Part III stuck on the back end to help resolve some of these questions, or if one more reflective paragraph would have done the trick (I mean, we don't even find out when and where he's writing from, and he's been teasing us from the future this whole time!). I get that Pinborough might have wanted to leave some ambiguity in the ending. I didn't need the widows to decisively win or for the humans to figure out a plan for eradicating the threat world-wide. I think the small hope of one human family is enough—as long as it feels like some kind of arc has been completed.

So maybe that's what I wanted. Because the arc is right there, in front of our noses. Matt loses Chloe but he finds Rebecca. One baby becomes a monster but he gains another, (presumably) hale and sane. So why doesn't Matt connect the dots? Why doesn't he satisfy the reader with an acknowledgement of how far he has come, how much has changed and stayed the same, and how much of it was worth it, in the end? Is that what it takes to make a good ending? I'm not sure. But I'm hoping next week's chapter of WWoH might give me a clue.


Citations: Pinborough, Sarah. Breeding Ground. Leisure Books, 2006.

Laimo, Michael. "Middles: The Meat of the Matter." Writers Workshop of Horror, edited by Michael Knost, Woodland Press, 2010, pp. 11-17.