CW: Racist and homophobic slurs

What a messed-up weird war story that was. A Vietnam War recon team discovers something horrible deep in the jungle across the border of Cambodia. A special forces team is assembled to tackle the threat, and discovers that it is far worse than expected. If you want a gruesome soldiers vs monsters story this delivers (ala Predator or Aliens).

The slow reveal of the monsters keeps the tension high, and they are so sufficiently unsettling that the more you discover about them the more delightfully revolting it gets.

The characters are super racist and are imbedded in their toxic masculinity so they regularly throw awful slurs around. As someone that grew up around a Vietnam Vet it felt uncomfortably accurate. If that accuracy is too toxic for you then stay away. That said, the soldiers aren’t portrayed as heroes, as much as they are psychologically damaged tools. The book doesn't expect you to like them, but there is a level of empathy describing how they got that way. There aren’t many characters that you root for, so when they get picked off in gruesome ways, you don’t feel too bad.

The unsettling journey deep into the jungle and the palpable tension are really the big selling points with the book. That and the ookiness of the creatures and what they leave behind.

If you want a shoot 'em up action creature feature, this delivers.

All out creature goodness in this one. Coming from everywhere and with a fun array of possibilities. The pace is lightning and action is explosive. A wild ride from beginning to end, set in an American man's man kind of setting (Vietnam in this case), with many o' guns, soldierly yelling and unthinking, and dudes beating their chests only to meet much bigger forest beasts.

When two marines chase a wounded man deep into the Cambodian jungle, one winds up dead and the other imprisoned. After he is rescued, Spiers tells the story of the creature that killed his commanding officer. In order to get out of the marines, Spiers agrees to go back to the valley as part of a unit to kill the beast. Will any of them make it out alive?

Tim Curran is the mutt's nuts and since spider creatures are involved, how could I not snap this one up? Before anyone gets their spoiler panties in a bunch, there's a spider on the cover and the title has the word 'weave' in it, you know something spidery is going to happen. Deal with it.

Like most of the reviews I've read, the first things that come to mind with Grimweave are Aliens or Predator, military vs. monster tales where you know there's a good chance only a couple people will survive. Nuking the site from orbit would have been a great option.

Tim Curran knows how to keep things tense. Even before any of the vermin are revealed, the jungle is a spooky place. From there, Curran deals out the gore and the grotesque arachnoid horrors slowly but surely, each encounter worse than the last. I also have to hand it to Curran for making the menace more than just the spider creature the cover depicts.

As I've said before, I think horror works best in short doses and Tim Curran is the king of the horror novella. This wasn't my favorite horror novella of his, however. The characters were kind of weak, even for a story of this type. I thought it maybe leaned a little too heavily on its Aliens/Predator roots. All things considered, I'm giving this a three out of five stars. It's three or four hours of creepy-crawling gory fun.

Fun quick read. Author did a great job at capturing the voice of the times and characters.

Great atmosphere in the book. You got the creepy vibes all through the book.

Action could have been spaced out more evenly and more time spent on the monster would have been nice.

Small errors within the internal logic of the world but nothing distracting.