1 out of 4 stars
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Spiders In Heaven is a fictional portrayal of the formation and operation of a Small Kill Team, a group of snipers trained to protect US soldiers in combat from enemy snipers and IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices). Author Jimmy Miller is a former combat sniper and the book is written in the first person from the point of view of a Recon Scout Platoon Sergeant who is selected to choose and train a Small Kill Team in order to take down an enemy sniper plaguing the base. Unfortunately, military politics mean he is permitted to recruit only from secondary personnel including cooks, clerks and technicians. Making the best of a bad job, our protagonist puts together a team of misfits, but they are unable to find the sniper. Eventually, he is able to seek help from another sniper, known throughout the book only as the Chief, in achieving his team’s goals.
Miller obviously knows his stuff as regards military operations, but as a writer, he has some serious shortcomings. The book is full of jargon which would be incomprehensible to a non-military reader, only occasionally with an explanation attached. This alone could be fairly easily addressed, but it took me three-quarters of the book to figure out that it was set in Iraq, and I still don’t know in which city, or even which war. The Chief is an intriguing character who acts as something of a Zen master to the protagonist, but he also makes no sense a lot of the time. The title ‘Spiders In Heaven’ comes from a line spoken by the Chief, but it has no real context and doesn’t seem to make any sense; even the protagonist doesn’t seem to understand it, so I have no idea why it is the book’s title.
The text jumps between past and present tense continuously, sometimes even in the same sentence, and there are numerous spelling errors and grammatical mistakes. There is no flow or continuity to the story, with anecdotes being included that don’t seem to fit within the overall context. With the constant jumps between past and present tense, I was never sure in what order events were actually occurring.
There was one part of the book I actually liked, and that was a chapter of ‘letters’ written purportedly from the troops to their families, one of which included a really tragic and shocking story about the death of an Iraqi child. Unfortunately, this was never addressed again in the book, either in discussing the aftermath of the tragedy or describing the actual events which occurred.
This book needs properly fleshing out from what reads like a rough outline, followed by a major content edit and a thorough proofread. For example, I’d have used the ‘letters’ as endnotes to each chapter, making them the emotional counterpoint to the events of the book, showing how the troops were affected by their actions. The emotions of the protagonists are what engages readers with a book; we have to care about them, and I found it impossible to care about any of the characters in this book when their feelings were never shared with the reader.
It’s possible that with a lot of work, this could become a good story about snipers and their actions during war. In its present form, however, this is barely even readable, and I cannot in good conscience recommend it to anyone. I am awarding it one out of four stars.
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Spiders in Heaven
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