This book is a near-perfect study of an author assuming their entire readership will be like them - USian white het dudes. It does better than John Dies at the End on this front, but once you notice it's hard to ignore: someone is a reporter or a lady reporter: a man or a black man etc etc. The author also goes out of his way to make jokes about black people, not wildly racist ones, rather expressing an urge to laugh at not with. My position on this kind of stuff is to read, use your brain and notice, and move on. It really just means I'm unlikely to recommend the book to anyone else. Aside from all that stuff, it's a much better book than JDatE. It is a novel rather than a series of episodes and it's a lot funnier. The story itself is a bit thin and while it's full of action it is missing some development of ideas (like about fear and the psychology of groups) and world-building for the spiders, baddies etc. Still, I read it quickly and stayed engaged the whole time.