![The legs of an insect are crushed under an unmade bed.]()
In “Life with Spider,”a young man named Fletcher suddenly finds that, everywhere he goes, he’s accompanied by a disturbing creature with many legs and shiny jet-black skin but—no eyes, ears, or mouth. This is Spider, and it terrorizes Fletcher. Much of the story is taken up with his increasingly frantic attempts to rid himself of the creature, which induces psychological as well as physical discomfort. This premise is not quite the same as waking up to find that you’ve been transformed into an insect, but, like Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” “Life with Spider” mixes astonishingly plausible action with an ever-present sense that something deeper is going on. For instance, FletcherrecognizesSpider. Spider is rendered with the rigor of a human character, and the reader is likely to recognize Spider—and the feelings it elicits—as clearly as Fletcher does. —Willing Davidson, senior editor | 
