When his agent suggested the pseudonym “Ezekiel Boone,” Zentner readily agreed. “They’re both great for different reasons.” going to a movie at the mall,” Zentner says. “It’s like going to a movie at the art house vs. The Hatching series is so different from Zentner’s other projects - literary novels Touch and The Lobster Kings - that he and his agent and editors decided it made sense to publish these books under a pen name. It gives you a global sense of what’s going on.” “Having a large cast allows you to skip through things. The infestation begins in Peru and swiftly spreads to China, India, the United States and beyond. What Zentner did instead was craft a creepy crawly trilogy - The Hatching (2016), Skitter (2017) and Zero Day (coming in 2018) - that focuses on a plague of spiders. His most recent novels, under the pen name Ezekiel Boone, are The Hatching and Skitter. Zentner’s first two novels, The Lobster Kings and Touch, are works of literary fiction. He earned an MFA from Cornell University and did his undergraduate work at Grinnell College. Sonny’s Blues by James Baldwin Foster by Claire KeeganĪlexi Zentner, an assistant professor of English who joined the Harpur College faculty in 2013, grew up in Ontario, Canada, and now lives in Ithaca, N.Y. The Master Butchers Singing Club by Louise Erdrich A million spiders is scarier.”Īlexi Zentner, aka Ezekiel Boone, loves to read and teach fiction. a couple of thousand spiders is different. a spider, well: Do you have a shoe? You win. “I didn’t want to write a book about being startled,” he says. The Harpur College author would turn the spiders into the vehicle for a fictional apocalypse. And it was shockingly hard to shake.” Zentner’s nightmares soon gave way to a plan. But I had an image of a spider burrowing in and bursting out of people. “The truth is most spiders are not dangerous. “It’s some sort of deep thing inside us where that movement startles us,” he says.

Alexi Zentner isn’t afraid to say it: He’s scared of spiders.

The Mansion by Ezekiel Boone