Giant Spider / Literature

• 1066 and All That: Robert the Bruce "armed himself with an enormous spider" at the Battle of Bannockburn.^note This is a nod to a legend about Robert sheltering in a ruined hut with a (normal-sized) spider at the ass end of nowhere, after yet another defeat by the English. After watching how hard she struggled to finish her web, even after gusts of wind undid her work several times, he was supposedly inspired to gather his scattered forces and go to war once again, this time successfully.
• The Adventures of Captain Proton: The giant Trundle spider in the Pocket Books novelisation. Proton and his companions are sacrificed to the giant spider, but it tells them it's sick of the lousy diet and helps them escape instead.
• Alex Verus: The books describe Arachne as a "tarantula the size of a minivan". Unusually for this trope she's extremely nice and helpful, and also makes really good clothes.
• Amtor: The targo are giant spiders that are native to Venus. The Venusians gather their webs, called tarel, which has thousands of uses.
• Anansi Boys has an entire army of big spiders at the end. Given the fairly central use of spider motifs in the book — the two protagonists are the sons of the titular West African spider god — this trope was inevitable.
• The Ancestral Trail: Baal is both intelligent and the size of a large house. And unlike most of the giant spiders on this list, he actually ate one of the heroes. Quite graphically too, with spurting blood and head-biting.
• Anno Dracula: In One Thousand Monsters, Clare Millinger, a vampire murderess is eaten from within by a tiny jorogumo (a Japanese monster known as the Whore-Spider). The result is a Giant Spider with scythe blade arms that can cut through a kappa's shell with ease, carapace so strong that silver and steel blades just bounce off it (as do explosive rockets) and when her eyes are shot out with silver bullets they regenerate seconds later. Additionally, she can breathe out deadly swarms of vampire butterflies and grows bigger as she eats more enemies.
• An Outcast in Another World: During a Dungeon Crawl, Rob is forced to fight a massive spider that’s continuously spawning smaller variants. As an Arachnophobe, he takes a savage glee in murdering it with excessive firepower.
• The A'rak by Michael Shea is a full novel Nift the Lean Sword and Sorcery story. The A'rak is a giant, soul-devouring alien spider who miraculously survives the destruction of its planet and crashlands on Earth in a pseudo-Celtic country. There the locals make a Deal with the Devil with this strange invader, in return for being fed livestock it'll only eat outsiders and will also guard their property. This arrangement enables the country to grow rich as it then offers banking services similar to a Swiss Bank.
• In M.R. James' story "The Ash-Tree", the Villain of the Week takes revenge from beyond the grave by means of a colony of supernatural spiders. One of them, glimpsed briefly from a distance, is initially mistaken for a squirrel, and their bodies are mentioned as similar in size to their victim's head.
• The Black Spider: The titular immortal demonic spider is as large as a human child, and its skin is poisonous.
• Bruce Coville's Book of... Aliens II: The protagonist meets a friendly one in The Spider Beast.
• Burton & Swinburne Series 3rd book Expedition to the Mountains of the Moon combines this trope with Spider Tank. During the World War, British scientists raised giant daddy longlegs and had them killed. They then motorized and armored the corpses before finally adding gun emplacements to make a powerful tank out of them.
• Breeding Ground (2006) and Feeding Ground (2009) by British author Sarah Pinborough are about spider-like creatures (whether derived from spiders or merely spider-like aliens is not entirely clear) which devastate Britain, leaving everything covered in tangled webs littered with dead bodies of humans. These charming creatures have found a way of using female humans as incubators for their young so that the women give birth to them in a fashion. The second book focuses on London, which has been similarly taken over. A group of people take refuge (so they think) in underground railway tunnels, but are not aware until it is too late, that one of these tunnels has been used by the spiders as a store-room, full of still-living humans wrapped up helplessly in silk and suspended in gigantic webs.
• Castle Roogna, one of Piers Anthony's earlier Xanth novels features a gigantic spider named Jumper (originally a very small spider before being caught in a magic spell) as one of the two main heroes.
• Children of Time (2015) presents a terraforming project gone awry where normal spiders gradually evolve over the centuries into giant (though still smaller than human) intelligent spiders. Along the way, they develop a unique society and technology fittingly suited their alien (to us) way of thinking. Unusually they are portrayed in a sympathetic light, arguably less monstrous than the last humans they eventually encounter.
• The alternate form of the shapeshifting half-demon in The Dark Tower.
• The Death Gate Cycle: Tyros are colossal spiders native to Pryan, the world of fire, whose front pair of legs has become adapted for manipulating objects. They are commonly used as beasts of burden by the local civilizations, due to their ability to navigate the treetops of the miles-high jungles that cover Pryan and the numerous gaps and vertical drops of its extensive "understory". Their webs are also used to construct bridges across gaps in the canopy.
• Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky features arachnoid aliens larger than a human.
• Destined to Lead has the spiedes, which are essentially cave-dwelling giant spiders, minus two eyes and four legs.
• In the second Dream Park novel, giant spiders with spikes or war clubs attached to their legs are among the guardians of the Cabal's home base in the Fimbulwinter Game.
• In Everybody Loves Large Chests The protagonist, Boxxy, is a mimic that first learns to grow legs by imitating those of a spider it observes in the Litgar dungeon complex. As a result, the chest-shaped mimic grows to resemble a giant square chest-shaped spider.
• Forest Kingdom: In the Hawk & Fisher spinoff series' book 6 (The Bones of Haven), Hawk, Fisher, and the Special Wizardry and Tactics team fight a giant spider while traversing the sewers.
• The largest predators of Hender's Island in the novel Fragment are creatures known as spigers, which as their name implies, resemble a cross between a tiger and a spider, and grow to the size of trucks. They're actually a type of crustacean related to mantis shrimp, though.
• In the Franny K. Stein book Frantastic Voyage, Franny is shown to have a pet giant spider named Snookums.
• In Richard Ryan's Funnelweb (1998), a nuclear accident has caused mutations which create giant funnelweb spiders (which are one of the most poisonous of all spiders) which lay waste to Sydney and bring Australia to its knees as it is quarantined by the rest of the world. There are many harrowing scenes of giant spider nests (one in the Sydney Opera House) in which hapless but still living humans are wrapped in spider silk and suspended in tangled webs, stored for future use as food.
• In the story "Gray Matter" in Stephen King's Night Shift collection, an ex-Bangor Public Works employee hints that what caused him to quit his job and become a drunk was something he saw in the sewers: "A spider as big as a good-sized dog settin' in a web full of kitties an' such all wrapped up in silk thread."
• Harry Potter includes creatures called Acromantulas, essentially giant spiders that can get up to elephant-size. They can talk and are sentient, but don't think you're likely to survive a conversation with one (unless you're Hagrid). They are most prominently featured in Chamber of Secrets, whose film adaptation actually specifies spiders in the BBFC content notice. Aragog, the "king" Acromantula, makes a cameo (albeit posthumous) appearance in The Half-Blood Prince as well... both in book and film versions, surprisingly, and the spiders return in Deathly Hallows when the Death Eaters drive them out of the forest and force them to attack Hogwarts, which also appeared briefly in the film. It should be noted that Ron is terrified of ordinary spiders, to the point that his boggart is a huge spider. Book Two wasn't very fun for him.
• The Heroes of Olympus: The Mark of Athena features Arachne, who is giant. Naturally, the arachnophobic Annabeth is the one who has to face her.
• Hothouse: They're not actual spiders, but traversers are plants roughly analogous to spiders in shape and capable of spinning a form of vegetable fiber. They're also each a mile in length when in the atmosphere and much larger in pressure-less space, and their webs are strong and extensive enough to connect the Earth and Moon.
• InCryptid: The dimension that Calculated Risks takes place in has many different species of Big Creepy-Crawlies, including giant spiders. Sarah tames and rides a small one — about the size of a Clydesdale.
• The Iron Teeth: Spiders the size of large dogs live in the forests of the titular mountains. When attacking, they paralyze their prey with their venom and wrap them up for later.
• This is what the titular antagonist of Stephen King's IT really looks like... or at least, that's how we see it. The book describes it as being about 15 feet tall. In the 1990s miniseries it was a monster which only vaguely looked like a spider, looking more like a spider crab with six legs, two reptilian forelimbs, an antlike head with only two eyes, and luminous muscles. In It: Chapter One, Pennywise briefly generates spider-like appendages, foreshadowing its true form that appears in Chapter Two — a cross between his clown form and a giant spider.
• The Spider from James and the Giant Peach. She's huge, but she's also one of the nicest characters in the book and its film adaptation. She was also a regular-sized spider before she was turned giant (along with the other invertebrates in the book and the titular peach) by a bagful of magic crocodile tongues.
• In one Journey to the West story, Sun Wukong encounters seven spider demons disguised as beautiful women, who try to seduce the group and spray webbing from their navels to wrap them up. They're also friends with a powerful centipede demon.
• Kingdom on Fire: One of the seven Ancients humanity has been at war with for over a decade in the book is Nemneris The Water Spider. She's a massive spider that lives in the sea, scuttling ships and eating their crews. She makes her first proper appearance in the series in A Poison Dark and Drowning.
• The title for the first Kingdom's Disdain book, "Web of Bones", comes from the Mountain Recluse's web. Cardinal wakes up entrapped by giant cave spiders, and is saved by Mad Crosbones.
• A spider with a twelve-foot leg span was described in Kong: A Natural History Of Skull Island.
  A spider that ate dinosaurs — if ever there was a single animal that exemplified nature's insanity on Skull Island, Stickalithus was it.
• Giant space spiders are the antagonists of Philip Reeve's steampunk novel Larklight. They aren't quite spiders, having ten legs instead of the usual eight, and unlike most of the other examples on this page, they're both sentient and technologically advanced.
• Micro includes a scene where the protagonists, who have been shrunk down to tiny sizes, encounter a huntsman spider, which from their perspective is described as the size of a house.
• There is a spider-like species of monster in The Mist.
• Mother of Learning: The grey hunter is a species of spider as tall as a human being, tough enough to withstand small-arms fire, with blinding speed and Super-Reflexes, and venom that completely disrupts the victim's ability to use magic. What makes it really dangerous, however, is its Super-Senses, perceiving magic and air currents and the vibrations of the ground to give it nigh-omniscience about everything in its vicinity (making traps and ambushes all but doomed to failure). Despite all the advantages of the time loop, including the ability to retry their fight over and over, Zorian and Zach still have a very difficult time putting it down, especially without sustaining serious injuries, let alone doing that without incinerating its alchemically valuable egg sac.
• Another one shows up in Needful Things, created from the pain of Polly's arthritis.
• Spider aliens attempt to heat up the Earth in John Lymington's Night of the Big Heat.
• Perdido Street Station features the Weaver, a psychotic hyper-intelligent multidimensional giant spider. Brrr. The bad news (well, the really bad news) is that the Weaver is not the worst thing in the city of New Crobuzon. The good news is that it teams up with the city government to fight the worse things when it is asked nicely and actually takes a shine to one of the more heroic characters. The not-so-good news is that it makes decisions based on its own alien ideas of what is aesthetically pleasing, so its idea of "helping" is unpredictable at best, and extremely dangerous at worst.
• In Poison, the titular character and her group must travel to the Realm of Spiders and retrieve a dagger. They encounter a gigantic spider's web, owned by an equally gigantic spider who they successfully trick. Poison then reaches a castle and finds the spider's wife, who for all intents and purposes looks like a pregnant dead woman. Later on, Poison is forced to press her hand to the spider Lady's belly, and she can feel the baby spider inside moving. It's also implied that she will eat her "husband" after the baby spider is born. A giant spider will be eaten by a woman.
• There's a battle with giant spiders in the novel A Rustle in the Grass by Robin Hawdon, but seeing as it's a told from the point of view of ants their great size is hardly surprising. Interestingly the ant protagonist doesn't find the spiders anywhere near as terrifying as his encounter with a toad, with its natural camouflage, ability to leap huge distances and strike with its tongue from well out of stinging range.
• In The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel, Perenelle Flamel allies with the gigantic spider-god Areop-Enap.
• In "The Seven Geases" by Clark Ashton Smith, Atlach-Nacha is an Eldritch Abomination resembling a giant spider with a humanoid face.
• Ancient legends in A Song of Ice and Fire refer to the Others riding "giant ice spiders". However, they have yet to appear in the saga.
• The Weaver Folk in Spellsinger are giant intelligent spiders and neutral-to-good guys. Conveniently, the main bad guys, the Plated Folk, are giant insects.
• In the late 1970s and early 1980s, at the height of a rise in the popularity of horror fiction in Britain, Richard Lewis wrote a two-book series of novels. In Spiders (1978), giant spiders rampage across the country attacking humans and generally wreaking havoc. In The Web (1981), set some years later, the spiders have grown a bit bigger — and are now catching humans in their webs and carrying them off into their underground nests.
• The Spider Beside Her, the last Graveyard School book, dealt with a wish-granting spider. That spider, though regular size, granted the wish of one Ari Spinner, an arachnid enthusiast whose deepest wish was to become a spider. Ari received the ability to transform into a giant spider at will, and while retaining her intelligence, developed the appropriate appetite of a spider of her size. Ari attempted to eat some of her classmates before being stopped by Mel West, who was bitten by the same spider. Mel's wish was to be able to create art with his left hand, and anything he draws with it becomes real. Mel had been able to draw Ari shifting back into a human permanently. Ari begged Mel to let her become a spider again by promising to never bother him or her classmates again. Mel complies. Of course, he turns her into a regular size spider, much to her frustration.
• Colin Wilson's Spider World novels are set in a post-apocalyptic future in which telepathic giant spiders (and various insects) are the dominant species ruling over mankind.
• The Cheka in the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Relaunch books are a sapient Giant Spider species. They control the expansionist Magisterial Cheka Kingdom, in the Gamma Quadrant. Then there's the semi-sentient Comes-in-the-night-kills-many, which was essentially a giant spider wielding clubs. They're extinct, now; wiped out by the Jem'Hadar after threatening a Dominion farming colony. Finally, friendly aliens the Pak'shree resemble a cross between a Giant Spider and a giant crab or beetle.
• Star Wars Legends:
  • Galaxy of Fear has things called brain spiders in one book, though they're only about three feet tall and are robots piloted by brains in jars. They freak Zak out a bit. A later book has the knobby white spiders of Dagobah, which are actually the mobile larval form of trees and can get quite a bit larger.
  • Elsewhere, the Fantastic Drug Spice is produced by Energy Spiders; they are huge and live in the deep mines of Kessel. Anyone caught by them will have their life energy drained from them; since they feed on energy, blaster bolts are a No-Sell on them, but ion blasters will get the job done.
• Large white spiders with crystalline carapaces are constantly attacking Nypre and others in the Stories of Nypre series.
• Aella fights one in Sword Sisters as part of the Red Reaper stories published by Ragnarok Publications. Double-points for being to rescue someone from a Human Sacrifice.
• A giant spider appears in Tarnsman of Gor; partially subverted though, in that it is civilized and can speak (with the help of Translator Microbes). It's not that big as giant spiders go either, although it's still pretty big for a spider. Despite averting, it plays to this trope when it assists the protagonist in a capture, pretending to want to kill the Damsel in Distress. His name is Narr and he's a relatively pleasant chap, although a bit of a fussbudget.
• Lots of large, hostile spiders appear in the first chapter of Tasakeru. Also applies to their sentient and very hostile mother.
• In There Is No Antimemetics Division, the forces of SCP-3125 have enlisted the aid of antimemetic spiders as tall as skyscrapers. Exactly how and why they are allied is never made clear.
• Tolkien's Legendarium: J. R. R. Tolkien felt no conscious dislike of spiders; he said he began to put spiders as bad guys in his stories because one of his sons was an arachnophobe.
  • The Hobbit has lots of talking spiders about the size of a large dog infesting the depths of Mirkwood, where they capture the dwarves with plans to eat them.
  • The Lord of the Rings introduces Shelob, their much larger and nastier relative. Gollum tried to use her appetite to dispose of Frodo so he could take the Ring for himself. Unfortunately for both him and Shelob, an absolutely furious Samwise Gamgee manages to free himself from Gollum. Through a combination of courage, cleverness, Elvish weaponry, and sheer dumb luck, he manages to wound her, driving her away.
  • And then their ancestor, Ungoliant in The Silmarillion, came along. For reference, she's so powerful that she can hide herself and Morgoth (Sauron's master) from the Valar. She is able to kill the Trees of Light by drinking their sap. Then for the finale, she captures Morgoth and it takes several Balrogs to free him. If there's ever an adaptation, there's going to be a lot more arachnophobes in the world.
  • That being said, Shelob and Ungoliant aren't so much giant spiders, as they are large horrific monsters that are spider-like. Shelob has a wasp-like stinger (real spiders can only inject venom with their fangs) and horns, and in the movie has a large gaping mouth, whereas real spiders can only ingest liquid. Ungoliant in particular is explicitly an Eldritch Abomination that has taken spiderlike form.
• Tortall Universe: Starting from The Immortals, there are the Always Chaotic Evil spidrens, which look like giant spiders with human heads. They eat people and have glowing, sticky, flammable webs.
• The Tough Guide to Fantasyland: All spiders in Fantasyland are huge, and prey on small Humans, Dwarfs and Gnomes. They live in deep forests and in caves, and spin thick, strong and extremely sticky webs. They're described like a ripoff of those in The Lord of the Rings (unsurprisingly). It's stated they've evolved to their size because of insects, their former prey, having gone extinct, forcing them to turn to humanoid prey.
• "The Tower of the Elephant": Conan the Barbarian encountered a spider as big as a pig, which struck down Taurus of Nemedia, a prince of thieves, with one bite. It suffered an unfortunate death via treasure chest to the face.
• True History: In the war between the Sun and the Moon, the Moon people have island-sized spiders spin webs between the two celestial bodies, so the armies can walk across while the Moon and Sun are sailing around the sky.
• Turn Coat: Harry Dresden is accosted by a group of intelligent, pony-sized faerie spiders while traveling through the Nevernever. They threaten to kill him, but he convinces them to back down by showing them his wizard cred by pulping the apparent leader of the group with a force spell. Later on, these same spiders turn out to be the minions of whoever the conspirators were during the battle on Demonreach Isle.
• The "spinners" in The Underland Chronicles are giant intelligent spiders. Despite their alarming appearances and cannibalistic habits, at least of their dead, they're actually allied with the good guys.
• The Wandering Inn: Huge spiders reside in a nearby area, where Erin, the main character, has her Inn. Although the size should be more than enough, they have armor-like protection on their backs, giving them the name "Shield Spiders", which makes it very hard to harm them.
• In The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the animals in a forest were terrorized by an evil, elephant-sized spider. The Cowardly Lion found it asleep and punched its thin neck, breaking its head off. In gratitude, the animals made the lion their king.

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