Spider Riders is a three-book series published by Newmarket Press. Conceived and fleshed out by Tedd Anasti and Patsy Cameron-Anasti. The husband and wife team wrote and produced over 500 episodes in various Walt Disney series. Their work includes Duck Tales, Beetlejuice, and The Little Mermaid.

They wrote the first novel in the series, Spider Riders: Shards of the Oracle. Stephen D. Sullivan -- author of several novels in the Dragonlance line of novels put out by Wizards of the Coast as well as other novels based on Legend of Five Rings, and junior novels based on movies about the Fantastic Four, Elektra, and Iron Man -- helps with the writing chores on the last two novels: Spider Riders: Quest of the Earthen and Reign of the Soul Eater.

The books were created to launch an animated series for syndication. So far 52 episodes have been made, though there were several changes from the books. More changes were made when the series went from the United States to Japanese syndication.

The novels center around a teenager (in the novels, though he’s only 11 years old in the animated series) named Hunter Steele who accidentally falls into a tunnel that drops him into Arachnia. Spider Riders: Shards of the Oracle tells the story of Hunter’s advent into this mysterious subterranean world. Once there, he finds the world menaced by the Insectors, who look pretty much like giant preying mantises -- at least, they did when I imagined them.

The Turandot, the human people who capture him, don’t know what to do with him. There are prophecies about the Earthen (which is what they call people from the surface world), but they don’t know if Hunter will help them or hurt them. He gets them to train him to become a Spider Rider, and he has to seek out and tame a ten-foot battle spider named Shadow.

This kind of story, and even this kind of writing, was better regulated to the pulp days of the 1930s and 1940s. Edgar Rice Burroughs made serious bank on stories that weren’t that much different than the story laid out here. In fact, if you take the John Carter of Mars series, Carson Napier of Venus, or David Innes of Pellucidar and match them up plot point for plot point, you’d probably be surprised at how close they are.

Hunter quickly becomes the best and most powerful Spider Rider that’s ever gone into battle. Unfortunately, the Oracle -- a statue that becomes animated at key, read: convenient, times -- has lost eight pieces of its crown. The first thing the Turandot have to do is get them back. Hunter quickly becomes part of that effort.