YMMV / Ferals Series

• Anti-Climax Boss: Despite being built up as an immensely dangerous foe responsible for the deaths of many powerful ferals, as well as having just undergone a One-Winged Angel transformation, the Spinning Man is defeated by Caw with relative ease by merely being dropped to his death.
• Complete Monster: Gideon Marshall, known better as the Spinning Man, is a sinister spider feral who seeks to take over the city of Blackstone by any means necessary. Instigating a war between the ferals in an event known as the Black Summer, the Spinning Man murdered his childhood friend Elizabeth Carmichael and her husband, and would've killed their five-year-old son Caw had the crows not taken him to safety. The Spinning Man's evil persisted even in death, as he attempted to torture Caw and Lydia when they entered the Land of the Dead to force them to return him to life. Seemingly destroyed by Caw's crows, the Spinning Man returns to the mortal realm by possessing Caw's friend Selina. Now going by the name the White Widow, the Spinning Man engineers a new crime wave, while simultaneously tormenting Caw via personal attacks, turning his allies against him and murdering one of Caw's crow companions, all the while draining Selina of her life force so that he may return in physical form. Eventually luring Caw back to his old home, the Spinning Man fully drains Selina of her life force, killing her before Caw's eyes, before promptly murdering Caw himself.
• Creepy Awesome: The Mother of Flies, who utilizes Synchronized Swarming to nightmarish, yet efficient, effects.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • The Spinning Man crossed this long ago when he murdered Caw's parents. The White Widow's Revenge makes this even worse with the reveal that the Spinning Man and Caw's mother were childhood friends.
  • Cynthia Davenport, aka the Mother of Flies, crosses this when she tries to murder her own daughter.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • Caw's parents' death via getting devoured by a swarm of spiders can be quite horrifying to arachnophobes.
  • Selina's Transformation Horror while possessed by the Spinning Man. Her skin starts to rot, her limbs become disjointed, her spine curves unnaturally, and her skeleton morphs to resemble that of a spider.
• The Woobie:
  • Caw. He's orphaned at the age of five and spends much of his life forced to scavenge to survive, with the crows as his only form of companionship. He goes through many hardships throughout the books, and even gets killed by the Spinning Man, though he gets better.
  • Selina Davenport. She's neglected, abused, and taken advantage of by her mother, who also tries to murder her for not following in her footsteps, she's treated with contempt by nearly everyone in Caw's group sans Caw himself, to the point that they even threaten to kill her several times, even though she's trying to help them, and at the end of the novel, she's been shot and poisoned. Things only get worse for her in the following novel, as not only is she still regarded with disdain by the ferals, but she then gets possessed by the Spinning Man, undergoing a nightmarish transformation into the White Widow, with the Spinning Man slowly draining her of her life force, which ultimately kills her. By the novel's end, she may as well be the biggest woobie in the series.
  • Lydia becomes this in The White Widow's Revenge after her father finds out her mother is a feral, leading to her parents' marriage coming under stressful times.

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