["The Insect Colony"] is about useless Americans scratching at each other in West Africa…. [The] characters are afflicted by irresponsibility and a sense of alienation;… illicit sex is the spring that propels the narrative….

[Larson] conveys the illegitimacy of his characters' presence in a landscape that has no need of them, that they cannot even profitably exploit. It occurs to Hunter Schuld, toward the end of his sojourn in a remote village of Cameroon, that he and generations of white interlopers had been blind to the reality of Africa; callous and inefficient predators, they gave nothing in return. Poor Hunter: a lonely entomologist who might have been content had he been left to study his African spiders, he awoke to only half the truth, the other half being that he is himself a victim, caught in a web set for him by a devouring woman. Hunter is vulnerable...