Spider is a novel by the British novelist Patrick McGrath, originally published in the United States in 1990. Its eponymous character, birth name Dennis Cleg, is a recent arrival from a lunatic asylum to a halfway house in the East End of London—just a few streets away, by strange coincidence, from the very house where he grew up, and the scene of some barely visible but tremendous trauma which peeps out at the reader gradually from the fog of Spider's reminiscences.