[Book Review] ‘Crawling Horror: Creeping Tales of the Insect Weird’

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This review originally appeared in Dead Reckonings and has been reprinted with the permission of the author.

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To any external observer, some indifferent alien surveyor, it would be the insects who rule the planet known as Earth. They fill the gamut of ecological niches, from lowly grazer to apex predator. They’ve developed agriculture and architecture as well as less visible, but no less complex, social structures. They outnumber the planet’s dominant mammalian species, an amusingly recent development in its bio-history, by a factor of nearly 1.5 billion to one.

Yet to us, those arriviste mammals, they are little more than creepy crawlies; at best considered jewels to be collected, at worst as vermin to be eradicated. In this anthology for the British Library’s Tales of the Weird series, Daisy Butcher and Janette Leaf have collected a series of stories that do what horror does best and turn the tables on our assumptions. What if we become the jewels, they ask. What if we become the vermin?

What if we become the food?

Even in a collection noted for its striking design, Crawling Horror’s cover immediately impresses. The skull on the back of a death’s-head hawk-moth leers out at us in a sickly blue-green, the moth’s winglets creating an ornate shroud draped around its shoulders. Yet, even despite this grisly motif and its inescapable association with The Silence of the Lambs, the hawk-moth is a perfectly harmless creature. It is nothing more than our prejudice and superstition that has cursed the moth with an evil omen, even to the extent of the species’ formal, scientific names: atropos, lachesis, and styx. This prejudice, and the fear that arises from it, is outlined in a number of the stories in Crawling Horror. Indeed, the book opens with Edgar Allan Poe’s The Sphinx where the narrator, already highly-strung after fleeing an outbreak of cholera, seems to see “some living monster of hideous conformation” with a “representation of the Death’s Head, which covered nearly the whole surface of its breast.” This vision creates “a feeling of horror and awe—with a sentiment of forthcoming evil, which I found impossible to quell by any effort of reason” and, as the beast opens its jaws to screech “a sound so loud and expressive of woe, that it struck upon my nerves like a knell,” the narrator faints clean away. An astute reader will guess the twist of this very short piece fairly easily but it’s still unsettling when it comes; a reminder that fear can make us see what we think we should see, rather than what is really there. It’s a motif that repeats through Crawling Horror, not least in the pomposity of the Reverend James Milligan as he encounters “An Egyptian Hornet.” Here Algernon Blackwood gives us a character study of hypocrisy and cowardice as the Reverend pours his own venom and untrustworthiness onto the motionless figure of a hornet, even as he admits that its “shiny body was beautiful, and the yellow stripes on its sleek, curved abdomen were like the gleaming ornaments upon some feminine body of the seductive world he preached against.” Milligan is entranced by the insect as much as he is repelled by it, something I think many of us have felt and an example of that “aversion with a backward glance, lingering over and even savouring its subject” that the philosopher Carolyn Korsmeyer calls the sublate. 

Not satisfied with these intimate, one-on-one encounters, Butcher and Leaf have also expanded their vision to the inevitable result of prejudice and confusion; open conflict. In Carl Stephenson’s “Leiningen Versus The Ants,” we see the colonizer—a white plantation owner in Brazil—stare into the mandibles of the jungle’s response to that colonization; a migration of ferocious, all-consuming ants. Rather than flee, Leiningen makes a stand, fuelled first by stubbornness and then by desperation, and deploys fire and petrol against the horde. It’s hard not to root for the ants given Leiningen’s unpleasant arrogance, perhaps not Stephenson’s intent, but there’s also a chill as the mass of insects inch towards their enemies; “They’re over,” cries one of Leiningen’s laborers and the following scene is as disturbing as it is brief. Greater even than this is “The Miracle of the Lily” by Clare Winger Harris, a quite astonishing piece of speculative horror that spans generations and millennia in its description of a global conflict between insects and humans. Published in 1928, “The Miracle of the Lily” presages modern-day concerns about ecological collapse by almost two centuries: “There was not enough food to feed the people of the earth. Fruit and vegetables were becoming a thing of the past,” laments one of the story’s multiple narrators only to be corrected by a descendant who admits that “the fault was not with Nature but with man’s economic system.” The planet’s surface is reduced to a barren wasteland and humanity clings to isolated settlements built around the oxygen processors that keep them alive in the absence of vegetation. This is a gloomy, cynical tale that allows the possibility of optimism only to deny it at the last moment but I found it deeply emotional and timely. A warning from the future from the past.

My favorite piece in this anthology, though, is the one I find most deeply disturbing. In E. F. Benson’s “Caterpillars,” he takes the least threatening aspect of the insect’s life-cycle, the defenseless and squirming grubs, and focuses in on their “irregular lumps and swellings,” the “soft fleshy thud” as they fall to the floor. In contrast with the pleasant setting, a few days’ holiday in a friend’s villa, there’s something about the faceless, implacable threat that these lumps of flesh—“or whatever it is that caterpillars are made of”—are infused with by Benson that I find deeply, inexplicably unpleasant. When the narrator stumbles into their presence and “then, as I looked, it seemed to me as if they all suddenly became conscious of my presence,” I squirm and itch, no matter how I know it’s coming. There is a vileness to their strange, abject existence that is almost zombie-like and, as the story eventually reveals, infectious.

Although these few are stand-outs in the book, for me at least, Crawling Horror’s other tales of cursed beetles and protective butterflies are all enjoyable, especially when taken as a way of re-examining our own place in a world where we are, at least numerically, very much a minority. Even the book’s pages, scattered with small but wonderfully detailed illustrations of bees and ants and all their kin, reminds us of how perilous our existence would be if, to paraphrase another of Benson’s chilling phrases, “all the mouths were turned in our direction.”

An excellent addition to an already-excellent series from co-editors Butcher and Leaf.

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Article written by Dan Pietersen

Daniel Pietersen is the editor of I Am Stone: The Gothic Weird Tales of R. Murray Gilchrist, part of the British Library’s Tales of the Weird series. He is a recurring guest lecturer for “The Last Tuesday Society” and the “Romancing the Gothic” project, where he produces an ongoing series on Haunted Houses and related topics. He has also contributed criticism and reviews to publications like Dead Reckonings, Revenant and Horror Homeroom. Daniel lives in a very old house in a very old town and is slowly becoming very old himself. He occasionally appears on social media as @pietersender.

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