Paperbacks from Hell [N.F. - Literature, Art]

Death Comes Crawling

The smaller something is, the scarier it seems. Hence Michael Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain, about a killer microbe, sold millions of copies, whereas no one has ever written a book called Stomp, about killer elephants. Insects nestle into that sweet spot: small enough to be disgusting, yet big enough to be dangerous. Even better, in their perpetual search for new critters to feast on human flesh, authors have 950,000 insect species to choose from. Whether in Peter Tremayne’s The Ants (1979), Edward Jarvis’s Maggots (1986), or Shaun Hutson’s Slugs (1982), tiny beasties seem united in their hatred of humanity.

Starting with the inevitable prologue and always ending with the survival of a few hardy specimens (just in case sales justify a sequel), these books have much in common. They take place almost exclusively during the hottest day/week/month of the year after radiation/evolution/untested insecticide causes fauna to mutate. Insect-attack books are basically morality tales in which unscrupulous developers, ethics-free businessmen, and ineffectual local leaders find their scale-balancing comeuppances between chitinous mandibles.

The exception is Pierce Nace’s wildly amoral Eat Them Alive (1977), in which Dyke Mellis tries to double-cross his criminal associates after a robbery. They foil his plan, castrate him, and leave him to die in the desert. Dyke recovers and is hiding in South America almost a decade later when an earthquake raises an island full of ten-foot-tall praying mantises off the coast. Immediately turning giant praying mantises into giant praying-mantis lemonade, Dyke trains them to kill at his command. He then makes his way to the home of each member of his old gang, letting his army of trained killer mantises eat them alive, usually starting with their genitals. In the end, someone with the same idea, only equipped with an army of even bigger praying mantises, lets them eat Dyke alive. There is no moral. God is dead and life is a bleak, dark tunnel lined with hungry insects.

Horror’s biggest mystery: Who is Pierce Nace? The best guess is that she’s Evelyn Pierce Nace, a 69-year-old Texan credited with authoring 40 paperbacks. Credit 72

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But insects don’t just want to teach us how to be good by chewing off our faces—they also want to gobble our junk. Michael R. Linaker’s scorpions (technically arachnids, but still likely to invade England, so basically insects) focus their attacks on women’s breasts when they aren’t spreading mayhem at the nearby circus. John Halkin’s caterpillars in Squelch (1985) home in on a police constable’s groin. And the seemingly benign moths of Mark Sonders’s Blight (1981) are full of surprises, as one young mother discovers when she is swarmed to death:

“They could hurt her no more. They had done their worst. Or so she thought. An intense slice of pain, unlike any she had ever before experienced, made her body jerk upright into a sitting position as the moths attacked and conquered areas obscenely tender and private.”

Moths are the Rocky Balboas of the killer-insect world. “They’re moths, man. Just moths,” someone observes. “They don’t even have teeth.” True, but, squeaking like bats, the moths unroll their savage proboscises and suck the blood out of humans, leaving baffled and dying characters in their wake. “Moths attack sweaters and fly around light bulbs. They don’t devour humans.” And yet they do, flying into ears and noses, down throats, and, unfortunately, up butts.

Strangely, the insect apocalypse seems to put everyone in the mood for love. In Squelch, after her sister has half her foot gnawed off by a hungry caterpillar, a young television director leaps into bed with her brother-in-law. In Blood Worm (1987), the main character’s wife sleeps with an enormous number of men during the worm-and beetle apocalypse and then leaves a note for her husband saying she’s a slut and, by the way, their daughter is missing. She immediately becomes an alcoholic hobo and is last seen stumbling around the ruins of London, which has been abandoned to the inevitable postapocalyptic motorcycle gangs.

These characters’ inclination toward romance could be due to spending much of their time drunk in pubs. Always the first meeting place for farmers alarmed that their prize sheep have been eaten by something they’ve never encountered before, the pubs never seem to close, no matter how many slugs reduce the local citizenry to piles of grisly bones or how many snails drag their prey from bed and into their hell maws. Gin and whiskey are dispensed liberally all day long, and everyone seems to be playing a drinking game: receive a shock, take a drink.

It’s also no surprise that in their inebriated state, humans often make terrible decisions—going outside in the dark to investigate why the dog suddenly stopped barking, or battling the caterpillar invasion by releasing thousands of five-foot-long lizards that eat the caterpillars and then quickly overrun the country themselves.

The weakness of killer-insect books is that bugs lack a compelling perspective on the world. Feral frogs, disgusting dictyoptera, gore-loving gastropods, angry arachnids, and lethal lizards (these are not insects, of course, but are still disgusting) have one-track minds: eat humans. Occasionally, an author will try to make us empathize with his insectoid invaders, leading to passages in which scorpions make “a grimace of rage” or spiders “howl with fury.” However, most of us would be hard-pressed to tell the difference between a scorpion grimacing in rage and one giggling with glee.

Maybe that’s why they hate us. We spend so much time swatting, slapping, spraying, and squeezing them to death that we never really take the time to get to know them as individuals.

Reptile, amphibian, arachnid—it doesn’t matter. If they’re gross and they want to invade England and eat people, they’re insects. Credit 75