Crawling Horror: Creeping Tales of the Insect Weird

Description

'Its long antennae waved inquiringly back and forth, its tiny eyes sparkled black with crimson points, and then it began to run. The Professor caught it in his hand as it toppled from the edge of the counter. It bit him.' A brush with a killer hornet upends a reverend's life. A moth wreaks a strange vengeance on an entomologist. Bees deliver a supernatural dilemma to a mother-to-be. This new anthology offers a broad range of stories from the long history of insect literature, where six-legged beasts play many roles from lethal enemies to ethereal messengers. With expert notes on how each tale contributed to insect horror literature, Janette Leaf and Daisy Butcher are your field guides for a tour through classic insect encounters from the minds of Edgar Allan Poe, E. F. Benson, Clare Winger Harris and many more.

Daisy Butcher is a scholar working on the Open Graves, Open Minds Project at the University of Hertfordshire. She is the editor of Evil Roots: Killer Tales of the Botanical Gothic, published in this series in 2018. Janette Leaf is a scholar researching Gothic and weird insects at Birkbeck. She lectures on bugs in books at national and international conferences, and reviews for the British Society for Literature and Science.