Crawling Horror

Janette Leaf

ISBN 10: 0712353496 / ISBN 13: 9780712353496

Published by British Library Publishing, GB, 2021

About this Item

'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.

Seller Inventory # LU-9780712353496

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Crawling Horror
• Publisher: British Library Publishing, GB
• Publication Date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0712353496
• ISBN 13: 9780712353496
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

'What a terrible calamity, what a stupefying circumstance, if mosquitoes were the size of camels, and a herd of wild slugs the size of elephants invaded our gardens and had to be shot with rifles...'

A blue scarab which makes the sound of a terrifying death-tick. A moth with the markings of a dead man’s face. An empire of intelligent, aggressive, and colossal ants. The insect kingdom has finally come to seek retribution for humankind's negligence. Never has a creature been so topical – with headlines warning of the mosquito-bearing viruses, fire ants destroying power sources, invasive yellow ladybirds, or an ecological insect apocalypse that threatens the very balance of our natural world.

With growing concerns about global warming, pesticides, and genetically modified crops, Eco-Gothic is moving to the fore in modern scholarship, and this collection allows readers to be a fly on the wall to some of the creepiest and crawliest accounts of insectoid horror from the likes of Edgar Allan Poe, E.F. Benson, and Jane G. Austin. Fear indeed walks on many legs.

About the Author

Janette Leaf is a PhD candidate at Birkbeck, and has presented on Richard Marsh’s late Victorian bestseller, The Beetle, and nineteenth-century Egyptology in London and the provinces. She is also a reviewer for Cambridge University Press and the British Society for Literature and Science.

Daisy Butcher is a Doctoral Student working on the Open Graves, Open Minds Project at the University of Hertfordshire. Her study focuses on depictions of the feminine in gothic and weird fiction, including particular discussion of female mummies, vampires, and of course, the killer plant.