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

Still, these crustaceans are not crushed. In the next book they pop up in Australia, where they spring two surprises. First, they’ve developed a fire allergy since their last clash, and second, King Crab is actually Queen Crab. A last-minute crab boil saves the valiant Aussies, and the crabs return to Britain to demand what is rightfully theirs: London! Pushing inland, aided in part by animal rights activists who worship them as gods and tie human treats to bridges as snacks, theirs seems less a good-natured rampage and more a full-blown revolution.

Thanks to their previous poison shower, the crabs live up to their zodiac sign and develop cancer. They all die immediately, proving once again that no animal can withstand humankind’s pollution.

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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.