Book #13: Crawling Horror edited by Daisy Butcher and Janette Leaf
Crawling Horror: Creeping Tales of the Insect Weird by Daisy Butcher
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I'd had this anthology on my bookshelf for several months, and was glad when I finally got to read it.
So, the connection between all of them is that they involve creepy crawlies, and mostly cast them in sinister, antagonistic roles. This is probably not particularly surprsising, given most peoples' reactions to bugs, although a small number of the stories in here included benevelont insects - for example, a butterfly that guides a ship to a stricken vessel.
I did manage to go to a book signing by the editors, both of whom are university scholars, and it was interesting to hear how they chose the stories. For example, all were unabridged, but they had to avoid any stories that might have content that could be triggering. Edgar Allen Poe's "The Gold Bug" was rejected because of its racist content.
All the stories in this book are from the 19th and early 20th centuries, so the only difficulty I had was coping with the language used in some of the narratives, which felt quite dense at times. I liked the fact that there was a mixture of very short stories (for example, Poe's The Sphinx), and longer novellas (for example, A. Lincoln Green's "The Captivity of the Professor").
Overall, I enjoyed reading this, and would definitely recommend it to others.
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