Book Review: "Crawling Horror" ed. by Daisy Butcher and Janette Leaf

Full Title: Crawling Horror: Creeping Tales of the Insect Weird edited by Daisy Butcher and Janette Leaf

I had made the mistake of trying to read this whilst eating lunch and honestly, it was pretty intense and horrifying. The series entitled The British Library's Tales of the Weird are compilations and anthologies of either a single author's horror stories or horror stories on a particular theme. Some are done more successfully than others and others are more interesting because of their ability to include previously unknown authors who have, perhaps either fallen out of the public eye or nothing was known about them to begin with. This book starts off with a very familiar face in the world of horror: Edgar Allan Poe.

One thing I enjoyed about this anthology I have to say is the way it incorporated many authors I had already heard of in order to entice me into reading the compilation. For example: starting off strong with The Sphinx by Edgar Allan Poe is great because some readers though they may have heard of the author, may not have read the story before. Now, I had read this story before and I had honestly forgotten it existed and to be fair, it is relatively frightening. The story begins with a man who is sitting in his friend's house and reading a book when he sees a giant monstrous beetle/moth-like creature outside the window. As we progress through the story, we begin to realise what this thing represents and the ending is actually something quite clever as you will realise when you read it.

The other story I have read before but I enjoyed just as much was the story by H.G Wells entitled The Moth. For those of you who know about Mr Wells' contribution to horror, it has much to do with the Sci-Fi side of things. My favourite Wells novel is The Island of Dr Moreau and this story fits into the same sort of theme perfectly. First we have a rivalry between two scientists, one of them dies and the other is haunted by a particularly strange species of moth which terrifies him. Written in perfectly terrifying styles most commonly associated with the author's interest in zoology, he tells the story in an almost claustrophobic way. It really is one of those disturbing books that contains a lot of these crawling horrors.

One of them I was quite surprised about in the anthology (and that I had not read before) was called The Wicked Flea by J.U Giesy. Now, I was surprised because this story was less scary and more of a social commentary comedy packed with metaphor. It is about a scientist who is doing an experiment on several large fleas and then, thinking his experiment is going well, he is optimistic. Afterwards, he sees that one of the fleas has decided to eat the others in a strange act of cannibalism. It then escapes to look for better and more food. The giant parasite is not uncommon in this anthology but the nature in which it is told makes it less frightening than Poe's story.

Other stories in the anthology that I enjoyed include: The Blue Beetle: A Confession by A.G Gray, Jun. The Captivity of the Professor by A. Lincoln Green was another. An Egyptian Hornet by Algernon Blackwood is on the list as well because honestly, who can ignore a great Algernon Blackwood story? Caterpillars by E.F Benson is also a great story though I don't know whether I enjoyed it as much as I enjoyed Benson's ghost stories. The final one I liked was The Blue Cockroach by Christopher Blayre which was a great take on the idea of the mythological difference and significance of the scarab and the cockroach.

All in all, I thought that this was a great anthology filled with very weird things happening and though not all of them were particularly 'horror' stories, they were all still brilliant to read and discover. I am surprised honestly, that the British Library and their team can keep coming up with new themes on the topic of the weird and I am looking forward to 2024 to see where that takes us next.