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

These characters’ inclination toward romance could be due to spending much of their time drunk in pubs. Always the first meeting place for farmers alarmed that their prize sheep have been eaten by something they’ve never encountered before, the pubs never seem to close, no matter how many slugs reduce the local citizenry to piles of grisly bones or how many snails drag their prey from bed and into their hell maws. Gin and whiskey are dispensed liberally all day long, and everyone seems to be playing a drinking game: receive a shock, take a drink.

It’s also no surprise that in their inebriated state, humans often make terrible decisions—going outside in the dark to investigate why the dog suddenly stopped barking, or battling the caterpillar invasion by releasing thousands of five-foot-long lizards that eat the caterpillars and then quickly overrun the country themselves.

The weakness of killer-insect books is that bugs lack a compelling perspective on the world. Feral frogs, disgusting dictyoptera, gore-loving gastropods, angry arachnids, and lethal lizards (these are not insects, of course, but are still disgusting) have one-track minds: eat humans. Occasionally, an author will try to make us empathize with his insectoid invaders, leading to passages in which scorpions make “a grimace of rage” or spiders “howl with fury.” However, most of us would be hard-pressed to tell the difference between a scorpion grimacing in rage and one giggling with glee.

Maybe that’s why they hate us. We spend so much time swatting, slapping, spraying, and squeezing them to death that we never really take the time to get to know them as individuals.

Reptile, amphibian, arachnid—it doesn’t matter. If they’re gross and they want to invade England and eat people, they’re insects. Credit 75

Gila monsters attacked New Mexico (Gila!), roaches infested Cape Cod (The Nest), and crocs swarmed New Guinea (Creatures), but everyone knew that all the really cool creatures were attacking the U.K. in Blood Worm

, Scorpion and Scorpion: Second Generation, Black Horde, and Parasite.

Unpublished Gila! sketch courtesy of Tom Hallman. Credit 76

Credit 77

Salad of the Damned

Here’s more bad news: it’s not just dogs and cats and insects and fish and birds and killer whales who hate humanity. Vegetables hate us, too. In a way, that hurts more. Old ladies putter about in their gardens, farmers lovingly tend their crops, and when we celebrate our most romantic occasions, we want our plant buddies with us, so we rip off their arms and bring them along. How could they not like us?

When John Wyndham’s subjects turn their stinging vines on humanity in his 1951 novel Day of the Triffids, their betrayal was understandable. After all, they were Soviet plants, born with hatred in their sappy green hearts. But when plants mind-control us so that they can feed on our blood, it’s hard not to be offended. After all, most of us don’t eat plants if we can help it, and then it’s mostly vegetarians who do the eating. If the plants want to murder them, something could probably be arranged.

When you can’t take a simple swim in the pond without Venus flytraps turning you into a murderous zombie (Gwen, in Green

; 1974), something really must be done. Diving into the literature, one quickly realizes that plants and humans have been enemies forever, or at least since Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1880 short story “The American’s Tale,” about a killer Venus flytrap in Montana. Or consider the 1898 story “Purple Terror” or “The Man-Eating Tree” of 1899. Given the history, maybe it’s too late for people and plants to live in harmony.

When considering the pivotal horror publications of the early ’70s, like The Exorcist and The Other, maybe a book of real-world horror should be included: 1973’s The Secret Life of Plants. In this popular work of nonfiction (which later became a documentary featuring music by Stevie Wonder), two hippies attach tiny polygraph machines to plants and discover that not only do they have rich emotional lives, but they are also telepathic. Probably. Plants also scream when pulled from the ground. Even worse, human sexuality causes them to recoil in disgust, and one plant was traumatized when it telepathically witnessed sexual intercourse. No wonder they want us dead.

Today, we think of ourselves as responsible stewards of this big blue ball called Earth, but literary evidence suggests we’re just suckers. Given the chance, nature will turn on us in a heartbeat. This is one issue on which carnivores and vegetarians must stand united: we must eat nature, or nature will eat us.