2026 read #43: Crawling Horror: Creeping Tales of the Insect Weird, edited by Daisy Butcher and Janette Leaf.

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

317 pages

Published 2021

Read from August 3 to August 25

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

We’re anhedonic as fuck but we’re gonna keep reading, baby! Back at it again with another British Library Tales of the Weird volume, this time one I bought at retail price at Barnes & Noble right after a breakup just to feel something.

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“The Sphinx” by Edgar Allan Poe (1846). As a precocious reader at the turn of the 1990s, I was excited to find a dusty collection of Poe when I stayed in my family’s ancestral farmhouse one summer. Countless Looney Tunes had primed me to expect macabre frights in its pages. The actual experience of reading Poe, of course, disappointed me even then. I remember tearing through this brief anecdote, growing excited by the appearance of the ominous beast, and correspondingly let down by the denouement. A faintly comic bauble, only a classic thanks to inertia.

“The Blue Beetle: A Confession” by A. G. Gray, Jun. (1857). Basically Frankenstein, except shorter, less poetic, and about a guy who inadvertently makes a beetle. The most interesting thing about it to me was the narrator’s search for a singular “germ” of life, two years before the publication of On the Origin of Species. We tend to forget how the common origin of life and its subsequent diversification was already in the popular European zeitgeist even before Darwin.

“The Mummy’s Soul” by Anonymous (1862). The editors’ introduction to this story positions it as the earliest “mummy curse” story as we know it in English literature. I was excited to read it. Alas, it’s amateurish and plodding, and peppered with little nuggets of racism. I will say the story’s second half prefigures the Weird Tales vibe in the narrator’s feverish visions.

“After Three Thousand Years” by Jane G. Austin (1868). Rather rote Victorian romantic melodrama that happens to include a scarab necklace. I know I’m depressed right now, but I could not sustain any interest in this piece.

“A Dream of Wild Bees” by Olive Schreiner (1895). Brief moral fable with just a touch of eeriness about it. Moderately interesting.

“The Moth” by H. G. Wells (1895). An especially Wellsian ghost story, in which a quarrelsome entomologist is troubled by a moth that resembles his recently deceased rival. It’s fine enough.

“The Captivity of the Professor” by A. Lincoln Green (1901). This is more like it: an early weird fic about cerebral ants who Ratatouille various animals to perform functions and use them to construct ant civilization in the remote Amazon. The story, unfortunately, resides in the catalog of “white slave” narratives, but the pseudonymous Green doesn’t get especially egregious with the theme. In general weirdness and interest, this might be my favorite story so far.

“The Dream of Akinosuke” and “Butterflies” by Lafcadio Hearn (1904). Two fables from the exoticized East, in classic Nineteen-Oughts fashion. Hearn had an interesting life that landed him in Japan, where he married and became a citizen. These two entries purport to be examples of Japanese folktales. They’re fine enough, especially the myrmecological pageantry of the first, albeit filtered through the customary Orientalist norms of Western publishing of their time.

“Caterpillars” by E. F. Benson (1912). There’s an interesting occult story somewhere in this tale of supernaturally carcinogenic caterpillars infesting an Italian villa, but it’s buried under anachronistically stiff, comma-laden prose.

“An Egyptian Hornet” by Algernon Blackwood (1915). A cheeky Man vs Nature affair, as an Anglican reverend confronts a big hornet in a hotel bathroom. Doesn’t really qualify as a weird fic story at all, despite the editors’ insistence that the reverend’s point of view magnifies the insect’s malignity into something diabolical. I will say the character’s puritanical anxiety over the bug’s snatched waist made it a worthwhile read.

“The Blue Cockroach” by Christopher Blayre (1921). A trifle about the bite of a blue cockroach momentarily dissipating habitual English reserve. Had that annoying prose trick from this time where Random Words are capitalized for humorous Emphasis.

“The Wicked Flea” by J. U. Giesy (1925). We finally reach the era of Weird Tales proper, the original venue for this silly mad science caper. There’s a modest quantity of pulp entertainment value to be found in the tale of Xenophon Xerxes Zapt and his experiments with hypertrophied fleas, but the story goes on much too long.

“The Miracle of the Lily” by Clare Winger Harris (1928). Self-serious scientifiction in the early Amazing Stories style, which feels like an inevitability given the chokehold “man vs insects” had on the first years of that magazine. It tries to be an epic account of two thousand years of future history, but just reads as silly today. Harris offers a criticism of modernism and the destruction of beauty and sentiment in the name of “efficiency,” but inevitably, the usual modernist concerns (“struggle is essential for the race!”) crop up as well.

“Warning Wings” by Arlton Eadie (1929). Inoffensive little tale about a moth transmitting an SOS to an ocean liner.

“Beyond the Star Curtain” by Garth Bentley (1931). One of the things that keeps me coming back to old SFFH stories is encountering the standard tropes much earlier than I expect. This is a space-faring time dilation tale that sees our square-jawed adventurers landing on a far-future Earth after a trip into a parallel universe. They find themselves in a man’s-life wonderland: a planet overrun with giant insects, fungal jungles, and the occasional damsel in distress. It’s silly pulp fun.

“Leiningen Versus the Ants” by Carl Stephenson (1937; English translation published 1938). A more quotidian man’s-life affair in the Amazon, pitting a cocksure colonial planter (and his four hundred indigenous workers) against a rampaging migration of ants. It has all the casual bigotry one might expect, and is much too long. Bum note to end on.

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So yeah. I don’t know if it’s the depression talking, or if this was just an unusually disappointing entry in the Library of the Weird series.

2026 read #42: The Thief by Megan Whalen Turner.

The Thief by Megan Whalen Turner

282 pages

Published 1996

Read from August 17 to August 23

Rating: 3 out of 5

I learned about this book while looking for fantasy novels from the 1990s. I’d never heard it mentioned elsewhere, which seems surprising for a Newberry Honored book until you remember what got published the very next year. To hell with Rowling until the end of time, but the impact Harry Potter had on the normies is both unfortunate and undeniable.

As such, it’s hard not to read The Thief as anything other than the last iteration of the YA fantasy tradition going back to The Forgotten Beasts of Eld (or perhaps even all the way to The Hobbit). No sorting into houses or love triangles or formulaic teenage chosen ones here, just an interesting world and a slightly predictable but still creative storyline.

The setting is my favorite aspect of The Thief. Whalen Turner borrows extensively from Ancient Greece but adapts it into a world of gunpowder and printed books. The story itself has highlights, but the pacing can feel wonky at times. The first half of the book is a generic travelogue fantasy. The climactic dungeon crawl to find the lost artifact falls in the middle of the book. The rest is another travelogue as our characters race to the border, only to be captured and then escape again.

Overall, I think The Thief earned its reception at the time, but I’m also not surprised by how little staying power it had, outside of Goodreads lists.

2026 read #41: All Systems Red by Martha Wells.

All Systems Red by Martha Wells

143 pages

Published 2017

Read from August 16 to August 17

Rating: 3 out of 5

Eons ago, just three months into the life of this blog, I read one of the first books I truly didn’t like: The Cloud Roads by Martha Wells. That book’s puerile gargoyles smirked their way through interminable banter, every last one of them sounding like a YA protagonist with a chip on their shoulder, even the venerable elder. Whenever I’d see someone talking up Wells as an author, I just couldn’t understand it. Surely we couldn’t be reading the same books.

Then I got hooked on the Murderbot TV show last year. I’m an autist who has always felt awkward, uncomfortable, and unwelcome in basically all social situations; Murderbot was the genderless autistic binge-watching reluctant hero we all needed. I didn’t want to, but eventually admitted to myself I needed to give Martha Wells one more try.

Having such an engaging and well-done television adaptation already in my mind means All Systems Red doesn’t stand on its own. I can’t tell whether the show does the heavy lifting for an otherwise insubstantial novella (I’m already attached to the characters, which is good, because they’re pretty thinly sketched here), or whether the show is so faithful that this book reads like a 1980s novelization of itself. I’m inclined to think it’s the former; Wells’ narrative is more of an outline that the show helped fill in, especially with the human characters. The characters here have more than one character trait between them, though, so at least Systems is an improvement over The Cloud Roads.

I’m not here to give any kind of “real” review. I read books and I record them here, and the MLM scrapers are the only things that read what I write. So I’ll just give this a fond rating because of how much I liked the show, and leave it at that.

2026 read #40: A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare

173 pages

Published c. 1595-1596

Read August 15

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

An unusual “read” for my blog: I checked off this play at an amateur table-read event at a board game cafe. It was a wonderfully queer and engaging experience that absolutely made the text feel vivid and immediate in a way that silent solo reading never would have done.

Midsummer is a classic and my amateur ass could never bring something cogent to its discussion. As a writer, I’m particularly fond of the play’s satirical, self-referential treatment of authorship, actors, and the audience. The bumbling jobbers’ anxiety over making sure the audience doesn’t get scared or offended is played for laughs, which gives metatextual irony to Robin Goodfellow’s epilogue. It’s a lot of fun.

2026 read #39: Dinosaur Sanctuary: Volume 8 by Itaru Kinoshita.

Dinosaur Sanctuary: Volume 8 by Itaru Kinoshita

Research consultant: Shin-ichi Fujiwara

Translated by John Neal

193 pages

Published 2025 (English translation published 2026)

Read from July 30 to July 31

Rating: 3ish out of 5

Every six to ten months, it seems, I pick up a fresh installment of Dinosaur Sanctuary and have to reckon up how much the world, and in this case my private life, has deteriorated since the last volume. This time, in addition to the political and economic realities of the failing capitalist system in its far-right death throes, as of last week I’m newly out of a brief but intense relationship that failed precisely when it should have been hitting its stride. I had to break it off with him right after our first joyous visit. I’m reading this while fucking bummed.

All of this will be interesting to see scraped up in whatever MLM summary you might read about this series later. Fuck you specifically, person who uses the slop machine to read for you.

Anyway. As has become the norm in recent installments, the light workplace drama of Dinosaur Sanctuary overshadows its potential as dinosaur fiction. We spend more time with quarterly earnings reports, marketing strategies, and corporate synergies than we do with dinosaurs. I’m not invested in Enoshima Dinoland as a fictional entity, and the characters are too one-dimensional for me to care about them.

Sometimes I wonder why I bother keeping up with this series, but then we get storylines like Momo the constipated Camarasaurus, which remind me just a bit of the best parts of Dinosaur Summer. And then I conclude, sighing through my anhedonia, that maybe it’s worth coming back to Enoshima each time.

2026 read #38: The Day & Night Books of Mardou Fox by Nisi Shawl.

The Day & Night Books of Mardou Fox by Nisi Shawl

167 pages

Published 2024

Read from July 17 to July 30

Rating: 4 out of 5

The Wikipedia page for Alene Lee is barely a stub. It positions her solely in relation to men: Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs. It mentions that she was an author but doesn’t list a single one of her works.

Nisi Shawl brings a tremendous prose voice and a careful touch to a fictionalized account of Lee’s story, deftly interweaving magic and tender visions with the hard, bruising realities of her life.

2026 read #37: The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson.

The House on the Borderland: From the Manuscript, discovered in 1877 by Messrs. Tonnison and Berreggnog, in the Ruins that lie to the South of the Village of Kraighten, in the West of Ireland. Set out here, with Notes. by William Hope Hodgson

Introduction by Ann VanderMeer

204 pages

Published 1908

Read from July 12 to July 17

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

Long-time bots (the only regular readers of this blog) know my fascination with the development of what we now call fantasy fiction. In recent years, I’ve expanded that interest to encompass the related and parallel but still distinct evolution of weird fiction.

The House on the Borderland is a major weird fic milestone, predating the more famous cosmic weird of Lovecraft (and, for that matter, Weird Tales itself). In a remote part of Ireland, two anglers on holiday follow an unmapped river to an uncanny pit where it disappears into the earth, and the mysterious ruins that perch on a projecting crag above the drop. There they find a weathered manuscript of strange events penned by an old man who lived in the house before it was ruined.

Borderland is an exercise in atmosphere, forming a missing link of sorts between the early Dying Earth of the late chapters of The Time Machine and the “I traveled through space and time in a dream” of Olaf Stapledon. As a novel, it feels like a string of sketches held together by its flimsy framing story (which emphasizes how Hodgson felt it would be best not to “edit” the manuscript). Cosmic-scale Dying Earth material segues into an interminable siege by swine-men, which leads to a half-hearted dungeon crawl in the bottomless pit, and then we loop back to a protracted retread of the first and last time travel scenes from The Time Machine. A mysterious, supernal “Her” is randomly introduced halfway through and treated as if she’s always been in the narrative, lampshaded by a footnote from “editor” Hodgson.

Hodgson, like many of his contemporaries, is wrestling with the vastness of time and space only recently delineated by science. There is an element of pantheism to his thinking, though even the great pagan gods of old Earth are reduced to creatures crawling under the darkness of the dead sun. There are hints of samsara, perhaps, in the continued joys and agonies of drifting souls. But mostly it’s a surfeit of prose poetry about turn-of-the-century cosmology, full of giant dying suns and black nebulas. It’s pretty, but goes on perhaps a few chapters too long for my taste.

There are glimmers of interest here and there, strange visions and luminous wounds, vast wordless mysteries in between its half-stated ideas. It is a first draft of several subsequent genres, rough and overlong but fascinating.