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Post by piglingbland on Aug 30, 2015 12:46:14 GMT
CREEPING CRAWLERS Edited by Allen AshleyShadow Publishing 2015
ISBN 978-0-9572962-2-0
Cover artwork & design by Steve Upham What is this lingering fear of insects, arachnids, arthropods, crustaceans and those that slither... is it a hangover from the survival battles in the savannah or does it go deeper and further back than that in our evolutionary heritage? Unchallenged, the locusts, the maggots, the worms, the flies, the aphids and the termites may consume and destroy all that we have and hold dear. Creeping, slithering, crawling horror, science fiction & fantasy stories by nineteen of today’s top authors .  David Birch, Spinnentier
Gary Budgen, Scarab Adrian Cole, Running with the TideStorm Constantine, In the Earth Andrew Darlington, Chemical GlidePauline E. Dungate, Mariposas Del Noche Dennis Etchison, Wet SeasonEdmund Glasby, Foreign Bodies John Grant, Little HelpersTerry Grimwood, Survivors Andrew Hook, Us! Mark Howard Jones, For the Love of InsectsAlan Knott, Dissolute EvolutionRobin Lupton, Guano Dong BabyRalph Robert Moore, You Dry Your Tears If They Don’t Work Richard Mosses, The Tarantata Marion Pitman, Woodworm David Rix, A Taste for Canal BurgersDavid Turnbull, The Sweet Meat and the Beet
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Post by dem bones on Aug 30, 2015 13:00:10 GMT
That will be another straight to wants list then. Will be very interesting to compare this with the last great wave of When Insects Attack titles, i.e. Guy N. Smith's Abominations, the John Halkin Slither-Squirm-Squelch trilogy, Richart Lewis, & Co. Somehow, I'm thinking these stories are going to be very different ....
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Post by piglingbland on Jan 5, 2016 8:45:31 GMT
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Post by piglingbland on May 10, 2016 11:03:28 GMT
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Post by dem bones on Apr 16, 2017 14:19:22 GMT
Allen Ashley (ed.) – Creeping Crawlers (Shadow Publishing, Aug. 2015)  Steve Upham
Andrew Hook – Us!
Storm Constantine – In the Earth
Adrian Cole – Running with the Tide
Terry Grimwood – Survivors
David Rix – A Taste for Canal Burgers
Pauline E. Dungate – Mariposas Del Noche
Dennis Etchison – Wet Season
Gary Budgen – Scarab
Mark Howard Jones – For the Love of Insects
Marion Pitman – Woodworm
Edmund Glasby – Foreign Bodies
Alan Knott – Dissolute Evolution
John Grant – Little Helpers
Richard Mosses – The Tarantata
Ralph Robert Moore – You Dry Your Tears If They Don’t Work
Robin Lupton – Guano Dong Baby
David Birch – Spinnentier
David Turnbull – The Sweet Meat and the Beet
Andrew Darlington – Chemical GlideBlurb; What is this lingering fear of insects, arachnids, arthropods, crustaceans and those that slither… is it a hangover from the survival battles in the savannah or does it go deeper and further back than that in our evolutionary heritage? Unchallenged, the locusts, the maggots, the worms, the flies, the aphids and the termites may consume and destroy all that we have and hold dear. Creeping, slithering, crawling horror, science fiction & fantasy stories by nineteen of today’s top authors.In which beloved When Insects Attack sub-sub-genre is applied a posho speculative fiction treatment. It's nature in revolt but not as we know it. Andrew Hook - Us!: A pivotal sequence from 'fifies sci-horror flick Them! as seen from the perspective of of the giant radioactive ants. Storm Constantine – In the Earth: Dappleheath village, Staffs. Eleven year old cousins Mawde and Jeryl hold diametrically opposed estimations of the insect world. Mawde's mother has taught her to respect all creatures, no matter how ugly and scary. Jeryl maintains that centipedes deserve to be torn in half because they burrow into your eyes. Should any slug or spider dare raise its unsightly head above soil when she's around, it will be trampled! Rule the ticks and bugs, she argues, and they'll do your bidding versus anyone who upsets you. Jeryl provides a demonstration of her mastery over creepy crawlies when a grumpy old timer chases the girls from his garden. Her fledgling psycho antics so frighten Mawde that she's glad when the holiday is over. The pair drift apart. Several years later, Mawde learns that her disturbed playmate eventually committed a crime so heinous her parents were obliged to adopt new identities. Not quite sure what to make of the haunting ending but it seems karma has everything under control. Adrian Cole - Running With The Tide: Celaphoids on the rampage! A freak heatwave engulfs the English South West leading to very real fears of drought. When two trawler-men fail to return after taking their boat out into the Bay, newcomer Rik Brennon volunteers to join the search party. The worse thing that could happen does. They find the missing boat on the weed-banks and within its cabin, what's left of Mick and Dan. The exhausted and terrified party struggle back home to the village - but can they outdistance the incoming tide and sinister rolling mist cloaking a monstrous army? Marion Pitman - Woodworm: Woodworm have been a fixture of his nightmares since childhood when the little blighters murdered his treasured rocking horse (admittedly, with much assistance from belligerent DAD's bonfire). On leaving school, he devotes his every waking hour to the eradication of beetle-kind until extreme exposure to insecticide plays havoc with the lungs. With invalidity comes the soul-crushing realisation that his life's crusade has been a complete waste of time. Mark Howard Jones - For the Love of Insects: Modril, the internationally renowned surrealist painter, shuns the glare of publicity preferring to let his erotic depictions of human-insectoid coupling speak for themselves. Imagine young Alex McCarthy's bewilderment when he somehow blags an invite to the great man's private residence! As an Entomophobic, the student is entirely unsuited to the challenge, but Professor Aitchison assures that the briefest interview will secure his doctorate. Let's hope Alex learns the secret of Mad Modril's success! Adrian Cole's Running With The Tide is personal pick of the five, but they all have something. [To be continued]
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Post by dem bones on Apr 26, 2017 8:17:34 GMT
David Rix - A Taste For Canal Burgers: "Maybe she was a lost ex-student, unable to find a toe-hold in the world and thus settling down here in one of the few lifestyles left that didn't steal your soul." On crashing his bicycle into Regents Canal at 3 AM, narrator is rescued by a stranger who just happened to be lurking beneath her narrow-boat when he fell. The all-action mystery woman invites him aboard to dry off. Turns out she is but one of a growing community driven onto the river by escalating property prices and disillusion with entire system. A depleted bank balance need not mean starvation as she lives off the fat of the canal - crayfish, earthworm, river salad, and, most recently, a large, phenomenally hideous spiked creature of species unidentified ... Begins like it means horror business, morphs into a suspenseful and ultimately feel-good fantasy. I enjoyed it. David Birch - Spinnentier: Fears for missing arachno-boy. If you're born into a tight-knit family of hybrids it doesn't pays to be the odd one out ..... Dennis Etchison - Wet Season: ( Gamma 5, September 1965/ Kirby McCauley [ed.] Night Chills, 1975.) "A touch of slimy evil in an ordinary family ...." After the bizarre and tragic bathtub death of his daughter, Jim Madden manfully struggles to hold it all together for the sake of second wife, Lorelei, and her two boys, Tad and Ray (he can't yet think of them as his own). All of which makes what Jim's brother has discovered about the second Mrs. Madden and the non-existent "Greenworth Women's Guild" even more painful to bear.
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Post by dem bones on May 9, 2017 15:44:27 GMT
"Its like something out of The Blob! It's .... bloody unreal." A pessimistic old school Sci-horror pulp; a Slimer/ Aliens hybrid, and a damn strange mummy story. Reading Creeping Crawlers is giving me Kitchen Sink Gothic flashbacks in that whatever I was expecting from the title, several of these stories aren't it. Gary Budgen - Scarab: The widespread use of a "harmless" pesticide eradicates all insect life on earth, triggering global crop failure, famine, drought, a cholera epidemic and a beer riot in Birmingham. How will we endure the last days? Salvation arrives in the unlikely form of Scarab, a "new" recreational hallucinogenic, available gratis from the mystery man in the derelict pet shop. Its devastating side effect - live mummification - is the one hope left for mankind. The ancient Egyptians knew what they were about. Edmund Glasby - Foreign Bodies: An oil rig thirty miles off the coast of Ecuador is encased in a thick gelatinous blue-green slime. The greatest scientific minds of their generation (also known as "eggheads") are baffled. What can it all mean? As the world tunes into live TV coverage , Colonel Frank 'Gunner' Kennington of the US Marines leads his men aboard to gather samples and search for survivors ... Terry Grimwood - Survivors: It is the future. The depleted ranks of the Fiennes expedition return from their 200 year space voyage to find Earth in even worse shape than the one they left behind. Nuclear and chemical warfare have decimated the population, the air is contaminated, and insects proliferate as never before. The few human survivors the landing party encounter at Heathrow are a surly, twitchy lot, makes you itch just looking at them. Mission Commander Lieutenant John Michaels doesn't trust their nominal leader, Lana, and has warned his colleagues to remain alert to danger. The Lieutenant already lost his wife and kids in the oily slime on Rigel IX and can't bear the prospect of losing lover Marta Hammer (security officer). The insect people have other ideas. it seems that whatever infected the tramps on the London Underground in Eddy C. Bertin's classic My Fingers Are Eating Me was highly contagious. |
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Post by dem bones on May 10, 2017 21:31:44 GMT
Robin Lupton – Guano Dong Baby: Meredith Matthews, 35 and desperate to have a child, turns to Chinese holistic medicine on the recommendation of a friend. Dr. Zhanglang prepares Meredith a herbal tea with a dash of ground cockroach egg, warning Mr. Matthews against sampling the resulting brew for himself. Fortunately for us, he's no great believer in New Age remedies and discards her advice. A nasty rash breaks out across his belly.
The Merediths would do well to invest in a fleet of pushchairs.
Richard Mosses – The Tarantata: Iain, a Glaswegian tourist in Southern Italy, is picked up by a sexy hitch-hiker from the local fishing village. Angelina shows him inside a voodoo shrine whose altar is dominated by a macabre image of the Virgin Mary. On their way to Iain's apartment, Angelina is bitten by a venomous spider. Iain drives her back to the village, hoping against hope that a doctor will know of an antidote. Instead the local baker takes up his fiddle and strikes a frenetic tune. A comatose Angelina revives and breaks into a wild dance, enticing Iain to kiss her poisonous lips ....
It might sound a bit grim, but ultimately The Tarantata is upbeat in its way as A Taste For Canal Burgers.
Ralph Robert Moore – You Dry Your Tears If They Don’t Work: Trying last day at the rectory for Father Mike Corrigan. Riots on the streets, a new priest to show around, an altar boy with a bizarre confession, an explosion in the courtyard, and an unwelcome visit from Homeland Security bully boys armed with guns, a stethoscope and a syringe.
Spiderbite-induced fever dream? Nightmare take on the story of the old priest's life? Not sure I got, or even particularly want to get this one but no denying it's high on incident and suspense.
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Post by dem bones on May 12, 2017 12:07:02 GMT
Alan Knott – Dissolute Evolution: You see, you fools! This is what comes of meddling with nature! A genetically engineered invertebrate is introduced to Third World countries to combat famine. Many dangerous modifications to its DNA later and the UK comes under threat from an enormous outlaw super earthworm. Can Professor Demurer and his crack team eradicate this Cathedral-toppling menace before its relentless burrowing takes down entire cities? "Its turning! Coming this way!" Great fun until you consider the plausibility factor. It could happen.
John Grant – Little Helpers: Unchivalrously knights Sir Gawm and Sir Madder ride into Karmlawth intent on freeloading off the villagers and ravishing their women. They reckon without Merle, the deceptively slight young battlemaster and his awe-inspiring pet wyrm, Grindle, "the crawler of the mound."
Pauline E. Dungate – Mariposas Del Noche: Another winner, almost a throwback to 'thirties horror pulp. Bossy entomologist Dominic Carter, 70, hires aspiring photographer Toby Lansdowne to accompany him to a 'cursed' tropical island in pursuit of a species of as yet uncatalogued butterfly. Their efforts are rewarded when the young lensman chances upon a processionary of caterpillars. Not just any caterpillar - these creepy little blighters are carnivorous. Toby considers himself fortunate to escape the Isle de Mariposas in one piece but Dominic just has to smuggle some eggs home to London ...
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Post by dem bones on May 21, 2017 19:50:05 GMT
There was always every likelihood that some of the Creepy Crawlers would trip me up and so it proved.
David Turnbull - The Sweet Meat and the Beet: Catastrophe unspecified has done for us, driving a human-insect hybrid underground to lead a joyless existence of toil in service to a Queen and "little master." Torn from his sister-lover and their child, Dandring, who dreams of seeing the sun and the blue skies, takes a stand against oppression. Not sure I got this one either but bad sex interlude and gruesome goings on in the Meat Chamber kept my spirits up.
Andrew Darlington - Chemical Glide: The spirit of Michel Parry's Dream Trips et al lives on. Can't even hazard a guess as to what the closing story is all about. No-one will mistake it for Edward Jarvis's Maggots, that's for sure.
A disparate group of revolutionaries, drop-outs and philosophers hole up in a commune and take to experimenting with Chemical Glide, a mind-expanding drug "unprecedented in terrestrial history. A short cut to psi-abilities, like phasings opening phantom twitchings in neural pathways a million years of future evolution may have eventually stumbled upon." Breakthrough for sure, but are we far enough advanced to cope? Quinn's world comes unglued when his friend and fellow drug-user commits suicide in the bath. Ahriman, who has been over-indulging for weeks, believes himself an extraterrestrial tracking vehicle in communion with spiders.
A very far out ending to another intriguing collection from David A. Sutton's mighty Shadow Publications!
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Post by piglingbland on Oct 2, 2017 15:16:01 GMT
The 2nd edition of Creeping Crawlers in now published, with creeping new cover artwork by Peter Coleborn! Shadow Publishing website |
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Post by dem bones on Oct 4, 2017 17:39:19 GMT
The 2nd edition of Creeping Crawlers in now published, with creeping new cover artwork by Peter Coleborn! Shadow Publishing website Fond memories of reading this one, even if a couple of items flew way over my head. Found Mariposas Del Noche, A Taste For Canal Burgers, Dissolute Evolution, Scarab and, especially Running With The Tide particularly appealing. I like Steve Upham's original cover artwork well enough but Mr. Coleburn's spider is absolutely gorgeous.  Peter Coleborn |
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