There’s something about insects in literature that make them the perfect monster. It doesn’t matter how they’re written. They can be small and deadly, or gigantic and misunderstood. They can be acting on instinct or driven by hyper-intelligence. Whatever the case, they’re perfect because up close, insects can look delightfully alien, with their multitude of legs, assortment of eyes, segmented bodies, and exoskeletons.
Also because ew. Bugs.
As I was thumbing through my library trying to come up with a fun Five Book post, I spotted two of my favorite reads this year, Mort(e) by Robert Repino and Grasshopper Jungle by Andrew Smith. Both feature gigantic insects hell-bent on eliminating mankind. So let’s take a closer look at five insects that ruin everyone’s day in five awesome books.
PRAYING MANTISES in Grasshopper Jungle by Andrew Smith
What happens when a strain of plague is discovered in a small town junk shop, and the virus starts mutating people into giant, eager-to-mate praying mantises? Absolute chaos and hilarity, mixed it with a dash of teenage angst and sexual confusion.
A brilliant piece of YA science-fiction, that touches on a lot of challenging issues. Also, giant praying mantises and the apocalypse.
BUGS IN SPACE in Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein
Mankind is wrapped up in an epic interstellar war with a race of giant insect creatures from another planet.
Unlike the (awesome but kind of bad but still kind of awesome) movie adaptation, you don’t actually see a lot of the bugs in the book. It’s more about themes circulating around the military and politics, than epic sci-fi space battles against multi-legged bugs. But hey, they are there.
GIANT HYPERINTELLIGENT ANTS in Mort(e) by Robert Repino
An epic science-fiction thriller out on January 20th, Mort(e) introduces you to a world that’s been conquered by hyper-intelligent giant ants.
Tired of mankind’s treatment of the world, the ants have risen to take the planet, and have made other animals self-aware. It’s an epic battle between humans, ants, dogs, ants, cats, ants, raccoons, ants, and it is incredible. And the protagonist, a housecat named Mort(e), will stick with you long after you close the pages.
GIANT (SORT OF) FLIES in The Mist by Stephen King
When a thick mist rolls over a small town, trapping a number of people in a grocery store, an array of horrifying creatures start attacking them. It ranges from a weird tentacle monster to… surprise! Bugs!
Fly-like creatures swarm the windows of the store, their skin a burnt pink and… well, gross. Technically the mist is ruining everyone’s day in this horror novella, but hey, those gross fly-like insects came along with it.
SUPERNATURAL BEDBUGS FROM HELL in Bedbugs by Ben H. Winters
What happens when you throw The Amityville Horror and Rosemary’s Baby into a cauldron and sprinkle it with demonic insects? Ben H. Winters’ Bedbugs, is a story of paranoia and terror involving supernatural bedbugs, possibly from Hell.
It’s made especially scary because the protagonist is the only one being bitten by the bugs, and no one else can see them. Ugh.
GIANT SPIDERS in The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
Bonus pick! Because spiders aren’t technically insects, right? They’re arachnids. But whatever, they are still hella scary. Particularly in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.
I’m looking at you, Shelob.
Originally published January 2015.
Eric Smith is a literary agent and Young Adult author living in Philadelphia who has worked on award-winning and New York Times bestselling books. When he isn’t working on other people’s books, sometimes he tries to write his own. Some of his recent books include The Girl and the Grove, Don’t Read the Comments, and the forthcoming You Can Go Your Own Way. You can follow him on Twitter at @ericsmithrocks.
Published six months after this piece was originally posted, Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time put spiders back in our nightmares. Great big, sentient spiders. So what if they’re arachnids…..
Ezekial Boone’s The Hatching and sequels are pretty creepy. Also, Sarah Pinborough’s Breeding Ground and Feeding Ground. As if regular spiders weren’t bad enough!
<insert snide comment about distinction between insects and arachnids here>
As they are running for their lives, hero 1 asks hero 2 – “so, did you count the legs?”
I think it was a book first but I remember beings quite scared after seeing the movie “Day of the Triffids”.
@3 I think spiders are insects in colloquial nomenclature. They’re all bugs, at any rate. Or arthropods, if you’re into fancy terminology.
Entomology ruins giant bug stories for you. You can’t be afraid of something that just wouldn’t work. Giant bugs wouldn’t be able to breath. They wouldn’t even be able to lift their limbs. Physics is against them. But then Kaiju wouldn’t be able to function either, and where’s the fun?
And if insects or spiders or even fungi aren’t inherently icky for you, there’s less of a punch. Except bed bugs. Bring a jar of bed bugs into a room full of entomologist and the same folks who, moments before, were cooing over some maggots or rhapsodizing over a spider, will all back away and squeeze themselves out of the room.
Nobody loves a bed bug.
Oh, and a pro tip for anyone writing about insects, there’s a convention to even the common names that refers to the taxonomy.
Why is it butterfly not butter fly? Mayfly not may fly? Because neither is a true fly.
Horse fly not horsefly? Fruit fly not fruitfully? Really truly flies is why!
A ladybug is a beetle. A bed bug is a bug.
etc….
@5: Sorry to be pedantic but spiders aren’t insects. This isn’t a technicality, they just aren’t.
That they can be placed into a larger group that also comprises insects doesn’t change that.
——
That bedbug book sounds really cool!
I’d rather prefer to read about them than experience them up close and personal!
Man, I try to recommend some cool books and get sniped by the “Actually…” club. Anyhoo.
Left out both of my favorites: The Furies by Keith Roberts & A Storm of Wings (Viriconium 2) by M. John Harrison.
Steph Swainston’s Castle series had a land attacked by giant insects, which were referred to as Insects.
Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Shadows of the Apt series is about a secondary world where giant insects form most of the terrestrial fauna. Vertebrates (except for humans, horses and goats) are vanishingly rare
@11 Haven’t read Shadow of the Apt, but having recently read Tchaikovskys’s Children of Time, that makes me very curious. I suppose in Children of Time, the insects aren’t bad as such, but it is an excellent book.
@8 You are indeed being pedantic. I specifically stated that insects and spiders are different sorts of animals. I was talking about popular nomenclature, as when we call lobsters “shellfish” or speak of the sunrise.
@6- Tchaikovsky’s spiders, while large enough to be freaky, are still small enough to consider the humans they encounter as giants. I don’t recall if we get an absolute scale.
It’s their intelligence, and coordination, (and communication with a more-than-half-mad AI) that makes them a real threat- and, later, something more.
Perhaps more relevant to this thread is the ants, with their sort of non-sapient analog computer hivemind. They’re bigger than normal ants, but smaller than the spiders, I believe.
Ew. Just, Ew. And now I’m all skeeved out, and everything itches.
For the “um, actually” people out there- as a scientist, there are so many things in common language that mean one thing, and within the technical jargon mean something totally different. Sometimes you just need to look at the context (are you talking to an entomologist or some guy across the back fence?) before you get bent out of shape about language. So, yes, in my mind, spiders are BUGS.
@14: Some people may call spiders insects but it’s not “popular nomenclature”, at least not where I am from.
People calling spiders “insects” are ignorant of basic biological facts and uneducated in this area. This isn’t a shame. I lack education in many areas. It’s wrong nonetheless.
Anyway, I’m not going to comment on this any further.
I’d like to add The Nest by Gregory A. Douglas from the 80s (recently republished in the Paperbacks from Hell line). Mutated cockroaches with a taste for human flesh take over an island and start feasting on the small community there. Trashy but still fun. Truly gruesome, not even a little bit afraid to go to horrific places (the scene with the elementary school class on the beach, oof).
@13 – I’d recommend Shadows of the Apt strongly. Tchaikovsky manages to combine a sort of steampunk-type industrial revolution (featuring things that just wouldn’t work in our world, such as clockwork-powered aircraft and compressed-air rifles that you just have to pump up a bit before firing repeatedly, but he gets away with this) with a preceding magic-based dominant culture, which is fun in itself, the way he writes it, and the writing and characterization are good. It’s a ten-volume series but it moves right along. I generally have no time for massive fantasy series but this one drew me in from the start.
Enders Game is a bit of a gimme here….
Spider-World series by Colin Wilson – There were also giant beetles in the series.
Going back to the early 70s, Thomas Page’s The Hephaestus Plague (basis for the movie Bug.) A plague of arsonist cockroaches!
#6, Gingerbug: “Entomology ruins giant bug stories for you. You can’t be afraid of something that just wouldn’t work. Giant bugs wouldn’t be able to breath. They wouldn’t even be able to lift their limbs. Physics is against them.”
Ed Bryant’s 1979 short story “giANTS” manages to be a story about giant insects, AND be scientifically valid. (And a very human story as well.) Deservedly won Best Short Story for the 1980 Nebulas, also a Hugo nominee.
(I miss Ed. Not only one of the best writers in the business, but a nice guy as well.)
@@@@@ 6 gingerbug:
Entomology ruins giant bug stories for you. You can’t be afraid of something that just wouldn’t work. Giant bugs wouldn’t be able to breath. They wouldn’t even be able to lift their limbs. Physics is against them. But then Kaiju wouldn’t be able to function either, and where’s the fun?
The televised Saint had Simon Templar vs. Giant Ants. Some super-science had grown them to cow-size. The bugs knocked over trees in blithe ignorance of the cube-square law.
the (awesome but kind of bad but still kind of awesome) movie adaptation [of Starship Troopers]…
Nice description. I went with a friend to watch the movie when it was released, and we came out of the cinema going “I cannot believe they let someone make that. But I’d probably watch it again.”
Are the bedbugs in Bedbugs by Ben Winter giant bedbugs? Asking for a friend.
I love the giant bugs in Miyazaki’s Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. They are very creepy and scary, but that doesn’t stop them from being ecologically vital (like arthropods everywhere). The manga is even more epic than the anime.
Apraxis wasps in the InCryptid books are “the size of a large kitten” — not giant compared to humans, but bigger (and much smarter) than wasps should be, and definitely inclined to lethally ruin everyone’s day. Johrlac aka cuckoos, featured much more prominently in the InCryptid books, are human-sized and very human-looking, but have “genetic similarities” to apraxis wasps (and are the only predators feared by apraxis wasps), are thus considered to be mammals that evolved from wasps, have inhuman biology that’s become increasingly bizarre in recent books, and survive mostly by using telepathy to ruin the day and/or the life of their human victims. Both species are in the InCryptid field guide on Seanan McGuire’s website: https://seananmcguire.com/fieldguide.php
Last year’s InCryptid book also featured a giant spider and some giant flying millipedes, but they’re not so bad. They’re not in the field guide.
And now I am put in mind of “The Sandkings” by G.R.R. Martin; although those were not giant, the resulting colonies…
From the Long Ago Before Times, but John Wyndham’s Web features a species of spider which has become a colony creature – like a nest of bees or termites.
The fact that they are venomous and territorial is a bit of a problem for the protagonists.
(TW: I’m pretty sure that the Racism Fairy has paid it a visit since I last read it, many years ago.)
The Bug Wars by Robert Asprin (oop I think)
Though in this case its lizard people who have their days ruined.
There are not many books written purely from an alien PoV and even then they will usually meet with a human or talk about them as a distant/extinct race. This may be the only SF book I’ve read with no humans involved/mentioned anywhere.
# 3: Call l me speciesist if you want but if it has more than four legs then I tend to suspect it’s up to no good.
I can’t let a discussion of giant bugs go by without mention Them!, a classic 50’s SF movie that is one of the best of the radiation creates giant bugs genre popular then.