Creepy Crawly Short Fiction
I’ve been having a love affair with a niche genre for a while now–and no, it’s not Romantasy. It’s short fiction with bugs.
There, I said it. I think insects are cool. Whether you’re talking about real-life bees and ants, hive-mind aliens, Kafka-esque literary metaphors, or humans going all Jeff Goldblum in the 1980s horror movie “The Fly,” I’m in. I like to pair short fiction with insects particularly because the form allows for more experimentation.
Here are a few of my favorite short stories with six- and eight-legged influences.
“Reeling for Empire” by Karen Russell in her anthology Vampires in the Lemon Grove
I’m going to start you off gently here, with nothing too scary or gross. Russell’s “Reeling for Empire” is set in a fantastical version of late 19th century Japan where a mysterious businessman lures girls to the city with promises of new factory jobs that will lift their families out of poverty. In truth, the young women are given a potion that turns them into human-silkworm hybrids destined to a lifetime of forced spinning.
I love the mix of the speculative, historic and literary in this story, which I pull out a few times each year to re-read. It’s ending is so cathartic and one of its themes – that it’s that humans that can be the real monsters – resonates with me deeply.
Now that I’ve lured you in with a sense of safety, let me just weird you out. This flash story is part military sci-fi, part whatdidIjustreadImeanwhaaaaaat. The premise asks, What if the government made you think a giant bug alien was super sexy so that you could be the deadliest combat couple in the universe? I’ve heard it said that the best perfumes are composed of opposite scents–something sweet and something disgusting—and I think this story works in much the same way. It’s so problematic, yet so good.
“Heavy Lies” by Rich Larson, published in the short fiction anthology Life Beyond Us.
Before I read this anthology, I thought I might have reached my fill of hive-mind alien queens; a lot of those stories were starting to feel the same. But Larson’s ant-like cannibalistic creation shocked me with her grim originality.
In this story, the alien queen isn’t trying to conquer another society, she’s deceiving her own people to avoid being replaced by a new queen. But be careful what you wish for, because over the generations her hunger for power births a terrible realization, and in the end, she craves something more desolate and devastating than eternal rule.
In this story, words are insects – winged creatures that spill from the mouth of a girl attending university far from home. The rest of her fellow students speak “wingless” speech and tease her while a seemingly helpful professor encourages her to learn to speak wingless so she can fit into their society. One of the things I love about speculative fiction is its ability to use magic as metaphor, and this sad-yet-beautiful story does so deftly, exploring the cost of assimilation with a fantastical language as its focusing lens.
It’s also worth noting that although I first read this story in Augur Magazine, it’s part of an insect-themed anthology The Year’s Best Anthropod Short Fiction, Vol. 2, which I really enjoyed. I have Volume 1 on my TBR wish list, and have my fingers crossed we’ll see future editions.
Ootheca by Mario De Seabra Coelho
“I have cockroaches for teeth.”
This is the first sentence of this bonkers tale, and hooooboy does it mean what it says. This is no metaphor. The main character’s teeth are cockroaches. They eat for him. Kiss for him. Get him kicked out of restaurants. The story takes place in a surreal world where people live in fear of getting “Hagged” – visited by a supernatural figure that bestows strange, disfiguring curses.
If you’re like me and have developed an aversion to cockroaches after a lifetime living in Florida, brace yourself. I promise it will be worth it. For all its cringe-inducing details and weirdness (or perhaps because of it?) the story is surprisingly touching with its insights on love, dating, insecurity, grief and mental health.
Bloodchild by Octavia E. Butler
Imagine if the only way to survive on a planet ruled by giant, centipede-like beings was to consent to be host to their incubating eggs. That’s the basic concept behind this classic work of science fiction and body horror that was originally published in 1984 but hasn’t aged a day.
What I find most fascinating about this story is how it examines the unsettling, grey areas of this relationship – the affection and possessiveness (and maybe even love?) that sometimes develops between the two species, the aliens’ fear of the human’s anger and violence, the human’s simultaneous feeling of disgust, attraction and addiction to the alien’s high-inducing eggs and venom.
Late in the telling, we learn the humans consented to this relationship only after fleeing a home world where their own kind wanted to kill or enslave them. This fact is mentioned almost as an afterthought, but to me it goes to the bloody, beating heart of the story and Butler’s all-too-real life inspiration here in the United States with our legacy of slavery, as well as the genocide and forced relocation of native peoples.