Book reviews

Caterpillars gives the monsters their own light

E. F. Benson lets us see his creatures clearly. The trouble begins when their feet make a hard floor behave like putty, and a small specimen proves no easier to contain.

Whimsical Woes editorial ·

The monsters in Caterpillars supply their own light. Hundreds of faintly luminous bodies cover a bed, making themselves visible in an otherwise dark room. E. F. Benson puts the worst thing in the center of the room. The longer the narrator looks, the more the materials around those bodies become the problem. A hard floor should put up some resistance to a pair of feet. This one does not.

The setting is an Italian villa with flowers, sea air and cool marble. Benson also supplies a remarkably practical floor plan. He places the narrator above the unused bedroom and locates artist Arthur Inglis's rooms along a separate passage. Those directions can feel fussy at first. Later they let us measure the threat. The narrator can see a landing without having a safe route across it. Knowing where everyone sleeps becomes a particularly unhelpful kind of knowledge.

Give the creature a material

The creatures have yellow-grey, swollen bodies and crab-like pincers in place of ordinary caterpillar feet. Benson gives them weight through the soft thud of one falling from the bed. He gives them grip by letting their feet sink into concrete as if it were putty. The combination does more than enlarge an insect. Something fleshy and vulnerable-looking can treat the building as softer than itself.

That change makes the narrator's escape feel provisional. He shuts his bedroom door, then considers what wood could possibly do against those feet. Benson returns to the cold of marble against bare soles, a plain physical sensation that follows the narrator out of the encounter. The story keeps questioning whether he was asleep. His body keeps supplying evidence that is hard to shrug off.

Their attention is equally unpleasant. They scarcely have faces, but their mouths all turn toward the person watching. There is no expressive monster portrait to interpret, no smile explaining whether this is malice or hunger. A whole heap simply changes direction. For an artist, that is a useful lesson in giving a creature intent through movement while withholding a readable personality.

Small is no safer

Daylight brings a miniature version in a cardboard pill-box. Inglis found it on his bed and wants to see what sort of moth it becomes. His curiosity makes a fine irritant beside the narrator's panic. A specimen can be kept, named and watched. A nightmare is supposed to vanish on waking. This small animal refuses to stay comfortably in either category.

The narrator throws the box into a fountain. Later, its cardboard has disintegrated while the creature is climbing a marble Cupid and spinning its cocoon. The decorative sculpture acquires an unwanted tenant. Trying to put the thing out of sight has produced another place to see it. Inglis eventually takes a much blunter approach, but the story has already made containment look embarrassingly optimistic.

A later swarm can thin itself to pass through a keyhole and swell again on the other side. That is the design's most unsettling freedom. The same creatures that press into concrete can become almost threadlike. A barrier cannot work if the body it is meant to exclude keeps renegotiating its shape.

The repeated qualifications about sleep can get tiring. Readers who want the narrator to act decisively may find the hesitation more frustrating than suspenseful. The eventual explanation also narrows an extraordinary image toward a single answer. Serious illness becomes part of the supernatural machinery, a choice that can feel cruel to someone close to the subject. The creature design is more convincing than the explanation attached to it.

Our reviews of The Ash-tree and The Voice in the Night follow other troubling encounters with organic life. Here, watch what each object can withstand. Benson gives the bed, box, stone and door a turn at failing. His best horror happens while we can still see the room perfectly well.

Questions from the crypt

Which version of Caterpillars is this review about?

E. F. Benson's short story in The Room in the Tower and Other Stories. The linked complete English text reproduces the 1912 Mills & Boon second edition. The review focuses on that individual story.

Is Caterpillars mainly an insect-attack story?

Its central effects are infestation, bodily disgust and uncertainty about what the narrator has witnessed. The creatures do move toward people, but much of the tension comes from watching doors, floors and containers cease to provide reassurance. Panic builds through close observation in this compact supernatural story.

What content should sensitive readers know about?

The story includes swarms, swollen insect-like bodies, a creature being crushed and serious illness. The imagery may be difficult for readers sensitive to infestation or illness anxiety. Its illness imagery supplies a supernatural explanation within the fiction.

Sources & further reading

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