![]() ![]() The covers usually showed undressed hunks clubbing waves of the nipping attackers. In the 1950s, needing more thrills for barely literate readers, they shifted to fictional animal attacks with titles like ‘Chewed Alive And Screaming’ and ‘I Battled A Giant Otter.’ Every possible creature was used, even the most innocuous, but the plots were identical: a hero finds himself on foreign soil battling quasi-commie foes in animal guise. James, it was spiders that poured out of a disturbed nest in ‘The Ash-Tree’ (1904) that got the pulse racing.ĭuring the Second World War, the more lurid of the American men’s magazines peddled fake “I was there” stories concerning manly exploits against Nazis and the Japanese. ![]() Wells wrote a somber assessment of our species’ chances against a marauding wave of African soldier ants in 1905, ‘Empire Of The Ants.’ (They were not, unlike the Joan Collins movie in 1977, in any way mutant.) Ants remained a scourge of note in Carl Stephenson’s story ‘Leiningen Versus The Ants’ in 1938, which itself was an influence on the 1974 movie Phase IV. ![]() There had been stories about rampaging animals since the turn of the century. For a while in the late seventies, British paperback imprints mined a market in short, gruesome novels about animal attacks that were targeted predominantly at schoolboys. ![]()
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