THE DEEP ONES: "The Crab Spider" by Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian

"The Crab Spider" by Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian

Discussion begins January 12. 2022.

First published Les contes fantastiques (1860).



BIBLIOGRAPHY

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?1170805

SELECTED PRINT VERSIONS

The Invisible Eye
100 Creepy Little Creatures
H. P. Lovecraft Selects: Classic Horror Stories
The Taste of Fear

ONLINE VERSIONS

https://dmdujour.wordpress.com/2016/04/25/erckmann-chatrian-the-waters-of-death/

ONLINE AUDIO VERSIONS

No online audio versions found to date.

MISCELLANY

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erckmann-Chatrian
https://writersnoonereads.tumblr.com/post/11893764403/both-m-r-james-and-h-p-lov...
https://tinyurl.com/3k3cbnat

Since nominating this story and finding the online version linked in >1 semdetenebre:, I found out that the Ash Tree Press collection The Invisible Eye ("selected and introduced by" Hugh Lamb) was (in 2018) republished by Harper Collins in the UK (Amazon UK lists a Kindle edition and (apparently) eight remaining physical copies).

According to the Writers No One Reads blog post linked in the miscellany, there were only 500 copies of the Ash Tree Press edition (and a previous collection complied by Hugh Lamb in the '80s lacks six stories that were subsequently tracked down ).

So I'll read this in a different translation (by Eithne Fearnley-Whittingstall) from The Invisible Eye.

I see that, by a nice coincidence, it's our second Rhineland-set story in as many weeks.

That is a fantastic double portrait of the authors

Found this rather underwhelming to be honest. The tropical spider setting up shop in the thermal spring was a tolerably clever idea, but the execution dind't impress me.

Also, I'm not sure there's anything weird here. The biology may be suspect, but I don't think Erckmann-Chatrian intended any of that "malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space" Lovecraft said characterized the proper weird tale.

4> I agree though we do have Agatha forced to use her psychic powers to give us information on the commodore's fate.

I get the vague impression that, from about 1880 to 1910, speculations derived from science and exploration were taken up by weird writers. This story reminded me most of William Hope Hodgson's "The Terror of the Water-Tank" which we previously discussed.

I wasn’t thinking of Agatha’s clairvoyance because it’s on the side of if not the angels then at least humanity - it’s not the scary thing in the story.

When I nominated this story, it was Agatha's clairvoyance that tipped the balance in its favour. I don't think the uncanny element has necessarily to be malevolent, just unsettling, suggesting worlds or powers we don't know.

Obviously this isn't a fully-formed weird tale, but as one of the functions of these Deep Ones discussions is a historical survey, I think looking at "proto-weird" stories is in order. I haven't checked but I think Lovecraft mentioned Erckmann-Chatrian in "Supernatural Horror in Literature", which would also give the selection some legitimacy.

It's also - I might try to argue - from a time when stories of exotic and dangerous animals could hit like a Cryptd or (Machenian) little people story. It's not even too fanciful to see a "family relationship" with "When the Summer Ends", is it? (the Crab Spider and the Kudzu Devils would admittedly be very distant cousins in this analogy, but the Devils are not supposed to be anything other than a previously unknown species. Not supernatural, and not aliens, I mean).

While I agree it is a "slight" story, still I'm pleased to have read it for all the reasons mentioned in >7 housefulofpaper:. So many tropes still familiar to us are evident here: rustic people faced with something beyond their ken, narration or key characters in educated elites, the failure or surprise of scientific investigation, the presence among us of a supernatural power sometimes harnessed for our uses (but at other times a malevolent presence).

Perhaps I'm jaded but I was imagining a spider more along the lines of Shelob! Certainly a spider as large as my head should be fearful enough.

>2 housefulofpaper: I see that, by a nice coincidence, it's our second Rhineland-set story in as many weeks.
That is a fun bit of synchronicity.

>7 housefulofpaper: I like your idea of a cryptid strain of the weird.

I'm not sure when it started, but there are definitely certain science fiction horror stories that feature such rationalized menaces: the Hodgson story I mentioned as well as his "The Voice in the Night", Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Horror of the Heights", H. G. Wells' "The Valley of the Spiders" and his "The Sea Raiders". They all strike me as sort of on the penumbra of the weird and interesting to look at.

Then we get the stories of invisible but probably not supernatural menaces like "The Horla", "The Damned Things", and "What Was It?".

Whether they are weird -- however you define that -- or not, I think it's fun and useful to look at these edge cases. Are they not weird because some sort of scientific explanation is offered for these mysterious creatures? Does it depend on reader reaction with one reader's sense of the weird being curbed or eliminated with such an explanation and another reader thinking it's still weird even with the explanation? De Maupassant's "The Horla", Bierce's "The Damned Thing", and O'Brien's "What Was It?" don't offer, as I recall, any supernatural explanations, but they seem weirder to many because even if no supernatural cause is given, we don't get much to replace it.

And then you get the sense of the weird even in some "hard sf" tales like Greg Bear's Blood Music. (There's a pretty good article on this aspect of Bear's work in issue two of Penumbra.)