Book Reviews: 'The Red Hourglass' and 'The Book of Deadly Animals'

"It's a brutal world for all of us, really, and some aspects of it are not comfortable for the sentimental or the squeamish. Somehow that's never dimmed my love for all animals. I celebrate their beauty, even the darker side of it." (Introduction, The Book of Deadly Animals)

"The predators far outnumbered the vegetarians."
(last words, The Red Hourglass: Lives of the Predators)

It's October, the "spooky" month with Halloween at the end of it; I sometimes take advantage of that to bring to light something a bit more horror themed than the usual Flayrah fare.

This year, I'd like to share the non-fiction books of Gordon Grice, which are about animals and their sometimes very tense relationship with man, because they are some of the scariest things I've ever read, and so appropriate enough under the "it's about animals and it's spooky" month to stretch the boundaries of what a furry publication can cover. Furthermore, from a personal angle, Grice spent much of his life where I'm originally from, the Oklahoma Panhandle (we share a birth town), and I occasionally like to shine a light on what would be to me local authors.

"The Red Hourglass: Lives of the Predators", Delacourte Press, 1998, 259 pages, Kindle $5.99, hardcover $19.32, paperback $17.10
"The Book of Deadly Animals", Penguin Books Ltd., 2010, xxvii + 383 pages, Kindle $4.99, paperback $24.00, illustrated, originally published as Deadly Kingdom

The Red Hourglass

Grice's first book, published all the way back in 1998, consists of seven essays about seven types of predatory animals. Spiders are especially prevalent, so arachnophobes beware. "Black Widow" is the first essay, "Tarantula" takes up the middle fourth, and the final essay is "Recluse". The other four essays are entitled "Mantid", "Rattlesnake", "Pig" and "Canid". Each features animals that Grice, or the average American reader, encounters frequently. All the animals covered are potentially dangerous to humans, with the exception of the mantids and tarantulas, which, while voracious predators in their own right, lack the size to truly harm humanity physically or venom either dangerous to humans, in the tarantula's case, or completely, in the mantid's.

The opening essay, "Black Widow", quickly sets the tone. It begins with the author's personal anecdotes hunting the spiders, which he keeps in terrariums. He knows the black widow, because he has studied it up close and personal. He tells us, matter-of-factly, that he has never been bit. It doesn't feel like bragging, just a statement of the facts. As the chapter continues, it becomes clear that it has to be true. He'd know if he'd been bit. A large section of the essay is spent on how it was not believed that spiders could actually have venom strong enough to kill a person, despite a lot of anecdotal evidence that they had. The essay tells the hair-raising story of how it was eventually proven the black widow was capable of killing a healthy adult. A scientist named Allan Blair conducted what The Book of Deadly Animals later confirms is the standard way for scientists to test how toxic arthropods are; he let one bite him.

Blair continued writing notes like a doomed journal writer in a horror video game until he was physically unable to; The Book of Deadly Animals also confirms this actually happens frequently. It tells the story of a snake researcher accidentally bitten by a krait who, incapable of speech due to the venom, gave written notes on how best to treat him. He was not as lucky as Blair, who survived the widow, barely; the snake researcher's last written words were "let me di".

The essays continue on like this, featuring anecdotes from Grice's own life sprinkled with well researched details about the animals' lifestyles. He often parallels the behavior of animals with that of humans. The final essay, "Recluse", tells the story of how brown recluse spiders were able to conquer his garden shed one summer. The recluse is another "deadly" spider, though its venom is not nearly as painful… at first. Grice admits to being bitten by this spider. For the record, so have I, and I have the scars to prove it. Anyway, just as Roald Dahl's The BFG contains the lie "Human beans is the only animal that is killing their own kind.", Grice preemptively sets out to disprove The Matrix's lie that "Every [animal] on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not." The recluse spiders destroy the little eco-system they encounter. Yes, it is a human-made one in this example, but Grice does note that naturalists say this boom-bust lifestyle is typical for the spiders in nature, as well. Is it any comfort that, as climate change begins to rev up, that, if we changed places with the spiders, they'd probably make the same mistakes?

The "Mantid" essay is both the most interesting, from a furry perspective, because it is literally about the concept of anthropomorphism, and also one of the scariest. He points out that, if you think of an intelligent bug alien, chances are, it somewhat resembles a mantis, despite there not being much evidence mantids are any smarter than any other bug. As different from us as they are, mantids do share some traits with us, including an erect stance, forward facing eyes and a pair of grasping limbs. They are, as far as insects are concerned, just the easiest to anthropomorphosize. Grice explains the dangers of anthropomorphism, at least for scientists, though he argues that they should be more agnostic to the idea of emotions in animals, rather than against the idea completely. An overworked H.P. Lovecraft quote says, "The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown." The final anecdote of the "Mantid" essay asks if that fear is old enough, and strong enough, can even a mantid share it? Grice doesn't answer the question, nor does he ever identify what the "cricket thing" that caused such a strange reaction in the mantis he observed even was. He just tells the story. The section begins with an appropriately Lovecraftian line, anyway:

"It was the rain that drove them up into the daylight world."

The Book of Deadly Animals

Grice's second book, The Book of Deadly Animals, is a bit of a letdown after The Red Hourglass. It is more of an overview of the entire animal kingdom, and as such is divided into chapters covering sections of said kingdom, rather than concise essays that make a point. The repetitive nature of this structure is also a bit of a problem. A tiger attack by itself exciting and memorable. A tiger attack followed by a lion attack followed by a leopard, followed by a hyena? Not as much.

That's not to say the book is bad. Grice's dry prose and dark humor is as present as ever. In one retelling of a python attack, a mother is able to save her young daughter, who in turn was only attacked while trying to rescue her kitten from the python. Grice assures us both girl and the kitten were fine. And though it may get repetitive, there's something to commend in just how comprehensive the book is. We get everything, from such famous and oft-repeated cases as the New Jersey rogue shark and the man-eating lions of Tsavo to a case where a feeder rabbit about to be fed to a pet python bit a boy's finger tip off in self defense, which, actually, good on the rabbit, there. Unfortunately, the rabbit ultimately did not survive this encounter, nor was the python, once again, fed.

The book begins with the Carnivorids, with chapters dedicated to cats, dogs, bears and, for once, hyenas. I've seen other books, even fairly recent books that should know better by now, disparage the spotted hyena as a scavenger who might be able to gang up on a person or larger animal, but Grice puts them right here with the big boys, both as a predator in general, and predator of humanity in particular, who just have the unfortunate luck to share territory with even bigger boys. A hyena even graces the cover of my paperback copy.

And Grice does assure us that wild animals do purposefully eat people, and that ideas that animals are innocents who only attack when provoked, on one end, are wrong, and that ideas that we are separate or even above the food chain, on the other, are also wrong. Grice assures us we are not apex predators. Actually, who wants to be an apex predator? Our omnivorous diet gives us a wide variety of foods to enjoy, while apex predators have an alarming tendency to go extinct, actually.

Grice's view is that animals are worth loving, even if they occasionally eat us, trample or gore us, poison or envenomate us, or give us the Bubonic plague. It might even be part of their charm. His main point is that, oftentimes, the most dangerous animals are the ones with the opportunity. What that means, statistically, your dog or cat is the most likely animal to do you harm. I have a cat, and I love her, but once again, I have the scars to prove it. It doesn't matter if an animal has the most powerful venom or the biggest teeth or actually think humans are the best tasting thing in the world, but it lives on one mountain in Antarctica, it's probably not going to have a big body count regardless. Of course, looking back at my statement that the most likely animal to do you harm is a dog or cat is wrong; Grice points out that the deadliest animal humans contend with are other humans. Grice points out that this is not a condemnation of humanity. We just have the most opportunity.

Two final things. There is a chapter on bats, and it contains this chilling little bit of foreshadowing (remember, this book was published back in 2010):

"There are more than nine hundred species of bat. Many of them live in colonies of hundreds or thousands, and that's what makes them ideal laboratories for the creation of new diseases. Viruses and bacteria can spread rapidly between hosts, mutating as they spread. Since bats may fly for miles in a night, they can spread microbes around. Our own swelling population brings us into contact with bats and their diseases."

Huh.

Well, anyway, I think there's just time for one more story. Grice does have a small section in the chapter on canids dedicated to fox attacks, though he seems to have only found cases of rabid foxes. (Not that I'm complaining; haven't we all been a rabid fox at one point or another, or is that just me?) He doesn't include any healthy fox attacks, but I know of a case that came out during 2010, which I will recount for the record, now.

It happened on an October night, no less, and in a graveyard, too. How perfect for my "Halloween" article. When I first heard about the incident, it was suggested that it was a suicide attempt, involving pills, but I can't confirm that detail. If that's the case, I'll at least say he picked an appropriate spot. Not a good spot, overall, however, as it turned out. He was eventually found by people, and taken to the hospital, but not before first being found by the local foxes. They ate part of his face, including his nose, and some fingers. 🦊