Title: Daddy Longlegs of the Evening
Author: Jeffrey Ford
In: Naked City (Ellen Datlow)
Rating Out of 5: 4.5 (Amazing, but not quite perfect)
My Bookshelves: Horror, Insects, Urban fantasy
Dates read: 11th December 2019
Pace: Fast
Format: Short story
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press
Year: 2011
5th sentence, 74th page: He’d traded a pair of official police handcuffs, with key, for the pack it came from.
A daddy long legs found its way into their son’s ear and made a little nest for itself in his brain… what comes next is definitely the things that nightmares are made of.
I should start this review by saying that I actually really, really love spiders. I keep trying to convince my partner to let me have a pet one… and I specifically love Daddy Long Legs because they are super safe and really cool looking. One of the least creepy spiders in the kingdom. Having said all of that, I wasn’t so keen on this story. It was actually quite creepy and I sat there looking around my room for spiders when I was finished… I didn’t want to turn into Daddy!
I do love that this story works on peoples’ sometimes irrational fears of spiders and them crawling into your brain. I’m not even sure if that’s something that tends to happen… but it’s still something that a lot of people tend to fear. I love stories that take these fears and make them into something that is a little comic, but still quite creepy. Which seems to be a bit of a theme within Ford’s short stories.
Even though I found Daddy in this seriously creepy… I was still seriously happy that he got away in the end. It means that he was probably out killing a whole other town. But I was still really happy that he did… if I don’t think about it too hard. My brain is a really weird place.
Earth and Skye 
3 thoughts on “Daddy Longlegs of the Evening by Jeffrey Ford”