“I feel I stand in a desert with my hands outstretched, and you are raining down upon me.”
― The Price of Salt
Illustration by Jean L. Huens for the Saturday Evening Post. Done for the short story “The Snails,” by Patricia Highsmith.
A long time ago – in 2012 I wrote a blog entry about a short story I remembered reading when I was a child.
The short story had scared the crap out of me when I first read it in 1967 (I would have been ten years old) in The Saturday Evening Post and it had never left my mind. In 2012 I did some web searching, found the story, and in a trip to the library found and read a couple of different versions of it.
Over the years since many people have hit that blog post searching for information on the story. It seems I wasn’t the only child frightened by this story of giant man eating snails.
The other day I finally found an online version of the story – someone has uploaded a PDF of the the version from Patricia Highsmith’s collection The Snail Watcher and Other Stories.
You can find the PDF here:
The Quest for “Blank Claveringi”
(Sorry, the PDF has been removed and the site now links to questionable material. If I find another copy, I’ll link it)
Andrew left a comment-
It’s one of the stories in “The Snail Watchers and other stories” and it’s available to borrow for 1 hour at archive.org – https://archive.org/details/snailwatcherothe0000high.
You have to sign up – but the Internet Archive is cool anyway – so now you can go read it. I’ve checked that book out, there are some other weird, worthy stories in it too. Thanks Andrew!
It’s a cool story – go read it.
Back in 2012, I wrote a bit of… I guess it would be fan fiction – a sequel to The Quest for “Blank Claveringi” – You can read that here:
I have wanted to write another sequel – a monster story about the National Guard fighting giant snails – sort of a Godzilla-type thing – The Attack of the “Blank Claveringi” – maybe I’ll write that over the weekend or sometime.
So little time.
Bill Chance 