Monster crabs are invading Europe. Armed with a jar of mayonnaise, Stephen Bleach steps into battle.An army of red monsters is marching west from Russia. They have eight legs, and huge claws, and they grow up to 6ft wide. They’ll eat anything they can catch. There are 10 million of them, and they’re multiplying rapidly.
So, I ask you, what better way to spend a short break than to nip up to Norway, catch a few with your bare hands and eat them with garlic mayonnaise?
The monsters in question are red king crabs and, while they’re not likely to put an end to the human race, they’re certainly enough to give it a few nightmares. They have shells covered in evil spikes and chillingly complex, insect-like mouth parts, all blown up to outlandish proportions.
They look like something dreamt up by the special-effects department of a film studio specialising in gratuitously nasty horror B-movies, then rejected by the director as implausibly unpleasant. I have stared deep into their stick-mounted eyes from a distance of six inches, and all I saw there was a dumb, relentless malevolence.
If you’d like to do the same, you need to go to Finnmark, at the very top of Norway. If you look on the map, it’s that spiky mohican haircut of land that fans out way, way above the Arctic Circle. Briefly, this is why the crabs are there: king crabs are native to Kamchatka, 2,500 miles away at the eastern end of Siberia.
