SOURCE: "The Quest For the Blank Claveringi" by Patricia Highsmith (The Saturday Evening Post, June 17, 1967)

DESCRIPTION: "...It was a snail, and its shell was about fifteen feet high. He had a view of its left side, the side without the spiral. It resembled a peach-colored sail filled with wind, and the sunlight made nacreous, silvery patches gleam and twinkle as the great thing stirred...The moist body, the color of tea with milk, came into view with the slowness of an enormous snake awakening from slumber...The snail's head, facing inland, rose higher and higher, and its antennae, with which it saw, began to extend...A gigantic face regarded him, a face drooping, scalloped cheeks or lips, with antennae six feet long now, the eyes on the ends of them scrutinizing him at his own level and scarcely ten feet away...He had a glimpse of a great belly gliding unhurt over a jagged tree trunk, of a circular mouth two feet across, opening and showing the still wider upper band of teeth like shark's teeth, munching automatically up and down..." ("The Quest For the Blank Claveringi" by Patricia Highsmith)

NOTES:  The Man-Eating Snails of Kuwa live on the remote and barren island of Kuwa, that is three miles long and one mile wide. A mating pair of seventeen-foot  tall adults guard a nest of infants the size of beach balls. The local Matusas hunted and supposed killed off the species twenty years earlier. A taboo keeps visitors away from the island.

HISTORY: An interesting paradox exists between this story and the work of Robert E. Howard. You'd almost think Howard inspired the giant snails or vice versa when you see the giant slugs in Conan or the situation in Howard's "The People of the Black Coast". Only these stories were published around or after Highsmith's, not back in the 1930s. They were published posthumously by L. Sprague de Camp and other editors. I guess snails and slugs just inspire horror.