Monsters On Parade

In Fiction, Halloween, Writing on 21 October 2009 with no comments

As the days begin to shrink in earnest and the tem­per­a­ture drops below what my California-reared skin can com­fort­ably lounge about in, mon­sters begin to claw their way out of my sub­con­scious and into the fore­ground. They whis­per, they cajole, they bark and they howl. Sometimes this is haunt­ing. Mostly, it’s extremely liberating.

Even as a child I knew exactly what kind of writer I was going to be. I would tell any­one who would lis­ten that I was going to be a hor­ror nov­el­ist. Eventually I had to stop say­ing this, how­ever, as more than a few peo­ple heard “whore nov­el­ist” and would blush and guf­faw. Eventually I started telling peo­ple that I wanted to be Stephen King.

That was only par­tially cor­rect, how­ever. What I really wanted was dark mythol­ogy, a uni­verse were peo­ple were con­stantly tor­mented by evils they could nei­ther see nor hear, but which were incon­tro­vert­ible and inexorable.

What draws me to the hor­rific and the fan­tas­tic are rarely phys­i­cal mon­sters. While I can appre­ci­ate the beauty of Frankenstein’s mon­ster and the wicked­ness of Dracula and Mr. Hyde, these char­ac­ters never moved me the way mon­sters I would invent later in life would. The sto­ries are cap­ti­vat­ing and tragic, and I’ve always been jeal­ous that Mary Shelley penned Frankenstein when she was only 18 years old. Yet while the merit of the sto­ries is doubt­less the mon­sters them­selves failed to sway me. They did not inspire fear.

When I was lit­tle, my father was some­thing of a bud­ding occultist, though I doubt he would have termed him­self that. A song­writer by trade, he decided to try his hand at a novel about the anti-Christ, and as part of his research delved into the worlds of demonology, scrip­ture, magic and the arcane. I would creep into his office and find books like The Magus and The History of Witchcraft and Demonology on the floor. Naturally, I flipped through them, both scared and fas­ci­nated. I was famil­iar with the Devil, of course. And while my Christian upbring­ing taught me that the books my father was read­ing were evil and not to be tri­fled with, I couldn’t help but be drawn to them. They con­tained some­thing within their pages that stirred in me real fear and trans­fix­ion, and the mag­net­ism of being ver­boten twisted me into a kind of secret, demon-loving freak.

Oh, to be sure, I was ter­ri­fied of my father’s books. I knew that their power could turn Jesus-loving lit­tle girls into drug addicts, psy­chotics, and hea­thens. I knew that to show too much inter­est was to invite the Beast into my world. I’d seen The Exorcist. I had no inten­tion of being Linda Blair.

And yet…they were just so won­der­ful, in their way. Too won­der­ful to resist. These were actual mon­sters. These were the objects of my most pri­mal fear. The demons and dev­ils that filled my head in those early days were beings of hate, woe, evil, and lust, and if you weren’t care­ful they had the power and priv­i­lege to posses your soul and take over your life. They could destroy your body and rend your soul from its shell and carry you straight off to Hell.

And why? Because they could.

What child could resist?

I admit that I have not spend too much time read­ing mod­ern mon­ster lit­er­a­ture, but what I have read dis­ap­points, because authors seem to enjoy strip­ping mon­sters of their mon­stros­ity. They want us to under­stand their mon­ster. They want us to be sym­pa­thetic. They want us to see their mon­ster from another point of view, to put our­selves in its shoes.

Real mon­sters don’t have moti­va­tions. They aren’t sub­ject to human morals or guide­lines – that’s what makes them mon­sters! They must be iden­ti­fi­able – if they are too dif­fer­ent from us, they’re not mon­sters, they are ani­mals. Monsters are nec­es­sar­ily born in the uncanny val­ley – they bear enough resem­blance to some­thing we know that we expect a cer­tain per­son­al­ity or inter­ac­tion. But upon closer inspec­tion we see that some­thing is hor­ri­bly, revolt­ingly wrong.

Monsters don’t care about us. They don’t care about our world. They don’t care about fit­ting in. They merely are what they are – incar­na­tions of the very things we fear most.

One of my favorite “hor­ror” movies is Shaun of the Dead. One of the things I love about it is that no attempt is made to explain the appear­ance of the zom­bies, nor their nature. We’re allowed to just accept that the zom­bies are the walk­ing dead, grue­some, some­what com­i­cal, and creepy. We can sit back and just appre­ci­ate the joyride they take us on. (Night of the Living Dead is of course won­der­ful also, but there’s some­thing about the dia­logue and blend of hor­ror and com­edy in Shaun that is just brilliant.)

Another favorite mon­ster takes the form of some­thing else near and dear to us – our homes. The houses in both The Dionaea House (one of my all-time favorite Halloween tales) and in House of Leaves are ideal mon­sters because they are rem­i­nis­cent of some­thing we know, some­thing that should be com­fort­ing and ground­ing but which are in fact hor­rific and inexplicable.

Contrast these mon­sters, which are not explained away but sim­ply allowed to just be, with the house in Zemeckis/Spielberg’s Monster House, which begins in much the same way as the house in Dionaea House (if a watered down, though very enter­tain­ing, children’s ver­sion) but by the end of the film is explained as being pos­sessed by the soul of the tor­mented woman who once lived there. Once the expla­na­tion set­tles we have lit­tle to truly fear, because now we under­stand. And while that under­stand­ing makes for a good children’s flick, it makes for a lousy monster.

When I took up fic­tion writ­ing, I at first did so with the inten­tion of spin­ning biogra­phies of won­der­ful mon­sters. After all, my child­hood was shaped by Lewis Carroll and Stephen King – I was doomed early on to have a pen­chant for the strange and unnat­ural. But as I began to develop my char­ac­ters and my plots I real­ized that the more I dealt with the mon­sters, the less scary they became. It became clear that the only way to deal with mon­sters and keep them mon­strous was to write around them, to tell the story from the points of view of those whose lives were being ran­sacked by their inter­ac­tions with the mon­sters. I could show as much about these char­ac­ters as I wanted, but the mon­sters had to remain largely in the back­ground. They could not be seen. They could not be known.

Harkening back to my child­hood, then, my mon­sters were pri­mar­ily incor­po­real – demons, dev­ils, suc­cubi, incubi, and imps. Enough was already writ­ten about these mon­ster to give them sub­stance, but they were unique enough that I could weave them into the lives of var­i­ous char­ac­ters under myr­iad dif­fer­ent cir­cum­stances and then sit back and watch as all Hell broke loose. It was won­der­ful! Eventually I ven­tured fur­ther into my imag­i­na­tion to con­coct other evil spir­its com­pletely my own. I was able to spin entire pan­theons and mytholo­gies from the inter­ac­tions of the mon­sters that dwelled in my head.

And yet, for all that I invented them, I can­not tell you much about them, because I do not know them. I keep them at arm’s length even from myself, because if I’m not scared of them, how can I present them in all their fear­some glory to others?

I enjoy see­ing other people’s mon­sters. I enjoy the yard haunts I see both online and in my own neigh­bor­hood, with corpses claw­ing their way out from the ground, ghosts swing­ing from bare tree branches, jack-o-lanterns twin­kling their wicked smiles. I enjoy the chil­dren dressed as vam­pires, ghouls, gob­lins and witches. I enjoy the way we embrace the dark­ness and our fears and cel­e­brate them full force, even if just for one night. For one night, all these mon­sters are beau­ti­ful, and my love for them is reflected and shared all around me. For one night, my mon­sters take a back seat so that the other mon­sters can dance cen­ter stage.

But only for a night. In the morn­ing, my own mon­sters will return, demand­ing to be reck­oned with.

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