Monsters

Most of what I wrote in my last few posts was fairly abstract, and while that shouldn't be a tremendous shock for anyone who's been following this blog, I want to show how some of those ideas can be turned into something more practical for worldbuilders.

So let's talk about monsters.



One of the points that you can take from Mary Douglas' work is that humans become uncomfortable when we're faced with phenomena that don't fit any of the categories that we've established for ourselves. We don't just react to them intellectually; we feel a visceral unease when confronted by them.

The substances of our bodies can do it easily: blood, saliva, sweat, or excrement can all stir up feelings of disgust. Even a strand of hair or a stray fingernail clipping can make some people squirm. Douglas would argue that our reaction comes from the fact that these things trouble our minds. Are they part of a person or not? They're still recognizable as the products of bodies, but they're not in their proper place--they're not connected to anyone anymore.

As much as we like to believe that our selves are whole and well-bounded, these remnants remind us how porous those boundaries are. Playing with that sense of unease gives you one route to horror. You can create monsters that remind your audience of the fluidity of their own condition by exposing it. Let them drip, bleed, shed themselves in pieces, and leave behind traces wherever they go.

You can even take a more grotesque approach, with a creature like the Scottish nuckelavee. Its basic shape is unusual enough--a centaur-like monster with flippers instead of hooves and an enormous, one-eyed head that lolls on its shoulders as if its neck isn't strong enough to support it--but then there's this:

But what to Tammie appeared most horrible of all, was that the monster was skinless; this utter want of skin adding much to the terrific appearance of the creature's naked body, - the whole surface of it showing only red raw flesh, in which Tammie saw blood, black as tar, running through yellow veins, and great white sinews, thick as horse tethers, twisting, stretching, and contracting as the monster moved. (From Katherine Briggs' A Dictionary of Fairies. Briggs, in turn, is quoting from Sir George Douglas' Scottish Fairy and Folk-Tales.)

Take away the skin, reveal the "raw red flesh" inside all our bodies, and monstrosity multiplies.

That boundary, the one between the inside and outside of our bodies, is just one that can give a shape to your monsters. You can do the same with living and dead, human and animal, or even different categories of animal. One of the things that gives Lovecraftian horrors their distinctive character, after all, is the way that descriptions of them incorporate images from parts of nature that we would never connect: they're part-animal, part-fungus, winged, tentacled, hairy, chitinous things that don't just challenge our categories, but destroy them. You don't have to go full Lovecraft to get a similar effect. ("Never go full Lovecraft.")

So here's a question for you: if you've created new monsters in your own writing, what categories are they disturbing? If you haven't created any yet, or if you're interested in monsters in general, what examples can you think of that express some of the ideas I've been writing about?

Talk amongst yourselves.