How to make a Monster

We learn from Mary Shelley's use of the word in her novel Frankenstein that 'creature' is not something hideous and prone to violence but that which has been created. A crucial distinction. The word 'monster' similarly means not a vile and dangerous creature but something of a larger than usual size. 'Monstrous' is the adjective form which describes a large animal, for example. And yet, in our modern day these two terms have taken on and held frightening connotations.

I actually did not read Frankenstein until I was an adult in graduate school. I had seen many versions of the story in film form, however - and unfortunately. In fact, for my Romantic Literature course, I made a project of comparing how the story and its themes were twisted in different films, from the fairly faithful to the absurdly deviant. Man playing God was the main theme portrayed, and the consequences of doing so, a warning to us all.

As a teen reader, I pored through the science fiction library, the more fantastic the story the better. Many of them involved astronauts exploring alien worlds, often encountering unusual life forms which challenged them. The astronauts would call them monsters. The fact that earthlings met the normal beings of another planet and considered them monsters was both amusing to me as a young reader and to me as an adult, as words are my special interest and the foundation of my career as an English teacher.

As a young adult, I read Michael Moorcock's great fantasy novel The Eternal Champion, in which the hero is drawn from his normal everyday life into a fantasy world where he is expected to fight - literally lead battles - for one kingdom against a rival kingdom. Besides the questions of How did this happen? and How can I get back home? are questions about doing the right thing. Eventually he is captured by the "bad guys" and comes to learn that they are actually the "good guys" and he should be fighting against the side that he initially was supposed to fight for. So he does. Then, instead of returning home in a flash-bang moment, he is pulled to his next adventure, and on and on through a whole series.

That turnabout situation blew my mind as a youth. The way one side was portrayed as good, the other evil, and only the rugged outsider could tell the difference, or see the truth. This twist or flip-flop made the book monumental for me. It stuck with me and perhaps surreptitiously influenced my current forthcoming novel THE MASTERS' RIDDLE. One difference is that I tried to employ only non-humans in my cast of characters. Another is the transition of the "bad guys" from a cruel mysterious race reduced to a pathetic, sick individual who needs the help of one which his race has enslaved and tormented. Yes, the ol' switcheroo.

At one point in the story, one of the creatures declares that they are not monsters. This could be determined to mean they are not dangerous or undesirable or unintelligent - in contrast to how the Masters treat them. I recall the tagline from the film The Elephant Man, about a Victorian-era man so deformed he was put in an institution until it was discovered that he was quite intelligent and erudite despite his hideous appearance. At one point in the film he cries out to his abusers "I am not an animal!" 

Now take the idea further: a race of interplanetary explorers - accessing other worlds via an interdimensional doorway - who collect creatures from across the galaxy, at first for their amusement, then for experimentation, for slave labor, and when they have more monsters than they can use, keep them locked up in prison cells until they can be used. Because I like a good twist, let's follow through this story seeing it from the point of view of one of those creatures that has been captured. Like the hero of The Eternal Champion, this captive doesn't understand why they were captured and doesn't know how to return home. Getting home is the driving force in the story. It is also a tale of survival, revenge, and what it means to not be human.

More inside information next time. 

THE MASTERS' RIDDLE is coming soon!

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