I. It Came and We Knew It

It’s not just that we live in a culture of monsters—that Frankenstein’s monster, say, shuffles from screen to graphic novel to breakfast cereal—but that we have always lived in a culture of monsters. Go back to Beowulf, and Grendel strips the flesh from a hapless warrior’s bones with his hideous teeth. Go back further, to the Book of Job, and the God who speaks to Job from the whirlwind boasts of having subdued and broken Leviathan, bridling the vast beast through its smoking nostrils. Go back still further, to Egypt’s Middle Kingdom, and the flint-headed Apep coils just below the horizon, his scaly jaws open wide to threaten the sun. And so on: from the ancient Chinese Xian Tian, whose giant, headless body shakes its sword and rattles its shield, to the contemporary Chupacabra, which stalks the border between Mexico and the United States, monsters are among the building blocks of our cultures, a legacy to accompany the languages we learn. We meet them in a variety of venues, from old movies rerun on TV to books read under the blanket by flashlight, from the bright panels of comic books to stories passed around the playground.

It should come as no surprise, then, how many monsters are familiar to us. Long before we have contemplated Godzilla as a trope for Japanese trauma over the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we hear the great reptile’s metallic roar. Before we have read Frankenstein’s monster as Mary Shelley’s grief over her lost daughter, we see the pattern of stitches that hold the artificial man’s body together. We experience our monsters first in all their strange and striking particularity, as the host of details that assembles into them. Only later do we see them as vessels fit for carrying a weight of meaning, as something other than literal. Perhaps this explains some of their continuing power, because, no matter how well we may think we explain them, they hail from a time in our lives when we did not know not to take them at face value.

No doubt, the current round of monster narratives that this anthology considers is indebted to the success of Stephen King’s fiction. Several of the stories in his first collection, Night Shift (1978), employ monsters in a serious and frightening way, a practice his short novel, The Mist (1980), and longer novel, It (1986), solidify. At the same time, King follows in a line of American writers of the fantastic, reaching back through Philip K. Dick, Ray Bradbury, and Theodore Sturgeon to H.P. Lovecraft and beyond. In “The Father Thing” (1954), “The Fog-Horn” (1951), “It” (1940), and At the Mountains of Madness (1936), these writers place monsters center-stage in their fiction. In addition, British counterparts such as John Wyndham and E.F. Benson have brought their sensibilities to bear on the topic, while Franz Kafka, one of the giants of twentieth-century European literature, rests his career on a long story about a salesman who is metamorphosed into a monstrous insect. If there is one thing this range of fictions has in common, it is the decision to place the monster in a contemporary, realistically-portrayed setting, an imaginary toad in a real garden.

Frequently, the effect of such a move is comic, as is the case with several of the stories collected in the first section of this book. Joe R. Lansdale’s “Godzilla’s Twelve-Step Program” imagines the great monster and his fellows laboring to resist their destructive tendencies; while Jeffrey Ford’s “After Moreau” retells and rewrites H.G. Wells’s Island of Dr. Moreau (1896) from the point of view of one of the doctor’s lesser-known creations, Hippopotamus Man; and Michael Kelly’s “Kraken” presents the story of what might be called a were-kraken. However humorous their premises, each of these stories swerves, sometimes unexpectedly, towards the dark. In this, they are of a piece with the section’s other selections. Both Jim Shepard’s “The Creature from the Black Lagoon” and Alaya Dawn Johnson’s “Among Their Bright Eyes” present monstrous narrators who are shot through with loneliness and melancholy, which their acts of often shocking violence do little to assuage. The monsters in Christopher Golden’s breakneck “Under Cover of the Night” and Carrie Laben’s offbeat “Underneath Me, Steady Air” are strange, savage entities antithetical to the humans they encounter; in this, they achieve something of the quality of the things that used to scrape the floor under our beds, to jangle the hangers in our closets. Yet in Golden and Laben’s stories, the monsters the characters confront are not completely unknown; whether from folklore or literary history, the protagonists are able to identify them.

It is a critical commonplace—cliché, even—to see the monster as the embodiment of the other. Certainly there are enough stories for which this is the case to allow this interpretation to stand. But the seven stories which open this anthology suggest an additional possibility: that what might be most frightening is that we recognize, whether from a movie watched from between fingers, or a story that made our hearts pound, or from a toy that used to stare across the bedroom at us.

GODZILLA’S TWELVE-STEP PROGRAM • Joe R. Lansdale
THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON • Jim Shepard
AFTER MOREAU • Jeffrey Ford
AMONG THEIR BRIGHT EYES • Alaya Dawn Johnson
UNDER COVER OF NIGHT • Christopher Golden
THE KRAKEN • Michael Kelly
UNDERNEATH ME, STEADY AIR • Carrie Laben.

II. It Came and We Could Not Stop It

What makes a monster monstrous may be less a matter of any distinguishing physical feature and more a matter of certain intangible qualities. Chief among these would have to be its persistence, its relentless pursuit of whatever its goal. That goal likely entails some threat to us, either direct or incidental, and the monster likely combines its single-mindedness with a capacity to endure whatever attacks we hurl at it. If the monster can be defeated, it will be by an artifact or invention whose uniqueness only underscores the creature’s singularity.
This iteration of the monster narrative seems the polar opposite of the power fantasy that animates so many stories of the fantastic. Here, what is on display is not omnipotence, but fatal vulnerability. The particulars of what we are liable to may change with the given story, as the narratives gathered in this second section demonstrate. Clive Barker’s “Rawhead Rex” presents a monster of unbridled male aggression, while David J. Schow’s “Not from Around Here” joins a monster of more general sexual excess with a concern for suburban alienation. Cherie Priest and Jeff VanderMeer focus on monsters for whom our bodies are little more than raw material to be used for their own, strange arts. Norman Partridge’s “The Hollow Man” expands on this idea, giving us a creature whose amusement lies in making us its puppets, while Al Sarrontonio’s “The Ropy Thing” addresses the perils of infatuation.

Whatever their surface differences, however, these stories are united by a sense, an anxiety, about the recalcitrance of the world, about those aspects of our existence over which we have no control, against which we struggle in vain. And underneath that plenitude lurks a common fact, that of our own, inevitable end. Asking himself whether he understands death, Mark Petrie, the boy-hero of Stephen King’s ’Salem’s Lot (1975), thinks, “Sure. That was when the monsters got you.” The stories in this section of Creatures bear him out.

RAWHEAD REX • Clive Barker
WISHBONES • Cherie Priest
THE HOLLOW MAN • Norman Partridge
NOT FROM AROUND HERE • David J. Schow
THE ROPY THING • Al Sarrantonio
THE THIRD BEAR • Jeff VanderMeer

III. It Came for Us

Monsters aren’t always indiscriminate. For every juggernaut that tornadoes across the page, leaving a body count in the double-digits, there is another creature that takes more care in choosing its victims, and while the eventual tally of its murders may approach or even exceed that of its less selective cousin, every death is a step on the way to its eventual goal: us. Perhaps the beast has fallen in love with us. Perhaps we have trespassed against it in ways intentional or accidental. Perhaps it has recognized in us a threat to itself that must be addressed. Whatever the cause, the monster’s notice has settled on us, and it will not rest until it has us. It is as if that secret, narcissistic sense we have as children, that the world revolves around us—which we are supposed to outgrow but never leaves us completely—is being validated in the most horrible of fashions. Yet whatever dark thrill such attention might bring, it must be qualified by our fear at the end result of this attention, as well as by some measure of guilt over its damage to those around us.

So in this third section, Kelly Link’s “Monster” gives us the monster as the terrible protector we longed for as children, without ever considering what the cost of such a guardian might be. In comparison, the mysterious entities at work in Genevieve Valentine’s “Keep Calm and Carillon” appear more benevolent, except for the rather odd task they require of the people they’ve saved from certain death, which rapidly moves from amusing in the direction of disturbing. The father in Robert McCammon’s “The Deep End” wages a very personal campaign against the water-beast that took his son from him; the sea serpent in F. Brett Cox’s “The Serpent and the Hatchet Gang” portends another kind of conflict. In “Blood Makes Noise” and “The Machine Is Perfect, the Engineer Is Nobody,” Gemma Files and Brett Alexander Savory, respectively, write of monsters that seem to know more about their intended victims than the victims do, themselves. Laird Barron’s “Proboscis” confronts us with monsters content to dwell amongst us unnoticed, until one of us sees more than he should.
The protagonists of all these stories share a kind of election. However terrible it might be, they have been chosen, singled out for a glimpse of the world’s hidden engines. The monster that threatens our flesh threatens our understanding, too, its fractured outrage tearing vents in the life we thought we knew.

MONSTER • Kelly Link
KEEP CALM AND CARILLON • Genevieve Valentine
THE DEEP END • Robert R. McCammon
THE SERPENT AND THE HATCHET GANG • F. Brett Cox
BLOOD MAKES NOISE • Gemma Files
THE MACHINE IS PERFECT, THE ENGINEER IS NOBODY • Brett Alexander Savory
PROBOSCIS • Laird Barron

IV. It Came From Us

Unsnarl the etymology, and you find that “monster” and “demonstrate” share a common root, the Latin monstrum, whose meanings include “sign” or “portent.” As Umberto Eco notes in On Ugliness (2007), the traditional view of the monster has been as an indication of something else, often a divine message. The monster is simultaneously that which snaps its misshapen jaws in front of us, and a signpost pointing us towards some additional significance. (Indeed, the idea of the monstrum might be a very profitable way to discuss how it is that horror stories function.) Often enough, the meaning a monster points to lies outside the self, in anxiety at the world’s threats and failings, the harm it poses to us physically and mentally. Certainly, the stories in the first three sections of this anthology offer a host of such meanings.

There is, of course, another direction to which the signpost might point, and that is at us. This is the monster as mirror, reflecting our own ugliness and shortcomings back at us. The stories in the fourth and final section of this anthology hold up the glass to humanity, and record what is found in its depths. China Miéville’s “Familiar” begins with a witch’s disappointment in the creature he has wrought from his flesh, and then follows the discarded lump as it remakes itself from its urban surroundings. In Lisa Tuttle’s “Replacements,” a strange new pet becomes the obsession of women all over London, much to the disgust and confusion of the men in their lives. Stephen Graham Jones’s “Little Monsters” is an exercise in the challenges of monster-construction, while Sarah Langan’s “The Changeling” presents an unwanted and neglected child who becomes a child-snatching monster in the service of the dead. Nathan Ballingrud’s “The Monsters of Heaven” asks to what ends we might employ our monsters in the expiation of our most terrible mistakes. And in the anthology’s powerful closing story, Nadia Bulkin’s “Absolute Zero,” eight-year-old Max is given a Polaroid picture of his missing father, a stag-headed avatar of the wild. As Max grows and tries to build a future by searching for pieces of his past, including his monstrous father, he discovers that the worlds of the human and the monster are hopelessly blurred.

To one degree or another, all the stories in this final section touch on ideas of parents and children. Given that family is the means by which we enter the world, and by which the world first enters us, it is not so surprising that stories about our monstrousness should involve the family. If this anthology has an overarching theme, it might be that monsters are our family, always closer to us than is really comfortable, the twisted limbs on our family tree.

FAMILIAR • China Miéville
REPLACEMENTS • Lisa Tuttle
LITTLE MONSTERS • Stephen Graham Jones
THE CHANGELING • Sarah Langan
THE MONSTERS OF HEAVEN • Nathan Ballingrud
ABSOLUTE ZERO • Nadia Bulkin