Bugbears, and other things that go bump in the night

So what exactly is Peal? What does it mean to be a "bugbear", apart from some small and timid prey animal? Let's try to figure them out.



When you're a small child, darkness is a living and deathly thing in a way it never again will be as you grow up. Things live under your bed, in your closet, creaking up in the attic or down in the basement... or looking at you through your bedroom window when the lights are shut. The hollow trees, under roots, abandoned buildings, empty playgrounds, dark alleyways, even your dreams - all are teeming with life.

You never see a bogeyman, but you know it's there. Stalking. Waiting. Even as an adult, you're not always sure that you're alone.

So the first question I asked was: "Why do they hide?"

The usual answer, in fairy tales and literature, is that they're predators that are just waiting for you to lower your guard so that they might pounce up and devour you. As dreadful as the empty darkness and occasional glowing pair of eyes is, it's still vastly preferable to the true terror of what they look like.



I flipped the premise around: what if they hid not because they're predators, but because they're the prey?



They're small and weak, scared of all the big loud folk like you and I, or wolves and eagles - but they're quick on their feet and good at laying low. They almost never come out in the open if they can at all help it, so most people don't even believe they exist, let alone know that they're not all that big or scary or toothy after all.

If you're a small child living out in a small village or farm, or an ancient manor or castle, and like to explore your surroundings... you might just meet one. They aren't that scared of children. But even then, odds are low - and odds of you remembering it, and not chalking it up as overactive imagination of childhood, probably won't be much higher.

And then, the natural next question... what if one was forced out of hiding? What if they lost their home and found themselves in the daylight sun, at the road to faraway lands and places?

It would be a highly uncomfortable and terrifying experience to the poor creature... and therefore make for a great story premise.

It's exactly what happened to Peal, after all. He found himself as a prey out in clear view... forced to take a page or two out of the book of the other kind of bugbears - and become more like a predator.



I intended to tell a little more about bugbears, their appearance and culture and what they were meant to represent, at the beginning of The Straggler's Mask - but in the end I cut most of these away, shoving the rest down into footnotes, so that the story itself might pick up faster without having to wade through all this exposition first. It probably worked a little better like that, but it still wasn't entirely ideal... and maybe it started a bit slow anyway.

Perhaps, if I ever end up writing an epic trilogy of books where Peal has to wander to a distant volcano and throw the palarum in, I can start it with a prologue called On Bugbears.