Monsters

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Light means nothing without darkness and a good fantasy hero is little more than a department store manikin with a sword absent a monster. Opposition defines greatness.

Speculative fiction provides fertile soil for monsters. Memorable ones, not merely sword fodder providing our heroes a stack of corpses to pose atop for Frank Frazetta after the battle. Who could forget Smaug? Bram Stoker created the definitive Count Dracula. Frankenstein’s Monster is the archetypal introspective, self-loathing monster. (Not my favorite trope, but I can appreciate the complexity without necessarily being an aficionado.) Other genres are limited to human monsters (which, admittedly, can be among the most interesting and most downright evil.)

Sword-and-Sorcery has done yeoman service in the field of monster creation. Ramsey Campbell can nearly populate a D&D Monster Manual with the critters he invented for his hero Ryre to face. These stories lean heavily into the horror aspect of S&S, which I think is a point in their favor. Poul Anderson’s The Tale of Hauk gives us a creepy, remorseless, undead monster. We have Andre Norton’s Toads of Grimmerdale. Toads are popular choices, especially for those writers working the (non-Euclidean) Lovecraftian angle. Robert E. Howard did, to good effect. And who can forget his The Valley of the Worm? Worms, snakes, dragons. All good monsters.

Bipedal monsters can be less reliable. Grendel, in the original saga, is a terrific monster. It seems that there is some international law requiring modern retellings to make Grendel sympathetic, make him a victim, or merely misunderstood. This weakens his effectiveness as a monster. LOTR’s Gollum isn’t a monster, he’s a villain. That isn’t a criticism; I’m simply avoiding a categorization error. The topic of the day is monsters, not villains. With a well-written villain you get the impression that there is a chance for redemption. That isn’t the case with a monster. No one believes there is the remotest prospect of Bilbo talking Smaug into relinquishing his claim on the Lonely Mountain and flying off to Mirkwood to perform community service cleaning up spiderwebs. Smaug’s a monster.

The difference lies in an unbridgeable gulf between humanity and an alien otherness. As with Smaug, there may be a superficial layer of familiarity, language, a veneer of formality in interaction. But the monster is fundamentally inhuman. This is why Lovecraft still resonates. This is partially why a dour, humorless character like Solomon Kane works so well; the dim outlines of his humanity show best in contrast against the inhuman darkness of evil. (The rest of the reason is Robert E. Howard, natch, skillfully hinting at hidden aspects of the Puritan swordsman’s psyche.)Those are my monstrous thoughts for today. Thanks for reading. Before you go, please consider picking up one or more books of the Semi-Autos and Sorcery series. You may encounter a monster or two, not to mention villains.