Here There Be Monsters

So, I’m reading Douglas Hulick’s Among Thieves right now and it’s quite good.

It has almost everything I want: witty dialogue, in-combat banter, pirouettes and pivots, thieves’ cant, underworld politics, magic systems, histories, rich cultures and nary a feasting scene, training montage or poetry recital to be seen.

The reason I say it has almost everything I want is because, at about 40% through (I read mostly on my Kindle these days), I realized I really wanted to see someone get eaten by something.

Which made me pause.  And made me think.  When was the last time I saw someone get eaten in fantasy in a way that wasn’t oral sex?  When was the last time I saw a golem or a cockatrice?  When was the last time I saw someone trying to fight a giant, flesh-eating beast instead of another dude with a sword?

Where did all the monsters go?

I think that, as George R.R. Martin continues to set precedent in fantasy, we are continuing along a shift away from things you might find in older, more “traditional” fantasies into more complex plots that deal with character development and interaction.  Treasure hunting has been replaced with understanding the economic impact on society.  Deus ex machina has been replaced with studies on how religion influences a culture.  And flesh-eating monsters have largely gone by the wayside in favor of seeing what motivates two people when they do battle.

This is all actually a good thing, mostly.  Character motivations, cultural implications and studies of cultures are, largely, more rich topics than, say, stabbing a manticore.  But it does bring up an alarming question.

Is there a place for monsters, demons and other vicious inhuman creatures in modern fantasy?

Sure, they’re present.  A Song of Ice and Fire has the White Walkers.  The First Law trilogy has the shanka.  But you rarely see them doing much, do you?  Much is made over their presence, but it never actually comes to much.  By the end of A Feast for Crows, I had all but forgotten the White Walkers and what they could do to people.

And they aren’t totally gone.  While The First Law doesn’t have a tremendous amount to do with the shanka, the Northmen are portrayed as a fairly alien culture that don’t understand civilized people in the south who frequently come into clash with each other.  In a lot of ways, we have successfully turned humanity into monsters and that’s actually a really cool avenue of exploration.

But it doesn’t quite fit what I’ve been looking for.

So, why are we so reluctant to put monsters into our stories?

A big part of it, I think, is that fantasy is very concerned about presenting the clashes between motivations.  Seeing two people meet on the battlefield, each one convinced in the righteousness or necessity of their cause, and allowing the reader to become emotionally invested in those motivations is a deeply rewarding experience.  And it’s exceedingly hard to find sympathy in a creature whose primary motivations are to eat and poop, respectively.

But another part of it, I think, comes from a phenomenon I’m eager to call “The Shame of Salvatore.”

It wasn’t too long ago, I think, that fantasy fiction was considered the domain of (man)children, largely dominated by things like Dungeons and Dragons and things that tied into them: Drizzt novels, Dragonlance novels, what have you.  And these were things where crazed beasts and dangerous monsters were most often found.  And they tended to be found rather poorly, serving mostly as inconsequential speed bumps in the journey that were mostly there to either pad out the story or showcase the characters’ power.  We felt nothing for the manticore that showed up and was dispatched by the brave heroes, but we did feel that it was pretty badass the way Drizzt did a double ninja backflip and decapitated the mofo.

As we matured, this stopped being enough for us.  Not only did we yearn to flex our muscle and see what we could really do with this genre, but we also wanted to put behind us the idea that this was a novelty genre for kids.  So we turned away from it entirely.  You still see reviewers sometimes complain that a story is “too D&D” to be taken seriously.

Which is unfortunate.

If it wasn’t obvious by the my writing (or the Lost Pages), I actually really, really, really like monsters.  I love tremendous battles with gigantic horrors from the deep.  I love vicious fights with bloodthirsty beasts driven chiefly by hunger.  I love the image of trying to hold back a pair of jaws, slick with one’s own blood, as they gnash ever closer to a tender, quivering throat.  I love demons.  I love beasts.  I love fiends.  I love monsters.

Which is why I flatly reject the notion that they have no place in modern fantasy.

But then…where do they fit?

My favorite subject to study in school was mythology simply because I loved the idea of gryphons and hydras and krakens.  I loved wondering about how creatures like these came to be, how they functioned, how they were put together.  How did a gryphon come to be half-eagle, half-lion?  Why an eagle and a lion?  For awhile, I was content to let these answers lie dormant.  It was an eagle and a lion because that’s how gryphons were made and I was able to put these in my stories with no real thought behind them.  A gryphon’s a gryphon, otherwise it wouldn’t be.

Like any good literary nerd, I loved books long before I loved textbooks.  So it wasn’t until I learned more about evolution and the natural process that I actually began to think about how these creatures functioned and why they evolved the way they did.  As I began to write more, my research came to include BBC and Discovery channel wildlife documentaries.  I could see how creatures were made and that affected how I made mine.

The creatures I make, as a result, are mostly biologically sound.  Sikkhuns have six ears that fold out like a radar dish because they are without eyes, growing up in the primarily lightless Nether.  Akaneeds are deep blue to serve as camouflage.  Environmental concerns dictated the growth of the Lizardmen.

Which is all worldbuilding, the type of shit you usually see nerds go nuts for.  Yet it’s somehow much easier to get someone excited in a tea ritual than in how bioluminescence plays a part in a fish-woman-demon’s evisceration technique.

 

Prrreeow (art by Sarah Elkins).

If worldbuilding is not enough, though, what other purpose does the monster serve?

Well, it’s not merely enough to have a monster exist for no reason.  Like any good student of Chekov, I believe that if you put a monster in the book, your characters should encounter it at some point.  And how they do that tells us a lot about that character and where they come from.

Consider Peter V. Brett’s world, for example.  Every night, demons rise from the center of the earth to torment mankind in a variety of shapes, sizes and flavors.  This has created a society that lives in perpetual terror and has shaped what they do and how they act.  They are terrified of the night, suspicious of anything that isn’t them, live in a largely isolated society and Brett harnesses this effect fairly well.

I do wonder, though, if we’re serving ourselves by denying the main reason we put monsters in our books.

And that is that monsters are freaking cool.

I wrote awhile back as to whether the expression of joy was enough of a reason to do something for an artist.  Frankly, I feel that it is.  God forbid something not be Spartan in its aestheticism.  God forbid something be in a fantasy because it’s awesome.  God forbid we try to have fun with what we write.

That’s not to say you can just throw it in and forget about it.  We cannot end our logic with “because it’s awesome,” but we can certainly begin there.  We can throw a monster into a story because monsters are awesome, but it must say something about the world it came from and the world it hopes to devour.  We can throw a romance into a story because kissing is awesome, but it must serve as a source of conflict and emotional tension.  We can throw a magic system in because it’s awesome (and we do), but for some reason we’re content to just leave it at that in most cases.

Let’s be more adventurous.  Let’s accept “awesome” as a good place to start.  Let’s devour flesh together.