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On this month's Special Page:

Bram Stoker- and ITW Thriller-Award Finalist JG Faherty tells us all about new ideas a writer can have with monsters!

greg

Born and raised in New York's haunted Hudson Valley and more recently a resident of North Carolina’s equally haunted Cape Fear region, JG Faherty is the author of 25 books, 4 collections, and more than 90 short stories, and he’s been a finalist for both the Bram Stoker Award (twice) and ITW Thriller Award. He writes adult and YA horror, science fiction, dark fantasy, and paranormal romance, and his works range from quiet, dark suspense to over-the-top comic gruesomeness. He is proud to be a relative of Mary Shelley. You can follow him on X, Facebook, and Instagram as @jgfaherty.

 

CLASSIC MONSTERS: AN ONGOING DEBATE
by JG Faherty

Monsters.

Love ‘em, hate ‘em, or, in the case of some people, just indifferent about them.

The interest—or not—in reading about monsters (and watching them, but that’s a subject for a different article) is as old as the horror genre.

A while back, there was a conversation on the Horror Zine’s Facebook page about what monsters readers found interesting and what ones they didn’t. One of the things I saw mentioned was that ghosts, werewolves, and religious horror (specifically demons) aren’t that interesting to those readers. One of the arguments given was that these monsters are derivative and there’s no room for anything new.

That got me a little riled up, to say the least!

See, I can understand people not liking horror that involves monsters. Or religious overtones. Or even the supernatural. Some people prefer more “real-life” horror. Serial killers. Slashers (the non-Jason kind). Psychological horror. And that’s okay. No one is here to say “your horror is wrong” or “you should like all horror.” Nobody likes everything. I know I don’t. Couldn’t get me to read extreme, violent, body horror if you paid me (well, maybe if you paid me!).

But the idea that there’s nothing new you can do with monsters?

Balderdash! (Picture me saying that with a bowler derby on my head and big curved pipe in my mouth as I sit in a high-backed chair before a roaring fire.)

There is ALWAYS something new you can do with any sub-genre, any trope, any supernatural creature. Ghost, demon, werewolf, whatever.

Writers throughout time have been proving this is so.

There was a time when all vampire stories were of a similar mold. The evil vampire who is both well-mannered in public and exposed as a bloodthirsty undead creature when he requires sustenance (or a lover). I say he because back in the first few decades after Dracula was published, the majority of vampire tales involved a male main character. But when you hit the 60s, 70s, and 80s, suddenly the vampire spread its wings, so to speak. You had horrible creature-type vamps, far worse than old Orlock. You had vampires that didn’t have fangs, vampires that fed on human energy instead of blood, vampires that were detectives or monster hunters. In the 90s, a new wave of writers gave us splatter punk and gory vampire tales. In the 2000s, sparkly vampires were all the rage.

Unlimited possibilities.

The same can be said for any monster, whether it’s “there are so many different takes on that creature” or “wow, there are so many possibilities for new takes on that creature.”

Let’s look at some examples.

Ghosts.

Where do we start? I could write a text book about all the ghost and haunting variations. Scholars of the genre will tell you that even back in the Victorian days, there were plenty of ghost stories other than just the ones involving wispy spirits rattling and moaning their way down castle halls, across the moors, or through cemeteries. Ghosts have haunted peoples’ minds, roads, apartment buildings, and vehicles. They have ranged from ethereal beings barely seen or heard to solid manifestations as tangible as you or I. They have been evil, murdering spirits and otherworldly detectives. In my novel Ghosts of Coronado Bay, I explored what it would be like if a person could make ghosts into real people again. In A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay, ghosts are used to symbolize mental illness. In Peter Straub’s Ghost Story, the ghost is sometimes present, sometimes just a memory, and always evil.

A ghost can represent anything, from death to insanity to loneliness to guilt. A ghost can be anything; a spirit, a manifestation of psychic energy, an alternate type of life force. Good, evil, indifferent. Present for no reason, or an important reason. Permanent or temporary.

We are writers. That means a ghost can be any damn thing we want it to be, and do anything we want it to.

Nothing new can be done with ghosts?

More like, so many things are still to be done with ghosts!

Then you have the werewolf, another example from our social media thread.

If you’re not familiar with the sub-genre, maybe it seems like it’s the same old, same old. Human gets bitten by wolf and every full moon transforms into this ravenous beast.

But if you know your lycanthrope horror, you know there’s a lot more out there.

In Robert McCammon’s Wolf’s Hour (and the various stories he wrote with the same character), our werewolf isn’t some shrinking violet or tortured soul when in human form. He’s a soldier, a Nazi hunter, and later a spy. As in many werewolf stories, he can control his transformations to a large degree.

In the High Moor series by Graeme Reynolds, the transformation of the main character is just the beginning of a whole series of thrilling events, including rampaging werewolves, warring factions, and a love story. Kelley Armstrong’s Bitten series portrays an entire werewolf society hidden from mankind, with all the political intrigue and drama of their human counterparts. In my short story “Origin of the Species” (in The Horror Zine’s Book of Werewolf Stories, where you can find all sorts of different were-tales!), I shifted the beginnings of lycanthropy from the traditional Romani curse to something far older, involving the gods of the Sun and Moon. And then there is Mongrels, by Stephen Graham Jones, in which you hardly see any wolf transformations at all; the book is all about how a family suffering from this genetic condition can keep from being found out by the rest of the world.

Once you begin scraping away the surface, there is a whole treasure trove of different werewolf stories to be uncovered by the interested reader.

As for demons, the opportunities are as limitless as the heavens (and levels of Hell).

Christian demons, and the stories about possession, exorcism, cleansing, etc. that go with them, are the most well-known of demon-based tales. And while there might be more TheExorcist rip-offs than there are beads on a rosary, if we look behind the church we’re going to find all sorts of different variations on demonology. Jewish demons, like the golem (or any of the other 50-plus demons recognized in Judaism). Egyptian demons, like the Ushabti (which I wrote about in my novel Ragman), or any of the hundreds of others they worshipped and/or feared. Every major religion has their own demons; maybe not as many as the Christians (which some religious scholars measure in the millions), but definitely plenty to write about. In a way, even the spirits of the Native Americans and other ancient peoples can be considered equivalent to gods and demons, since some are good and some evil. Examples of the latter might be the Trickster (another demon I’ve used in a novel) and the manitou.

I could go on about this topic forever, but this isn’t intended to be a treatise, just a reminder to readers (and writers) that no monsters or tropes in horror should be considered done and finished, or no longer interesting. The possibilities for new variations and stories are limited by only one thing:

The imaginations of writers.

So, what are you waiting for?

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