We do need our monsters, don’t we? To haunt the edges of our maps, to keep the shadowy spaces perilous, to rend and devour if it comes to that. To be something worse than we are. We squirm at the violence and gore of the horrors we build for movies and video games today. And that’s nothing new. Just look at what the Cyclops did to Odysseus’ crewmen (from the Fagles translation):
Lurching up, he lunged out with hands toward my men
and snatching two at once, rapping them on the ground
he knocked them dead like pups—
their brains gushed out all over, soaked the floor—
and ripping them limb from limb to fix his meal
he bolted them down like a mountain-lion, left no scrap,
devoured entrails, flesh and bones, marrow and all!
Monsters have been popping up in my work since the beginning. My first published story was a bestiary of sorts, and it’s still lurking over at La Petite Zine. Most terrifying of all, I think, are the monsters we keep hidden. The secret monsters whose twisted existence we don’t dare acknowledge. That was the idea I was working from when I wrote “Inheritance,” a story about a man who discovers a strange beast in his recently deceased father’s basement.
That story, which originally appeared in the green issue of Fairy Tale Review, has just been reprinted in Monsters: A Collection of Literary Sightings, edited by B.J. Hollars.
The book includes stories by the likes of Kelly Link, Benjamin Percy, Matt Bell, Alissa Nutting, Kate Bernheimer, and Brian Baldi, who I first met some seven or eight years ago, on the night he read his Godzilla-themed story in a barn somewhere in Western Massachusetts.
Want to get your paws on a copy? The book is available now from Powell’s, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and your local independent bookseller.
