Creatures: Thirty Years of Monsters Read online
CREATURES
THIRTY YEARS OF MONSTERS
edited by
John Langan & Paul Tremblay
For our own little monsters: Cole, David, and Emma.
Copyright © 2011 by John Langan & Paul Tremblay.
Cover art by Alexey Stiop / Shutterstock.
Cover design by Telegraphy Harness.
Ebook design by Neil Clarke.
All stories are copyrighted to their respective authors, and used here with their permission. An extension of this copyright page can be found here .
ISBN: 978-1-60701-319-8 (ebook)
ISBN: 978-1-60701-284-9 (trade paperback)
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Contents
IT CAME AND WE KNEW IT
Godzilla’s Twelve-Step Program by Joe R. Lansdale
The Creature From the Black Lagoon by Jim Shepard
After Moreau by Jeffrey Ford
Among Their Bright Eyes by Alaya Dawn Johnson
Under Cover of Night by Christopher Golden
The Kraken by Michael Kelly
Underneath Me, Steady Air by Carrie Laben
IT CAME, WE COULD NOT STOP IT
Rawhead Rex by Clive Barker
Wishbones by Cherie Priest
The Hollow Man by Norman Partridge
Not From Around Here by David J. Schow
The Ropy Thing by Al Sarrantonio
The Third Bear by Jeff VanderMeer
IT CAME FOR US
Monster by Kelly Link
Keep Calm and Carillon by Genevieve Valentine
The Deep End by Robert R. McCammon
The Serpent and the Hatchet Gang by F. Brett Cox
Blood Makes Noise by Gemma Files
The Machine is Perfect, The Engineer is Nobody by Brett Alexander Savory
Proboscis by Laird Barron
IT CAME FROM US
Familiar by China Miéville
Replacements by Lisa Tuttle
Little Monsters by Stephen Graham Jones
The Changeling by Sarah Langan
The Monsters of Heaven by Nathan Ballingrud
Absolute Zero by Nadia Bulkin
Biographies
Publication Credits
IT CAME AND WE KNEW IT
It’s not just that we live in a culture of monsters—that Frankenstein’s monster, say, shuffles from screen to graphic novel to breakfast cereal—but that we have always lived in a culture of monsters. Go back to Beowulf, and Grendel strips the flesh from a hapless warrior’s bones with his hideous teeth. Go back further, to the Book of Job, and the God who speaks to Job from the whirlwind boasts of having subdued and broken Leviathan, bridling the vast beast through its smoking nostrils. Go back still further, to Egypt’s Middle Kingdom, and the flint-headed Apep coils just below the horizon, his scaly jaws open wide to threaten the sun. And so on: from the ancient Chinese Xian Tian, whose giant, headless body shakes its sword and rattles its shield, to the contemporary Chupacabra, which stalks the border between Mexico and the United States, monsters are among the building blocks of our cultures, a legacy to accompany the languages we learn. We meet them in a variety of venues, from old movies rerun on TV to books read under the blanket by flashlight, from the bright panels of comic books to stories passed around the playground.
It should come as no surprise, then, how many monsters are familiar to us. Long before we have contemplated Godzilla as a trope for Japanese trauma over the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we hear the great reptile’s metallic roar. Before we have read Frankenstein’s monster as Mary Shelley’s grief over her lost daughter, we see the pattern of stitches that hold the artificial man’s body together. We experience our monsters first in all their strange and striking particularity, as the host of details that assembles into them. Only later do we see them as vessels fit for carrying a weight of meaning, as something other than literal. Perhaps this explains some of their continuing power, because, no matter how well we may think we explain them, they hail from a time in our lives when we did not know not to take them at face value.
No doubt, the current round of monster narratives that this anthology considers is indebted to the success of Stephen King’s fiction. Several of the stories in his first collection, Night Shift (1978), employ monsters in a serious and frightening way, a practice his short novel, The Mist (1980), and longer novel, It (1986), solidify. At the same time, King follows in a line of American writers of the fantastic, reaching back through Philip K. Dick, Ray Bradbury, and Theodore Sturgeon to H.P. Lovecraft and beyond. In “The Father Thing” (1954), “The Fog-Horn” (1951), “It” (1940), and At the Mountains of Madness (1936), these writers place monsters center-stage in their fiction. In addition, British counterparts such as John Wyndham and E.F. Benson have brought their sensibilities to bear on the topic, while Franz Kafka, one of the giants of twentieth-century European literature, rests his career on a long story about a salesman who is metamorphosed into a monstrous insect. If there is one thing this range of fictions has in common, it is the decision to place the monster in a contemporary, realistically-portrayed setting, an imaginary toad in a real garden.
Frequently, the effect of such a move is comic, as is the case with several of the stories collected in the first section of this book. Joe R. Lansdale’s “Godzilla’s Twelve-Step Program” imagines the great monster and his fellows laboring to resist their destructive tendencies; while Jeffrey Ford’s “After Moreau” retells and rewrites H.G. Wells’s Island of Dr. Moreau (1896) from the point of view of one of the doctor’s lesser-known creations, Hippopotamus Man; and Michael Kelly’s “Kraken” presents the story of what might be called a were-kraken. However humorous their premises, each of these stories swerves, sometimes unexpectedly, towards the dark. In this, they are of a piece with the section’s other selections. Both Jim Shepard’s “The Creature from the Black Lagoon” and Alaya Dawn Johnson’s “Among Their Bright Eyes” present monstrous narrators who are shot through with loneliness and melancholy, which their acts of often shocking violence do little to assuage. The monsters in Christopher Golden’s breakneck “Under Cover of the Night” and Carrie Laben’s offbeat “Underneath Me, Steady Air” are strange, savage entities antithetical to the humans they encounter; in this, they achieve something of the quality of the things that used to scrape the floor under our beds, to jangle the hangers in our closets. Yet in Golden and Laben’s stories, the monsters the characters confront are not completely unknown; whether from folklore or literary history, the protagonists are able to identify them.
It is a critical commonplace—cliché, even—to see the monster as the embodiment of the other. Certainly there are enough stories for which this is the case to allow this interpretation to stand. But the seven stories which open this anthology suggest an additional possibility: that what might be most frightening is that we recognize, whether from a movie watched from between fingers, or a story that made our hearts pound, or from a toy that used to stare across the bedroom at us.
Godzilla’s Twelve-Step Program
Joe R. Lansdale
One: Honest Work
Godzilla, on his way to work at the foundry, sees a large building that seems to be mostly made of shiny copper and dark, reflecting solar glass. He sees his i
mage in the glass and thinks of the old days, wonders what it would be like to stomp on the building, to blow flames at it, kiss the windows black with his burning breath, then dance rapturously in the smoking debris.
One day at a time, he tells himself. One day at a time.
Godzilla makes himself look at the building hard. He passes it by. He goes to the foundry. He puts on his hard hat. He blows his fiery breath into the great vat full of used car parts, turns the car parts to molten metal. The metal runs through pipes and into new molds for new car parts. Doors. Roofs. Etc.
Godzilla feels some of the tension drain out.
Two: Recreation
After work Godzilla stays away from downtown. He feels tense. To stop blowing flames after work is difficult. He goes over to the BIG MONSTER RECREATION CENTER.
Gorgo is there. Drunk from oily seawater, as usual. Gorgo talks about the old days. She’s like that. Always the old days.
They go out back and use their breath on the debris that is deposited there daily for the center’s use. Kong is out back. Drunk as a monkey. He’s playing with Barbie dolls. He does that all the time. Finally, he puts the Barbies away in his coat pocket, takes hold of his walker and wobbles past Godzilla and Gorgo.
Gorgo says, “Since the fall he ain’t been worth shit. And what’s with him and the little plastic broads anyway? Don’t he know there’s real women in the world.”
Godzilla thinks Gorgo looks at Kong’s departing walker-supported ass a little too wistfully. He’s sure he sees wetness in Gorgo’s eyes.
Godzilla blows some scrap to cinders for recreation, but it doesn’t do much for him, as he’s been blowing fire all day long and has, at best, merely taken the edge off his compulsions. This isn’t even as satisfying as the foundry. He goes home.
Three: Sex and Destruction
That night there’s a monster movie on television. The usual one. Big beasts wrecking havoc on city after city. Crushing pedestrians under foot.
Godzilla examines the bottom of his right foot, looks at the scar there from stomping cars flat. He remembers how it was to have people squish between his toes. He thinks about all of that and changes the channel. He watches twenty minutes of “Mr. Ed,” turns off the TV, masturbates to the images of burning cities and squashing flesh.
Later, deep into the night, he awakens in a cold sweat. He goes to the bathroom and quickly carves crude human figures from bars of soap. He mashes the soap between his toes, closes his eyes and imagines. Tries to remember.
Four: Beach Trip and The Big Turtle
Saturday, Godzilla goes to the beach. A drunk monster that looks like a big turtle flies by and bumps Godzilla. The turtle calls Godzilla a name, looking for a fight. Godzilla remembers the turtle is called Gamera.
Gamera is always trouble. No one liked Gamera. The turtle was a real asshole.
Godzilla grits his teeth and holds back the flames. He turns his back and walks along the beach. He mutters a secret mantra given him by his sponsor. The giant turtle follows after, calling him names.
Godzilla packs up his beach stuff and goes home. At his back he hears the turtle, still cussing, still pushing. It’s all he can do not to respond to the big dumb bastard. All he can do. He knows the turtle will be in the news tomorrow. He will have destroyed something, or will have been destroyed himself.
Godzilla thinks perhaps he should try and talk to the turtle, get him on the twelve-step program. That’s what you’re supposed to do. Help others. Maybe the turtle could find some peace.
But then again, you can only help those who help themselves. Godzilla realizes he cannot save all the monsters of the world. They have to make these decisions for themselves.
But he makes a mental note to go armed with leaflets about the twelve-step program from now on.
Later, he calls in to his sponsor. Tells him he’s had a bad day. That he wanted to burn buildings and fight the big turtle. Reptilicus tells him it’s okay. He’s had days like that. Will have days like that once again.
Once a monster always a monster. But a recovering monster is where it’s at. Take it one day at a time. It’s the only way to be happy in the world. You can’t burn and kill and chew up humans and their creations without paying the price of guilt and multiple artillery wounds.
Godzilla thanks Reptilicus and hangs up. He feels better for awhile, but deep down he wonders just how much guilt he really harbors. He thinks maybe it’s the artillery and the rocket-firing jets he really hates, not the guilt.
Five: Off The Wagon
It happens suddenly. He falls off the wagon. Coming back from work he sees a small dog house with a sleeping dog sticking halfway out of a doorway. There’s no one around. The dog looks old. It’s on a chain. Probably miserable anyway. The water dish is empty. The dog is living a worthless life. Chained. Bored. No water.
Godzilla leaps and comes down on the dog house and squashes dog in all directions. He burns what’s left of the dog house with a blast of his breath. He leaps and spins on tip-toe through the wreckage. Black cinders and cooked dog slip through his toes and remind him of the old days.
He gets away fast. No one has seen him. He feels giddy. He can hardly walk he’s so intoxicated. He calls Reptilicus, gets his answering machine. “I’m not in right now. I’m out doing good. But please leave a message, and I’ll get right back to you.”
The machine beeps. Godzilla says, “Help.”
Six: His Sponsor
The dog house rolls around in his head all the next day. While at work he thinks of the dog and the way it burned. He thinks of the little house and the way it crumbled. He thinks of the dance he did in the ruins.
The day drags on forever. He thinks maybe when work is through he might find another dog house, another dog.
On the way home he keeps an eye peeled, but no dog houses or dogs are seen.
When he gets home his answering machine light is blinking. It’s a message from Reptilicus. Reptilicus’s voice says, “Call me.”
Godzilla does. He says, “Reptilicus. Forgive me, for I have sinned.”
Seven: Disillusioned. Disappointed.
Reptilicus’s talk doesn’t help much. Godzilla shreds all the twelve-step program leaflets. He wipes his butt on a couple and throws them out the window. He puts the scraps of the others in the sink and sets them on fire with his breath. He burns a coffee table and a chair, and when he’s through, feels bad for it. He knows the landlady will expect him to replace them.
He turns on the radio and lies on the bed listening to an Oldies station. After a while, he falls asleep to Martha and the Vandellas singing “Heat Wave.”
Eight: Unemployed
Godzilla dreams. In it God comes to him, all scaly and blowing fire. He tells Godzilla he’s ashamed of him. He says he should do better. Godzilla awakes covered in sweat. No one is in the room.
Godzilla feels guilty. He has faint memories of waking up and going out to destroy part of the city. He really tied one on, but he can’t remember everything he did. Maybe he’ll read about it in the papers. He notices he smells like charred lumber and melted plastic. There’s gooshy stuff between his toes, and something tells him it isn’t soap.
He wants to kill himself. He goes to look for his gun, but he’s too drunk to find it. He passes out on the floor. He dreams of the devil this time. He looks just like God except he has one eyebrow that goes over both eyes. The devil says he’s come for Godzilla.
Godzilla moans and fights. He dreams he gets up and takes pokes at the devil, blows ineffective fire on him.
Godzilla rises late the next morning, hung over. He remembers the dream. He calls in to work sick. Sleeps off most of the day. That evening, he reads about himself in the papers. He really did some damage. Smoked a large part of the city. There’s a very clear picture of him biting the head off of a woman.
He gets a call from the plant manager that night. The manager’s seen the paper. He tells Godzilla he’s fired.
Nine: Enticement
“They hate me there,” says Godzilla. “I burned Tokyo down.”
“You haven’t done so good here either. Lucky that was a colored section of town you burned, or we’d be on your ass. As it is, we’ve got a job proposition for you.”
“What?” Godzilla asks.
“You scratch our back, we’ll scratch yours.” Then the men tell him what they have in mind.
Ten: Choosing
Godzilla sleeps badly that night. He gets up and plays the monster mash on his little record player. He dances around the room as if he’s enjoying himself, but knows he’s not. He goes over to the BIG MONSTER RECREATION CENTER. He sees Kong there, on a stool, undressing one of his Barbies, fingering the smooth spot between her legs. He sees that Kong has drawn a crack there, like a vagina. It appears to have been drawn with a blue ink pen. He’s feathered the central line with ink-drawn pubic hair. Godzilla thinks he should have got someone to do the work for him. It doesn’t look all that natural.
God, he doesn’t want to end up like Kong. Completely spaced. Then again, maybe if he had some dolls he could melt, maybe that would serve to relax him.
No. After the real thing, what was a Barbie? Some kind of form of Near Beer. That’s what the debris out back was. Near Beer. The foundry. The Twelve-Step Program. All of it. Near Beer.
Creatures: Thirty Years of Monsters