Everyone loves a good horror story. Try to write one, though, and you will quickly discover that it's not enough simply to create a monster. You must also create a reason for the monster to exist. Or, to quote the great Albert Camus, who would have turned 100 this year, "A character is never the author who created him. It is quite likely, however, that an author may be all his characters simultaneously." In all great horror stories, literary or otherwise, the monster is often a manifestation of a character's inner monstrosity.
Ali Simpson's story, "The Monster" is a terrific example of this kind of character. The story was first published at The Southampton Review and reprinted at Electric Literature, where you can read it now.
How the Story Works
The story introduces the monster in the first line: "Laura was becoming unsure about what to do with the monster in her closet."
- What kind of world have I entered? (In other words, are there monsters in every closet? Is there some kind of society of closet-monsters?)
- What kind of monster is it?
Watch how the story clearly answers this first question in the opening paragraph:
He shouldn't have been there -- she wasn't a little girl; she was a grown woman with a full-time job and a roof over her head that she paid for herself with her full-time job. She had food in the fridge, dishes in the drying rack and dress pants pressed. Who had time or inclination to deal with monsters when there was work to be done, friends to have drinks with and love to pursue? Besides, the world was filled with enough scary stories as it was. Robbers, rapists, famines and wars. Every day on the way to work, she passed people more unfortunate than she, and she knew if she stopped for a second, she would become a part of them, hungry all the time. She suspected she had a few scary stories lurking inside her and spent the better part of some nights guessing what they might be.
So what kind of world is it? It's a realistic world full of dirty dishes and jobs and wrinkled clothes. It's a world with characters who have lives that do not involve monsters. This last part is important because it's not true of all monster stories. Take the vampires out of Twilight, and the world evaporates. Take Voldemort out of Harry Potter or the gremlins out of Gremlins, and you also remove the central conflict -- and, to some extent, only conflict -- facing the characters. But in this world, the narrator has a life and problems (and so does the rest of the world) that existed before the monster arrives.
Now, watch how the story answers the second question in the next two paragraphs:
So the monster came at the right time in her life. She had just put her dog to sleep because of his eye tumors. She had also recently kicked out her boyfriend because he thought she was his mother. She told him he was mistaken, that she was not his mother, and then she helped him pack his things, fed him lunch and kissed him good-bye. After Bumblebee went to sleep and the boyfriend was sent on his way, her apartment smelled empty and her sheets were cold. She lay around on the couch when she didn't have to be at work and kept telling herself not to feel sad -- she had a lot going for her.
The loneliness made her sick and pale. Nothing made her feel better, and she wondered if the loneliness had been there all along but that she had somehow avoided looking it in the face until now.
So, what kind of monster is it? It's a manifestation of the narrator's deepest fears. In fact, we're not yet sure if there really is a monster or if the narrator has simply conjured it out of her fear and doubt. As you read the rest of the story, though, you'll see how that uncertainty is quickly put to rest.
The Writing Exercise
Let's create a monster (real or imagined) using Ali Simpson's "The Monster" as a model. To do so, we'll answer the questions, "What kind of world is it?" and "What kind of monster is it?"
- Introduce the monster. To do this, you'll need to state the following: Where is the monster? Who sees it? How does that person feel about the monster? (This last part is perhaps the most important. If the character is terrified for her life in the first sentence, the story will proceed much differently than if the character is amused or irritated.)
Good luck and have fun! You're writing a monster story. To paraphrase Kurt Vonnegut, if that isn't nice, then I don't know what is.
This post first appeared at Read to Write Stories.