Where the Monsters Lurk - by Garth Nix
I have an affinity
with creatures, at least on the page. I like to make up horrible monsters and
include them in my stories. Things that walk on spiked feet, striking sparks
from stone; monsters made from gravemould and blood; misshapen spirits
reemerging from Death; malignant spirits from some terrible ancient time,
unwittingly awoken.
Where do these
creatures come from? Until I was asked this question, I must confess I’ve never
really thought about it. At various points in stories I need monsters, and they
always seem to be in my head, waiting to be written down. Or at least the seed
will be there, and as I begin to write about them, they grow and become
fully-fledged. Fortunately, they are not
there until I need them: my mind is not constantly teeming with a zoo-full of terrifying
monsters clamouring to be let out.
But even though
they do seem to be there when I need to write them, I realize on examination
that it’s not as straightforward as that. My subconscious is probably aware of
the fact I will need a monster long before my conscious writing brain catches
up on it, and the reason one will be there is almost certainly due to the fact
that over my entire lifetime I have been equipping myself to be a maker of
monsters. Mentally, that is, for literary purposes only. I have refrained from
building a secret laboratory in my back garden to recombine insect and human
DNA for example, and actually make my own. Honest.
I began, of
course, with other people’s monsters. In picture books when I was very young, I
particularly liked dragons and bears, and I guess at that age (and to some
degree still) preferred it when the creatures turned out to have much nicer and
kinder than their fangs and spikes suggested. But not soon after, as I moved on
to chapter books and full-sized novels, I wanted stories with monsters who were
inimical. Creatures to be defeated, or tamed, or banished. I wanted that
growing sense of dread as their presence was hinted at, the thrill of their
first appearance, and then the rush of excitement as they were dealt with by
the protagonist or their allies.
Many of my first
encounters with such monsters came from children’s books about myth and
legends, typically from the Greek and Norse myths. I have Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopaedia and the magazine Look and Learn to thank for meeting the
Minotaur, and Pegasus, the Midgard Serpent, Frost Giants, Medusa and many more.
While I loved
these myths and legends, they were often told in a way that made them feel like
history. I am fascinated by history and I read a great deal of it, but when I
was a child this storytelling technique was often a distancing one. So the
creatures of myth and legend were not less alive, but they felt more distant to
me than more modern fiction where I could feel that I was with the main
character experiencing it all, or in fact, I was the main character, going up against these monsters. Or running
away from them, which as I grew older appeared more and more sensible and realistic.
These very
identifiable stories of monster experience possibly began for me with The Hobbit, which was first read to me by
my parents around the age of six or seven and I started reading it myself to
get ahead. I not only identified with Bilbo, but also with the Dwarves and
Gandalf. Reading it, I was with them,
and I was them, and we were all out
on that winding road having adventures, which necessarily including meeting
monsters.
The Hobbit also has very distinctive
monsters, never just stage pieces rolled out to get an “ooh” from the crowd
before they trundle around a bit and disappear. From very early on, we have the
Trolls who combine humour with dread (which is quite difficult to do); the
goblins who I think embody the fear of hostile crowds (the individuals are not
so scary, but en masse it is quite
different), a fear greatly magnified by darkness; Gollum, who is both creature
and major character; the spiders of Mirkwood, which for an Australian
arachnophobe were particularly daunting, again made somewhat easier to cope
with by humour; and of course, Smaug, who like Gollum is both a monster and a
major character.
Many other books
taught me how to make monsters and what to do with them. I’m writing this while
somewhat jetlagged after flying from Sydney to Boston, so this is by no means
an exhaustive list and I’m bound to forget some important examples, but here
are just some of the authors whose creatures impressed me deeply at a young
age, and in so doing, inadvertently helped me prepare to make up and use
monsters in my own fiction.
Alan Garner for
the Brollachan in The Moon of Gomrath,
and generally for his creatures that feel very deeply connected to myth and
legend.
Tolkien, beyond The Hobbit, for the Nazgul and Shelob, the
Balrog, the classic creature of fantasy (so often imitated), the many varieties
of Orc, for Sauron himself and more.
Ursula Le Guin,
for many things, but for the dragons in A
Wizard of Earthsea and sequels, as important monster characters, and for the
sense of their enormous age and deep connection to the earliest history of
Earthsea.
Andre Norton, who
across numerous books made monsters that I loved in my childhood reading, but
most particularly whatever it was that the archaeological machine in her sci-fi
novel Catseye almost brought back
from the past, its time shadow, as it were, enough to drive people insane . . .
the hint of a monster and the effects
of its presence as effective or perhaps even more effective than any
description.
There are many
more, of course, too many to list or for my jetlagged mind to immediately
produce. These books, and others, provided me with something of an
apprenticeship in monster-making, and of course began to equip my mind with the
tools for storytelling in general.
But in addition
to my reading, something else helped me along in my monster-making endeavours.
When I was twelve years old, I saw in a games shop a small white box that
contained three booklets named Men & Magic; Monsters & Treasure; and The Underworld & Wilderness
Adventures. In other words, Dungeons
and Dragons.
I already liked
games, and had recently started playing miniature wargames, but these three
booklets were a revelation to me, because they were about playing games that
were fantasy stories, basically about being in a story. Within a day of
reading the rulebooks I recruited five friends from school and we started
playing. Perhaps because I’d bought the rules, I was the dungeonmaster, though
I suspect it was more to do with my natural authorial tendencies that were
already in evidence back then. I wanted to direct the story as much as be part
of it.
Dungeons & Dragons, as
required for game purposes, gave monsters characteristics. I could look up a
creature in Monsters and Treasure and see its armour class, and hit
dice, and its attacks values and so on. There was also a brief description,
sometimes including special characteristics that were not easily handled by the
games’ basic mechanics. In those early days, these characteristics and game
mechanics were far simpler than they later became, but in some ways I think
that was useful because it gave more leeway to me as a dungeonmaster to use the
creatures in my own way and I am glad that even at twelve, I fully took on that
the three booklets were a skeleton structure to make something of one’s own,
not a restrictive or exhaustive set of rules.
This was made
explicit by D&D authors Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, but even so, some
players and dungeonmasters treated the rules as set in stone.
To me, and most
other players, the open nature of D&D and later role-playing games provided
enormous scope to develop our own adventures, and one of the main parts of this
was, of course, developing new monsters beyond those in the original rulebooks
and later supplements (of which there would be a veritable plethora, continuing
to this day).
I first started
by adapting monsters that weren’t in the rule books, taking monsters and
creatures out of my favourite books and working out their characteristics in
D&D terms. What I didn’t realize back then, though, was that one of the
primary reasons these monsters would work in a role-playing game adventure
wasn’t because I’d got their game attributes right, it was because they were
already so well-defined and real from the stories I’d got them from
(which the players had invariably read as well), so the mere mention of some
distinguishing part of their appearance or behavior would lead to the players
knowing what they were up against, with the consequent emotional impact derived
from the shared experience of the story.
I guess what I’m
saying here is that you can work out all the mechanistic details of a creature
and its description and so on, as if defining it for a game or an encyclopedia
or some data file, but this does not make it come alive and does not make it
feel real to either roleplayers or readers. What does do this is story,
and the monster’s place in it. In fact, as in Catseye I mentioned above
(and in many horror stories), it is quite possible that never actually
describing or detailing a monster might make it all the more effective. A
reader needs to be provided with just enough information (which might be overt
description, it might be character’s reactions to the creature, it might be
dialogue, it might be mere allusion) to enable them to imagine the creature
themselves, and whatever the reader thinks up themselves will be invariably
more terrifying and effective than a huge amount of text from the author.
So, my
apprenticeship in monster-making began with reading and continues to this day
with reading; later to be enhanced by the once-a-week D&D sessions I ran
for a good part of my teenage years; and then continued with writing, as I
began to want not just to read stories, and co-create them in an RPG environment,
but also to make stories that were my own.
Many fantasy writers begin with their worlds,
working them out in a great deal of detail, and often this will include the
creation and development of creatures. Sometimes they will be entirely original,
sometimes they will be drawn from myth or legend, and sometimes they will be
orcs from Tolkien. (Orcs are a very invasive species, it seems, given their
ability to infest so many different fantasy books. Sometimes they are called
something different, though we all know “that which we call an orc
by any other name would smell as foul.”)
Developing the world first is a very effective technique, one
adopted by many great writers, but it’s not one that I follow. I tend to
discover my fantasy world as I go along, I only work out what I need for the
story as I need it, and this also applies to creatures.
So from my very earliest stories, I would be writing away and
then all of a sudden I would need a monster, and as I said at the very
beginning of this piece, I would usually find one waiting in my head. Or at
least the beginnings of one, often just a sense of what kind of feeling I want to evoke with that
creature, or perhaps some minor point of physical description. And there I will
pause for a while, sometimes for a few minutes, sometimes for a few days, while
the necessary minimum I need to know about that monster rises to my conscious
and can be used in the story. I say the necessary minimum because as I’ve
mentioned above, I don’t want to give too much to the reader, I want to supply
the catalyst for their imagination to finish creating the monster for
themselves.
And now, because I am writing this while on tour for Goldenhand, I’m afraid I must away.
Perhaps appropriately to New York Comic Con, where I will see depictions of
many monsters, but not I trust, encounter any real monsters lurking within.
Which leads to a closely related topic: about how humans are the real monsters
. . .
Garth Nix, October 2016
