Ed.Christopher Golden - The Monsters Corner: Stories Through Inhuman Eyes

Zombie: An Anthology of the Undead

Published by Hachette Digital

ISBN: 9780748132218

All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Copyright 2011 by Christopher Golden

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

Hachette Digital

Little, Brown Book Group

100 Victoria Embankment

London, EC4Y 0DY

www.hachette.co.uk.

The Awkward Age copyright 2011 by David Liss

Saint John copyright 2011 by Jonathan Maberry

Rue copyright 2011 by Lauren Groff

Succumb copyright 2011 by John McIlveen

Torn Stitches, Shattered Glass copyright 2011 by WordFire, Inc.

Rattler and the Mothman copyright 2011 by Sharyn McCrumb

Big Man copyright 2011 by David Moody

Rakshasi copyright 2011 by Kelley Armstrong

Breeding the Demons copyright 2010 by Nate Kenyon. Breeding the Demons first appeared in When the Night Comes Down, edited by Bill Breedlove and published by Dark Arts.

Siren Song copyright 2011 by Dana Stabenow

Less of a Girl copyright 2011 by Chelsea Cain

The Cruel Thief of Rosy Infants copyright 2011 by Tom Piccirilli

The Screaming Room copyright 2011 by Sarah Pinborough

Wicked Be copyright 2011 by Heather Graham

Specimen 313 copyright 2011 by Jeff Strand

The Lake copyright 2011 by Tananarive Due

The Other One copyright 2011 by Michael Marshall Smith

And Still You Wonder Why Our First Impulse Is to Kill You: An Alphabetized Faux-Manifesto transcribed, edited, and annotated (under duress and protest) copyright 2011 by Gary A. Braunbeck

Jesus and Satan Go Jogging in the Desert copyright 2011 by Simon R. Green

AND STILL YOU WONDER WHY OUR FIRST IMPULSE IS TO KILL YOU:
AN ALPHABETIZED FAUX-MANIFESTO transcribed, edited,
and annotated (under duress and protest)
by Gary A. Braunbeck by Gary A. Braunbeck

JESUS AND SATAN GO JOGGING IN THE DESERT
by Simon R. Green

ANYONE WHO HAS EVER READ my work, or even glanced at my Website, will already know that I love monsters. Not in the manner of some passing fancy, the way teenagers express theirOMGlove for those shoes, that dress, this hat. Nor can my love for monsters be compared to your love of ice cream or pizza or pad thai or whatever makes you salivate. It is an enduring love. A love that comes with a deep and abiding connection, an understanding, a knowing.

One of my earliest childhood memories is of sitting on the back porch of my house on Fox Hill Road in Framingham, Massachusetts, with the little black-and-white TV my mother sometimes had on in the kitchen and watching Frankenstein for the first time. I might have been seven. When the monster finds a moment of joy with the little girl by the lake, laughing with her and tossing flower petals into the water until she is the only flower remaining to be plucked and cast

Wow.

The moment terrified me and broke my heart, all at the same time. The monster didnt know any better. He didnt understand the world into which he had been thrust. He had been created with the power to do so much damage, to inflict so much brutality, and yet all he wanted was peace and laughter. When the monster is shown walking into the village with the dead girl in his arms and the villagers react with horror and hatred, the tragedy is complete.

I cried that day. Im sure I cried in horror and in fear, but I know that my tears also sprang from my sadness for this creature whose monstrosity is no fault of his own.

In the years that followed, I developed a love for all kinds of monsters, thanks in large part to a television landscape that included Creature Double Feature and local programmers who filled their airwaves with Japanese giant monster movies, 1950s atomic nightmares, Hammer horror classics, and others in that vein. But it wasnt just the movies. My favorite Bugs Bunny cartoons always had monsters in them. When I started reading comic booksor, rather, buying them on my ownI gravitated toward the wonderful horror comics Marvel published in the 1970s.

While there are monsters who are simply that and nothing more, who are truly evil and alien, there are so many more that inspired me to think and feel. The 1976 remake of King Kong, with Jeff Bridges, might not be very good (hey, I was nine, cut me some slack), but when Kong died at the end, it broke my heart. Even as an adult, when I watch the 1933 original, it touches me.

The Tomb of Dracula, the finest of the Marvel horror comics, gave us a Lord of Vampires who was terrifyingly evil, and yet astonishingly human and sympathetic as written by Marv Wolfman and drawn by Gene Colan. His behavior was monstrous, and yet readers could not help but feel for him.

As my literary interests grew, I found myself gravitating toward such portrayals of monstrosity again and again. I read Mary Shelleys Frankenstein at last, and finally realized something that I had known in my heart for years by that timethe monster was the hero. The monster was the protagonist. Though the story might be structured otherwise, the language and characterization made it an inescapable truth.

This epiphany opened up a whole new way for me to see these stories. Godzilla, of course, was widely misunderstood. Magneto might be the X-Mens greatest nemesis, and his methods wrong, but he believed in his causebelieved he was doing the right thing for his people.

In college, I wrote more than one paper dissecting my favorite film, Blade Runner, examining the Frankenstein-like moral structure of Ridley Scotts masterpiece. When it came time to write a term paper on Moby-Dick, there could be no other choice for me than to write an essay titled In Favor of the Whale. Though the novel is structured to make Ahab the protagonist, everything about Melvilles language tells us that the opposite is true.

Monsters and monstrosity. Both subjects fascinate me. So much of what we write on those topics is about how we view ourselves, and about the things we fear in ourselves and in others. We want understanding for our own behavior, for the ugliness or otherness we see in ourselves. Like H. P. Lovecrafts outsider or Billy Joels stranger (not Camuss strangerthat guys an asshole), we exist in a world that either does not notice us, or does not notice the us we believe ourselves to be, or which we hope will never notice the us that we fear will not find acceptance in the world. Who are we? What are we? Will others understand?

Back to Blade Runner. Roy Batty tells his creator that he has done terrible things, but nothing the god of bio-mechanics wouldnt let you in heaven for.

Monstrosity is about how we define each other and how we define ourselves. Its about what we see in the mirror and what we fear others will see. And, at its most basic, it is also about the disturbing truth that we do not know what it is in the minds of others, that the woman next to you in line at the bank or the man dressed as Santa at the mall may view the world and humanity and morality very differently from the way that you do.

Now, lets talk about reality for a moment. There are monsters, and then there are monsters. There are real killers who go on rampages that leave people dead and others wounded and destroy the lives and the hopes of so many. These are the real monsters, and there are others in our world. My understanding of and sympathy for monsters does not extend to these real-life horrors. It is reserved for the Beast who is misunderstood, whose noble intentions are wrongly perceived by so many, but who, if he is fortunate, finds understanding in the eyes of a Beauty.