Monsters

Zone One: Part One

| ruthpelletier

The Part About Zombies in General

By Colson Whitehead

ALL POSTS CONTAIN SPOILERS

I spend a lot of time thinking about monsters.

It’s probably not difficult to understand why: 1) they are so cool and 2) they are everywhere these days. We have a monster glut. We’ve always been obsessed with them, I think, but monsters are particularly culturally abundant right now: vampires, sexy vampires, vampires fighting werewolves, sexy werewolves, werewolves playing sports, vampires in love with people, vampires in love with vampire slayers, vampires in the American South, zombies in the American South, zombies in love, zombies fighting Mila Jovovich. It’s a lot.

It’s market-driven, clearly; people love monsters. I love monsters (always have), so I’m fine with it, but certain aspects of the monster ecosystem confuse me. To be specific, I am puzzled by the relative super-abundance of vampires.

All monsters are metaphors: they are scenarios dreamed up to interrogate existential problems. They are one of the ways that we ask certain questions, about life, death, humanity, brutality.

Vampires are absurdly popular, which is confusing to me because vampires are so shallow, metaphorically speaking. They are about immortality: what would you give up to live forever? Would you give up your very humanity if you could avoid death?

It’s not a bad question, but it is simplistic. First of all, it supposes that everyone wants to live forever, which, of course, we don’t. Second, it can be answered simply: yes or no. There is no philosophical meat. Either you would, or you would not, depending on how scared you are to die. There’s not a lot more there.

(I’m being a little reductive here, I know: there is actually a slightly interesting wrinkle in the vampire mythos: in order to live forever, you have to literally drain the life out of other people – is that worth it? But, of course, even that question assumes you want to live forever, which, again, isn’t universal.)

I’m not just shitting on vampires and their fans: werewolves are barely more interesting. They’re just a heavy-handed metaphor for human savagery, asking, “Are we responsible for our own capacity for violence if it’s innate?” It could be interesting question, but it does not deserve the creation of entire monster-type to address it.

Zombies, though, zombies are different. Zombies are deep. They are complex, multi-faceted, the most metaphorically rich of all the major monsters. Zombies are powerful.

Werewolves and vampires ask questions which make assumptions about what people want. They assume that everyone longs for immortality, that everyone has a brutal streak which can be interrogated in canine metaphor. I don’t think that this is true, actually – I think there are plenty of non-brutal people who prefer a natural lifespan – but, either way, these questions only address facets of ourselves.

Zombies, though, ask universal questions, questions with global scope: what makes us who we are? Are we our bodies, or are we our minds? If you had to choose between your life and the lives of your loved ones, which would you choose? Would you kill them to survive?

There comes a moment in every zombie story when a protagonist sees their loved one infected. It might be a parent, a child, a spouse, a sibling, the story is the same. The loved one is infected, but change isn’t instant: they will suffer a period of doomed lucidity, waiting to turn.

Zombie protocol is clear: once bitten, a person must be destroyed, lest they turn and spread the infection. This is the one inviolable Zombie Law, universal and non-negotiable. Our protagonist knows it, but, at this, the crucial moment, as they stare into the eyes of their most cherished person, they will falter.

This is what zombies are about: could you stare into the face of the ones you love and destroy them for the betterment of all? Even if you knew they were doomed, even if they begged you to put them out of their misery, could you?

(As an aside, this is why I think zombies canonically require headshots. This killing, this destruction of the loved one, must be brutal. You cannot ease them into a painless death, put them gently to sleep: violence is required. A bullet to the brain, head chopped off, a knife to the top of the spinal column – there will be no mistaking that you killed them)

This is the kind of metaphor I can get behind. This is a wrenching, terrible question that speaks to one of the few truly universal human experiences: the love of another.

Vampires and werewolves are narcissistic creations: they are about what we want (immortality, the ability to vent our rage without consequence). Zombies, on the other hand, are about what we are, especially in relation to other people. They ask us whether or not it is possible to be truly safe while loving someone else.

This problem, known in real life to everyone who has ever been scared of rejection, is made literal in all zombie stories: is being alone the only way to be safe? The instinct of our zombie-story protagonists (as with humans in general) is to band together, to forms tribes and then colonies of survivors, to huddle for protection. But more people means more risk: more chances to get bitten, more vectors to bring the contagion home. Someone will eventually fail to latch the door tightly, forget to close the blackout curtain, will sneeze at the wrong moment: the more people, the more likely this becomes. More than that, if you love someone, your judgment may be compromised – you are more likely to make bad, emotionally-driven decisions if you are attached to your fellow travelers. Is the comfort and help of other human beings worth it? Or are you better off alone?

Zombies are brainless on only the most literal level; metaphorically, they are complex, and literarily, they are far and away the most emotionally effective monster. The vampire story has not yet been written which can compare to the visceral impact of imagining your loved one – your child, your spouse, your sibling – changing, becoming less and less human, and wondering if you will have to kill them to save yourself. Would you be capable? How could you ever convince yourself, sufficiently and truly, that you could never have cured them, that they were truly lost? It is the impossible choice.

Why am I talking about this?

I’m talking about this because I just finished reading the zombie novel I’ve been waiting for my whole life and got really excited about the whole topic. I originally meant this to be a one paragraph intro, but I got carried away. I’ll talk about the book next week.

The Monster of Elendhaven

| ruthpelletier

By Jennifer Giesbrecht

ALL POSTS CONTAIN SPOILERS

“Florian dipped gingerly, right at the sodden border cut by the tide, and plucked out a stone: perfectly round, an inch in diameter and opalescent in sheen. He held it aloft for Johann’s benefit. “The oldest stories of the North called these rocks Hallandrette’s Roe. She lays her clutch along the beach, and protects them from the destructive hands of mortal beings.” Florian turned on his heel and pitched the stone at the cliff-wall as hard as he could. It bounced off the slate harmlessly. “See? Hard stone. Unbreakable.”

Johann frowned. “How do you crack one open, then?”

Florian smiled, secretive. “A privilege reserved for Hallandrette’s chosen. When a wretched child, one wronged or wounded deep in the soul, throws what they love most in the ocean they may cast a roe against the stone and a hallankind will be born. Keep the stone in their pocket and the Queen sends to them one of her children.:

“A friend for the lonely soul.”

“A companion,” Florian affirmed, “made from the same dark matter that coats the bottom of the Nord Sea. A hallankind will love that wretched child as a brother or sister. They will drag whoever wronged their brother-sister-friend into the sea and wring them through the spines of their mother’s baleen until they are foam and sea particle, forgotten in the cradle of her belly.” (p. 52).

Maybe all stories are love stories.

OK, not ALL of them – it’s difficult to describe, oh, ‘Heart of Darkness’ as a love story – but it’s surprisingly hard to come up with a story that isn’t, in some way, a love story.

The trick of it is to understand that love stories sometimes come hidden in unlikely disguises. All sorts of people have love stories who don’t look like they deserve them. Broken people, evil people, sad people, rude people, angry people, all sorts of morally unphotogenic people who nevertheless occasionally find themselves looking for love, feeling love, or acting out of love.

In some ways, those are our favorite love stories. Maybe it’s because they are more suspenseful, since we aren’t sure that the characters in them will find love. Maybe it’s because they are more ambiguous, since we don’t know whether we really want them to find love. Or maybe it’s because they feel truer, since very few of us feel 100% certain that we deserve love.

The inside jacket cover of ‘The Monster of Elendhaven’

When I saw ‘The Monster of Elendhaven‘ in a bookstore the other day, I didn’t think it was a love story. It doesn’t look like a love story. I’m not sure why I bought it – I’m not in the habit of purchasing books of unknown provenance. But the cover was creepy and the description was even creepier, and I was on a mini-vacation, so I bought it.

Elendhaven is failing industrial city on the northern edge of the map. A hideous accident generations ago has left the ocean poisoned and black. The ancient noble families of Elendhaven have fallen into poverty and the magic that was the source of their power has been outlawed.

Johann does not know who he is or where he came from. All he knows is that he used to be nameless, unloved, born of darkness, until he decided to call himself Johann. He tends to slide off people’s attention, unremarked and unremembered by anyone who meets him. And he can’t be killed, at least not permanently.

And he knows that he likes to kill people. Johann is an accomplished killer – a monster, in fact – who stalks the streets of Elendhaven taking whatever he wants and killing whomever had it.

One night, Johann chooses to rob Florian Leickenbloom, the last living member of the once-magnificant Leickenbloom family. Florian is a small, beautiful man who also happens to be, as Johann soon learns, a sorcerer. Orphaned as a child when the rest of his family was killed in a plague, Florian lives in hermitish seclusion, planning his revenge. And instead of killing him, Johann will fall in love with Florian, and help him realize his terrible plan.

I don’t know if it’s more or less beautiful when a monster loves another monster. But something I respect about Giesbrecht: her monsters are really monsters. They are ugly and evil; they hurt people and they enjoy it. They even hurt each other, and because they have lived lives characterized by pain, cruelty, and rejection, this is part of their love.

‘The Monster of Elendhaven‘ is gory, viscerally and explicitly gory. It’s creepy, and sexy, and kind of funny, and sad. It’s also romantic, I think?

Romance is not my strong suit, so I might be wrong. It’s also not my favorite genre – I actually have to leave the room during proposal scenes in movies, because they make me so uncomfortable. But, as far as I understand it, romances are stories in which two elements complement each other in a way which makes each feel as though things about them which had been wrong or missing are, in fact, purposeful and right.

This is why this they are powerful for us. We’re all missing pieces, or rough along an edge or two, crumpled where we should be smooth, and romances provide a reason for those traits: those are things which make us ourselves, so if someone loves us, then the self that we are is the right self, and therefore those things are right, too. Love justifies our pain, and our mistakes – it is the forgiveness from the world we need to forgive ourselves.

Jennifer Giesbrecht

And that’s why the romances of monsters are the most revealing romances of all: they are the far-out test case, the most extreme example. They are interesting, yes, monsters are always interesting, but it’s more than that: they are the limit on the possible. And you know you fit comfortably within their limit, and so you know that your experience, your romance, your love, will fit comfortably within theirs.

I wonder if I am the only person who read ‘The Monster of Elendhaven‘ and thought about love the whole time. I’m definitely not the only person who noticed it was a romance, but I might be the only person who thought it was a lovely romance (rather than a horrific one). That there is something beautiful about the idea of an abandoned little boy raging at the world, calling a monster forth from the ocean who will love and avenge him and who cannot die the way his family did. Who can therefore never leave him alone. In the idea that, if we are monsters, the world might provide another monster to love us, to make us whole.

Because maybe only a monster can truly love another monster.

It’s like there’s a whole other world, full of weird, creepy people (which I definitely am), and we get a whole different, creepy literature. But just because we’re weird and dark doesn’t mean that we don’t have feelings – it just means that our feelings are creepier and weirder than other peoples. And ‘The Monster of Elendhaven‘ is a romance for us.

Maybe that’s a weird reaction. But such a weird little book deserves a weird little reaction. ‘The Monster of Elendhaven‘ is a book about revenge and hate and gruesome death, and I thought that it was super romantic, but not in the way I hate – in a way I kind of loved. It’s the most romantic murder book I’ve read.

At least this year.