 Because monster stories have always served explain the unexplainable. To rationalise away the things that would otherwise be put in the too-hard basket. Lots of much smarter people agree: LEE MURRAY: Jim has asked for a guest post to accompany Gingernuts’ review of Grotesque: Monster Stories, so I thought I’d ask you what on earth you think you’re doing? Why, at this particular juncture in history, would anyone choose to release a collection of monster stories? It’s the year of devastating global events. We launched with Australia’s bushfires, which obliterated thousands of hectares of forest, endangered species, and set world climate reform back another half hour on the doomsday clock. Then, when firefighters were still stamping out the flare ups, the pandemic exploded, killing hundreds of thousands of our most vulnerable, sending the global economy into a tailspin, and exacerbating the inequalities in society. Even seemingly robust societies have seen unrest, hunger, and hardship. And on a personal level, aren’t you the woman who suffers acute anxiety and depression? Didn’t you just lose your dad? No one would reproach you for putting this release off for a year. Heck, you could simply forget the whole thing. No one needs a book of monster stories; the real world is monstrous enough. Lee: There’s a lot of comfort to be found in monster stories. LEE MURRAY: Comfort? You’re kidding, right? You’ve got a raft of monstrosities in this collection: spliced genetic aberrations, zombies, automatons, and golems. Creatures and creations from all over the world, plus one or two which you’ve clearly conjured from your twisted imagination. Where’s the comfort in that? Lee: Because monster stories have always served explain the unexplainable. To rationalise away the things that would otherwise be put in the too-hard basket. Lots of much smarter people agree: “Supernatural elements externalize and emotionally relieve core existential human problems, including death, deception, meaninglessness, and other problems that are factually and rationally intractable,” writes Ara Norenzayan and colleagues.1 [Monster stories provide] “a way for us to understand our own modern fears and their monstrous offspring, and new ways to think about broad questions of political history and relate them to the modern age,” says University of Buffalo Professor, David Castillo.2 I think for me some of the comfort arises from the power of capturing those monsters on the page. When we set our fears down on paper, we introduce an element of distance, of safety. And it’s from that place of safety that we can reflect, analyse, evaluate, perhaps even devise some viable solutions to the things that haunt us. In an increasingly dark and ominous world, monster stories gird us with hope. I guess now would good time to quote researcher Kay Redfield Jamison and her important work An Unquiet Mind: “But, with time,” she wrote in 1995, “one has encountered many of the monsters, and one is increasingly less terrified of those still to be met.”3 LEE MURRAY: Okay we get it; this book is your attempt to tame some demons. Lee: Well yes, that, and on another level, there is the sheer joy of plunging headlong into a magical supernatural world, one which resembles our own but really isn’t. There’s the delicious escapism of reading a book. Some of the world’s best-loved stories involve monsters, after all. LEE MURRAY: [whispers behind her hand] But you do realise there is no such thing as monsters. Not really. Lee: Now you’re being deliberately obtuse. Monsters as mythology, as culture, as psychosis, most certainly exist. To deny them is to deny people their faith, their identity, and their sanity. But you’re correct that, in literature, monsters exist as representations, as symbols. Filmmaker Guillermo del Toro made this clear in a 2011 YouTube clip when he said, “monsters are living breathing metaphors.”4 Many of these metaphors are well-known to us by now: zombies as the pandemic, kaiju as nuclear war and globalisation, Frankenstein as a symbol of scientific hubris, for example. But just as there are new viruses, global threats, and scientific advances, we can always take a fresh lens to the monster story, and I hope I have achieved that here with these eleven stories in Grotesque: Monster Tales. Works cited: 1. Norenzayan, Ara, Scott Atran, Jason Faulkner and Mark Schaller. Memory and Mystery: The Cultural Selection of Minimally Counterintuitive Narratives. Cognitive Science, 6 May (2006): 531-553. 14 June 2017 2. Donovan, Patricia. (2011, October 27). Why We Create Monsters. UB Reporter, 27 October 2011. 3. Redfield Jamison, Kay. An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness, Knopf 1995. 4. del Toro, Guillermo. Monsters are living breathing, metaphors. Big Think. YouTube, 14 June, 2011. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXBU0X_LuQI  Lee Murray is a multi-award-winning writer and editor of science fiction, fantasy, and horror (Sir Julius Vogel, Australian Shadows) and a three-time Bram Stoker Award® nominee. Her works include the Taine McKenna military thrillers (Severed Press), and supernatural crime-noir series The Path of Ra, co-written with Dan Rabarts (Raw Dog Screaming Press), as well as several books for children. She is proud to have edited thirteen speculative works, including award-winning titles Baby Teeth: Bite Sized Tales of Terror and At the Edge (with Dan Rabarts), Te Kōrero Ahi Kā (with Grace Bridges and Aaron Compton) and Hellhole: An Anthology of Subterranean Terror (Adrenaline Press). She is the co-founder of Young New Zealand Writers, an organisation providing development and publishing opportunities for New Zealand school students, co-founder of the Wright-Murray Residency for Speculative Fiction Writers, and HWA Mentor of the Year for 2019. In February 2020, Lee was made an Honorary Literary Fellow in the New Zealand Society of Authors Waitangi Day Honours. Lee lives over the hill from Hobbiton in New Zealand’s sunny Bay of Plenty where she dreams up stories from her office overlooking a cow paddock. Read more at www.leemurray.info She tweets @leemurraywriter  11 short stories from the imagination of New Zealand's multiple award-winning author and editor Lee Murray! Contains 4 original stories including a new adventure in the much-lauded and awarded Taine McKenna series! The book has already received outstanding praise and reviews, including the following:- “With Grotesque: Monster Stories, Lee Murray proves she is a first-rate talent! These stories are fascinating, unexpected, and scary as hell!” — Jonathan Maberry, New York Times bestselling author of Rage and V-Wars. “Action, thrills, monsters, awesome!” — USA Today bestselling author, David Wood. “It has been said creating is a path of immortality; Murray’s engaging tales bring us into the dream time of imagination, mixing her unique dark stories and the Māori culture to create a collection existing outside of time, taking us with it.” -- Linda D. Addison, award-winning author and HWA Lifetime Achievement Award recipient.   THE HEART AND SOUL OF HORROR REVIEW WEBSITES Comments are closed.
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