Monsters stagger early onto the theatrical stage of every childhood. They are universal, timeless, and haunting.
They also crop up in my fiction a lot. In my new novel, still being edited, a monster appears to Caleb, an eleven year old boy who remembers it from nightmares he had when he was four.
When creating this monster I tried to think of something exotic and wildly imaginative. I drew pictures. I tried one eye and three eyes. I tried peeling flesh and a spiked tail. But in the end, the monster in my mind remained a big furry mass, with fangs and long claws, and even though I risked triteness, I could not accept him as being any other way.
Why?
The simple shaggy bear-like form fit my childhood vision of a monster more than any other.
The monsters of my toddler-hood nightmares were never so sophisticated as zombies or vampires. They never had tentacles or multiple eyes. Without fail, my dream monsters were the animals most familiar to me: giant cats, spiders, or rats. They all wanted to eat me and very often did, bringing my dream to an abrupt close.
True to my childhood view of a monster, my fictional beast was more bear than zombie, with a color that to me signified his origins in childhood: purple.
However, because he is bear-like and purple, I have been accused by Beta testers of my novel of having borrowed from Monsters Inc. (The monster in that movie was blue, by the way, not purple.)
I could argue that Monsters Inc. borrowed its monster from Sesame Street.
With Cookie Monster, Grover, and Elmo, Jim Henson began an entirely new tradition of monster: the friendly, shaggy kind with fur the color of flower petals or blueberries. These monsters transformed a common childhood fear into something google-eyed and adorable.
The expression of delight, “Om nom nom nom nom,” invites not screams, but hugs. Classical monsters are not so adorable, nor so blue. They tend to prefer brains to cookies. They kill and embody death. They feast on blood and entrails.
Not that I am pinning blame on Pixar for “borrowing from” Jim Henson. I suspect that even Sesame Street drew from an existing beast prototype, evident in stories such as Where the Wild Things Are.
But the question is worth asking: Where did Sesame Street get its idea for a monster? It added the blue and the red, but where did it get the shaggy bearish form? My guess is that in human pre-history, it must have been common for children to be eaten by animals, which would explain my instinctive childhood fear of them. And bears, although deadly, can be cute and huggy, too, so for Sesame Street, it was perfect.
For whatever reason, the big shaggy monster is a classic, and however hackneyed it may seem, it existed way before Monsters Inc. ever did.
However, there is more to a monster than its form. I mainly focused on the personality of my monster. I tried to merge the two monster traditions: the friendly monster and the hostile, destructive kind, even though they are obviously at odds.
My solution was to make my monster a redeemed villain.
In my novel, the monster plays a double role: he is a former villain who once tortured a four year old with nightmares; however, when he returns to the grown eleven year old, the monster has changed.
When my monster lumbers onto the stage, he is more concerned about the fate of his world than scaring and needs my disturbed main character Caleb to help him prevent disaster. Caleb has to decide whether to trust him. As the story progresses, the monster adopts an advisor role.
Because of the helper status of my monster, I have had to ask: Is he a monster at all? What makes a monster a monster? Is it appearance? Is it overwhelming physical strength combined with the intent to do harm?
Can a real monster be nice? Can a real monster be purple?
What, after all, does a color say about a monster? What if Cookie Monster or Grover had been brown or black instead of blue?
Purple or blue, for whatever reason, seems to inspire trust. A pastel is a tag that turns a monster into a toy and removes the fear. It takes the monster out of nature and puts it into a costume. It becomes charmingly absurd.
But scary and absurd, like evil and nice, are a hard combination to achieve.
Monsters are not ordinarily nice. Usually, the eviler the better. Was my monster evil enough, even in his reckless days, to inhabit a story with silly elements but serious themes? Scaring a four year old is naughty but hardly approaches infanticide.
Of course, no monster has to bepurely evil. My favorite monsters are the ones with a human side. The monster of Frankenstein longed to enjoy human pleasures, and literature abounds with lonely, tormented vampires who struggle against their murderous natures. The best monsters have a few sympathetic traits. However, a monster usually proves to be a monster, and its cruel nature triumphs in the end.
However, dousing my monster with extra cruelty to fit this mold contradicted his role in my story. My goal was to write good fiction, not conform to a rigid definition, and the story role trumped the need for monster cred.
Besides, did Jim Henson ever write pensive articles questioning whether Grover or Cookie Monster made the Hall of Infamy? If he can redefine monsters to fit his vision, so can I.
That is why the purple stays for now, and so does the shaggy bear form, but I added details to my monster which were previously lacking. I gave him a snout and small shrewd eyes, and I have moved his purple toward a darker eggplant shade.
The darker coat seems more fitting for a monster. However, within the confines of my fictional world, a monster is a monster if I define it as one, whether he is golden, sable, or turquoise, and whether he is shaggy, bald, or has a five o’clock shadow. Instead than modeling my monster from Monsters Inc., I drew from the same cultural well that it did. Pixar has no monopoly on big shaggy monsters that trend toward the ultraviolet.
My dreaming toddler self knows this and will tell you with perfect candor that it was her idea first.