I’m obsessed with this. I tried not to be, I really did, but I can’t help myself, I love monsters. I love monsters so much that I am blogging about them. I love monsters so much that I don’t even care if I don’t have any friends because of it. 

I don’t care what they look like, either, so long as they’re monstrous. But that’s the beauty about monsters: they can be whatever you want them to be. Pretty, ugly, hairy. All of the above. But before anyone can undertake a sensible conversation about monsters we have to define what a monster is. And for that Wikipedia does a good job: 

A monster is a type of fictional creature found in horror, fantasy, science fiction, folklore, mythology and religion. Monsters are very often depicted as dangerous and aggressive, with a strange or grotesque appearance that causes terror and fear, often in humans. Monsters usually resemble bizarre, deformed, otherworldly and/or mutated animals or entirely unique creatures of varying sizes, but may also take a human form, such as mutants, ghosts, spirits, zombies, or cannibals, among other things. They may or may not have supernatural powers, but are usually capable of killing or causing some form of destruction, threatening the social or moral order of the human world in the process.

So basically, anything. That’s all right by me. I like all of them but I have to say I have some favorites. Today I wanna talk about monsters that (or who, I guess) save the world. I think those are kind of rare. I mean okay the Hulk, right. But before the tesseract and all that, he was just plain old Dr. Banner getting pissed off and turning into Lou Ferrigno and throwing people through windows. Then long after that he was part of the dream team that saved the world. But I don’t know, the Hulk sort of bores me. 

Now one of my favorites didn’t so much save the world as he saved a girl (one time anyway). The beautiful and incomparable Esmerelda. Yep everybody’s favorite monster Quasimodo. I mean his name is monstrous, or at least unusually strange. He’s sad and lonely but super strong. In fact his strength comes from his monstrousness even though I’m gonna say it probably wouldn’t really work that way. Anyhow, the thing about Quasimodo is he was so ugly it was shocking just to look at him and of course he goes after the hottest gypsy girl around. It is revealed in the story that his terrible monstrousness is tempered by his kind heart. 

Beauty and Beast plays on the same point. The beast must be transformed by the beautiful woman and it turns out he’s a pretty nice guy after all. He’s mean and surly in the actual story and not nearly as cuddly as he is in the Disney version, BTW. 

Now if we can switch over to another beloved monstrosity for a moment and take a peek at one of my be(a)sties we shall see something entirely different at work in The Wretch. Commonly known as Frankenstein. Here the monster is tempered by his love for a woman. In fact, he never even gets a woman. Dr. Frankenstein says he’ll make him one, at threat of death to his family, but he never comes through because he can’t bring himself to compound his crime of making this monster in the first place. So, yeah, there never was a bride of Frankenstein, in the book anyway. The civilizing influence for this monster is philosophy. That’s the transformative elixir. Naturally, it doesn’t solve all of his monster issues, like how terrible a thing he is, but it does make him quite intelligent and very intuitive. You could talk for hours with Frank over a pint or two and still not get bored with the conversation. He might strangle you at the end of it, but it would be a solid night out for sure. 

In my book The Demon of Montreal a monster is made by a demon and yes that monster saves the world. It saves the world without the world ever knowing it and naturally, it’s a pretty thankless job. For the monster and the demon. I was accused of being too dark in that book but really it can’t be dark enough. 

This theme is then repeated in another book of mine The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Zombie Hunter and that’s a pretty good time too. Especially, when you consider that Mr. Hyde really does such an excellent job at killing zombies. I mean, if you’ve never seen it or heard tell of it, you really ought to.