UST AS HISTORY IS PRIMARILY WRITTEN BY THE WINNERS, IN HORROR FICTION, STORIES ARE GENERALLY TOLD FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF THE HEROES, LEAVING MONSTERS TO BE THE ONE-DIMENSIONAL VILLAINS STALKING THE SHADOWS OR SPARRING WITH THE GOOD GUYS UNTIL THEIR INEVITABLE, PREDICTABLE DEFEATS. But not so in The Monster’s Corner, a new collection of horror stories edited by prolific genre author Christopher Golden (When Rose Wakes, Wildwood Road), which puts the Big Bads in the driver’s seat – and even allows them to come out on top.


Like many a lifelong genre fan, Golden has monsters on the brain, but the


idea of creatures inhabiting non-traditional roles in fiction has been a particular fascination since his college years, when he wrote a paper proposing that Moby Dick is the true hero of Herman Melville’s Moby- Dick; or, The Whale. “Ahab may have technically been the protagonist,


but Moby Dick was the hero,” Golden argues. “And Roy Batty in Blade Runner is the same thing. Roy Batty may be the monster but he really is the one that you’ve got to root for. ... Clearly, the best exam- ple of this kind of story is Frankenstein, where the monster is a monster through no fault of his own and he’s a much more sympathetic character than Frankenstein.... So I always had these kinds of things in the back of my mind and I thought it would be re- ally interesting to gather together an eclectic lineup of authors and look at what their perspectives would be if they tried to tell a story through the eyes of a monster.” That’s exactly what Golden has done with The Mon-


ster’s Corner (out next month from St. Martin’s Griffin). He invited writers from an array of genres – namely mystery, literary, horror and fantasy – to submit works. The result is a collection that’s as diverse as the authors who contribute to it, among them Michael Marshall Smith, Tananarive Due, Kelley Armstrong and Gary A. Braunbeck. Of course, as a successful writer himself, Golden already knew a thing or two about what was needed to sell this kind of a story to an audience. “I think you have to mean it; you can’t fake it,” he says of writing from the


monster’s perspective. “You have to take on the persona of that monster. ... Obviously in pop culture we have a dearth of three-dimensional villains and I think that with good monsters you really should be able to turn the tables and write a story from their perspective in such a way that the people reading the story can understand where they’re coming from and sympathize with them,


even if they don’t agree with what they do, their methods or their actions.” This is certainly the driving force behind the book, which features both un-


apologetic creatures and more sympathetic ones. The former is exemplified by David Liss’ “The Awkward Age,” which features a flesh-hungry teenage Lolita who has more than simple seduction on her mind. The latter gets some play in Tom Piccirilli’s “The Cruel Thief of Rosy In- fants,” in which a fairy baby-snatcher tries to set things right after a changeling swap goes wrong, and in Sharyn McCrumb’s “Rattler and the Moth- man,” via a candid conversation with the titular cryptozoo critter, who clears the air on his own mythos. Some of the other unconventional narrators found


within include a feasting succubi, a man-eating plant, a janitor who just won’t stop growing follow- ing a laboratory accident (in a tale by David Moody that explores the devastation and loss of life an enormous human would inevitably cause), and an artist who creates body-part collages to titillate his monstrous clientele. Even Medusa and Franken- stein’s monster make appearances. With such striking originality on display here, one


can’t help but wonder why we haven’t seen more monster-fronted stories over the years. After all, this


narrative switcheroo seems to offer a large wellspring of untapped ideas. Golden thinks he knows why. “Unless you can make the monster literally the hero, there is not a real mar-


ket for it, because how are you going to sell a series of fantasy novels where your main character is eating people?” he muses. “We do see these things from time to time and hopefully we will continue to see more, but I think that you get a lot of pushback from publishers if you have a main character who’s eating people. Although now that you mention it, who knows, maybe I’ll give it a shot.”


T H E N I N T H C I R C L E 55RM


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