Monster

11 April 2010

Automaton followed by Monster? What’s the world of random words trying to tell me?

Monster's a great word. Unfortunately – despite listening to Lady Ga Ga's “Fame Monster” as I write (by sheer coincidence, honest) – I don't really feel in the mood to do it justice. I could start talking about the monster hangover I had today (yawn), or start a really serious piece on what makes a monster and does evil really exist, but I'd probably end up concluding that it would be monstrous of a blog founded on a single, simple and relatively fun idea of riffing on random words to be quite so serious, and then feel a bit guilty.

I don't think I was ever much of a monster child. I was quite taken with dragons, but I don;t think I ever thought they were real, and I certainly didn't imagine that there was anything scaly living in the wardrobe. I was always more terrified by subtlety. There were a string of cardboard “Gingerbread Men” on my wall. By day I loved them, with their big smiling faces. At night those smiling mouths would move incessantly, mouthing silent statements at me as I lay awake in terror, trying to ignore what they might be trying to whisper. I would imagine shapes moving, or be terrified by unexplained noises, but I never assumed it was a beast. “Shadows of a nameless fear”, as Tolkien would have said.

I'm not sure what I thought was lurking. Did I really think the Gingerbread Men were hostile, or was I just freaked out because the darkness made their cardboard mouths look as though they were moving? Ghosts probably. Not actual ghosts of dead people, just unspecific spooky things.

Like Lady Ga Ga, I suppose.

I did have one dream that the house was full of monsters, which were sitting around and perching on the the bannisters as I walked down the stairs. But by far the spookiest dream I ever had was imaging waking up and finding a cowled monk at the foot of my bed just staring at me. So I was horrified to read that a friend's little girl had awoken and announced: “that she woke up in the night with 'Mr Nobody' standing beside her bed, looking down at her 'with no eyes and no face'.”
Worse than any monster. Poor kid. Next Neil Gaiman, I reckon.