Guest post written by author Melinda Salisbury
Famously, there was a night in summer 1816, when Lord Byron, effectively trapped in the Villa Diodati near Lake Geneva thanks to inclement weather, suggested to his companions that they read ghost stories to each other to pass the time. And when they ran out of haunting tales he proposed a contest, where they’d compete to see who could write the scariest story. The others with him in the villa included the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, his partner (and mother of his child, but not yet wife) Mary Wollstonecraft-Godwin, her half-sister Clare Clairmont, and Byron’s physician, Dr John Polidori (whose story from this time, The Vampyre, is said to have inspired Bram Stoker’s Dracula). The future Mary Shelley’s literary career was launched that night, as she showcased a nascent version of what we’d come to know as the gothic classic, Frankenstein. It’s the kind of literary salon that seems impossible now, this assemblage of names who would go on to become legend. But the thing that stands out to me most is not who they were but that they chose horror as their inspiration. That, trapped indoors together, miles from home for the foreseeable future, all of them on the run from a society that had rejected them as soundly as they’d rejected it, they wanted not to make each laugh, or cry, or swoon, or even think. They wanted to frighten each other.
What is it about horror that’s so alluring? Why do we love to be frightened? Is it the idea of the unknown and the unknowable that’s so tantalizing? If that was the case, then horror wouldn’t actually need monsters. The suggestion that something was amiss would be enough, and yet it often isn’t. We want to see what our enemy looks like. We want to know our monsters. But why?
It’s something I thought about a lot while writing Hold Back the Tide, which is a book with multiple and varied monsters in it. The domestic monsters that you share a home with, that you have to placate, tip-toe around and stay one step ahead of; the big-wig monster that, through privilege and wealth (and maybe a little corruption), has power over you and everyone you love and so can’t be provoked; the monster that hates differences and wields prejudice against anything it deems ‘other’, dehumanizing and debasing until ill-treatment is normalized. The monster that lives in the dark, mostly forgotten until someone is careless…
The question that’s asked over and over about Frankenstein is which is the real monster, the doctor or the creature? Is it the man who steals parts of corpses, sews them together and animates them, only to abandon his creation when it isn’t what he wanted it to be? Or is the creature, resembling nothing we know as human, which eventually kills an innocent woman to teach its creator pain and grief?
In fiction, it’s through their differences to humans that we use monsters to define the opposite of normal, or right, and to give us something tangible to defeat. Novels like Frankenstein are rare – it’s not often we’re asked to consider the monster’s perspective, or motivations. Monsters in fiction function as a symptom of a diseased society – the vampire who creeps through the night and drinks your blood, the ghost that won’t let the past rest, the werewolf that represents a bestial nature that cannot be contained, the witch, an unfettered, unowned, dangerous woman. We’re all familiar with the idea that George Romero’s zombies are an allegory for consumerism, and vampires – particularly Anne Rice’s and the 1992 film version of Dracula – are metaphors for the dangers of sexual promiscuity and moral licentiousness.
We use monsters to manage our own worst traits and fears about our species, but at the same time, we fashion them as a shield to protect ourselves from having to confront our darker sides. To do this we exaggerate their features; give them claws and fangs and unholy appetites, we strip from them any resemblance to humans in order to make it clear that we are not monsters. In dehumanizing them, we both give ourselves license to destroy them without remorse or mercy, and help keep from being accused of being a monster too. How often do you hear or read people saying ‘He didn’t look a killer/she didn’t look capable of it’? We can’t cope with evil when it has a human face. Because if someone that looks like us can be a monster, how can we be so sure that we’re not one, too?
Horror, then is rarely, if ever, about the monsters it features. Instead, it is about us as humans, proving our ability to triumph over the abominable, our enduring ability to recognize, survive and to defeat evil. More than that, we use horror to hold up a mirror to the monster in the hope we won’t see ourselves reflected there. That is the goal of a monster in a story. Because, in real life, the monsters we fear are the darkest parts of who we are, made manifest. The thing we’re most afraid of when we wake up, sweating, heart pounding, in the middle of the night, is ourselves.
Melinda Salisbury is the author of HOLD BACK THE TIDE, which went on sale January 5 via Scholastic Press. She was born in the 1980s in a landlocked city, before escaping to live by the sea. As a child, she genuinely thought Roald Dahl’s Matilda was her biography. When she’s not trying to unlock the hidden avenues of her mind, she’s reading, writing, or traveling. Her first novel, THE SIN EATER’S DAUGHTER was the bestselling UK YA debut novel of 2015, and collectively her books have been nominated and shortlisted for multiple national and international awards and accolades – including the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize, the YA Book Prize, the Edgar Awards Best YA, the 2016 and 2019 Carnegie medals, Eason’s YA Book of the Month, and more. She lives in the UK, is a passionate vegan and (bad) mother to many plants. She can be found on Twitter as @MESalisbury, though be warned she tweets often.
