Overcoming the Monster: Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror

Let me tell you how I overcame a monster. A writer gets few a-ha! moments because the process of story-creating can be a murky thing. Sometimes you get a little niggle of where a scene or a character came from. An example of a little bite of understanding for me, was when I wrote and later re-read “Wekka’s Gold”. The last scene has someone reveal Wekka’s terrible fate. My subconscious had cribbed it from the ending of Kipling’s “The Man Who Would Be King” (movie version). You know, where Michael Caine reveals Sean Connery’s severed head. I wasn’t thinking about Kipling or that movie. My brain just felt that the story ended on such a reveal.

That’s a small example. Sometimes, a door really opens and you get to see a lot more…

Seven Basic Plots

For me that door was Christopher Booker’s Seven Basic Plots (2004). The book sounds like it is going to be a boring and obvious list but nothing could be further from the truth. It is the book that explains why we read and write what we do.

The first basic plot is called “Overcoming the Monster”. The hero sets out to defeat an antagonistic force (often evil) that threatens the hero and/or hero’s homeland. This simple description describes all the Greek heroes, Beowulf, men’s adventures like Alistair Maclean’s The Guns of Navarone, James Bond, The Seven Samurai, most Westerns and Star Wars. It is every comic book punch-up, every cop show, every trickster, every good-guy-versus-bad-guy you can think of. And that was the revelation for me. This is all I write!

The other six plots are often woven into this one: The Quest and Voyage and Return in Fantasy, Rags to Riches in Heinleinian Science Fiction, Comedy and Tragedy are pretty easy, and Rebirth is the core of most Young Adult stuff, with the hero becoming the person they were meant to be.

Edgar Rice Burroughs

As with many people my age, the writer who got me into story was Edgar Rice Burroughs. Originally hated by librarians, he was loved by readers. Like L. Frank Baum, he succeeded generation after generation despite poor critical acceptance. I can remember being a young man, living in the uneasy times of nuclear threat, but always safe in my world of great apes, Martian thoats and Pellucidarin dinosaurs. The unkind would say this is escapism and it made me into a person who can’t handle the dry harshness of reality. I say bollocks! ERB gave me what we all need: hope, with a sense that we can win out in the end.

This is the elemental purpose of “Overcoming the Monster”. Life will give you conflict but as the hero, you will overcome, survive and find balance. It may be the balance of the jungle ape but balance all the same. And it is only now that I understand Edgar Rice Burroughs and his appeal. Burroughs was “Overcoming the Monster” as environment. ERB’s settings are what makes his stories so good. You can’t learn how to deal with real people from his work. His coincidental plots and cardboard characters can’t do that. (I should just say that even though this is true, his narrator are so likeable and I would follow them anywhere.)

His heroes must overcome the hostile worlds they live in. For Tarzan that means jumping on lions’ backs and using his knife. John Carter, using his incredible jumping and his fast sword, must hold back enemies on all hands. David Innes and Abner Perry must face a dinosaur, ready to eat them if they survive the sabertooth before that! The message to that kid long ago: you will survive your environment.

Robert E. Howard

After Burroughs, I quite naturally went onto reading the work of Robert E. Howard. Cut from the same Pulpy cloth, Howard gave me a roll call of heroes featuring Solomon Kane, Kull, Bran Mak Morn, and of course, Conan. These brawny swordsmen were later joined by Dark Agnes, Turlough O’Brien, Cormac Mac Art and El Borak. I read anything by Howard because he was “Overcoming the Monster” in distilled form. Raw, exciting, powerful stuff that can only be compared to Beowulf that ancient hero of old. Where ERB was about setting, Howard was about the hero. Which wasn’t to say Howard’s Hyborian world wasn’t cool, because it was. But Howard was about the hero first, not the setting. Proof of this, when Howard predicted the comic book team up and had King Kull cross time to fight alongside Bran Mak Morn. The time didn’t matter, only the fight.

It is apt that I mention comic books here. The superhero punch-ups that we all loved as kids from Marvel and DC, were there before book reading (at least for me). These picture stories set me up to want to read Burroughs and Howard. The message of good over evil sold comics to a lot of parents as they overlooked the violence. Like the artwork of masters like Frank Frazetta, they make us feel a live (if not safe) with a feeling that the hero will win out. Some how, some way, after a titanic struggle of massive proportions, the good guy (read Conan, Iron Man, Superman, etc.) will win because he is meant to overcome that monster.

J. R. R. Tolkien

As my reading ability improved with ERB and REH I finally tackled the fantasy giant of them all: J. R. R. Tolkien. It was nice of him to write The Hobbit so I could make my way up that long, arduous mountain known as The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien is very popular worldwide, but I don’t know if readers understand just how many boxes he ticked here. Tolkien certainly does “Overcoming the Monster”, and he has the environmental elements of Burroughs (Middle Earth isn’t dinosaur haunted but a band of orcs or a swarm of giant spiders is nothing to sneeze at.) He also has the character struggles of Howard, with Aragorn being a kind of Beowulf we can believe in, with Gandalf fighting his old boss, Saruman, and of course, the hobbits versus Sauron.

But Tolkien doesn’t stop there (as do most of his imitators). He incorporates ALL seven of them. Overcoming the Monster is pretty obvious when you have a world full of monsters. The other six are more subtle. Rags to Riches is used in the story of Aragorn, literally a ragged Ranger from the North, he rises to become king of Gondor. The Quest is again fairly obvious. If you asked someone to name a quest story they might say “the quest for the holy grail” but they are just as likely to say “the quest of the fellowship of the ring”. Voyage and Return is not as obvious but for those who ‘read the book’ versus ‘saw the movie’, the return of the hobbits to the Shire after the ring is destroyed fulfills this plot perfectly. The hero who goes on a voyage does not return the same person they were when they left. Frodo, Sam, Merry and Pippin can’t return to drinking in the tavern and playing pranks. They are now kick-ass adventurers though perhaps happy to travel no more.  Comedy is defined as a story with a happy ending. The lovers, Aragorn and Arwen, finally reunited provide this. Tragedy is a story with a sad ending, and Boromir and Theodon come to mind. Rebirth is at the core of Tolkien’s long story. The world goes from a place tainted by evil to a better place, where a hobbit can enjoy a pinch of pipeweed and a good ale and sing a few songs. Tolkien truly was a master in all things.

Robert A. Heinlein

I’ve been using Fantasy examples here for the most part. That was because I started with the first books I read. As my teen years went on I discovered Science Fiction books. As a movie and television watcher I had been a fan of Star Trek, Space 1999, Logan’s Run then Star Wars. But with fiction it began with Robert Silverberg. During a bout of flu my mother got me a copy of Silverberg’s Downward to the Earth. She had no idea what it was about. She just saw the Paul Alexander cover was that crazy shit her son liked and got it. That was my actual baptism to “The Literature of Ideas”. I went on from Silverberg to read all the greats but it was probably Robert A. Heinlein who best exemplifies “Overcoming the Monster” in SF.

Whether it was the copy of Have Spacesuit, Will Travel I had inflicted on me in Grade 8 English (not until John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids, would I be that lucky again!) or Orphans of the Sky or any of the other juveniles, I can see the classic “by-his-bootstraps” Heinlein facing off against the universe. Heinlein has ideas of course. All SF must offer something that is not ordinary. But the plot is not about ideas but the struggle of the young hero to become an adult. The monster is immaturity.

Now not all SF is focused this way. Not even Heinlein. Two of his best, The Puppet Masters and Starship Troopers, have obvious alien monsters to overcome. Here Heinlein is taking a page from H. G. Wells, who invented this kind of story with The War of the Worlds (1898). Other tales are basically scientific mysteries or puzzle stories, where the hero must use his noddle to get out of a terrible predicament. Here overcoming the monster is not succumbing to the fact that the ship is falling into the sun, or that there is a stowaway on a ship with a precious amount of air. The solution is the win, good consequences or bad. What if the hero isn’t an Heinleinian superhero? What if the monster can’t be overcome?

H. P. Lovecraft

Years after all the Fantasy and Science Fiction tales, I became more of a Horror fan. This is, in fact, the genre I am best known for. (Which mystifies me some days.) I read many ghost stories and love horror films but it was the work of H. P. Lovecraft that consumed me for decades. I wondered how does horror fit in with all these heroes and elves “Overcoming the Monster”? Turns out horror is “Overcoming the Monster” when it fails. Every fight has at least three possible outcomes: win, lose or draw.

When the hero wins you get Savage Sword of Conan but when the hero loses, defies the darkness but evil wins, you get horror. And the thumbs down version has its own rewards. Where a tale of the hero conquering may give us hope (I am reminded of John Jakes saying after a dire surgery all he wanted was a cheeseburger and a Louis L’Amour novel.), the story where the protagonist (did Lovecraft ever write about a hero?) loses gives us another kind of catharsis. It allows us to think of the horrible things, a kind of preview of our own mortality. Morbid, but we all know intellectually we will die someday. Some run from that idea and hide in their beds. Others, horror fans, like to peek out from the sheets and see that monster. One that you will not overcome.

Now Lovecraft (and the Cthulhu Mythos that was sculpted after his death by August Derleth) offers this anti-version of OTM in a way that few before him had. He stripped away all the things that we crouch behind to avoid that terrible reality. (And they call us escapists!) He said religion is a fairy tale. The universe is big, and nasty, and uncaring, and we don’t matter. (He coined the term cosmic horror for this.)  That’s a frank, materialistic point-of-view that horror fiction as a rule did not take. If a ghost was in a story, it reaffirmed there was some kind of life-after-death. When Victor Frankenstein commits hubris, it implies there is a god to offend. Lovecraft did away with all that. You will not overcome the monster. You are monster chow.

Occult Detectives

As much as I love HPL and his squidgies, I also have an affection for the occult detective, also known as the ghostbreaker, the ghost buster, the psychic doctor or the ghost chaser. Take your pick. When I like to dial back on Lovecraftianness, I prefer to do it with a character type that is horror but is not always the extreme anti-OTM. Carnacki, Harry d’Amour, Buffy Summers, Constantine and Carl Kolchak are “Overcoming the Monster” in its purest form. The modern hero, one who lives in our world, not a realm of fairies and dragons, faces the literal monster and usually wins.

Elements of Mystery fiction season the occult detective story. He or she is a detective after all. This is the half of the mix that pulls me back from the Lovecraftian abyss. If all life is pointless, then why bother going to the dark mill to find clues about the ghost of the old sea captain? Occult detectives have their own reasons, of course, but they, like superheroes, are often the line between the dark and the oblivious world of ordinary mortals going about their usual lives. In this sense they are heroes, not unlike those found in Burroughs or Howard. That fight to hold the line against evil is a costly one.

Conclusion

So, here I sit now. The door is open and I see what and why I write. But like the science experiment frog, can I put the thing back together? Will knowing how the car works make me a better driver?  I don’t know. I haven’t written any new fiction for a long time. In training an athlete, knowledge makes the performance better. In science, math, most things, knowing how it works and what you need to to do, makes it better. But writing is a murky beast. You dive into the junk pile of your mind and when you come up for air you hope you have said something at least a little new. That kid who used to dive in whole-heatedly is gone. I poke a toe into those dark depths and wonder: can I overcome the monster this time? Any time, ever again…