This is the first in a series of articles on writing Monster Stories. It is only fitting that the first author we should focus on for tips on creating monsters is H. G. Wells. Jan Stacy and Ryder Syvertsen’s The Great Book of Movie Monsters (Contemporary Books Inc, 1983) features two hundred and thirty five of which seventy-five (a third!) are directly descended from Wells. He was a futurian and a social rebel but he was also a monster writer.
H. G. Wells offers us many classic beasties including the killer plant, alien invaders, intelligent ants and giant chickens but the monster I’ve chosen is a personal favorite: the Morlocks from The Time Machine (1895). Despite being his first novel, Wells does some clever things with his Morlocks. The first is he never shows them quickly or in their entirety until the end of the book. This is one of the reasons that the last film version The Time Machine (2002) starring Guy Pierce failed so horribly. They made the Morlocks big, stronger than men and obvious in the first half of the film. No mystery, nowhere to go after that. A dull, dull remake. The original author does much better. He offers up the bright carefree world of the Eloi first, only hinting at the presence of the Underworlders. The time traveler thinks he has seen a deer in the bushes.
This is the nicest comparison Wells uses for the Morlocks. That is Wells’s first trick: animal comparisons. Through the novel he compares them to apes, spiders, worms, specimens in jars, even sloths. The Morlocks fingers examining him while he sleeps make him dream of a sea anemone wiggling small tentacles in his face. A most unpleasant sensation! Here’s a few of the best bits:
“…I lit a match, and, looking down, I saw a small, white, moving creature, with large bright eyes which regarded me steadfastly as it retreated. It made me shudder. It was so like a human spider!”
“Suddenly I halted spellbound. A pair of eyes, luminous by reflection against the daylight without, was watching me out of the darkness. The old instinctive dread of wild beasts came upon me. I clenched my hands and steadfastly looked into the glaring eyeballs…”
“…I felt a peculiar shrinking from those pallid bodies. They were just the half-bleached colour of the worms and things one sees preserved in spirit in a zoological museum…”
All these separate glimpses add up to our eventual idea of a small, hairy, bleached apish creature that climbs well. Of their personalities Wells also builds a gradual image, one that isn’t very complimentary. The first idea of their nature comes after the time machine has been hidden away: “I banged with my fist at the bronze panels. I thought I heard something stir inside-to be explicit, I thought I heard a sound like a chuckle-but I must have been mistaken.” Make no mistake, like an evil child the Morlock’s cruel nature begins to unfold. Again when the traveler goes down into the Morlocks’ tunnels he hears them laughing. This is one of the few human emotions they have other than fear. Wells makes a point of describing their language as murmurous and untranslatable, putting up a wall between man and Morlock that keeps us from sympathizing with them. Even when they stumble around inside the forest fire, dying in pain and fear, the time traveler feels no real sadness at their deaths, though he does lose his blood-lust for hitting them. To put a final nail in the coffin of our liking the Morlocks, he has the time traveler witness them eating dead Eloi. Even if the Eloi are basically happy cows, we find them more appealing than the cold, dreadful Morlocks.
In one of his descriptions he says: “I felt a peculiar shrinking from those pallid bodies.” The sense of feel is increased because we don’t get a clear picture of the Morlocks. He adds to the murmurous sounds of their machines and an odorous stench. Instead of giving us a visual monster Wells wants us to experience the Morlocks with our other senses first. He may have borrowed this technique from J. Sheridan Le Fanu, who in his ghost story “The Familiar” has the reader feel the ghost before he can see it, heightening the repulsion. Usually when we can see a threat we can deal with it better. Hearing, smelling, feeling it, let’s us know it is there but does not give the sense of security that sight does.
Wells does a few other interesting things. At one point he describes the Morlocks thus: “But I had scarce entered this when my light was blown out and in the blackness I could hear the Morlocks rustling like wind among leaves, and pattering like the rain, as they hurried after me.” Unlike an animal image, this nature description has another purpose. On a one-on-one level the time traveler is the match for a single Morlock. Armed with a metal mace he kills three in the forest without difficulty. But collectively, which has a social underpinning for Wells, the Morlocks are a match for the traveler. Like a force of nature, the power of the Morlocks is subtle but real. It is only the fact that his machine can take the time traveler away that saves him from their final trap. As a social commentator, Wells certainly was talking about the class struggle in this novel, with the Eloi being the upper classes and the Morlocks the working classes. He may also have been saying that as a collective (Socialist or otherwise) the Morlocks have great power. As a monster writer you aren’t required to make such comments, but the ability to use such connections to build more interesting monsters (satirical or otherwise) is an option.
So, to recap:
– Wells reveals the Morlocks slowly, allowing them to be mysterious for as long as possible.
– He uses unpleasant animal comparisons to describe them.
– He uses the other senses to heighten our dislike for Morlocks.
– He makes communication with the Morlocks very difficult to keep them alien to us.
– He uses sub-text to make social commentary.
The end result is a classic monster that remains unforgettable despite never being openly described. Wells’s Morlocks would inspire many other great monster writers including H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard and a host of others.
