H. P. Lovecraft pokes fun at a Monster Writer’s Dilemma in his short horror tale, “The Unnameable”. He begins it this way:
We were sitting on a dilapidated seventeenth-century tomb in the late afternoon of an autumn day at the old burying ground in Arkham, and speculating about the unnamable…when my friend chided me for such nonsense and told me that since no interments had occurred there for over a century, nothing could possibly exist to nourish the tree in other than an ordinary manner. Besides, he added, my constant talk about “unnamable” and “unmentionable” things was a very puerile device, quite in keeping with my lowly standing as an author. I was too fond of ending my stories with sights or sounds which paralyzed my heroes’ faculties and left them without courage, words, or associations to tell what they had experienced. We know things, he said, only through our five senses or our intuitions; wherefore it is quite impossible to refer to any object or spectacle which cannot be clearly depicted by the solid definitions of fact or the correct doctrines of….
As he points out, writers define experiences, monsters, most things in terms of the previous experience of our four senses. If so, how do you create a monster that is entirely and completely beyond your previous experience? As Spock and McCoy discuss death in Star Trek IV, Spock says, “It would be impossible to discuss the subject without a common frame-of-reference.”
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