IT CAME FOR US

Monsters aren’t always indiscriminate. For every juggernaut that tornadoes across the page, leaving a body count in the double-digits, there is another creature that takes more care in choosing its victims, and while the eventual tally of its murders may approach or even exceed that of its less selective cousin, every death is a step on the way to its eventual goal: us. Perhaps the beast has fallen in love with us. Perhaps we have trespassed against it in ways intentional or accidental. Perhaps it has recognized in us a threat to itself that must be addressed. Whatever the cause, the monster’s notice has settled on us, and it will not rest until it has us. It is as if that secret, narcissistic sense we have as children, that the world revolves around us—which we are supposed to outgrow but never leaves us completely—is being validated in the most horrible of fashions. Yet whatever dark thrill such attention might bring, it must be qualified by our fear at the end result of this attention, as well as by some measure of guilt over its damage to those around us.

So in this third section, Kelly Link’s “Monster” gives us the monster as the terrible protector we longed for as children, without ever considering what the cost of such a guardian might be. In comparison, the mysterious entities at work in Genevieve Valentine’s “Keep Calm and Carillon” appear more benevolent, except for the rather odd task they require of the people they’ve saved from certain death, which rapidly moves from amusing in the direction of disturbing. The father in Robert McCammon’s “The Deep End” wages a very personal campaign against the water-beast that took his son from him; the sea serpent in F. Brett Cox’s “The Serpent and the Hatchet Gang” portends another kind of conflict. In “Blood Makes Noise” and “The Machine Is Perfect, the Engineer Is Nobody,” Gemma Files and Brett Alexander Savory, respectively, write of monsters that seem to know more about their intended victims than the victims do, themselves. Laird Barron’s “Proboscis” confronts us with monsters content to dwell amongst us unnoticed, until one of us sees more than he should.

The protagonists of all these stories share a kind of election. However terrible it might be, they have been chosen, singled out for a glimpse of the world’s hidden engines. The monster that threatens our flesh threatens our understanding, too, its fractured outrage tearing vents in the life we thought we knew.