IT CAME FROM US

Unsnarl the etymology, and you find that “monster” and “demonstrate” share a common root, the Latin monstrum, whose meanings include “sign” or “portent.” As Umberto Eco notes in On Ugliness (2007), the traditional view of the monster has been as an indication of something else, often a divine message. The monster is simultaneously that which snaps its misshapen jaws in front of us, and a signpost pointing us towards some additional significance. (Indeed, the idea of the monstrum might be a very profitable way to discuss how it is that horror stories function.) Often enough, the meaning a monster points to lies outside the self, in anxiety at the world’s threats and failings, the harm it poses to us physically and mentally. Certainly, the stories in the first three sections of this anthology offer a host of such meanings.

There is, of course, another direction to which the signpost might point, and that is at us. This is the monster as mirror, reflecting our own ugliness and shortcomings back at us. The stories in the fourth and final section of this anthology hold up the glass to humanity, and record what is found in its depths. China Miéville’s “Familiar” begins with a witch’s disappointment in the creature he has wrought from his flesh, and then follows the discarded lump as it remakes itself from its urban surroundings. In Lisa Tuttle’s “Replacements,” a strange new pet becomes the obsession of women all over London, much to the disgust and confusion of the men in their lives. Stephen Graham Jones’s “Little Monsters” is an exercise in the challenges of monster-construction, while Sarah Langan’s “The Changeling” presents an unwanted and neglected child who becomes a child-snatching monster in the service of the dead. Nathan Ballingrud’s “The Monsters of Heaven” asks to what ends we might employ our monsters in the expiation of our most terrible mistakes. And in the anthology’s powerful closing story, Nadia Bulkin’s “Absolute Zero,” eight-year-old Max is given a Polaroid picture of his missing father, a stag-headed avatar of the wild. As Max grows and tries to build a future by searching for pieces of his past, including his monstrous father, he discovers that the worlds of the human and the monster are hopelessly blurred.

To one degree or another, all the stories in this final section touch on ideas of parents and children. Given that family is the means by which we enter the world, and by which the world first enters us, it is not so surprising that stories about our monstrousness should involve the family. If this anthology has an overarching theme, it might be that monsters are our family, always closer to us than is really comfortable, the twisted limbs on our family tree.