A good fantasy story must have a monster, or two or three. In order to make a good monster, you have to leave room for mystery, though sometimes you can get away with just making a monster that is large and powerful; thus the success of the Godzilla and King Kong franchises. People inherently fear what they don’t know or understand, and as writers, we have to prey on that fear. I had to create a character that was mysterious enough the readers would feel a sense of dread.
Like so many writers before me, I had a very active imagination as a child, and I had frequent nightmares. Stephen King talked about how as a boy, he imagined a creature living under the stairs waiting to snatch him; I had similar experiences. I imagined all sorts of monsters creeping in the woods behind my childhood home. When I would stay with my grandparents as a child, the room I normally slept in had a window that faced a patch of woods, and every night I always imagined something terrible was out there, lurking. In the first book of Legend of the Sword Bearer, I introduced the Hunter. He only appears in a few frames, just so the readers know he exists. The characters talk about him to create suspense. This is vitally important in any kind of horror writing. The writer must create suspense. You can have all the blood and violence in your book, but if there’s no suspense, it won’t have the same impact. Look at some of the classic Alfred Hitchcock films, and TV shows like The Twilight Zone, and you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. I can’t tell the reader everything, or there will be no surprise. The idea of the Hunter is present in nearly every culture; the bogeyman who stalks the night searching for human prey. Many of these mythological beings have animal features, such as horns and hooves. The Hunter himself is based on Herne the Hunter, a being of British folklore who is said to roam the forest at night and abduct children and livestock. He may have descended from an even older legend of the Celtic Horned God. As I said, there are similar beings found in many of the world’s myths. In Hebrew myth, there exist beings known as Shedim, who are spirits of uninhabited places. They too are said to have animal features and are associated with misfortune. This is probably a holdover from the human sacrifice once practiced among the Celtic and Semitic peoples long ago. It seems that we humans create fictional monsters in order to confront challenges in real life within the confines of myth and legend. In a sense, monsters are real and we have to confront them. As poet G.K. Chesterton said “Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed."
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AuthorI'm Ian Wilson; an eccentric comic artist, just telling a story.
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