Since I learned about the party last weekend I've been trying to think about how I feel on monsters. I just don't do horror or gore yet I love reading other peoples creepy stories etc. When I was little monsters were suppose to be the bogyman etc that lived under the bed or in the wardrobe ready to burst out and cause mayhem as soon as you fell asleep. I was always an inquisitive child though (some people would probably translate that in to being bloody minded) and while some children went to bed fearful, I decided if there was a monster living anywhere in my room I was going to find it. Not sure what I planned to do with it if I had found one but I was definitely going to face it head on. Didn't matter how many times I looked under the bed or in cupboards though before I went to bed I never did come across one.
Terry Pratchett uses his characters as always to give completely practical and sensible advice on dealing with monsters in his discworld books.
[Twyla hears a bogeyman under her bed. Susan bashes it with a poker and hauls it out from under the bed]
Twyla: Do The Voice on it.
Slimazel the Bogeyman: No! Not The Voice.
Twyla: Hit it on the head with a poker.
Slimazel the Bogeyman: Not the poker.
Susan: This is a friendly warning. Understand? Because it's Hogswatch.
Slimazel the Bogeyman: What are you? A witch or something?
Susan: I'm just... something. Now you won't be around here again, will you? Or we'll put your head under the blanket. It's got fluffy bunnies on it.
Slimazel the Bogeyman: Fluffy bunnies. No!
Susan: [sternly] Go away and stop bothering me.
Twyla: That wasn't as much fun as the one last month. You know, the one when you kicked him in the trousers.
and of course Granny Weatherwax always the most sensible of witches when it came to dealing with monsters of any kind.
Granny Weatherwax had never heard of psychiatry and would have had no truck with it even if she had. There are some arts too black even for a witch. She practiced headology—practiced, in fact, until she was very good at it. And though there may be some superficial similarities between a psychiatrist and a headologist, there is a huge practical difference. A psychiatrist, dealing with a man who fears he is being followed by a large and terrible monster, will endeavor to convince him that monsters don’t exist. Granny Weatherwax would simply give him a chair to stand on and a very heavy stick.
As I grew older I didn't understand my peer groups obsession with horror films. I didn't and still don't like them because I didn't like the gore but the monsters themselves, I just didn't get what was so scary, they were after all just people dressed up as characters from fiction. I still have not worked out why some people think those fictional characters are so frightening, Ok they killed people, so did people in other types of films, what made one more scary than the other? What always upset me in any films was if an animal got killed, monsters never seemed to do that, too my young mind that put them one up on humans. Gradually it dawned on me that the real monsters in this life have always been of human form, not fictional characters. I guess you could say I've now got a soft spot for fictional monsters, I think they've had a bad press, on the other hand, carrying a heavy stick never hurts.
Please visit the hosts I've linked too at the top of the post so that you can see who else is playing in the party and visit them for more delicious monster madness.
Thanks for stopping by.
