Thoughts on Mr. Monster

Trigger warning: Same as the first, found here. 

Some words to describe Mr. Monster: unsettling; bleak; gross; heart-rending; violent (I need a synonym for that, stat); alarming; gripping; appalling. Even as I sit here in the sun-filled daytime, I find myself looking for any excuse not to write or think about this book.

The demon of this book is a creature who doesn't have its own emotions, and instead feeds off the emotions of others; "feeding", though, is rather too civilized a concept for what it does. This is not all table manners and finger sandwiches; this is gluttony and greed, smacking lips and dripping carcasses. The demon seeks an emotional fix, like a drug addict - the stronger, the better. And as we've learned from earlier interactions with John, the strongest emotions are the negative ones: fear, rage, betrayal. 

John, like this demon, finds he connects with people best (in his case, more-or-less only) in a state of fear: when he threatens his mother at knifepoint, he’s entranced. He likens it to a dance, where two people move together, feel together, understand and are understood. John works very hard at keeping this destructive urge under control: he recognizes that threatening his mother with sharp implements is not good or right, and will not help him be a better person.

The demon, on the other hand, has no such reservations or control. It kidnaps and tortures women, keeping them for years in a specially-designed house of torture. It feeds off their fear and anxiety, their rage and desperation. It keeps one woman tethered to an IV and imprisoned in a wall, forced to watch the tortures it enacts on other women. It kidnaps John in order to use his lack of emotions to counter the women's fear, and put their emotions in sharper relief. A cuddly demon this is not; it is, to use the vernacular, nightmare fuel.

The most frightening thing, perhaps, is that one can imagine a real, live human being doing such horrific things. Demon 1 was a little easier to rationalize away, as humans can't absorb the limbs and organs of others in order to regenerate decaying flesh. We don't grow jaws that bite or claws that catch, capable of sawing through bone and rending flesh. And we sure can't pull a Frankenstein and use those ripped off bits to repair ourselves.

But imprisoning another person in a house in order to inflict abuse? I can only think of the heartbreaking story of Genie. (Warning: The story of her abuse is tragic and abominable.) This demon is not confined to the fictional ward; it is dreadfully and despicably real. The motivations may be different, but the outcomes are the same: the innocent suffer.

To digress momentarily and give you (and me) a break from this ghastly demon, let's talk about fear in a slightly less terrible setting. It is a longstanding debate between me and E. as to who is the most frightening sci-fi villain: Star Trek's Borg or Firefly's Reavers. Which of course meant we had to have lengthy debates on what makes something frightening, especially when the setting is so fantastical. Because, despite John being a sociopath and the demon being an emotion-eating beast from the depths of hell, they aren't wrong: fear connects people. Fear is a common denominator; being genuinely afraid of a sci-fi villain means the show’s creators are doing it right. The writers have tapped into a commonality; fear is part of the human experience. A truly frightening villain humanizes an otherwise fantastical show. The spaceships may be nutty, the jargon ridiculous, and the aliens bizarre, but the fear [1] grounds the story, makes it real. 

So what elemental fears do the sci-fi villains tap into? The Reavers will take your body and your sanity; the Borg will take your identity and your will. I suppose in a way, they both operate on the same fear: you involuntarily lose your self. Reavers are bloodier, gorier, more intent on physical pain and mutilation: eyeball squick and cannibalism. The horror of the Reavers is summed up thus: "If they take the ship, they'll rape us to death, eat our flesh, and sew our skins into their clothing – and if we're very, very lucky, they'll do it in that order." All this is gross and frightening; but perhaps the biggest terror of the Reavers is that they're not some sort of hell-creature or manufactured evil thing: they're people who "looked into the blackness of space" and went insane. They've lost their minds, and now torture and kill and disfigure what they once held dear. I maintain that one of the most powerful and heartrending scenes of Serenity is when the crew has to turn the ship into a Reaver vessel: it is a desecration  and a horror.

The Borg are much more sterile than all that. Unlike the Reavers, they think. They have a purpose: to make the universe in their image. To absorb and promulgate their biomech selves until perfection is achieved. Perhaps in some lights, this is a semi-worthy goal: progression and learning are good and right principles. But the Borg go at it cockeyed: there is no choice in the matter. Consciousness and character will be subsumed to the Collective. After all, "Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated." And what it does with your resources - your mind and your body, your intelligence and your power - is completely out of your hands. You will serve the Collective, whether you agree with their purpose and methods or not. You will be a means to an end, and no longer an end of yourself.

E. and I never have decided which one is worse: the visceral, bloody Reavers or the sterile, conviction-laden Borg.

The demon of Mr. Monster has elements of both the Reavers and the Borg: like the Reavers, it will desecrate and torture, take captive and kill; like the Borg: it will take your feelings from you, use your fear for its own ends. It will feed on your rage and there’s nothing you can do to stop it. And like both of them, John fears turning into the demon: he sees himself easily capable of becoming this beast: using fear and despair to feed his desire for connection.

In much the same way as the first book, John uses his latent serial killer instincts (instincts? That's an odd word, but I can't think of a better one.) to fend off a demon. In book 1, he bashes the demon’s wife in the head, ties her up, and lures the demon to him by sending it camera phone photos of this beating. In book 2, the stakes go up. It is no longer just sneaking up on a mostly tangential old woman and clubbing her with a clock; no, this time, John seemingly gives into the demon. The demon brings John's love interest, Brooke, to the house of torture in order to tempt him into joining it, giving in, becoming a monster. 

At this point in the novel, I truly feared for John. I feared that he would falter, acquiesce, let go: that all those daydreams and nightdreams of embalming Brooke, of torturing her, of killing her, of making himself her absolutely only concern by frightening and hurting her, would finally become a reality. In the final scenes, in the demon's torture house, he comes after her with insanity and pain in his eyes. 

But John is tough stuff, tougher than the monsters within or without. He doesn't torture her, though she and the readers can see his desperation to do so. He can't afford to rein in the desire; being in the presence of an every-emotion-feeling demon means most everything has to be genuine. John lets out his Mr. Monster to defeat an external monster, and it's not a pretty sight. 

John finds that while fear connects people, it also tears them apart. Brooke will no longer have anything to do with him, after he comes at her with rage and savagery. He killed the demon, didn't torture Brooke, freed all but one of the women trapped in the house,  but the fear is too great. John's Mr. Monster is too vicious, and his good deeds not enough to outweigh his evil thoughts. 

*** 

Stay tuned next time for I Don't Want to Kill You and rambles one what makes something True. 

xo, 

Devo

[1] I suppose love can do the same thing, but this is not the time for love stories.