scary monsters

The fantasy and horror/fantasy genres almost invariably feature heroes (or just protagonists) combatting some kind of personified evil. I rather arbitrarily draw a distinction between horror/fantasy and straight horror in terms of story resolution: if the protagonists win an unambiguous victory—against Sauron, or against pesky neighborhood vampires—it's fantasy or fantasy/horror; if the ending leaves hints that the unstoppable serial killer will rise yet again, despite being dismembered or burned to a uniform crisp, it's horror.

Again: the distinction is arbitrary. It would seem, for instance, to leave the collected works of H.P. Lovecraft strictly within the realm of horror. (Of course, one could reasonably argue that any mythos which treats humanity as some sort of excrescence should fall into that category.) But for my purposes here it will suffice.

Sometimes the heroes are ordinary people. The desperate band who pursue a Transylvanian count in Bram Stoker's Dracula possess no gifts more unusual than van Helsing's learning. Even Tolkien's hobbits, with their short stature and most unusual feet, are still marked by their earthy ordinariness: stout-hearted English country folk in a perilous realm, changed only a little in transition.

Yet our fiction is also filled with protagonists that are somehow special: other than human, or humans possessing strange gifts with which they combat the darkness. Such characters may be divided into three general categories—again somewhat arbitrarily, but close enough for 3 am on a weeknight.

First are superheroes (restricted here to those who face down demons and monsters, as opposed to the more typical supervillians). Blade is perhaps the most obvious example. Born just as his mother was dying from a vampire's bite, he gained some of her killer's preternatural powers, though without actually becoming undead himself. I've never read the comic book, and only bothered with the first Wesley Snipes movie. Eh: it was an eminently forgettable popcorn flick.

Climbing a ways up the ladder of sophistication, we come to a very different vampire slayer. (Much cuter, for one thing.) Buffy was interesting in large measure for the characters and dialogue, and yes, even for some of the soap-opera-ish situations. Still, on many levels the series never really transcended superhero conventions, what with the de rigueur origins myth and the overwrought action scenes (there is, after all, only so much that a 105-lb girl can do, even given a generous suspension of disbelief). What's more, the demons of the Buffyverse are rarely scary—often gross, yes, but for the most part just ill-tempered Star Trek aliens with disturbing eating habits.

The second category of extraordinary protagonists might be called the longaevi (“long-lived ones”), to use a word revived by C.S. Lewis. Not man, not angel, but Other: though as Lewis describes in The Discarded Image, the precise nature of that other—as glimpsed not just in folklore, but in literature from the Roman era through the Renaissance—remains elusive. Even so, this literature displays unmistakable hints of beings as far removed from diminutive winged sprites as an eagle is from a bumblebee.

They are the fées of French romance, the fays of our own, the fate of the Italians. Launfal's mistress, the lady who carried off Thomas the Rymer, the fairies in Orfeo, Bercilak in Gawain (who is called 'an alvish man' at line 681), are of this kind. Morgan le Fay in Malory has been humanised; her Italian equivalent Fata Morgana is a full Fairy. Merlin—only half human by blood and never shown practising magic as an art—almost belongs to this order. They are usually of at least fully human stature. […]

These High Fairies display a combination of characteristics which we do not easily digest. […]

Two descriptions of fairies, one from a later and one from an earlier period, come nearer to High Fairies of the Middle Ages than anything our modern imagination would be likely to produce. A rowdy High Fairy would seem to us a kind of oxymoron. But Robert Kirk in his Secret Commonwealth calls some of these 'wights like furious hardie men'. And an old Irish poet desribes them as routing battalions of enemies, devastating every land they attack, great killers, noisy in the beer-house, makers of songs.

Lewis continues on to discuss various medieval theories on the origin of the longaevi. Two of the more interesting conceptions play a role in the culmination of his Space Trilogy, That Hideous Strength: first, that the creatures are indeed members of “rational species distinct from angels and men”, and second, that some are angels, perhaps not entirely fallen, but still demoted from their heavenly abode. Although That Hideous Strength is without doubt his strongest contribution to the good vs. evil fantasy genre (in parts it may be better described as fantasy/horror), Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia remain his best-known application of these ideas.

Yet however erudite his professional work, Lewis's fiction is sometimes haphazard: there seems no other way to explain the appearance of Father Christmas in Narnia, for instance. But what if a scholar were to painstakingly strip away the layered misconceptions of folklore and other cultural accretion, pondering long on forgotten words like orcnéas and wudu-wása and ettin, seeking a thread of story running through jumbled source material like quicksilver over dross? Lewis's fellow Inkling J.R.R. Tolkien did just that, rescuing the High Fairies—Elves—from their unfortunate association with butterflies and domestic gardens and revealing them both in their terrifying beauty and heartrending tragedy.

But in this secondary history, the War of the Ring and the End of the Third Age were a very long time ago. Someone might want to write about what came after, when mythic history began to blend into recorded history, when men still knew, if increasingly vaguely, of the presence of others: of Fair Folk and wood-nymphs and elementals; and of nightmares that walked the woods wearing the shapes of ravening wolves. Someone just might want to write about that.

Like me, perhaps. I even had a promising scenario cooked up (or at least I once thought as much). The last wandering tribes from Faerie, slowly dwindling in numbers, were migrating west across Europe. A messenger—essentially an incarnate angel, if angel is construed in a very loose fashion—is sent to urge them on their way. (Tolkien's Elves, after all, were not the only ones said to depart into the West.) When this task is accomplished, the messenger elects to stay behind—in part because of pity, as men had no defense against the preternatural evils still lurking in forest and under hill. But he also faces down the ancient powers still demanding to be called gods: Mórrígan, for one, is a bitter adversary.

So why am I not banging on the doors of publishing houses? Several reasons. First, even given the fantasy elements described above—mythic history becoming real history, and all that—in order to make such a tale convincing I would need to know, well, real history—and cultural anthropology, and something about languages, and the geography of Europe some three millenia ago. I'm off to an awfully late start on all that. Second, the fantasy shelves of bookstores already groan under the weight of paperbacks describing the exploits of immortal protagonists. Most of these books deserve to be pulped, of course, even if a few do merit the read.

But the last straw was reading Tolkien beyond The Lord of the Rings—starting with Unfinished Tales, continuing with the Letters, and so on. I discovered that my carefully constructed metaphysics was but a pale shadow of his own, and that—an even greater shock—my main character, the incarnate messenger, was just a lesser Maia. Well: as the saying goes, nothing new under the sun.

Except when there is, of course. The twentieth century did see the apotheosis of the anti-hero—indeed, one of the reasons that Tolkien's masterwork is disdained by lit-crit types is that his heroes are simply too heroic. And so we arrive at the final category of extraordinary protagonist: the deeply flawed mere human who combats evil, perhaps not entirely by his own choice, and whose “gift” is more of a terrible burden. Thus far, no one has been able to equal Lance Henriksen's portrayal of the haunted profiler Frank Black in the late-90s Fox TV series Millenium.

Millenium was certainly compelling television—scary as hell, and often unpleasant, but utterly fascinating. Henriksen deserves much of the credit. Frank Black's unnatural insights into the minds of the most depraved killers—and beyond that, into the realm of the demonic itself—seem to have aged him beyond his years, and he never seems far from deep existential despair. But even so, Black remains one of the good guys, much more hero than not.

The same cannot be said for John Constantine, who is a perfect bastard.

The loss of the soul of an innocent girl, condemned to Hell because John screwed up an exorcism, was probably the defining moment which got John to stop believing he was God's gift to magic. As a result, he stopped using his powers for selfish ends, and began to use them to try and reign back evil. […]

Things took a decided turn for the worse when John discovered his chain-smoking habit had caught up with him: he had developed terminal lung cancer. Refusing to go quietly, he tricked the Lords of Hell into healing him, earning the everlasting enmity of the First of the Fallen. Not content with having the most evil being in all creation gunning for him, he also faced off against the Lord of the Vampires, source of all the nosferatu in the world, and took on the British Royal Family. He lifted the curse that affected his family, so that he would be the last Constantine afflicted by magic, and soon afterwards turned forty.

Constantine is the hero (so to speak) of the DC Comics title Hellblazer. He's a Brit, former punk rocker, and—according to creator Alan Moore, who developed the character in the mid-80s—was purposely intended to look like Sting.

So naturally he is being portrayed in the movie by Keanu Reeves. Said film is receiving very mixed reviews. Ah well: I'll likely see it this weekend, anyway.

If you are curious, there is an interesting interview with Tilda Swinson—who appears in Constantine as the archangel Gabriel—over in the NYT. Interesting, that is, once you get past the obligatory Bush-administration-as-fascists comparisons (what is it with these Euros, anyway?).

The interview does contain spoilers, so be forewarned. There's also a bit of tangentially related trivia: Swinson will appear as the White Witch Jadis in this year's adaptation of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. That may well prove the most inspired casting of a transcendent Lady this side of Cate Blanchett's Galadriel.

Great essay. You don't have to be an obsessed linguist like Tolkien to write a story with fantastic elements. Just a thoughtful writer.

Tilda Swinton is always interesting. She can't help but bash Bush because SHE'S NEVER HEARD ANYONE DO ANYTHING ELSE. There is precious little diversity in Euromedia. She was hilarious in Teknolust, in which she played Dr Rosetta Stone, who made 3 clones of herself (all played by Tilda Swinton), who needed to inject human sperm to survive...

Well: I suppose that if I can get the bloody dissertation finished, anything is possible.

Teknolust, huh? And here I thought that Swinton was until only in artsy kinds of films. Not that B-grade trash can't be art of its own, but...

Thanks for the kind words, btw.