I’m currently all aflutter about Pan’s Labyrinth, which I highly recommend everyone go see, if they can. It’s Guillermo del Toro’s latest film, and it’s spectacular. Del Toro himself isn’t half bad either. This is a guy who can pause in the middle of serious film criticism and remark how he never wants to make a film without monsters, because he loves monsters so much.

I also recommend this NPR interview with del Toro. When you get to the part about Frankenstein being a Miltonian metaphor for teen angst…well, that’s the point at which Your Humble Narrator, at your service, just about keeled over.

When he says monsters, he means something very specific. But it got me thinking (always dangerous) about what I think monsters are.

I’d like to say there are monsters in every book. A monster could be a situation, or a villain, or the hero. What the monster does for a book is simple–it provides the impetus for a story.

The best way I’ve heard to describe a story is this: There is a situation at rest/equilibrium. Something happens to destroy that equilibrium. Consequences happen. The story ends when equilibrium is restored.

The monster can come along at any point, but I truly believe every book needs a monster. It doesn’t have to be a hunchback (the real monster in Hugo’s book is the xenophobia that kills Esmerelda, not to mention Phoebus’s shallowness and Esmerelda’s naivete) or a bolted-together corpse (and who is the real monster, Frankenstein or his creature?)

Paranormal authors have the freedom to make monsters into heroes. We can have a monster as a hero and another monster as a villain. We are engaged in the remaking of monsters, in a constant dialogue about what a monster means. Stephen King’s monsters are violations of the natural order as well as the inevitable compromises of growing-up. Laurell K. Hamilton’s monsters are a kind of Freudian Other, defining her heroine by what she is not*. Christine Feehan’s monsters are the vampire hunters, afraid of what they can’t understand, or the urges inside her heroes that defy control.

Monsters go through cultural stages. Shelley’s Frankenstein was a product of her time and its struggle with the question of a mechanical universe, the existence of the soul, and ambivalence over whether man could act as the Promethean stealer-of-fire. Stoker’s Dracula is a Freudian parasite expressing deep mistrust of women and the chaos of nature untamed by man. Yet Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula is a man enraged by injustice and determined to take his fight to God Himself if necessary. The Mummy in the fifties was a horrific creature, but today he is a man paying for forbidden love, a romantic hero. Monsters are shapeshifters in the most basic of senses, conforming to whatever question our culture is asking itself at the moment.

I often play “spot-the-monster” when I’m reading a book or watching a film. You’d be amazed how many monsters can fit into a single work of art. A monster doesn’t have to be insectile, twisted, or tentacled. For example, Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho stars a monster who looks perfectly human and has all the “good things” in life, including wealth and attractiveness. Contrast this with Huckleberry Finn (one of my favorite books), where the monster is a world that despises innocence and rests on the injustice of slavery. Huck’s father is the picture of a monster made by ignorance, and the river is by turns monster and savior. (I could talk about the Duke and the King as monsters all day. Stay on topic, Lili.)

Recently I watched The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. The monster in that film was poverty and greed. No fangs, fur, or gore was necessary. The monster is one we see every day when hunger or isolation or poverty strips away the veneer of civilization. And in Pan’s Labyrinth (to bring us full circle) the faun may be a monster, but Capitan Vidal is even more of a monster, and the forces he represents (blind obedience, fascism, rigid order) are monstrous in the extreme. The partisans in the woods can be monsters too, made violent by being backed into a corner.

So, my fellow writers, here is the point I’ve been wending toward. Love your monsters. It is impossible to write them without love in your heart. It is understanding the monster that makes us able to create; the monster inside ourselves is otherwise known as the Muse, and s/he is that thing that recognizes no law but the story. A story without a monster is like a car without an engine, it will not go anywhere. For it takes the monster to give the equilibrium of the world a whack, and in the settling of that equilibrium is the motion necessary to make the story run.

A monster written without love is unintentional parody, at least in my humble opinion. I think it’s important to love your monsters enough to forgive them their flaws, and be glad they are there to help you create your story. Loving your monsters may even save you from becoming one of them, always a risk when we put ourselves into the vulnerable space of letting them speak through us.

And, you know, as del Toro says, monsters are fun. They scare, enlighten, frighten, and entertain. Who could ask for anything more?

* Note: I must confess I’ve only read Nightseer and the first two Anita Blake books, and the first Merry Gentry. So my analysis of Hamilton’s monsters may be lacking.