GIVE ME MONSTER

The Gospel Of Monster

Sum be greater than these realities

“Monster Soup” by author

When Dad was my age, he told me and my older brother about James Cameron’s 1986 magnum opus, Aliens.

I remember where and when we were: somewhere on the back lawn, probably 1991 — that’s the smell of the memory, definitely still the 80s, which we didn’t really sober up from until 2000.

But it could have been the year 2, a father at the fire telling his sons vital stories about life: inevitable horror and maybe survival.

Dad talked about losing contact with a colony, about marines travelling there to find out what happened, about the encounters they have with 7-foot insect monster things, then he said, “But there’s more… There’s a queen monster. She’s huge.”

“How huge?” we said.

“As big as the house.”

Joe and I looked at the house and marveled. We imagined something that big killing us. We were thrilled.

“When can we watch it!” we said.

“When you’re older,” said Dad.

We held our breaths and farts and strained to grow older. As usual, Joe got there first, but eventually I did too. We watched Aliens and discovered what we’d already suspected:

Dad had picked a very important story to tell us that day.

He’d picked one of the few truly universal stories.

• There’s people.
• Boring.
• Wait for it… There’s a monster.
• I’m listening.
• People have to fight the monster.
• People aren’t so boring it seems. They live, they fight, and if they walk away, they have wonderful stories to tell, stories about what’s out there and how to deal with it and maybe survive.

by author

This is a good time to talk about storytelling. Here it is in a nutshell:

People + Monster = Story