Writing Monsters: How to Craft Believably Terrifying Creatures to Enhance Your Horror, Fantasy, and Science Fiction by Philip Athan
Here’s another review that’ll interest some of you.
If you’re interested in writing horror, then there’s one thing you’ll probably want to do: write believable monsters.
(I’d argue that this book is useful for other purposes as well, which I’ll discuss below.)
There are a lot of rubbish books out there with unbelievable monsters. Even some of the greats have their moments with ridiculous monsters that take you well out of the story due to their lack of believability.
There’s a book that will help you with this. It’s called Writing Monsters: How to Craft Believably Terrifying Creatures to Enhance Your Horror, Fantasy, and Science Fiction.
Writing Monsters Review
Writing Monsters by Philip Athans is a book about – you guessed it – writing monsters into your fiction.
I keep mentioning pulp fiction books throughout these articles, because I’m working on a fiction project.
I stumbled across Writing Monsters whilst looking for books that’d be relevant to said project.
I’ve got to be honest, I was pretty dubious when I read the blurb to Writing Monsters. Nothing set me off in particular, but there are a lot of writer’s guides out there which are terrible. The more niche you get, the more likely they are to be pretty dire.
So I opened Writing monsters with a bit of apprehension.
That was unfounded.
Writing Monsters By Philip Athans
This is actually a great book if you want to write monsters.
It lays out some pretty awesome things. It gives you an idea of a list of things you could build your monsters around that are guaranteed to work.
It then gives you a questionnaire which will help you build your monster.
Throughout the book it gives you examples from people such as Stephen King and H.P. Lovecraft.
It gives you a framework for building monsters that are just as in depth as any other character. That brings me to a subject that I think Writing Monsters should have gone into to make it an even better book.
(As always, this is just my opinion.)
What Could Have Been Done Better in Writing Monsters?
I said above that a complete character profile was made possible through following this book.
Something that Philip Athans didn’t mention is that this need not apply to just monsters.
I’m not talking about human monsters here – like Hannibal Lecter.
He is human, but he is a monster after all. A human-shaped one, but a monster nonetheless. (Although I half-expect a hundred edgy teenagers to come to the comments and tell me “we’re the real monsters.”)
But, the point still stands: you could use this book to create convincing criminals.
You could also make your “monster” into a redeemable hero in a love story, or a convincing anti-hero in a bad-boy romance book.
You could use this book in journalism to make the antagonist/evil troll/politician in your news story more monster-like.
The list goes on, and is really limited only by your imagination.
It’s a great book, and if you’ve got the Kindle app/an e-reader you can get it on that for a reduced price over the paperback.
Get Your Copy of Writing Monsters: How to Craft Believably Terrifying Creatures to Enhance Your Horror, Fantasy, and Science Fiction on Amazon
(P.S. Short article today. I read the book this morning, and then I’ve had a non-stop day. I really wanted to keep the daily writing streak alive though. Probably a more in-depth post tomorrow.)