This is the cover to one of author Ray Garton's books. It's the cover to the book "Bestial," not the cover to the book "Monsters," which is the book I'm talking about in this post, because "Monsters" isn't available for purchase anywhere online except in old, tattered copies of a book called "Night Visions 6: The Bone Yard," but you can get "Bestial" everywhere, so you should go buy that one and read it, because it's really good, too. I'm posting this cover in lieu of posting the cover to "Monsters" since it's not available, and "Bestial" has a really lurid cover that will give you an idea of the kind of book you're in for if you ever do get the chance to read "Monsters." I woke up yesterday screaming in a full-blown panic attack because I was having a nightmare. What was the nightmare about, you might ask? Oh, I was arguing with someone about a book I loved and suddenly I realized I was in hell and damned for all eternity to torture and pain. I have these nightmares a lot, though in recent years they've slowed down a little, thankfully. I think I had this nightmare again because I've been thinking a lot more recently about some people from my past who've died and how much I miss them, and these thoughts have brought up fee;ings from the past that refuse to stay buried, because the past isn't past and sometimes it's not even gone. Given that, I thought maybe I should write a little bit about some things from my past that have resurfaced throughout my life, mostly related to some books I've read, and attempt to untangle my thoughts about them in an effort to get them out of my head and into the world where they won't be haunting me and waking me up from a deep sleep anytime soon. With that in mind, here is my set of rambling thoughts about Ray Garton's story "Monsters."
"In the end, they always win."
Boy did this sentence piss me off. So much so that, when I was 14 years old and I read a novella that ended with this depressing sentence , I immediately wrote a seven page response on why I didn't agree with this sentence and why I believed the details of the novel itself didn't necessarily agree with this conusion. If those weren't the acts of a future literature major, I don't know. It's kind of amusing to me now, that before I was ever assigned to write a response to a story and give citations from the text that supported my view, I chose to do so on my own because the story pissed me off so much. I wish I still had that spontaneous paper I wrote. I bet it's hilarious. I'm kinda glad I don't have it now though, because I bet it's also terrible.
For years afterward, long after I couldn't remember many details from that story, "Monsters" by Ray Garton, I remembered that line and how much it pissed me off. How much I wished it weren't true. Hoped it weren't true. See, I have a lot of experience with monsters in the world, and a lot of evidence that they often get away with their horrible deeds. It does seem like they win a lot of the time. More than they should. Hell, once is too much as far as I'm concerned, but no one asked me.
That was the problem back then. No one asked me. Very few people knew that I was alive. I was trapped in a home full of monstrous things, i didn't have an outlet because I didn't hardly leave the house, even to go to school. My mom paid tuition at an accredited home school so she'd have paperwork that proved I "was enrolled in school," but she didn't teach me much. I had to rely on myself when her patience wore out and turned to screams and threats, so I taught myself to read and write, and after that, books were my escape. She took me to the library, and that's where I discovered the world. I gravitated toward dark and horrible books (gee, I wonder why?) Stephen King got me through many long nights. All the pretend monsters helped me cope, but they never erased the truth.
The truth was that I was trapped. I didn't have much contact with the outside world, I didn't have formal schooling, so I didn't have much hope. What would happen to me when I grew up, if I lived that long? What kind of life would I have? The few times I pressed my mom and got any kind of response before she screamed and sent me to my room, she would vaguely say that someday she would "take me to get tested" and I would graduate high school. I don't think she really knew what was going to happen, so her answer was more of a way to make the question go away than any real solution. I felt the hollowness of that answer, and I knew there wasn't much hope there. So I threw myself into books, into fiction, drawn to the darkest stories I could find, and this story wormed its way into my consciousness by some miracle that I wouldn't even appreciate for years to come.
So I decided that I needed to read this story again if I were going to give any honest and truthful account of what it says. I mostly try to keep my past hidden under wraps so no one has to see it. Seriously, no one wants to see that bullshit, right? But sometimes it overflows, and this is one of those times, so I don't really have a choice but to delve into the depths and pray it doesn't swallow us both whole.
I've repressed so much of what this story is about that it was kind of a shock reading it again and seeing what it really said instead of what was built up in my head. It's about this guy who grew up in a deeply religious community who saw his drawing towards the darker side of life as something evil, and his connection to horror literature as something wrong. They shunned him from their community, and started calling him and harassing him as someone evil who had left the faith. They go beyond harassing him, in fact, and start torturing him, killing his pets and doing other horrific, evil things that made me question how they could call HIM the monster (which is the whole point). Even as he receives some success as a horror and thriller writer, they still see him as evil, so he decides to return to his community and teach writing at a local college as a way of bridging the gap and showing that his talent was good all along, and he was never of the devil.
I guess I don't need to tell you that things don't go as planned, and he is still seen as evil by those of his strongly religious community. The church he belongs to in the beginning is a lot like the churches I was drawn to back when i first became a Christian: very strong doctrine, strong list of rules to follow to lead you to the truth. It almost doesn't matter what label they wear, all religious sects that adhere to such strong rules are so similar as to be almost interchangeable, though they would insist this isn't true. Basically, those who agree with their doctrine and follow it will be saved. Those who deviate...well, they will suffer.
Now reading this, you'd think that if as anything, I would have absorbed the story's warning against such religious sects and have avoided them like the plague, but of course the opposite is true. I closely followed any religious sect that gave me strict rules to adhere to in order to please God. The stricter the better. I burned all my "secular books" and all my "non-Christian CDs," I followed strict rules about how I dressed and what I believed, and I waited to feel whole, because that was always what was promised: that I would find God, buried beneath all the rules and regulations. Telling me that without God I was hopeless, sick, damned, and lost was nothing new. I'd been told how bad and horrible I was all my life, so the condemnation felt familiar tome, and it offered me a way out: follow God, follow this strict set of rules, and your sick, evil self will be washed away and you'll be accepted into the family of God!
In hindsight, it definitely should have rung my alarm bells that the trap I was falling into was the same one that the lead character of this story fought so hard against. I read this story when I was fourteen, maybe fifteen, and I became a fire-and-brimstone Christian when I was sixteen, so I wasn't very far removed from the dangers this story should have warned me against. Hindsight is 20/20, I guess. I missed a LOT of the points behind this story, and that hit me pretty hard when I read it again, just how much I'd missed. The story goes on to show that when our main character was still trapped in his uber-religious community, he was suppressing his talent and the things he truly loved, like writing about dark things, and the more he pushes his true self down, the more that true self stays under the surface, growing darker by the minute, and the more that he tries to hide it for fear that it's evil, the more evil it becomes. As one of the characters in the story says, the more you call a man a monster, the more he starts to become one.
So pretty much yeah, I missed that whole entire point, and somehow in my mind the story became about a guy who could never have sex, because then he would turn evil (um, no, given some of what happens I can see why that stuck in my head, but that's still NOT what the story says, you weirdo, WTF) and I just remembered that, and the "in the end they always win," line, and I stayed eternally pissed off about it. Ok, not ETERNALLY, but I've been pissed about this story for YEARS. I hold grudges like Japanese horror movies, yo. Because like I said, I'm deeply invested in the idea that they DO NOT always win, dammit. Sometimes, yeah. Sometimes the bad and evil and sick and depraved get called the good and the right and the true, and sometimes, no matter how hard you fight against them, you lose. But not always.
Not.
Always.
Let's face it, if "they" always win in the end, then there's nothing we can do, and we might as well give up. I've felt that, down to my bones and marrow and into the deepest parts of my being. I've been through things, some things I'm going to be writing about in later posts, that have stripped me bare of anything that looked like hope. It's dark, and it's cold, and it's scary. But the thing is...I'm still here. I'm NOT dead, I'm still alive, and because I didn't give up, I get to laugh with my friends and cuddle with my cat and sing beautiful hymns in church and watch horror movies and appreciate the good things they give me because I know I'm NOT evil and sick and dirty and damned and any and all things I might have believed that made me want to give up because there was no hope.
I don't use this word very often, because I think it gets overused, but the idea that "in the end they always win" offends me. It offends me like nothing else, because what's the point, then? Why bother living and loving and trying, why bother even writing a stupid story to tell everyone that they always win, because they'll still always win anyway, so there's no point? ARGH, it makes me angry. It makes me angry because writing, for me, has always been a way to ensure that "they" DIDN'T win, in the end. That "they" won't have the last word, that they can say whatever they want and spread their lies, but I know the truth, and someday, others will know, too. Because I wrote it down. And I wrote it down in the hopes that someday, it will be read. Someone will find it, and read it, and know the truth. And that's a reason to keep going. Someday someone will know the truth.
See, as angry and offended as I was by this story, even in my wrong, twisted memories of what it was about, even when pissed off teenage me wrote several pissy pages about how wrong the story was, it hit me, the story did. It hit me and lodged in my brain and moved me to write a long, possibly hilarious, ranty letter, and it stayed in my head and in my heart all those years, even when I was wrong about what it was trying to say, it still prompted me to fight back, to try to keep THEM from winning. Even all those years when I couldn't find a light, I still tried to fight the darkness, because a tiny piece of a horror story about monsters lodged in my brain and made me want to try to keep the monsters from winning. That's why, even when I was still pissed at what I thought the story was about, even before I re-read it and got my shiny new perspective, I was still grateful to Ray Garton and his story "Monsters," because it was one of the stories that shaped my life and inspired me to keep fighting. I wouldn't be here today without that grace, that strength, that never let me give up, and as messed up as it may seem to some, God used this story to nudge me in the right direction, to give me that strength. And I'm grateful for that.
One of my favorite shows is "Criminal Minds." It's traumatizing and it usually makes me cry, but it allows me to let out some of my fear and anger at the evil things that have happened, to me and to others, and the evil things that are still happening now. In the season six premiere episode, one of the FBI agents in the show, Jennifer, got onto the radio and gave this message to a killer, hoping he would free his hostage, a little girl named Ellie. What she says here about monsters really resonated with me, so I'd like to end this entry by quoting her speech:
"I don't know for sure that you can hear me, but my name is Jennifer Jareau. I work for the FBI as a communications Liaison for the behavioral...look, mister Flyyn, I wanna talk with you about letting Ellie Spicer go. I mean, I wanna ask you to. See, I am not a hostage negotiator. I've never done anything like this at all, ever, but sometimes circumstances...it's...look, you can tell I'm not a hostage negotiator, but I am a mother, and I know what your mother did to you when you were little. What she was. What she made you watch. What she let men do to you. And it makes me so...it's just...not fair. And no one can make that better.
"I wish I could. If I could somehow go back there and make what was happening to you stop...if I could just pick you up and tell you that it will all be ok, that's what moms are supposed to do. They're not supposed to be the cause of your pain, they're supposed to make it go away. They're supposed to hold you and tell you everything is gonna be alright. They're supposed to tell you that thunder is angels bowling, and that it's ok to be afraid of the dark, and that it's not silly to think that there might be monsters in your closet, and that it's ok if you wanna climb in bed with them for just this once 'cause it's scary in your room alone. They're supposed to say it's ok to be afraid...not be the thing that you're afraid of. But most importantly, they're supposed to love you no matter what.
What happened to you isn't fair, and it's not right, but...I'm supposed to empathize with you. Sympathize. Understand. But I can't. That would be a lie. The truth is I don't understand what you've done. I don't sympathize with you killing people all these years, and I especially don't understand you taking Ellie. What I can do is tell you what a mother should tell you. That you can't take away your pain by hurting someone else. That it doesn't make all the nights you went to bed scared and alone any better if you scare someone else the way you're scaring Ellie."
"What happened to you isn't fair, but what you're doing to her isn't fair either, and if anyone should understand what that feels like, it's you. You have the power. You can do what you wanna do. But for once, you can choose to use that power to do for Ellie what should have been done for you. You can choose letting her go. You can choose teaching her that yes, there are monsters and it's ok to be afraid of them, but it's not ok to let them win. And it's not ok to be one."
Like I said, sometimes, no matter what you do, the monsters win. But it's not ok to let them win. And it's not ok to be one.
