Fantastic Beasts and How to Write Them
Some Jurassic examples of great monster-writing
Upon reaching the limits of civilised knowledge, the mapmakers of yore would resort to monsters. Hic Sunt Dracones – Here Be Dragons. In truth, cartographers almost never wrote this1, but there’s a reason the phrase has endured.
It conjures images of fabulous beasts prowling the margins of the world, of plumed leviathans coiled around galleons daring to cross seas uncharted. Here be not only dragons, but the eternal boundary between science and the wild unknown.
Fantasy writers and Dungeon Masters alike often take a similar top-down view of the secondary worlds they create and stage-manage. That’s why so many fantasy novels open with a helpful map and why the bestiary might be the first section you turn to in a new RPG.
Your standard-issue, Lord of the Rings-derived medieval fantasy is usually dominated by peoples more or less civilised (humans, elves, dwarves, the magically inclined), or at least somewhat housetrained (orcs, goblins, randy barbarians). You’ve also got your various revenants, demons and elementals, all regimented by the arcane laws of magic.
Then there’s the wildlife, those feral beasts, carnivorous critters and lonely titans born not of alchemy but the natural world, of the wilderness that awaits beyond the familiar bounds of city or farmstead. These are the dragons that dwell in regions uncharted, in dungeons drowned, in deserts unmappable, in jungles unbridled as the id. Here be the nesting hydra, the bellowing cyclops, the web-weaver the size of a Humvee, all hungry for a fresh bundle of bones to strew about their lair.
Such monsters are essentially animals and – unless they’re legends like Shelob or Moby Dick – they rarely come with a backstory. They’re fluent only in growls and bellows and have few interests beyond eating and lurking. The rest is a mystery. Wizards seem to know more about conjuring the dead than they do about local zoology.
Monsters are commonly identified with their environment, making it easy for writers and DMs to reach for them in a pinch. We’re in a desert. I guess a few Giant Scorpions will do. A forest, eh? How about a Shambling Mound.
But writers often fall into the trap of deploying monsters like captured Pokémon, siccing them on their wandering hero, setting up the creatures as obstacles, threshold guardians or XP dispensers. The monster’s job here is to liven things up a bit, give the hero a taste of the wild and the chance to flash their blade skills.
The monster is all too often disposable, reduced to a commodity by professional slayers like the Witcher. They end up being just part of the scenery and don’t have much of a life beyond their narrative function.
Who can blame fantasy writers and DMs for falling in love with some glorious monstrosity they’ve found in a bestiary and wanting to throw it at their characters at the first drop of a spiked helmet?
Yet authors who apply the Ash Ketchum approach to monster-wrangling often succeed only in making a monster feel airdropped into a story, instead of having them arise out of a need to dramatize a fantasy ecosystem or symbolise a certain theme.
Early Dungeons & Dragons delighted in the ‘funhouse dungeon’, a chocolate box of trap-rooms and encounters, with random monsters seemingly parachuted into their lairs with a childlike disregard as to how they might actually react or even survive.
The sole reason for the monster’s existence here is to eat adventurers or die trying. Such chaos may be fun within the improvised, collaborative storytelling of a role-playing game, but in the more calculated realm of realistic fantasy fiction it spells death.
(For a superbly thought-out and comprehensive tutorial on how to create monster-encounters for RPGs, you need to read What Makes a Monster by Nate Whittington.)
Like the owner of any exotic beast, the author must take care to integrate their monster into its surroundings. The creature needs to mean something to the story, or else it may as well be extinct.
Dinosaurs are the monsters with which many of us first fell in love, and they offer a perfect baseline when it comes to examples of good monster-writing. Indeed, it was the ancients’ discovery of fossilised dinosaur bones that lent a wonderous credence to their tales of the dragon, the giant and the griffin, mythic creatures that share the dinosaur’s awesome size and ferocious appetite.
Yet dinosaurs have a complex appeal all of their own. Separated from us by the abyss of time, they are as unknowable as any dragon and yet unquestionably real. They are concrete yet protean, morphing over decades of palaeontological debate, from Biblical leviathans to outsized lizards to feathered scavengers. They are symbols of power and majesty, and the fragility of that dominion. No wonder the British were so fascinated by them during the age of Empire. The dinosaur is the dragon whose death symbolises the passing of an age.
Dinosaurs hold a seemingly instinctual fascination for children, for whom they offer the thrill of primordial violence from the safe distance of some 66 million years. To look up at a tyrannosaur skeleton as a child is to see a thing that was even bigger, older and more powerful than your parents, as your imagination furnishes those granite bones with several tons of plodding, predatory muscle.
Yet the notion of dinosaurs is not even 200 years old. Cameras and calculators have been around longer than the word ‘dinosaur’ (meaning ‘terrible lizard’), which was coined by British palaeontologist Sir Richard Owen in 18422. Owen’s newly identified Megalosaurus got a name-check in the opening of Dickens’ Bleak House (1852), while Owen maintained a highly entertaining feud with his rivals in the scientific fraternity. Their public quarrels helped build a more comprehensive view of the creatures’ evolution, as well as packing ‘em in at museums and exhibitions. But public interest in dinosaurs had become extinct by the turn of the 20th century. European missionaries, explorers and empire-builders had left few corners of the world unexplored.
Here be dragons no more.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was in his early fifties and thoroughly fed-up writing Sherlock Holmes by the time he published The Lost World in 1912. Originally serialised in The Strand, it may not have been the first novel to feature dinosaurs as the main attraction3, but it was the bestseller that revitalised the popular fascination with dinosaurs that endures to this day4.
Influenced by the filigreed escapades of Jules Verne and the colonial rip-roarers of H. Rider Haggard, The Lost World follows the bullish Professor Challenger and his team charging into the Amazon to prove the existence of an isolated plateau where dinosaurs and ape-men still thrive.
Challenger himself is tremendous fun5. Dismissed by his peers as a violent crank, he’s something of a dinosaur himself, bullying and bellowing his way through the sweating thickets under threat of professional extinction. The adventure chugs along agreeably (though you do have to weather a lot of late-Victorian racism), but lights up when we get our first, unflinching view of the book’s most memorable monsters.
“Some hundreds of yards from where we lay, were pools of green-scummed, stagnant water, fringed with bullrushes. It was a weird place in itself, but its occupants made it seem like a scene from the Seven Circles of Dante. The place was a rookery of pterodactyls. There were hundreds of them congregated within view. All the bottom area round the water-edge was alive with their young ones, and with hideous mothers brooding upon their leathery, yellowish eggs. From this crawling flapping mass of obscene reptilian life came the shocking clamour which filled the air and the mephitic, horrible, musty odour which turned us sick. But above, perched each upon its own stone, tall, grey, and withered, more like dead and dried specimens than actual living creatures, sat the horrible males, absolutely motionless save for the rolling of their red eyes or an occasional snap of their rattrap beaks as a dragonfly went past them. Their huge, membranous wings were closed by folding their forearms, so that they sat like gigantic old women, wrapped in hideous web-coloured shawls, and with their ferocious heads protruding above them. Large and small, not less than a thousand of these filthy creatures lay in the hollow before us.”
The narrator’s horror achieves Biblical proportions with its reference to Dante. “Like gigantic old women, wrapped in hideous web-coloured shawls” feels wonderfully witch-like, a distinct and evocative simile that anchors the fantastic (“gigantic”, “web-coloured”) within the familiar (“old women”, “shawls”). The scene feels hellish, a blasphemous “congregation”, dead yet somehow alive (“more like dead and dried specimens than actual living creatures”). But that’s exactly the problem with these monsters; there’s little sense of life. Labelled with all those empty adjectives (“hideous”, “obscene”, “horrible”, “filthy”), they feel like exhibits in some hushed Edwardian gallery, striking but inert.
There’s a similar – crucial – lack of threat when Malone, the young reporter and narrator, gets ambushed by a Megalosaurus.
“I stood like a man paralysed, still staring at the ground which I had traversed. Then suddenly I saw it. There was movement among the bushes at the far end of the clearing which I had just traversed. A great dark shadow disengaged itself and hopped out into the clear moonlight. I say ‘hopped’ advisedly, for the beast moved like a kangaroo, springing along in an erect position upon its powerful hind legs, while its front ones were held bent in front of it. It was of enormous size and power, like an erect elephant, but its movements, in spite of its bulk, were exceedingly alert. For a moment, as I saw its shape, I hoped that it was an iguanodon, which I knew to be harmless, but, ignorant as I was, I soon saw that this was a very different creature. Instead of the gentle, deer-shaped head of the great three-toed leaf-eater, this beast had a broad, squat, toad-like face like that which had alarmed us in our camp. His ferocious cry and the horrible energy of his pursuit both assured me that this was surely one of the great flesh-eating dinosaurs, the most terrible beasts which have ever walked this earth.”
The dinosaur stalks him, sniffing out his trail…
“Even now when I think of that nightmare the sweat breaks out upon my brow. What could I do? My useless fowling piece was in my hand. What help could I get from that? I looked desperately round for some rock or tree, but I was in a bushy jungle with nothing higher than a sapling within sight, while I knew that the creature behind me could tear down an ordinary tree as though it were a reed. My only possible chance lay in flight. I could not move swiftly over the rough, broken ground, but as I looked round me in despair, I saw a well-marked, hard-beaten path which ran across in front of me. We had seen several of the sort, the runs of various wild beasts, during our expeditions. Along this I could perhaps hold my own, for I was a fast runner, and in excellent condition. Flinging away my useless gun, I set myself to do such a half-mile as I have never done before or since.”
Malone makes a run for it, thinking he’s managed to lose the monster, but then it catches up with him…
“The moonlight shone upon his huge projecting eyes, the row of enormous teeth in his open mouth, and the gleaming fringe of claws upon his short, powerful forearms. With a scream of terror I turned and rushed wildly down the path. Behind me the thick, gasping breathing of the creature sounded louder and louder. His heavy footfall was beside me. Every instant I expected to feel his grip upon my back. And then suddenly there came a crash — I was falling through space, and everything beyond was darkness and rest.”
Likening his dino to the peculiar hopping of a kangaroo or the stance of an erect elephant says ‘circus sideshow’ more than ‘apex predator’. The comparison to a toad is one of revulsion rather than terror. Overall, this monster feels more like a scientific curiosity than a threat to life.
And when the beast gives chase, it feels disengaged from its surroundings. We’ve been told of its “enormous size and power”, that it, “could tear down an ordinary tree as though it were a reed”, that its senses are “exceedingly alert”, but we see no evidence of this. The monster doesn’t smash obstacles out of its way. There’s no moment in which it picks out its prey in the darkness, giving Malone no place to hide. Those “enormous teeth in his open mouth, and the gleaming fringe of claws upon his short, powerful forearms” may as well be there for decoration.
“Behind me the thick, gasping breathing of the creature sounded louder and louder. His heavy footfall was beside me.” But Malone doesn’t feel that breath on his back, doesn’t report any sense of heat or smell, and that “heavy footfall” is merely “beside him” rather than shaking the earth and threatening to knock him off his feet. It doesn’t help that this is all coming second-hand (“Even now when I think of that nightmare…”) and riddled with passive verbs (“was”, “were”), robbing the chase of immediacy and danger.
Chicago-born pencil-sharpener salesman turned pulp god Edgar Rice Burroughs takes an All-American swashbuckling tack with his dino-fiction but runs into similar problems. The Tarzan creator wrote two series of lost world adventures: the Caspak trilogy set on the Antarctic island of Caprona and which begins with The Land That Time Forgot (1918, very heavily influenced by James De Mille’s novel A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder from thirty years before)6 and another series set in the Vernean hollow-earth of Pellucidar, which begins with At The Earth’s Core (1914) and runs to six more novels7.
Burroughs’s plots come at you like machine-gun fire – and then and then and then and then – told in a breezy, daydreamy style that worships speed and spectacle. Combined with his instinct for primal myth, it’s easy to see why Burroughs became a pulp icon.
But in The Land That Time Forgot, for example, Burroughs deploys his monsters like speed-bumps, hiccups to keep things interesting and jiffy things along to the next confrontation. Like those in Doyle’s Lost World, Burroughs’s dinosaurs feel too docile.
“Whatever the thing was, it had leaped upon our deer and was devouring it in great mouthfuls which it swallowed without mastication. The creature appeared to be a great lizard at least ten feet high, with a huge, powerful tail as long as its torso, mighty hind legs and short forelegs. When it had advanced from the wood, it hopped much after the fashion of a kangaroo, using its hind feet and tail to propel it, and when it stood erect, it sat upon its tail. Its head was long and thick, with a blunt muzzle, and the opening of the jaws ran back to a point behind the eyes, and the jaws were armed with long sharp teeth. The scaly body was covered with black and yellow spots about a foot in diameter and irregular in contour. These spots were outlined in red with edgings about an inch wide. The underside of the chest, body and tail were a greenish white.
‘Wot s’y we pot the bloomin’ bird, sir?’ suggested Whitely.”
Burroughs’s narrating hero is too busy with his tape-measure (“ten feet high”, “a foot in diameter”, “about an inch wide”), creating a too-static portrait. It’s like reading stats in an RPG bestiary.
But at least Burroughs gives us more than Doyle did in showing what his monster can do, like gulping down fifty pounds of venison in one go. He shows even greater flair when the dinosaur attacks. Having absorbed a volley of rifle-fire, the monster refuses to die and instead makes a charge. But Nobs, the hero’s loyal airdale terrier, rushes to his master’s defence.
“[the dog] raced to the rear of the tremendous thing and seized it by the tail. There Nobs made the error of his life. Within that mottled organ were the muscles of a Titan, the force of a dozen mighty catapults, and the owner of the tail was fully aware of the possibilities which it contained. With a single flip of the tip it sent poor Nobs sailing through the air a hundred feet above the ground, straight back into the clump of acacias from which the beast had leaped upon our kill – and then the grotesque thing sank lifeless to the ground.”
Burroughs writes a far more dynamic dinosaur encounter than Doyle, dramatizing the monster’s power as it soaks up a hail of bullets and scores a field goal with the hero’s dog. But as the plot progresses and the explorers venture deeper into the island, Burroughs becomes more interested in feuding ape-people than in dinosaurs. His monsters fade into the foliage, there to get bagged and grilled like grazing buffalo as the heroes advance to conquer this new world.
A giant of 20th century science-fiction, Ray Bradbury was among the first generation of monster kids. As a boy, he devoured Burroughs’s Tarzan books, wrote John Carter fan-fic, mourned when King Kong was assassinated atop the Empire State. To Bradbury, dinosaurs were more than just plot devices. In tales such as The Foghorn (1951)8, they’re melancholy symbols of nostalgia and eternity, of the wearying passage of time. In his 1980 introduction to The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury, he wrote of dinosaurs, “rising here in nightmares to founder there in loneliness and despair.”
That Bradbury’s monsters stand for something beyond their function, that they touch an emotional nerve in the author and his viewpoint characters, is what gives those creatures their resonance, making them more than just cogs turning the plot.
Bradbury’s much-anthologised short A Sound of Thunder (1952) is perhaps the most widely read dinosaur story outside Jurassic Park. A commercial time-traveller named Eckels goes on a prehistoric safari in the hope of bagging a T-Rex.
“They were ready to leave the Machine.
The jungle was high and the jungle was broad and the jungle was the entire world forever and forever. Sounds like music and sounds like flying tents filled the sky, and those were pterodactyls soaring with cavernous grey wings, gigantic bats of delirium and night fever.”
Bradbury sets the stage without resorting to visual techniques9. He doesn’t describe the hunters actually leaving their time-machine and setting foot on prehistoric soil, recording their every twitch and motion as though documenting real-time through a movie-camera. Instead, Bradbury angles his descriptions in such a way that allows the reader to fill the gaps for themself, further immersing you in this primordial world. The repetition of “the jungle was” along with “forever and forever” is overwhelming, giving a 360-degree sense of being surrounded, isolated. Same with “sounds like music”, “sounds like flying tents.” You can hear the ‘thwump!’ of the pterodactyl’s wings without having it spelled out. And these flying critters are more than just local colour; they’re charged with metaphorical meaning, “gigantic bats of delirium and night fever”.
Warnings are given and tension builds as the time-travellers venture forth and finally spot their supposed prey.
“It came on great oiled, resilient, striding legs. It towered thirty feet above half of the trees, a great evil god, folding its delicate watchmaker's claws close to its oily reptilian chest. Each lower leg was a piston, a thousand pounds of white bone, sunk in thick ropes of muscle, sheathed over in a gleam of pebbled skin like the mail of a terrible warrior. Each thigh was a ton of meat, ivory, and steel mesh. And from the great breathing cage of the upper body those two delicate arms dangled out front, arms with hands which might pick up and examine men like toys, while the snake neck coiled. And the head itself, a ton of sculptured stone, lifted easily upon the sky. Its mouth gaped, exposing a fence of teeth like daggers. Its eyes rolled, ostrich eggs, empty of all expression save hunger. It closed its mouth in a death grin. It ran, its pelvic bones crushing aside trees and bushes, its taloned feet clawing damp earth, leaving prints six inches deep wherever it settled its weight.”
The first thing we see in detail are those legs, then those armoured thighs, “the great breathing cage of the upper body”, the arms, the neck and finally the head. Describing these elements in sequence, gives the feeling of slowly looking up in mounting awe and horror, like this thing’s just too damn big to take in at once.
We get the overall scale of it against the trees. We get measurements and tonnage, but they feel imprecise, at-a-glance, hyperbolic. And this monster isn’t likened to some goofy kangaroo, but “a great evil god.” There’s strength (“a ton of stone lifted easily) contrasted with the delicacy of its “watchmaker’s claws”. This thing has substance; its presence affects its surroundings, “crushing aside trees” and smooshing pawprints into the mud, putting all that power and weight into action. How alive does this monster feel compared to the daguerreotypes of Doyle and Burroughs? How much more overwhelming and dangerous?
"It can't be killed," shrieks Eckels. "We were fools to come. This is impossible." What enables all this poetic description is the terrified perspective of the viewpoint character, suddenly realising he’s hopelessly out of his depth, reduced to the stature of a helpless child. For all his ten-thousand dollar cheques, his years on safari, his firepower, this adventurer has suddenly found himself on the lowest rung of the food-chain.
“The Monster, at the first motion, lunged forward with a terrible scream. It covered one hundred yards in six seconds. The rifles jerked up and blazed fire. A windstorm from the beast's mouth engulfed them in the stench of slime and old blood. The Monster roared, teeth glittering with sun.
The rifles cracked again. Their sound was lost in shriek and lizard thunder. The great level of the reptile's tail swung up, lashed sideways. Trees exploded in clouds of leaf and branch. The Monster twitched its jeweller’s hands down to fondle at the men, to twist them in half, to crush them like berries, to cram them into its teeth and its screaming throat. Its boulderstone eyes levelled with the men. They saw themselves mirrored. They fired at the metallic eyelids and the blazing black iris.
Like a stone idol, like a mountain avalanche, Tyrannosaurus fell.”
The monster is so big it’s death throes take up a whole other paragraph, in which it uproots trees and drowns its tiny killers in torrents of its own blood, leaving the men throwing up, cursing and shaking with aftershock.
This is gold-standard monster-writing: power, poetry, viewpoint.
Harvard Medical grad Michael Crichton was over twenty years’ deep into his career as a bestselling author and movie director when he published his blockbuster novel Jurassic Park in 1991.10
Though it stars another tyrannosaur in a headline role, Crichton’s novel is a very different beast to Bradbury’s A Sound of Thunder. Crichton was a theorist not a poet. He wrote fast-paced techno-thrillers that distilled sprawling scientific theories for the mass market. And if you want to keep those pages turning, then poetry must defer to pace.
Dr Crichton’s style is as clinical as a tray of surgical instruments and applied just as ruthlessly in Jurassic Park’s masterful midpoint suspense sequence.
The first half takes place mid-tour as young siblings Tim and Lex are in a rail-jeep with the PR guy, while heroic fossil-duster Alan Grant, prehistoric plant-lady Ellie Sattler and sexy mathlete Ian Malcolm are in the one behind. (We’ve all seen the movie.) Grant is the cool-headed viewpoint character, waiting for the gene-hatched tyrannosaur to take the bait of a tethered goat. Crichton gives us the first whiff of his monster, “a garbage stench of putrefaction.” Death lurks on the other side of those 10,000-volt wires.
“The dinosaur must be somewhere among the trees, but for a moment Grant could see nothing at all. Then he realised he was looking too low: the animal’s head stood twenty feet above the ground, half concealed among the upper branches of the palm trees.”
He recognises it as an “animal”, not a “monster”, not a “great evil god”, neither of which we’ve ever seen. But most of us see an “animal” every day. Crichton couches his dinosaur in the language of the mundane, helping the reader buy into the fantasy.
“Grant stared at the enormous square head, five feet long, mottled reddish brown, with huge jaws and fangs. The tyrannosaur’s jaws worked once, opening and closing. But the huge animal did not emerge from hiding.”
Just the head. That’s all we get for now. There’s no grand, full-shot unveiling as in Bradbury, Burroughs and Doyle. Like Jaws, this one’s a lurker. But there’s realism in the tyrannosaur’s hesitancy as well as suspense. Like Grant, we feel like we’re visitors at the zoo, frustrated at having to wait for the lion to emerge from its den. This subtle familiarity makes the dinosaur feel all the more real.
Grant the expert says they may have to wait a while before the tyrannosaur emerges, only to be contradicted instantly as the dino springs out and nabs the goat. So much for Grant’s expert prediction. Throughout the sequence, Crichton strips away the characters’ every assertion, every certainty, every defence; a classic horror technique.
“The tyrannosaur bent down, and sniffed the carcass of the goat. A bird chirped: her head snapped up, alert, watchful. She looked back and forth, scanning in small jerking shifts.”
‘Like a bird,’ Ellie said.”
This dinosaur doesn’t behave like a Harryhausen monster, writhing and bellowing centre-stage. It’s nervous, dainty in contrast to its enormous size. Grant has seen this hesitancy in big cats becoming cautious after their kill, fearful of competing predators. This monster isn’t some dumb brute or living monolith. It’s something that thinks.
“The huge animal bent over the goat again. One great hind limb held the carcass in place as the jaws began to tear the flesh.”
There’s no soaring verbs, no fancy nouns, none of the theatricality of Bradbury. The writing is plain and believable as we witness what this monster can do from a safe distance, leaving us grateful for the protection of that electric fence - and yet dying to see it come down.
With his Chekov’s T-Rex nicely foreshadowed, Crichton builds suspense over the interim of the next four chapters, in which a maelstrom looms and the tour makes a pitstop to attend a sickly Stegosaur. Cracks in the park are starting to show as life finds a way, the midpoint-dam finally breaking when turncoat computer-wiz Dennis (‘See? No one cares’) Nedry goes to steal those million-dollar dino-embryos and shunks off the park’s power supply.
For the second half of Crichton’s big monster-moment, we switch to the viewpoint of the youngest, smallest, most vulnerable character, little Timmy. We sit with him in the stalled jeep as the rain comes down, still in radio-contact with Grant in the other jeep, and thinking about how cool it would be to see a tyrannosaur up-close.
Crichton ratchets up the tension by keeping us cooped up with the kids for a while. They’re bored, hungry and annoying. Whether as a parent or a child, we’ve all been here. The author lulls us with the familiar, the plausible, before his dino comes crashing in. Tim scans the dripping trees and spots something through his night-vision goggles, something that definitely isn’t a tree. Crichton gives us a glimpse, nothing more.
“[Tim] saw the huge head of the tyrannosaurus. Just standing there, looking over the fence at the two Land Cruisers. The lightning flashed again, and the big animal rolled its head and bellowed in the glaring light. Then darkness, and silence again, and the pounding rain.”
The monster isn’t poised like Nosferatu, claws threatening murder. It doesn’t act like a monster at all. It’s “just standing there”. There’s nothing gothic here; in contrast to Bradbury, the tone is understated, naturalistic, believable.
“The animal looked from one vehicle to another. Then back again. It seemed to stare right at Tim.”
I wonder what it’s thinking about. Thank God, that fence is still working, huh?
As soon as we see the animal’s paw gripping that dead wire, we switch viewpoints to that of the publicist, Ed Regis. Why? We switch because…
“Ed Regis knew what a dinosaur attack was like. He knew what happened to people. He had seen the mangled bodies that resulted from a raptor attack.”
He’s the character who understands the true extent of the danger they’re in.
“When the tyrannosaurus roared it was terrifying, a scream from some other world.”
Ed pees his pants and flees, leaving the kids unprotected. Lex panics (“he left us, he left us!”), while Tim remains transfixed by that watchful tyrannosaur, “motionless and huge. Rain dripped from its jaws.” Crichton zeroes in on that dripping rain, a small but vivid image that evokes both the animal’s stillness and the sense of rain dripping from something rooftop-high and wide.
“The tyrannosaur rolled its head and took an awkward step forward. The claws of its feet had caught in the grid of the flattened fence.”
Bradbury’s T-Rex was way too awesome and otherworldly to be so clumsy, but this stumble is a neat naturalistic touch, one that finds the animal at odds with its artificial environment.
As it prowls the jeep with the kids inside, sections of this huge creature – its feet, its head, its tail – are constantly blocking Tim’s view through the windows. By never giving us a complete, all-in-one view of his dinosaur, Crichton implies its enormity, so huge and all-encompassing it’s like the surrounding jungle has come alive to menace Tim and Lex.
The old horror trick of assurance-contradicted is played rapid-fire now as the pace of the scene intensifies. Speaking through the radio, Grant assures the kids the tyrannosaur won’t see them if they to stay put. But the dinosaur has already seen them; it knows there’s something tasty squirming around inside that funny metal box. Grant tells the kids if they stay quiet, the tyrannosaur won’t find them. The huge creature not only finds them but starts tearing up the jeep like a dog with an Amazon delivery.
Having weathered the creature’s initial assault, Tim tells Grant they’re okay, only to find his sister unconscious and covered in blood, the dinosaur now peering through the smashed windshield directly at Tim.
“The head rushed forward toward him, the jaws open. There was the squeal of metal against teeth, and he felt the hot stinking breath of the animal and a thick tongue stuck into the car through the windshield opening. The tongue slapped wetly around inside the car – he felt the hot lather of dinosaur saliva – and the tyrannosaur roared – a deafening sound inside the car-”
The dinosaur’s enormity is broken down again, the intruding tongue feeling like a separate entity, a monstrous worm.
What carries the second half of this monster encounter is something more than just naked suspense. Our tyrannosaur has a clear, motivated need: it wants to eat the kids. But there’s an obstacle; they’re dug inside the car like juicy little ticks. In trying to get them out, the dinosaur slices its tongue on the broken windshield.
“It seemed confused by what had happened to it. Blood dripped freely from its jaws.”
Enraged, the tyrannosaur lifts that battered lunchbox in its jaws and hurls it into the brush, those two confounded morsels still screaming inside it. Throughout the scene, the monster exhibits a sequence of emotions and responses: curiosity, hunger, frustration, pain, anger. It’s a character within the scene, just as much as Tim.
A common mistake I see in monster stories (and ghost stories) is failing to treat the monster like a living (or unliving) thing possessed of its own needs, temperament and perspective. The first two Alien movies take care to establish the xenomorphs’ ecology. The monsters don’t go around killing willy-nilly, but are driven by a sense of monstrous purpose. They want to bundle you away and paste you to the walls of their burrow, ready for a smooch with their eight-legged larvae. The alien queen hunts Ripley while seething with the desire to avenge her incinerated brood. The later movies abandon all that, reducing them to screeching berserkers, seemingly incapable of thought.
A monster is all the more terrifying if we can get a sense of its will, its hunger, its purpose. It gives monster-writers something to work with and their characters something to fight, even if that struggle does nothing but define their own helplessness.
All the best monsters have feelings too.
Stay weird.
The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and The Land That Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs are both public domain works. A Sound of Thunder by Ray Bradbury and Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton remain copyright of their respective authors. Passages are quoted here under terms of fair use for the purposes of criticism.
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The most famous – and possibly only – instance of ‘Here Be Dragons’ is engraved on the so-called Hunt-Lenox Globe, an artefact currently housed in the New York Public Library and made around 1510, warning travellers of the imagined perils of Southeast Asia. Pre-Renaissance cartographers were far more likely to write, Hic Sunt Leones - Here Be Lions. Medieval mapmakers made up all kinds of mad shit about giant ants and people with faces growing out of their chests, while Ptolemy’s Atlas from c.150AD issued far more sensible warnings about elephants, hippos and cannibals.
I’m guessing before then dinosaurs were called, ‘Here’s a Bunch of Weird Bones I Just Found.’
Jules Verne’s Voyage au centre de la Terre / Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864) is the most well-known precursor to Doyle’s novel. Published almost fifty years prior, Verne’s tale follows an eccentric scientist and his team of explorers who rappel down the throat of an active volcano and into a prehistoric biosphere that exists at the earth’s core. But aside from a brief dust-up involving a plesiosaur and scrapes with the odd pterodactyl, this one’s disappointingly light on dino-action. Canadian author James De Mille’s satirical romp A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder (published posthumously in 1888) has the titular message uncorked by a lord and his chums out yachting off the coast of Madeira. They’re startled to read an account of a mariner stranded in a volcanic world buried within Antarctica, where pterodactyls and iguanodons co-exist with a race of civilised cannibals, whose antics form a Swiftian satire of late 19th century values. British author Frank Savile’s Beyond the Great South Wall (1899) discovers yet another tropic civilisation at the heart of the Antarctic, this time a lost race of Mayans worshipping a brontosaurus with hypnotic powers.
Conan Doyle wrote The Lost World with the explicit intention of revolutionising the ‘Boys Own’ adventure story the way his Sherlock tales had revolutionised detective fiction. Hugely influential, The Lost World would give its name to that pulp fantasy subgenre of pith helmets, volcanic jungles, terrible lizards and prehistoric civilisations, from the secret Tibetan utopia of Shangri-La in James Hilton’s novel Lost Horizon (1933), the tropic mayhem of the Jumanji movies (which began with the 1981 picture-book by Chris Van Allsburg), the Savage Land of Marvel Comics’ (yet another Antarctic hideaway), Wonder Woman’s Mediterranean hometown of Themyscira, to the epic ruins uncovered by globetrotters like Tintin, Indiana Jones and Lara Croft.
The volcanic Professor returned in two more novels, apocalyptic sci-fi The Poison Belt (1913) and supernatural mystery The Land of Mist (1926), as well as a couple of pulpy sci-fi shorts, When the World Screamed (1928) and The Disintegration Machine (1929).
The People That Time Forgot and Out of Time’s Abyss followed the same year.
Pellucidar (1915), Tanar of Pellucidar (1929), Tarzan at the Earth's Core (1930), Back to the Stone Age (1937), Land of Terror (1944), Savage Pellucidar (a short story collection published posthumously in 1963).
Filmed in 1953 as The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, whose made-up ‘Rhedosaurus’ was animated by Bradbury’s lifelong pal Ray Harryhausen.
Here’s a terrific piece on visual techniques vs. prose techniques by Lincoln Michel, Turning Off the TV in Your Mind.
His early sci-fi novels – The Andromeda Strain (1969, his sixth novel, but the first published under his own name) and The Terminal Man (1972, his twelve novel and second under his own name) were bestsellers and both adapted into movies. He also wrote and directed sci-fi movies Westworld (1973), Coma (1978, which he adapted from the novel by Robin Cook), Looker (1981) and Runaway (1984). He also created the TV show ER (1994-2009).
I’m so glad I followed you. This was great
Saving this publication as it absolutely nails everything I love about writing monsters and the many different ways authors have brought them to life. Truly inspiring stuff and well worth the read