Do You Believe in Monsters?: A Guest Post by Dennis Mahoney
What kinds of monsters plagued you as a kid? Was it Pennywise from It? Frankenstein, Dracula or Godzilla? Whatever your fancy (or fright), Dennis Mahoney’s latest taps into those fears with a brand-new terrifying entity. Read on for Mahoney’s exclusive essay on writing Our Winter Monster.
Hardcover $26.95
Our Winter Monster
Our Winter Monster
In Stock Online
Hardcover $26.95
Chilling holiday horror about an unhappy couple running from their problems and straight into the maw of a terrifying beast, perfect for fans of Paul Tremblay and Sara Gran.
Chilling holiday horror about an unhappy couple running from their problems and straight into the maw of a terrifying beast, perfect for fans of Paul Tremblay and Sara Gran.
A reasonable adult might say, “I don’t believe in monsters.” That adult would be lying, to you or to themselves.
Maybe a monster is a metaphor for something inexpressibly scary—a real-world horror that defies safe logic. The conscious mind short-circuits from shock, dread, or trauma, so the unconscious mind makes a picture of the thing, like a child drawing something godawful with a crayon.
In Santa Fe, New Mexico, the entire community has conjured Zozobra, a white mountain beast that embodies everyone’s anxiety and hopelessness. It’s like their evil mascot. And at the end of every summer, they build a fifty-foot effigy and burn it. Is Zozobra real? Does the cleansing fire work? Ask a Santa Fean and they’ll probably say, “YES.”
I’ve been gobsmacked by monsters all through my life. When I was six in 1980, I discovered that Darth Vader was the good guy’s Dad. Patricia Highsmith’s story “The Quest for the Blank Claveringi” introduced me to massive, flesh-eating snails. Grownups spoke seriously about Bigfoot. As a teen, I met Pennywise from It and Bob from Twin Peaks. And in adulthood, all I had to do was check my phone to see an hourly parade of goblins and grotesqueries.
What was under those forms that obsessed me completely? And why, years later, did I write about a snow monster? I don’t create books to intentionally confront a stressful zeitgeist. But Our Winter Monster did emerge from very tense years. There was the Covid lockdown, when I rarely left the house, and everything outside felt threatening and strange. Relationships were strained. Some of them imploded. So many people were lonely, scared, or dying.
I started to imagine a creature in the snow. What did it represent? At first, I didn’t know. I took a handful of characters with ordinary problems—dating, winter blues, bubbling insecurity—and threw them into a blizzard with my unformed monster. The more I wrote, the more the darker elements emerged. PTSD. Disintegrating love. Dangerous forces beyond our control. I wrote to understand the monster I was picturing: to look beneath the skin and see the real meat.
That’s the deal with a monster. It’s the skin of something real. It’s why we have the word—to name the Bad Thing—and so many stories trying to explain it. Have you seen your own monster? How should you confront it? None of this is kid’s stuff. Ask Santa Fe. Because whenever we’re inclined to dismiss it all as fiction, our deeper selves might have something scarier to say.
