Monsters: A Guest Post by Philip A. Suggars

After a dangerous mishap, a troubled young man is swept off course into an alternate London, where bizarre creatures roam and ancient mysteries await in this inventive portal fantasy. Read on for an exclusive essay from Philip A. Suggars on writing Our Monthly Pick, The Lighthouse at the End of the World.

I love monsters.

But what makes a good one? For me the definition is it’s a category error. Something that, no matter how hard you try, won’t conform to the boxes that make up your mind (well, my mind anyway). The creature in Frankenstein is a classic example. It lives but is stitched together from bits of dead things.

In a similar vein, imagine a city composed of red brick houses, smoking chimneys, honking factories. Now picture it on enormous legs, stampeding across a beach toward you beneath a sky that just might be painted on.

This was the image in my head when I started thinking about The Lighthouse at the End of the World around ten years ago. At the time, I was lying in bed, recovering from a nasty bout of flu. I’d just had an odd fever dream about a person piloting the entire city of London down to the seaside for a day out. I scribbled a note on a scrap of paper, took some more paracetamol and went back to bed.

I ended up coming back to that image a few times in short stories, but was never quite able to exorcise it; and as I puzzled it over, I realised that what had hooked me was that I couldn’t really tell whether this thing was a city that thought it was an animal, or an animal that dreamed it was a city. It was a category error: monstrous.

It was that mismatching, that wrong-thing-in-the-wrong-place quality that made me love books such Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea when I was a kid. For me, one of the most compelling things about that novel was that its main character, Ged, was not a Gandalf; he wasn’t a fully formed all-powerful twenty-fifth level wizard with an itchy beard and a flowing cloak. He was a mouthy upstart from a hard-scrabble island with impulse control issues and an ego that, frankly, we’d probably describe today as being a little bit extra.

So, Ged too is a category error. He resists the box marked hero almost entirely.

Which is how Oyster McLellen arrived as the main character in The Lighthouse at the End of the World. Oyster has some things in common with me. His background and family life are, shall we say, complicated. He sticks his nose in where he shouldn’t, and he has an entirely misplaced sense of his own genius.

Unlike me, he has a knack with cards and is a talented short-con artist with ambitions in all the wrong directions. People may have plans for him, but like Ged he’s not the chosen one. He’s a twerp from South London with a mouth that gets him into trouble.

And when I think about it, Oyster is in good company.

In life, we are all shoved into boxes we don’t naturally feel at home within. We are all category errors. Each of us, monstrous, one way or another.

Which brings us to the thing I love most about a good monster. That is, if you look at them from the right angle, they always show you how daft our categories actually are.

BIO: Philip A. Suggars’ work has appeared in Strange Horizons, The Guardian and Interzone. He has won the Ilkley short story prize, been long-listed for the BSFA short story award and been included in The Best of British Science Fiction. When not writing words, he records music as one half of the post-punk electronica outfit, we are concrete. Born in South London, he currently lives on the south coast with his family.