RIG: Monsters Archives - Samantha Lienhard

Snow: Great in Concept, Less So in Execution

Books, Reviews, RIG: Monsters 6 Responses »

Nov 112013

Our next monster story to look at is Snow by Ronald Malfi. This one…is not a favorite. Fair warning to anyone who plans to read it, there will be spoilers in this post.

But let’s start by discussing what I liked about this book–namely, the monsters. Snow is the story of a

This. This is the enemy.

group of travelers/survivors in a small town that has been taken over by snow monsters. This isn’t just a story in an snowy setting. Here, the monsters are the snow. The first monster seen in its natural form is described as “a hurricane swirl of snow, funneled and compacted so that it was nearly tangible” (Malfi 69). They also have sword-like arms that they drive into people’s backs. However, they aren’t normally seen in that form.

The Snow (capitalized to avoid confusion with regular snow, because the creatures themselves aren’t given a name in the novel, unless it just passed right by me) prefer to take people over. They either use them as temporary puppets–a trick they can perform even with corpses–or enter their bodies to use them as more permanent “skin-suits” (it doesn’t work with children, however, who end up faceless). Either way, they solidify their sword-arms in order to get inside a person. Although these “skin-suits” can imitate humans decently enough, as shown by Eddie Clement, the monsters in Snow regrettably act more and more like zombies as the story goes on.

Actually, more than zombies, the skin-suits reminded me of the Taken from Alan Wake. Just like the Taken need to be blasted with light before they can be killed, the Snow (seriously, was there a real name given to them?) need to be hit with heat, which forces them into a corporeal form. Both are also controlled by an external consciousness–the Taken are controlled by the Dark Presence, and the Snow receive orders from the mysterious storm that rages over the town.

One of the feral children grows up to be Slender Man.

This is all pretty wacky stuff–the monsters look like snow, except they have blades for arms. They take over humans and can imitate them somewhat successfully, except for children, which become faceless for no clearly explained reason (but it’s creepy and reminds me of Noppera-bo, so I’m not complaining), and near the end they show a couple more forms they’re capable of. It’s weird, but I like it. Even though they start acting more like a zombie horde in Snow, the idea behind them isn’t quite like anything else I’ve heard of. And I love snow. It was very interesting to see something I love turned into a monster.

Their origin, motivation, and true nature is never made entirely clear. It’s suggested that they come from “a whole other world, a whole other dimension” (298). The fact that they struck multiple towns, and that the epilogue implies they aren’t finished yet, indicates a plan. It wasn’t just a random event, but the book never gives solid answers, either. I’m not sure how I feel about that. I’m just glad it didn’t try to tell me they came from genetically modified food.

All right, now that I’ve talked about what I liked, let’s move on to what I disliked.

Everything else.

Okay, that’s unfair. It wasn’t a terrible book. Compared to some literary things I’ve been forced to read, this was a masterpiece. I didn’t hate it. I just didn’t particularly like it, either. I felt nothing for the characters. I found Nan and Fred to be more interesting than any of the others, but the book chose to focus on Todd and Kate. It wasn’t long before I figured out that Todd and Kate were THE main characters, as they encountered various survivors here and there and outlived them. And I just didn’t care. The book tried to throw pieces of their past at me (and either it was my imagination, or every point of view character narrated their sexual history, because that’s what people think about during the Apocalypse, apparently), but it didn’t help. It didn’t feel like character development. It just felt like a bunch of facts about some people I didn’t care about.

Once the skin-suits took on their zombie characteristics, then really all I had was yet another zombie story, with survivors I didn’t care about. And then I was just waiting for it to end.

Snow had an interesting premise and interesting monsters, but they weren’t enough to keep my interest. I would have liked to see more about the Snow–and maybe the point of view of someone as they were taken over. I don’t think we got even a single one of those. It had a lot of potential, but it didn’t live up to it.

Works Cited

Malfi, Ronald. Snow. New York: Dorchester, 2010. Print.

Relic: It’s Like Scratches Meets Crichton

Books, Reviews, RIG: Monsters 7 Responses »

Nov 042013

Due to a broken modem, I’m writing this blog post on my iPad in the library, so I won’t be able to easily add links and pictures like I usually do. That makes me sad, particularly since we’re going to be discussing Relic by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child. I absolutely loved Relic, and since I started reading it well in advance to have enough time with a decently long novel, and instead found myself glued to the pages, I had plenty of time to think up images to put in here. (I returned later to add images.

For now, Relic. There will be spoilers in this post.

A mysterious tribe that lives on in more than just its legends… A strange artifact taken away… A curse that haunted the tribe and seems to follow the artifact… I could be talking about Scratches again, but this time I’m talking about Relic. (Despite those similarities, which jumped out at me right away, the two stories are extremely different.)

This novel by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child begins in the Amazon Basin in 1987 with Whittlesey, who is responsible for the discovery and transport of the Mbwun figurine, which he believes is proof that the Kothoga tribe exists. The expedition ends in failure, but the figurine makes it back to the New York Museum of Natural History. The main story takes place at the museum in the present day (around 1994, based on their statements that Whittlesey’s expedition took place 7 years previously), where a series of odd murders begin.

The murders are brutal and strange–a very specific part of the victim’s brain, the hypothalamus, is removed and apparently eaten. There is no sign of who or what was responsible. And the murders match previous unsolved murders that have followed the crates from the Whittlesey expedition on their journey. The unusualness of the situation brings in Special Agent Pendergast, who is pretty awesome. Pendergast joins the rest of the main cast of characters–researcher Margo Green, Dr. Frock, Lieutenant D’Agosta, and reporter Bill Smithback–in their efforts to uncover the truth behind the murders before anyone else dies, particularly with Museum authorities insisting that they continue with their plans to throw a huge opening party for their new expedition.

Yeah, the creature may be the literal “monster” in this story, but special monster points go to Wright, Rickman, and all the other nitwits who routinely stand in the protagonists’ way, and especially to Coffey, an FBI agent who seems to live for the sole purpose of disagreeing with Pendergast.

While their antics sometimes aggravated me to the point where I wondered how anyone could be that stupid, I liked the main characters a lot. I didn’t like Smithback too much in the beginning, but by the end he’d grown on me. I had to laugh when he keeps eating during the chaos until he realizes he’s snacking his way through what could be the biggest story of his career. His goals weren’t as noble as those of some of the others, but he was a good character.

As time passes and the case gets weirder, it becomes clear that the murderer is perhaps the so-called “Museum Beast,” and evidence turns up that suggests it could bear an uncanny resemblance to the mythical Mbwun, or “He Who Walks On All Fours” (Preston and Child 234), from the legends of the Kothoga. As they look at the situation further, Dr. Frock presents his own theory, that “every sixty to seventy million years or so, life stars getting very well adapted to its environment. Too well adapted, perhaps. There is a population explosion of the successful life forms. Then, suddenly, a new species appears out of the blue. It is almost always a predatory creature, a killing machine. It tears through the host population, killing, feeding, multiplying” (203), and that the Mbwun creature loose in the Museum is just that.

I have to say, I loved all of it–the Kothoga legend, the science, and Frock’s theory (which did make me think more than a little bit of the Reapers popping up to wipe everyone out whenever life has reached an advanced enough state).

As monsters go, Mbwun spends most of its time in the shadows for this novel. Bodies are found after they’ve been killed, characters hear the beast walking around, and the figurine is the main link to the creature. It isn’t clearly seen until near the end. However, I thought the mystery surrounding it make it a very interesting creature nevertheless. The link to the plants confused me at first (mainly because of Margo saying “Mbwun” is the name of the plants, which I’m still unsure about), but that turned out to be an interesting twist and gave the monster a motivation beyond “kill people.” It needed plants. It needed those hormones. It needed to eat hypothalamuses if it couldn’t get its plants. The comparison of the plants to a virus was interesting–even more so in the revelation in the epilogue of Whittlesey’s true fate.

My iPad has decided to go crazy on me and make typing this as difficult as possible, so I’ll end here instead of gushing on further about how much I loved this book.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to look up Reliquary,the sequel.

Works Cited

Preston, Douglas, and Lincoln Child. Relic. New York: Tor, 1995. Print.

The Thing: Paranoia Time

Movies and Shows, Reviews, RIG: Monsters 6 Responses »

Oct 282013

I’m not a big watcher of horror movies, so I’d never seen John Carpenter’s The Thing before this semester. I was, however, familiar with the story, the major plot points, and the characters. Last October, Linkara began to review the comic book sequels to the movie. (He reviewed two more this October and has more planned for next year.) For those of you who don’t know, Linkara is an Internet reviewer of bad comic books. He loves the movie, but yes, he thinks the comics suck. But we aren’t here to talk about the comics (though I do recommend you check out the reviews). Let’s discuss the movie.

Fair warning: there will be spoilers in this post.

First, I want to mention the music just briefly. Sometimes I feel like movies, television shows, video games, and so on have an advantage over books because they can use sound to help create a mood. I really liked the song that played during the opening and closing credits of The Thing. It did a perfect job of setting up a sinister, creepy atmosphere.

Next, I referenced the setting in a previous post. Antarctica is not as terrifying and isolated as space, but it’s still pretty high on the list. But this movie uses that setting for a twofold purpose. It traps the research team, yes, but it also traps the Thing itself. It’s both a means to heighten the fear (no way to escape) and provide a form of grim hope (the monster can’t get to the rest of humanity). The Thing’s resources are limited because it’s in the middle of Antarctica. If it was in a more populated setting, it would become an Apocalypse scenario pretty quickly.

Even without the computer’s amazing analysis to make things clear, you can imagine how bad it would be. The Thing wouldn’t have to rely on a dozen men and a handful of dogs. With a huge variety of people and animals to infect, it would go from being the stalker/imitator of the movie to a plague–a thinking plague that actively tries to spread itself.

As monsters go, the Thing is pretty scary. Not only is it incredibly resilient and powerful, but its greatest strength is in its ability to imitate other organisms. It imitates them perfectly. This is no T-virus or Flood that mutates its host from the onset. This is a creature that assimilates its prey and becomes an exact duplicate. Until it’s forced to show itself or tries to attack someone (at which point it displays some pretty grotesque body horror), there’s nothing to set it apart from any of the others.

It could be me. It could be you. If imitation is its greatest strength, paranoia is its greatest weapon. You can’t trust anyone, and no one can trust you. I like the paranoia aspect a lot. I think that’s an excellent way to add tension and suspense to a plot. It’s a step up from the “any one of us could be the killer” plot element. The cast–or at least Macready–does eventually come up with a way to discover whether or not someone is human by doing a blood test, but they still end up with a pretty grim ending–MacReady and Childs, the only survivors, await their deaths in the wreckage of the outpost, and neither knows for sure if the other is infected. (And this is part of the reason a direct sequel to the movie is problematic.) By the way, apparently the television version managed to make the ending even more hopeless by showing a Husky running from the burning camp.

In many ways, it shows the unstoppable force of some of the other monsters we’ve looked at, but it’s also intelligent. It’s not just killing people that get in its way. It’s actively trying to get out of Antarctica. Apparently, there’s some ambiguity about whether or not infected people know they’re infected, but I like to think the Thing is in control of the infected, and that it’s smart enough to imitate their behavior well enough for no one to notice anything strange. It adds a different layer of fear and paranoia if the Thing could be lurking dormant inside of you and you wouldn’t know it until it made its move, but I still prefer the hidden malevolence of the Thing pretending to be a human.

All of these aspects come together to make it one of the scariest monsters we looked at. And as aliens go, it’s one of the most alien. It made for a solid, tense, disturbing movie.

Also, that spider-head thing is going to haunt my nightmares.

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