A good monster story is more than the sum of its body parts. A monster can mean so many things to the narrative that it lives within—a dark desire, a deep guilt, an unwanted urge—all of which makes the creature feature an endlessly fascinating genre. We’ve compiled eight excellent, innovative tales to send a shiver up your spine.
He wants to roll over to face the opposite side of the bed, where Pamela ought to be sleeping, her body denting the mattress, but she is not there. Something else is.
Starting strong with an already infamous master of the monster, Benjamin Percy’s Ward is a haunting story about loss, grief, and choice. In it, Dr. Sam Volk finds out more about his wife’s passing than he bargained for, forcing him to make difficult decisions that ultimately uproot his work, his relationships, and his life—all while a mysterious, terrifying creature follows him from the breakfast table to the operating room.
Looking back through it, she recognized where she’d come from: the slight dimness of the woods and, beyond that, the hill where her classmates raced toward the parking lot. The kinds of images a person might toss into a drawer and forget. She felt something like wings brush her shoulders.
Debbie Urbanski’s The Portal is a twisting tale that takes its readers through the wilds of one woman’s imagination as she explores her own identity, experiences, and trauma. There is a wealth of ideas here, from shapeshifting fairy-like magic-users to a magical pill that can force sexual desire on anyone who takes it, Urbanski is able to pull them all together into a complex narrative that demands its readers keep pace.
‘Is it a big risk,’ she asked during a coffee break at the animal rescue, ‘or is it a little risk?’
‘You don’t look like an animal to me,’ the new volunteer said between bites, ‘and, like, you just brought donuts.’
Thistle by Mary Kurlya is a surrealist piece that allows us to enter the inhuman mind of Ruslana as she attempts to navigate human behavior and the world around her. While the story leans into the marvel of magical realism, Kurlya’s clear voice encourages her readers to make a strong connection with Ruslana, regardless of how strange her actions and thoughts are.
She opens her own mouth wide, wide, wide until her jaw pops and the skin of her lip splits. To make room, she drops her tongue to the floor of her mouth and reminds herself why she is doing all of this in the first place.
Ira didn’t secure her engagement to Koschei the Deathless on a whim. Nor did she get swept up in the undead sorcerer’s eternal, youthful glow. No, she has a mission. One that involves bread, and a lot of it. Kristina Ten’s narration of Ira’s mission in Head of the Household is as thrilling as it is referential, bursting at the seams with its knowledge of Eastern European folklore, retold in a modern setting for her readers’ pleasure.
The monster appeared on Laura’s worst night. She was counting the dead bugs in the ceiling light when a low snuffling sound came from her closet.
Ali Simpson’s The Monster is a familiar story turned on its head. Laura may know herself well enough to kick out her terrible boyfriend and start living life, but making that hard choice has wounded her, leaving her a wreck. Surely the monster in her closet, the one that’s so scared of the outside world and so eager to please her, surely this monster won’t hurt her like that boyfriend did. Even if it did, she’s smart enough not to make the same choice twice, right?
As a wedding gift, he found her a set of teeth so white they threw the honeymoon sun back at the sky. He joked that if she wanted his attention she should smile, like a lighthouse, and he’d catch the flash. She bared her teeth in the Hawaii sun, pretending to blind him.
Creepy, fleshy, and strange, The Bethmoer Baby by Kyle Piscioniere is a piece that reimagines the shapeshifter as a creature of the modern world. Piscioniere pushes this imagined creature one step further by asking not just how these creatures would exist now, but also, horrifically, how they would reproduce. The result is a wonderfully weird narrative that plays with body parts the way some stories play with emotions.
So, all right then: What was it like to be transformed into what I am now? I’ll tell you. It was like a sundering. A splitting. Icy lightning cleaved along my limbs.
With inspiration from Margaret Atwood’s Siren Song, Emily Mitchel’s Thread reframes a notorious Greek myth as a monster story. Her narrator faces the reader head-on, daring them to name her as she tells them her tale, revealing herself to be the bloodthirsty monster she denied being at the beginning of her story. You aren’t left wondering who she is or how she’ll eat you, the only question to ask is how long you have left.
The lake had always been there—as was the nature of lakes—but that spring, it began to move. It crept forward at night, stretching dark tentacles toward the village. People whispered that it had changed color, more green now than blue, more black even than green.
Vodník by Melissa Brasher is a classic monster tale with a Slavic twist, complete with a haunted village, a monstrous lair, and a damsel in distress. Brasher’s clear, beautiful descriptions bring something special to the tried-and-true narrative, building tension around the strange creature at the heart of this story, and bringing a genuine tragedy to its fast-paced, thrilling conclusion.
Claire van Doren holds degrees in English literature and journalism as well as a certificate in LGBTQ+ studies from Arizona State University. She is a volunteer reader for Uncharted magazine, a publisher of genre fiction. Her writing has been published by Inner Worlds, Zocalo Public Square, and ASU News.
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