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BEVAN THOMAS

~ Writer, editor, storyteller

BEVAN THOMAS

Category Archives: Monsters

Coping with Mental Health Issues: Frankenstein’s Monster

04 Saturday May 2019

Posted by Bevan Thomas in Mental Issues, Monsters

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depression, Frankenstein

“The fallen angel becomes a malignant devil. Yet even that enemy of God and man had friends and associates in his desolation; I am alone.” 
-Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

To honour Mental Health Month and my own struggles with anxiety and depression, I will be exploring various examples of characters with mental issues throughout literature and popular culture, starting with perhaps the most gut-wrenching: Frankenstein’s Monster.

Arguably the greatest horror novel ever written, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein produced the most compelling horror icon of all time. The Monster himself is terrifying — a huge and hideous product of an unnatural birth — but also someone who we feel such empathy for. It is telling that the two most iconic version of the story (the Mary Shelley novel and the James Whale movies with Boris Karloff) initially envisioned Dr. Frankenstein as being the protagonist and named the story after him, but most people think of the title as referring to the Monster rather than the scientist because the Monster is far more memorable, and it is he who feels like the real protagonist.

His suffering is anyone who has suffered from mental issues such as depression or anxiety can sympathize with. The Monster feels different, unnatural, wrong — he knows the population of the world is divided between himself and everyone else, that he has been made imperfectly, falsely. When I am at my darkest, I myself often feel like a “patchwork man,” a bunch of pieces that don’t seem to quite fit together, a soulless automaton rather than a real person.

When in the depths of depression, one feels unloved, incapable of being loved, which is the great curse of the Monster. He has been defaced by the Mark of Cain, though unlike Cain, it’s not a punishment for any crime he did. He is desperate for a place in the world, but cannot find it anywhere he goes. The more the Monster is rejected and persecuted, the more his hope is consumed by desolation and rage. Many people who experience mental issues feel intense frustration for who they are, that they are fighting against themselves, against pieces of their mind that don’t seem to quite fit together. The Monster knows why they don’t fit — because he was made improperly by a person who thought himself God.

Dr. Septimus Pretorius: Do you know who Henry Frankenstein is, who you are?
The Monster: Yes, I know… made me from dead… I love dead… hate living.
–Bride of Frankenstein

Speaking for myself, I have always found Karloff’s interpretation of the Monster to be even more compelling than the original. His treatment in James Whales’ Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein is one of the most emotionally intense performances in cinematic history. Perhaps it’s because the Monster here feels closer to me. He’s not just broken in body as Shelley’s Monster is, but broken in head.

Karloff’s Monster has a hard time understanding the world, a hard time communicating. He has impulses he cannot understand, which often take control of him (here derived from a murderer’s brain that he was cursed with). Shelley’s Monster is always very cognizant of all the damage he caused, coldly striking in vengeance against a humanity that rejected him, but Karloff’s Monster is confused. He drowns a girl under the mistaken belief that she’ll float as happily and prettily as the flowers that he and she were tossing into the water. He happily follows Dr. Pretorius when the mad scientist suggests that he can make a friend for the creature, and then howls in frustration and betrayal when that doesn’t happen. Karloff’s Monster was brought into the world unable to understand it, and remains baffled and pained by whatever’s going on. He is us as we try to claw our way through life, seeing other people who find it so much easier than we do. He is us living in a world that seems to be built for other people.

I have screamed at the sky, demanding the universe tell me why I was built this way, why my brain seem to respond to things differently from how other people do. Why does this storm of negative emotions seem to crash through my body? Why do I feel false, broken? The Monster knows why. Because his creator built him not knowing what exactly he was, then tossed him into the cold, leaving him unable to know how to cope with existence.

In a weird way, he fulfills a strange fantasy I’ve had — wouldn’t it feel nice to punish the God that made you such a broken person? Who decided that you should have a mental storm most other people don’t? Wouldn’t it feel good, just for a little bit — to drag that being down to the depths of depression that you regularly god? Of course, it wouldn’t make anything better. In the novel, the Monster tortures Frankenstein, murders everyone he loves, and then forces Frankenstein into a long and tortures death in the snows, and seeing the corpse just makes the Monster sob, makes him rant about how pitiful he is, and decide to burn himself to death with Frankenstein’s corpse at the North Pole. In Bride of Frankenstein, the Monster does the opposite, deciding that Frankenstein and his wife should go and live because he is “alive,” whereas the Monster and his bride are “dead…. We belong dead.” I feel that the Monster saving Frankenstein has less to do with any real forgiveness and more him wanting someone to remember him positively — to get some satisfaction as he kills himself.

The Monster: We belong dead. 
–Bride of Frankenstein

The horror of Frankenstein is not that we will be attacked by the Monster, but that deep down we are the Monster. That we are soulless automatons who have been “made wrong,” beings damaged and then discarded by our creator. We have bodies that don’t do what they’re supposed to, minds that don’t do what they’re supposed to, impulses that drive us mad, and there is no one else like us, and if there were, they would reject us too (as the Bride rejects the Monster), for who could truly care for us — even fellow freaks would try to be with normal people. We are, as Karloff’s monster succinctly said, “dead.”

If the Monster can be a metaphor for mental issues, that feeling of lonely brokenness that frequently haunts our brains, then what is it ultimately saying about those issues? It is how they can possess the person who feels them, take over their lives. How it leads to fear, to frustration, to rage. How it can make us lash out against those we blame for our pain. How in the end, when it takes us over, the person we most lash out against is ourselves.

Though certainly not the most empowering image of depression and mental issues, perhaps nothing better captures the isolation and imagery that it produces than Frankenstein. We are all Frankenstein’s Monster, but unlike the Monster, we cannot punish our creator. We can only hurt ourselves. At the end of both the novel and Bride of Frankenstein, the Monster commits suicide — either burning himself alive along with Frankenstein’s corpse in a funeral pyre or pulling a convenient switch in the lab to blow him to atoms. Are the stories saying that this is the only possible ending for those who feel dominated by mental issues?

The ultimate motivation for the suicide is desolate loneliness. The Monster feels no one cares about him, he is truly alone. However, we in the real world who deal with these issues are not alone ourselves. There are other people out there who suffer from similar issues, and we can reach out to each other. We can tell each other that we are not dead, we are not automatons, robots, or zombies. We are human, we are people. We are not broken. We are merely different. And we are not alone. Maybe often we with mental issues feel like we cannot save ourselves, but we can save others who are similarly touched — we can save them because we understand what they’re going through, because we can show them they are not alone. Unlike Frankenstein Monster, we are not alone.

Monster Alphabet is up and complete!

14 Sunday Jul 2013

Posted by Bevan Thomas in Link, Monsters

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artists, Cloudscape Comics, Monster Alphabet

Albora Monster Alphabet

Albora by Reetta Linjama

26 new monsters, one for every letter of the alphabet, each one drawn by a talented comic artist, and each one featuring a bestiary entry, a bio, written by me. Come down to the Monster Alphabet at Cloudscape and take a look; we’ve got everything from Albora to Zoq!

Monster Alphabet

03 Friday Aug 2012

Posted by Bevan Thomas in Event, Monsters

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challenge, Cloudscape, creatures, Monster Alphabet

I love monsters. I’ve always loved monsters. Whether they’re dinosaurs and sabre-tooth cats from our prehistory, dragons and griffins from myth, or vampires and werewolves from modern horror movies, monsters are so much fun. And one of the best things about these monsters is their bestiaries, the loving encyclopaedias created by medieval monks or modern eccentrics about all the creatures that used to exist or were believed to exist or were imagined to exist. All the beasts of never, creatures of myth, and legends of long ago.

Along with my love of monsters is my love of world-building and of collaborations, and thus we have the Monster Alphabet. Every week, I create a monster name for a particular letter of the alphabet (A, then B, then C….), and then talented comic artists sketch what they think that particular monster should look like, it gets posted on the Cloudscape website, people vote, a picture is chosen, and a write a description of the critter that matches that particular description. It’s a lot of fun.

So far, the monsters have been:

A is for Albora

The most exuberantly friendly animal you could imagine, except during the full moon….


B is for Babithy

Multiple bodies inhabited by a single mind, sent out to feed.


C is for Calillux

A giant gastropod that zealously protects all slugs and snails.


D is for Degyt

A massive territorial beast with a savage temper and hypnotic eyes.

Come and take a look!

Monster Name Game: Flumph

12 Friday Aug 2011

Posted by Bevan Thomas in Monsters

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Dungeons & Dragons, flumph, monster, Name Game, role-playing

Hey, I’m back with another Monster Name Game, where I take a picture and name of a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster and create a totally new monster from it. Because I love a challenge, I’ve decided to go with the flumph, a strange jelly-fish monster who was the only “Lawful Good” creature in the classic Fiend Folio book. The creature has long been derided by D&D fans, both for its strange appearance and for the incongruous alignment. What is so benevolent about these floating jellyfish? Do they rescue maidens? Heal the sick? Always pay their taxes on time? What good deeds do jellyfish perform?

So what direction could I go based on their appearance and their name, which sounds like it’s being spoken by someone with his mouth full of marshmallows? Just to make things extra difficult, how about I keep the “Lawful Good” alignment. Whatever kind of creature my flumph is, it’s benevolent.

Well, what do I think of when I see a bizarre tentacled creature with a peculiar name? Aliens. Now fantasy fiction is not generally big about visitors from another planet, but what about visitors from another universe? Some extraplanar entities who have phased into our reality for some special purpose. What if the flumph is like those benevolent “star-brother” aliens you often get in stories? The ones who show-up to deliver some message of peace to humanity or perhaps to supply use with knowledge that will improve our lot as a species. The flumph look so strange because they are inhabitants of a higher plane of existence, one where our heavy, clumsy bodies would not function. They’re not angels, not servants of a divine power, but simply a more self-aware kind of being than us who has watched us for a long time and sometimes given a helping tentacle. They almost treat us like we were their little siblings to be taught and protected, though they are aware that us mere four-dimensional beings often respond to the strange with fear and hate, so the flumph generally keep their appearance known to only a deserving few.

What’s interesting about them being extra-dimensional beings is that then their strange appearance and goofy name makes sense. Their universe is different from ours, and their views of what’s beautiful are different as well. To each other, the flumph appear handsome and heroic, and their species name is grand and noble. It shows the jarring contrast of the two universes that we have a hard time taking the flumph seriously.

“Do not be afraid, young one. We come in peace. We have much to teach you.”

Monster Name Game: Fairy Dragon

13 Wednesday Jul 2011

Posted by Bevan Thomas in Monsters

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dragon, Dungeons & Dragons, fairy, monster, Name Game, role-playing

There’s a game my brother Ian likes to play: he flips through some old role-playing book of monsters, randomly puts his finger on one of the creatures, and then invents a totally new being based only on the existing monster’s appearance and name.

Fairy Dragon

That’s fun. Let’s try it. Flipping through my Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st edition Monster Manual II, I come to the Faerie Dragon, a grinning little reptile who unlike other dragons has butterfly instead of bat wings. The normal D&D version is a precocious little pixy who bobs along some sylvan forest, playing magical pranks on any mortals who stumble through and breathing out a fog that knocks people into a euphoric stupor. Certainly that’s one way to interpret a dragon of the fay world, but right now I’d prefer to go a little darker.

Depending upon how you interpret the term, giants can be classified as fairies: they’re nonhuman beings, often with supernatural powers, who inhabit lands away from human civilization. And if so, then the greatest “fairy” dragon was Fafnir from Norse mythology, a giant who murdered his family for their treasure and then turned himself into a huge dragon to be better guard it. In some versions of the story, his transformation was on purpose, but in others it was that the treasure’s curse twisted his own greed and made him into a monster against his will.

So what if that’s a fairy dragon? An ancient fairy lord, some elf king or giant chief or satyr elder whose power, greed, and wickedness become so great that he degenerates into a ravenous monster. He still keeps court in his castle, but now his subjects have to contend with an impatient monster who will swallow them whole if displeased and who desires more and more: more food, more gold, more playthings.

Fafnir breathed fire, but for our fairy dragon, let’s pick something a little more unusual. Fairy powers are frequently illusions, so perhaps the fairy dragon breathes out a gas that causes hallucinations that dance before a person’s eyes so that they believe themselves to be beset by monsters and cannot tell friend from foe. A sadistic trickster, the fairy dragon giggles in glee as its enemies murder each other, each believing themselves to be defeating one of the dragon’s slaves.

The fairy dragon maintains all its power from before its transfiguration: the elf king’s magic, the giant chief’s strength, and as well is a master shape-shifter. It can change its size, become different creatures, even take on the fey form it had before it became a monster. Subtle and manipulative, the dragon often uses its shape-shifting to infiltrate groups, spreading discord and dividing its enemies. However, taking on such forms requires a lot of focus. The moment the monster’s concentration slips, such as when it loses its temper, it becomes a raging dragon again.

The fairy dragon looks more or less the same as how D&D depicted it, except much bigger. Its smile, while originally gentle, is now mocking and sardonic, while its butterfly wings create a hypnotic whirring as it flies through the sky. People look up and can’t take their gaze off the wings’ patterns as the creature descends upon them.

Beware of fairies who become dragons….

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