A Monster With a Badge

Comic writer and novelist M.R. Carey, author of our Book Club book of the week The Girl With All The Gifts, explains why he thinks the scariest kind of evil is the kind that comes from inside.

I was thinking about monsters the other day, in my own work and other people’s work, and I had a Godzilla-sized epiphany. Actually the trigger wasn’t anything I’ve written, it was a novel by a respected and beloved author – beloved by me, as much as anyone – that I’d been meaning to read for ages. But I was about a third of the way in when I hit a reef.

Anyone who hates hypocrisy should look away right now, because what I’m about to say is going to sound pretty outrageous from someone who wrote the comic series Lucifer for seven years. But it’s this: I really, really don’t like stories that have the devil in them. Well, not so much stories that have the devil as a character, but stories that have the devil as the ultimate source of all evil.

My Lucifer – who was Neil Gaiman’s Lucifer with a little bit of John Milton’s and William Blake’s – really had very little to do with human evil, while admittedly being a nasty piece of work in his own right. He didn’t believe anyone could own someone else’s soul, and he had no interest at all in collecting them.

Which is fine by me. And more to the point, I think it’s fine for the story. Whereas having the big bad in your novel either be the devil himself or draw his power from the devil seems to me like sailing into really troubled waters.

If your monster is the devil, then he’s up against God and he’s going to lose because that’s how it works. You can’t beat the house when the house is the one that has many mansions.

If your monster is the devil’s disciple then he or she is a monster with a badge – appointed and empowered by a bigger evil outside himself or herself. I think the crucial word there is “outside”. You’ve either got a monster who’s succumbed to that external power, that external temptation, or one who’s made an alliance with it and pretty much has to be the weaker partner. In which case we’re looking over their heads at the real big bad, and behind that big bad there’s God who’s a lot bigger again. So we’re still playing in a rigged game where the good guys have to win.

But even if God looks the other way, as he does in some extreme versions of monotheism, and doesn’t intervene when the bad guys get the upper hand, I’m still not enthused. Who’s interested, at the end of the day, in an evil that drops into your head like a coin into a slot machine? An evil that chooses you, changes you, equips you, appoints you as its agent? Well, probably lots of people when you put it like that, but not me. No.

I’ll tell you how I like my evil: endogenous. Growing inside you and working away at you until it erupts like a boil or an improvised explosive device or a tactical nuke (depending on the scale of your canvas). It seems to me that that’s more like our actual experience of evil, our day-to-day encounters with monsters, and has more to tell us about the potential for evil in ourselves.

Let me give you two examples, if the boil analogy didn’t already shake you off.

The first is Charlie Manx, the quasi-vampire with the magic Rolls Royce in Joe Hill’s masterful horror novel NOS4R2 (NOS4A2 for readers in the US, because you say tom-ay-to). Manx is authentically terrifying for a whole lot of reasons, but one of them is that he believes he’s good. He doesn’t see himself as abducting children and turning them into feral sadists – he sees himself as protecting them from the tides and tribulations of the world. The kids in Christmasland never grow up, and they’ve had their consciences excised by the baleful effects of the Wraith. Which, in Manx’s eyes, means that they never have to suffer and never lose their innocence. He’s made himself the hero of his own story, which is what evil people do.

Another monster I have a lot of time for is the one created by Victor Frankenstein in Mary Shelley’s masterpiece. Where Charlie Manx sees himself as an innocent, Frankenstein’s creation really is an innocent – a child abandoned by his father and left to make his own way in the world. The evil that he does ultimately comes from this parental dereliction, from Victor’s failure to take on the duty of care he owes to this being he has brought into the world.

And yes, this is an allegory – both of real parental responsibility and of the relationship between the powerful and the powerless in the world we know.

When I was writing The Girl With All the Gifts, I had Frankenstein right at the forefront of my mind. Melanie isn’t created by the people around her in a literal sense, but like all children she’s utterly dependent on adults for what she knows about the world and her own place in it. Where the Frankenstein comparison comes in is that the adults around Melanie, like Victor Frankenstein, have all bottled it. They’ve either lied to her about her own nature or just evaded the subject, and they’ve given her a view of the world that’s big on irrelevant factoids and vague on the all-important details.

So if she’s monstrous at all, she’s conditionally monstrous. She doesn’t understand the danger she represents to the people around her because nobody – not even her precious Miss Justineau – has ever told her the truth. There’s a scene late on in the novel where Sergeant Parks argues with Melanie about the disposal of a body. Melanie starts to talk about how you honour a fallen soldier, using terms she’s picked up from the story of the Trojan War. Parks is horrified: he suddenly realises that Melanie’s knowledge of the world outside the base is effectively nil. Her education has been one long string of nonsense, and that the people who profess to care about her have let her down the most.

“His stomach lurches. He has a sense, for the first time in his soldiering career, of what a war crime might look like from the inside.”

But of course the character in the novel who comes closest to being a monster in the sense we’ve been discussing is Caroline Caldwell – a woman of science and erudition whose stated and sincere goal is to find a cure for a plague that has decimated humanity. Again, like Manx, Caldwell would be outraged to hear herself described as evil. What she does, she does for the survival of humanity, and in her mind that’s justification enough for anything.

“If the road to knowledge was paved with dead children – which at some times and in some places it has been – she’d still walk it and absolve herself afterwards. What other choice would she have? Everything she values is at the end of that road.”

This is why I’m not interested in monsters who get their power and their mission statement from the devil. I don’t actually know any of those monsters. But if I look around me on a clear day I can see all kinds of people who either do bad things without thinking about them at all or do bad things and forgive themselves because they’ve come up with a narrative where the bad things are good.

A monster with a badge? An agent of Hell, the way Nick Fury is an agent of SHIELD? That’s not a scary thing to see. The really scary monsters are just like you and me, and they wouldn’t have any truck with Satan. They’re pretty near certain they’re the good guys.

M.R. Carey, for Waterstones.com/blog