Dark Narratives March Issue

Boyish beasts, beastly boys -- a deep dive look at folks who love monsters

Hey creepies! Welcome to our second-ever edition of Dark Narratives, straight from the brain of T.L. Bodine. In this issue:

• A monthly horror news roundup featuring enamel pins, un-agented submissions and more!

• “Monsterfuckers vs Monster Boyfriends” - the internet’s obsession with sexy beast-men

• Are you a fan of The Midnight Pals, those funny tweets about horror authors gathered around a campfire? If so, you may be interested to know that the author has penned a comic book version of the witch-hunting manual, Malleus Maleficarum, and it looks awesome.

• If you love The Magnus Archives, you might want to go order one of these enamel pins designed by Greer Stothers (known for the very entertaining cat blog Pangur & Grim).

• Put this on your calendars: in June, Tor/Nightfire will briefly open its editorial window to un-agented submissions of adult horror novels and novellas.

• The charity publisher TL;DR Press is running a flash fiction contest with entries open through the end of March. Entrants will receive personalized feedback and a shot at a cash grand prize!

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In 2018, The Shape of Water won Best Picture and opened the floodgates for a conversation that had not, perhaps, been widely discussed in the open market of ideas: The idea that maybe the beast doesn’t have to turn into a prince to be loved, or that sex with a bona fide beast-man could be exciting, hot, and maybe even sweet.

Venom, released the same year, was a critical flop but a fandom darling, embraced by an internet subculture who delighted in the homoerotic overtones of the Symbiote relationship (to say nothing of the long prehensile tongue). And what about the sudden sexual interest in Pennywise after It: Chapter One in 2017? A casual stroll through social media sites like Tumblr, Reddit and even Twitter reveal a broad interest in monsters as romantic interests.

Quite suddenly, it seems, an interest or fetish that had previously existed only in quiet corners was pushing its way into the public eye by way of pop culture — and now “monsterfucker” has entered the modern parlance. But what’s the deal with these monstrous fascinations, really? And is wanting to bone the fish-man actually any different from Beauty and the Beast retellings of yore?

First, Let’s Get Our Terms Straight: What Qualifies as a Monster?

For the purposes of this discussion, we can define a monster with a few crucial traits:

• It may be human-shaped, but it must be clearly inhuman in appearance and/or demeanor.

• It must be more dangerous or powerful than a regular person.

• It must have human-like intelligence, being capable of some level of cunning, reason and capacity for consent — even if it doesn’t communicate in a human way.

In general terms, humans have been fascinated by monsters since prehistoric times, and we see instances of beastly bridegrooms and inhuman courtship popping up throughout folktales and myths in every culture — seductive kitsune in Japan, the ancient Greek minotaur, the shape-shifting selkie brides of the Scottish Isles. Humans have always been fascinated in the idea of an exotic “other,” perhaps as a symptom of our great loneliness. We are the last survivors of our evolutionary branch, and it’s hardly a surprise that we might tell stories wondering about a world where there were other creatures like us — discarded rough drafts created by gods, or surviving vestiges of evolutionary paths long assumed extinct.

Monsterfucking and Monster Boyfriends: A Convergent Evolution

Are you ready for my hot take?

I would argue that there are in fact two distinct groups with a predilection for monsters — and though their aesthetics may sometimes line up, their motives, tastes, identities and interests are actually quite different. Treating them as the same ignores the very real psychological underpinnings of each audience group and opens you up to a lot of white-hot discourse, hurt feelings, and reader dissatisfaction.

Also, despite the many think-pieces that rattled around the internet about sexy fish-folk, nobody seems to have really broached this distinction, and I daresay it’s time we fix that.

Monster Boyfriends

The monster boyfriend might also be called the demon lover. He is frequently older, sexually experienced, aggressive, dangerous and brooding. Some examples include:

• Jareth the Goblin King

• The Phantom of the Opera

• Pretty much every sexy vampire

• Inexplicable sexy Pennywise headcanons

• Sad-boy goth interpretations of Jeff the Killer

The monster boyfriend may or may not have physically monstrous features, but he frequently has inhuman appetites. Crucially, though, he does not harm the girl who falls for him. He may frighten her, intimidate her, or try to drive her away, but in the end she wins him over with her stalwart affections and uncovers his soft, vulnerable inner nature.

The monster boyfriend is a personification of masculinity. It’s rooted deep in hetero-normativity and fixed gender roles — the sexual fantasies of women who grew up under expectations of passivity, where the idea of sex as painful or frightening carries over from puberty. Once you push past his external defenses, you discover that the monster boyfriend will never hurt you — but he will use his beastly masculine traits to protect you, even to the point of tearing apart your enemies.

In this sense, the monster boyfriend is quite similar to those other romance staples — the billionaire and the bad boy. In any case, these stories provide a way (for women especially) to explore fear and attraction to (toxic) masculine traits in a controlled environment.

Monsterfuckers

Known variously as exophiles, teratos, teratophiles or just plain “monsterfuckers,” there exists an alternative group who are interested in monsters for other reasons. The object of affection for this group often has quite different characteristics:

• Often elicits more of an “awww!” response (sympathy vs fear) - whether the creature is conventionally cute or not, it’s frequently a woobie

• May be incredibly inhuman, to the point it’s hard to imagine how sex with them would even work (patch of sentient haze, angelic clusters of eyes and wings)

• Usually act inhuman in obvious ways, requiring accommodations to make any sort of relationship work

• May or may not be physically or sexually aggressive

More often than not, the people in this camp are themselves members of an “othered” group or identity — queer, neurodivergent, disabled, perhaps all of the above. For many, sexy monster stories are a reassurance that they, too, can be loved and desired despite whatever “inhuman abnormalities” they may have. Fantasies about monsters kitted out with fangs and claws can form a protective armor and sense of empowerment for people traditionally victimized by society.

With this in mind, I’d argue that The Shape of Water falls firmly into this camp, which may be why so many feminist critics failed so spectacularly to understand the movie. Instead of a story about a beast who can be tamed by a woman, it’s a story about a creature who forges a genuine connection with a misfit.

If monster boyfriends share their closest literary kinfolk with billionaires and badboys, I’d posit that the monsterfuckers have the most in common with furries, body horror fans and transhumanist cyberpunks. In any case, theirs is an issue of identity, self-modification, and often struggles with navigating a body (and sexuality) that is weird, alien, even traitorous.

For many queer people, sex is highly personalized — not just in emotional terms, but in physical. Moving away from heteronormative sexual roles and anatomical line-ups means sorting out the rules on an individual basis, exploring different ways to derive pleasure from an assortment of hardware options. Bodies are weird, sex is weird, being human is intensely weird. Why not fantasize about throwing some fish-monster or tentacle creature into the mix? It’s not much weirder than anything else.

Thank you for reading!

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