WHy I Write about monsters

I stopped sleeping well when I was eight. 

Gone were the nights when I could drift off peacefully, dream of unicorns or ponies, and wake ready to embrace the adventure the next day held. 

In its place was a tightness in my chest. A whisper of awareness that hummed just beneath the skin. One part of my brain sinking into sleep while the other lit a torch and stared unblinking into the dark of night, waiting. 

Waiting to hear the tiny metallic click of a doorknob opening. The soft scrape of a footstep on the carpet. The heavy breathing just above me as my monster approached.

The fact that he only visited my house or we visited his once every six weeks or so didn’t change the fact that something within me had irrevocably shifted. I was prey, and I knew it. Even when the predator was miles away, my ears strained for proof that I was, indeed, safe for the night.

I was the last child in my first grade class to learn how to read, but once I grasped the concept, nothing could stop me. I read with a voracious hunger that continuously shocked and delighted the adults in my life. My mother, an avid reader herself, took us to the public library every Tuesday where I checked out my limit of 20 books. By the following Tuesday, I’d read them all, and had even read a few of them twice.

When I was nine, I discovered books with monsters in their pages. The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe was my first taste of an alternate world where a true villain lurked, evil and dangerous, and where the cost of defeating that villain was high.

It was like taking my first breath of air in months.

I knew what it was like to have a powerful villain wreak havoc on my life, and in those pages, I imagined that I, too, could find the courage and the weapon necessary to free myself from my monster’s claws.

By the time I was in fourth grade, I’d faded into a shadow of my former self. I was withdrawn, unable to maintain conversations with peers at school. I spent long hours in my room, disappearing into the pages of my beloved books.

Fairy tales. Fantasy stories. Anything I could find where good and evil were spelled out in black and white. Where victory belonged to those who stood up to evil and where villains received the terrible justice they so richly deserved.

Partially into my fourth grade year, my teacher announced a reading competition. He reserved the upper half of one classroom wall for a race to see who could read the most pages that quarter. Each student’s name was listed in alphabetical order, and as they turned in detailed book reports, he added to the thin strip of colorful construction paper in front of their name, an inch per chunk of 25 pages, creating a visual of how much each of us had read so far.

By the end of the quarter, my line wrapped around the entire classroom. I won a personal pan pizza from Pizza Hut.

That was the year I discovered Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. I devoured the Hobbit first and then all three books in the LOTR series. Much of the allegory and depth in the stories went over my head, but that didn’t matter.

What mattered was that I’d come home. Here was a land where monsters roamed. Where danger didn’t just lurk in the corners--it actively stalked the innocent hero, who hadn’t asked for trouble, but was in the middle of it all the same. Here, evil wore several faces, power over innocents corrupted those of weak character, and the fight to defeat the monsters left lasting scars, grief, and a bone-deep weariness that matched my own.

When Frodo and Sam finally fought their way into Mordor and threw the ring into the fire, a thrill of purpose lit within me and flickered bravely.

I could find a way to get away from my monster, too. I had no idea where to start. Nobody in the 80’s had open conversations about the things I was facing. But like Frodo, I figured I needed outside help. He’d had Gandalf on his side. I needed someone who’d faced hardship and understood darkness and who was old enough to have advice that could guide me, too.

With this plan in mind, I decided to write a letter. (Hiii, it was the 80’s. We did things like this all the time.) I’d recently read a biography of Joni Erickson Tada, who’d become quadriplegic at the age of 18 and who’d found a way to overcome depression and obstacles to embrace a life of joy and artistic abundance as a painter who held the paintbrush in her mouth. She’d listed a correspondence address in the back of the book. 

I sent my letter, figuring I would get some encouragement or guidance to help me understand how to have friends again (all of mine were long gone, a consequence of my inability to live anywhere outside my head). Maybe, she’d even have an idea for how to manage the needs of my monster without it continuing to crush me.

Weeks later, a whirlwind struck our life. Police had been called. My parents were notified of what was happening to me. A court date was set. In the end, I was freed from my monster, and we moved to another state.

I get asked sometimes why every fantasy I write ends up having monsters within its pages. Sometimes those monsters are terrifying creatures, like the wraith in The Blood Spell who feeds on the blood of children to gain the power it craves. Sometimes those monsters are people trying to mask their true nature, like Queen Irina in The Shadow Queen, whose delicate beauty hides a woman who would sacrifice anyone, even those who love her, for the power she thinks should be hers. Sometimes, as in Rise of the Vicious Princess, both the monsters and the people are dangerous.

I write monsters because they exist in our real lives. Because while some of my readers will simply find them entertaining, others will draw their first full breath of air in months and whisper, “I know what that feels like.” Because some people desperately need to see true evil acknowledged while also seeing how wounded, flawed people find the courage to face their fears and rise up against that evil. 

I write monsters because I’m creating a roadmap toward hope.