Short and Odd

Been busy getting my novel ready for prime time... got distracted.  Okay, I have no excuse.

Readings in the Genre - Week 11 – Human Remains

“Human Remains” is a story that is rather bizarre amongst those we’ve read this year in my opinion.  For one thing, we’re given a protagonist that is so far outside of many people’s comfort zone we’re already at odds with the story in some ways.  Gavin is a male prostitute, and this is not a comedy.  Those two facts make for a rather strange setup, and the creature’s design just makes it even weirder.

We have a creature that seems to be an amorphous combination of many different concepts, it seems to be a doppelganger (one who assumes the form of another and replaces it in some traditions, in other traditions a mythical person that’s basically an evil twin), a mimic (able to change shape and appearance of others), and a construct (the ugh factor of incorporating the human remains of previous victims into its body).

At this point I think I’ll turn back toward what will most likely be the crux of my final paper for the class since it’s a theme that has appeared again and again at various points in the novel, the idea that we become or that we are the monster.  The subtle transition of Gavin into the creature coupled with its consumptive nature reminds me a bit of the werewolf and the Alien monsters from both the Thing and Alien.  We are once again seeing a replacement story, where a monster replaces a normal person and then causes death… mayhem… chaos… and destruction.

It’s getting to be a bit repetitive but at this point I’ve got to call it what it most likely is, a convention of the genre.