Six Degrees of Beowulf

Nobody knows who first made up the Beowulf story, or where or when. Coulda been a pagan Scandinavian in the year 500, or a Christian Saxon poet half a millennia later. The scholars are divided and confounded, the only "source material" for this epic poem being a damaged manuscript about a thousand years old. But I can tell you why Beowulf exists: because monsters are awesome. Grendel is awesome. According to our... mystery poet, Grendel is a "wrecker of mead-benchesa powerful demon, a prowler through the dark" who storms the countryside making midnight snacks of the mightiest Danish warriors. Monsters, as opposed to villains, are rarely burdened by complicated motivations. They attack because they're hungry, mean or jealous; they bubble with hate and boil with evil just because. Grendel is said to nurse a "hard grievance" against humanity, but the text so spellbindingly translated by Seamus Heaney doesn't expand on this. Because, bottom line, he's a big scary monster and that's good enough. Anyway, yeah, along comes Beowulf, from across the sea in Geatland, a man as accomplished in the art of foe-smiting as he is in bragging about it. Spoiler alert: He dispatches with Grendel handily. As is often the case for monster-smiters, the foes keep lining up for beatdowns; after Grendel, there's Grendel's mom and a fire-dragon (and, via flashback, some kinda sea beastie). And where modern readers might expect that massive ego to be his undoing, Beowulf is a straight-up force of good pitted against no-bullshit forces of evil, and never misses an opportunity to tear them limb from limb with his bare hands. Monster-killers? Pretty awesome, too.

He's a Harvard legacy who wrote speeches for Lyndon Johnson. His grandpa co-founded the famed litnerd coven, the Algonquin Round Table. His dad wrote children's books, and humor pieces for the New Yorker. So how the hell did Peter Benchley end up writing a classic slab of horror-pulp like Jaws? Who knows, but it's likely the effectiveness and enduringness of the book not to mention the namesake movie with which it shares... a narrative skeleton, if not the psycho-thriller meat can be attributed a little bit to writing chops, and a lot to how scary and vicious great white sharks are. Like Grendel, Jaws (yes, I'm pretending this is a title-shark) strikes without warning. One minute you're enjoying a drunken skinny dip off some quaint beach in Amity (or a frosty flagon at the mead hall), and the next you're a stickpile of severed limbs and a fountain of blood. Your last thought is something along the lines of "wtf omg those are huge teeth." Of course, Benchley scores extra scarepoints by choosing an actual real monster that, in your more paranoid moments, you will think about before deciding whether or not to go back in the water. They say there's like a one in a million chance that a great white shark will attack you. Yeah. Tell that to poor Chrissy Watkins. Oh, wait, you can't. Jaws ate her.

I'd like to think the "powerful demon" at the center of Scott Smith's even pulpier horror novel looks over at Jaws and Grendel like "whatevs, who has the energy for all that?" Don't think it's a spoiler to say that The Ruins is about a people-eating plant that lives in a Mexican jungle and waits for the next gaggle of too-stupid-to-live tourists to get within a vine's reach. Like many photosynthesis-inclined monsters,... it gets by not through hunting and gathering, but the low-impact "FEED ME SEYMOUR" approach. Smith ups the tension in the humans-v.-monster dynamic by never leaving the victims' POV. We have no idea where The Plant came from, or why it's doing what it's doing, or how, or anything. All we know is our mostly clueless protagonist backpackers are suddenly, day after day after day, trapped and fighting for their lives. Uh, unless one of you kids has a Beowulf in your family tree, you are probably screwed.

Pennywise is, certainly, the scariest monster on our list, at least to our modern sensibilities. I'm sure Vikings wet their beds thinking about mead-bench-wreckers, but we are talking about A Clown That Lives In The Sewers And Eats Children here. You used to be a child. You probably pass a storm drain every day. You don't like clowns; nobody likes clowns. Of course, if It was just about clowns eating kids, one... would never make it through the 44-plus hours audiobook (because one would be in a padded cell). Nope, Stephen King a man known for his gigantic horror epics really outdid himself with this one, creating a monster that can take on many non-clown forms, too: a werewolf, a spider, a whole town full of cruel bigots. It's really thorough. And yet, we see hints of Grendel in Pennywise, and glimmers of Beowulf in the small pack of dorky kids (and later, their dorky adult selves) pitted against him. This is a classic, if utterly complicated and unpredictable, story of good standing up to evil. More surprising are the parts of It that strongly resemble King's monster-free Stand By Me: the nostalgia, the outcast kids, the ever-present bully issues. But those are only the things you think about between Clown Attacks.

Okay, everybody settle down. Not all monsters are scary. The ones in Dave Eggers's "all ages" novel adapted from Spike Jonze's movie of the same name, and Maurice Sendak's classic children's book Where The Wild Things Are do have a history of eating people, but they're usually pretty funny about it. Plus: Not a drop of blood in the whole book. But don't mistake the Wild Things for good guys; they spend... most of their time creating chaos for their new king, the young Max (a human boy with a similar predilection for misbehavior). Like Jaws in the ocean and Pennywise in the sewer, these monsters live just outside the confines of civilized society, and yet Max feels more than a little kinship with them. Is it because he created them with his own imagination? Does that make them less dangerous than a "naturally" occurring fiend?

Our journey ends here with the only monster nursing a legitimate "hard grievance" against humanity, and one human in particular. The "demon" at the center of Mary Shelley's classic gothic novel did not ask to be born into a world in which he has no natural place. I'm not saying it's cool to run around murdering everybody who calls you ugly especially when you are, really but if you wanna wring your... dad Dr. Frankenstein's cowardly neck, be my guest. Over the years, the power and particulars of the original tale have been corrupted by movies and Halloween decorations, so it may surprise you to discover just how human Shelley's monster is. He speaks like a heavy hearted poet; he teaches himself to read Plutarch and Goethe; damn if he isn't a vegetarian to boot. And, for a monster, he's fairly reasonable, promising the dirty doctor that he'll stop killing his friends and family once he's provided with a similarly hideous monster girlfriend. He lays out the terms in eloquent badassery: "If you will comply with my conditions, I will leave them and you at peace. But if you refuse, I will glut the maw of death, until it be satiated with the blood of your remaining friends." Grendel, were he capable, would be proud.