When PW checked in with two authors whose forthcoming books feature monster-hunting protagonists, each cited what in retrospect seems an obvious antecedent: Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick.
“So much about American life and American culture feels like a monster hunt: the mythical American dream, this perception of the city on the hill—both are in pursuit of something unattainable,” says Sheldon Costa, debut author of The Great Work (Quirk, Nov.). “The easy reference is Moby-Dick. I love Moby-Dick. Regardless of how you feel about Moby-Dick as a ‘big important American book,’ it’s also a monster-hunting book.”
In Costa’s novel, which received a starred review from PW, Gentle Montgomery and his nephew Kitt dodge the law, doomsday cults, and other hunters as they chase a giant salamander that’s terrorizing frontier towns in the 19th-century Pacific Northwest. Gentle believes the salamander, which causes surreal nightmares that drive people mad, is responsible for the death of his best friend, Liam, and that its blood is an alchemical ingredient that Gentle can use to bring Liam back from the dead.
The monster hunt, Costa says, “is the perfect vehicle for digging at deeply American themes, especially violence and this perception of the natural world as dangerous and something that needs to be conquered.”
The Works of Vermin by Hiron Ennes (Tor, Oct.) finds protagonist Guy Moulène willing to take on any job to keep his beloved sister out of debt. He joins the ranks of exterminators charged with ridding Tiliard, a city carved into an ancient tree stump, of all manner of terrible pests. His latest quarry: an enormous centipede that’s eating its way through Tiliard’s artworks—a particularly destructive act in a city where, Ennes explains, “artistic movements are basically substitutes for political parties.”
That’s not the book’s only metaphor. “Debt is like a very hungry organism,” Ennes says. “It’ll eat away at you. It will follow you. It will prove itself very, very difficult to shake off. Debt can be a very daunting hunter. Guy is chasing one monster to get away from another monster and in doing so, ends up in a den full of all sorts of different monsters, and not just the insectile kind.”
Like Costa, Ennes draws a through line from Melville to contemporary horror. “Good monster stories don’t really end with the monster. From Moby-Dick all the way to The Works of Vermin, the monster is either a stand-in for something, or you’re as hunted by the monster as you’re the one hunting the monster.”
