There aren't many things you can do that'll have me instantly piffing your book to the other side of the room. Sure, if your book violates multiple 'Good Writing' rules, like introducing twelve narrators in the first hundred pages, having an ancient species evolve under a blue hypergiant that still exists, and failing to grasp the basic process of stellar formation, I'll plonk your book down unfinished in my 'don't bother' pile, and pick up the next.

The 'next' will not likely be a book by you. You're in literary-Azkaban, unless you've previously proven yourself of good standing.

But I do like to give a book a chance. A clumsy line here and there, a plot hole, a character whose motive's a little contrived, or some worldbuilding that went a bit askew with the laws of physics - I can forgive these. We're all friends here. But I do have pet hates. And of them, the unimaginable monster is one of the worst.

I suspect Lovecraft started it. I've certainly read it in almost every wanna-be-Lovecraft horror piece I've come across. You probably have, too. It's the point where the creepy, terrifying climax is crescendoing, and the hero (or victim) is finally confronted by the source of the horror, the terrible thing that will doom and consume him. And he turns, and gazes upon...

... " a creature so terrible, it was beyond man's imagining".

Or, " a monster so horrifying he was unable to imagine it".

Ugh. Booooored now.

The blank wall

The problem with this is so simple. When we read, we use our imagination. We picture the story, we internally hear the sounds and smell the smells. We're living in our heads, using the words to prompt our minds.

So when you tell your readers nothing except that a monster defies imagination, then they have nothing to imagine. Their brain is a big blank grey slate where the monster is concerned. Oddly enough, this is not scary. It's not anything, except a big neon sign reminding the reader that This Stuff Isn't Actually Happening. Because there's a thing, and I have no idea what it looks like. If i was there, I could see it. I could look, and see tentacles or armour plating or teeth and be appropriately horrified. In fact, what it does is rip your reader immediately and irrevocably out of the story - because you've told them that this bit, this crucial bit here, they're not allowed to see. You've reminded them that they're only imagining this, that it's only a story.

In my opinion, this comes from two problems. Well, one, really, because the second problem is due to the first one, which is that - these writers don't understand how horror works.

Horror is not monsters

I read a book of horror shorts many, many years ago. In one of them, a group of Bad People were trying to coerce the Hero to tell them Stuff. They Hero refused, so they brought forward the Hero's Girlfriend, a rat and a copper bowl. Those of you who've been around will know what the intent was, but I was young and naive.

The story proceeded to spend a good number of pages hiking up the tension. The girl was chained to some posts, the Bad People threatened, but they refused to say what it was they were going to do. The Hero, also unaware of what the rat and bowl implied, refused to tell. And the tension was unbearable as you realised that, whatever this terrible thing was, they really were going to do it to the girl.

And then the story completely fell apart. They did it. There was a gruesome and rather anatomically-impossible description of the torture, and the Hero escaped and killed the Bad People, but of course the girl is dead before he gets to her because we can't have a happy ending in horror.

The mistake the writer made (besides apparently misunderstanding basic human anatomy) was that they thought the horror was in the girl's death, in the gruesome aftermath of the rat and the bowl. But it wasn't - the horror was in the fear of the unknown terror, of knowing that some kind of unspeakable agonising bodily harm was being threatened, and not knowing what it was. Once it was obvious what was going to happen, we detached all interest from the girl and yawned our way to the end.

Horror is about our internal fears - the unknown, the what-might-happen. It's about letting the reader's imagination do the work, because it's far more powerful than any words you can put on the page. If we extrapolate this to monsters, we can see that the monster itself is not the thing we're frightened of. It's what might happen to us because of it. Where it came from, what the consequences are. The monster, in and of itself, is not scary. It's what the monster might mean for our future - what we're frightened it will do to us - that is.

The main problem these horror writers have is that they make the horror-crux (pun unintended) of their stories the monster itself, instead of the unknown consequences. The place the physical horror ahead of the psychological horror. But physical horror isn't horror at all without a psychological base.

How do I make it scary enough?

Does it have tentacles? Slime? Teeth? Is it only five-foot-three with silky chocolate skin but a smile that makes you want to scrub your eyeballs out?

Here lies the second problem - if your monster is the horror-climax of your story, how is it ever going to be scary enough? No amount of tentacles and teeth will ever make it feel real, feel terrifying enough. The reader will always be aware they're reading a description, and unless you start giving anatomical references and drawings (rarely appropriate), it's probably going to take far more text than the pacing allows to give them an accurate vision.

The inexperienced writer, instead of realising that the problem is with the focus of their story, decides instead it's with the description of the monster. They just can't write a scary enough one. Well, there's an easy solution to that, isn't there? I'll tell you it's so scary, your mind can't even comprehend it! That means the reader will just imagine the scariest thing they can, right?

No. The reader will only imagine what you lead them to imagine. If you give them nothing, they'll imagine nothing.

The unimaginable monster comes from a writer who is scared they can't write a good enough monster. It comes from misunderstanding what horror is all about. It's not about schlepping blood and guts all over the joint - writing very rarely does gratuitous violence well. Writing horror is a delicate psychological balance, and requires a healthy dose of insight into what people really fear, not a mix-and-match anatomical reference book.

if you want to write horror well, take a good look and what it is that scares you. I promise you, when you really look, it's not going to be a six-foot-tall-tentacled-teeth-machine.

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