How I chose to write a monster romance for my debut novel is proof of this.
Determining if I was a musician or a writer first is my personal chicken-or-egg question. As a child, I had an expansive imagination: a gravel pile at the farm could be a cliff one day, a fortress the next. The woods behind my backyard’s fence could lead me anywhere, and the neighborhood pool offered countless opportunities for a little girl to imagine herself a magnificent mermaid. Equally formative to my development was the chokehold music had on me, and no other film captivated my rapidly forming mind than Disney’s Fantasia. The arrays of color and flashes of light on the screen to the strains of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor both soothed and excited me, while the Greco-Roman artistic narrative (which I have since recognized as deeply problematic) set against Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6 planted the seeds for my ever-present fascination with mythology.
There was, however, one section of the film my parents did not permit me to view. And for me, like for many young children, that which was forbidden was the most tantalizing.
For the final number, the creators chose Modest Mussorgsky’s tone poem, Night on Bald Mountain, which then transitions into Franz Schubert’s Ave Maria. Using descriptions the composer wrote on the original score, the animators developed a sequence of images to portray a Witch’s Sabbath hosted by Chernabog, an enormous, winged creature residing at the mountain’s summit. Imposing, sharp-toothed, golden-eyed, and wielding immense power, the figure orchestrates the festivities before casting his ghastly guests to oblivion. Both the music and animation seem at once both chaotic and orderly, which is why to this day that section of the film is embedded in my psyche.
In midyear 2021, a group of writers decided to support each other in their self-publishing journeys, brought together by their love of monster romance. Seeing this as the kick-in-the-pants to reacquaint myself with that winged creature on the mountain, I asked to join them; I remain eternally grateful for their kindness in welcoming me to their audacious project. Thanks to my husband’s patience and willingness to serve as my storyboard draftsman, I rewatched the sequence and relistened to Night on Bald Mountain numerous times, searching for the precise words to capture what it is that keeps it engraved in my memory.
How could I make this terrifying, fascinating creature a romance hero? Like any passably decent writer born under a Virgo sun and armed with a graduate degree, I dove into research.
The Disney character Chernabog is inspired by the Slavic god of ill fate, known in Latin as Zcerneboch. Mining my lifelong appreciation for mythology, I scoured JSTORR for any scrap of material on the origins of Zcerneboch and the other figures of the Slavic pantheon, using those nuggets of information as starting points. After organizing them into a cohesive list, I turned my attention to the kind of figure who would be a god with wings yet choose to exist in solitude atop a mountain. When one has freedom of movement and the blessing of immortality, why would one remain in one place?
Taking another common element of mythological stories dealing with fate, as many do, I chose for this hero to be cursed, specifically to be imprisoned in his cavern hold.
And what better way to make this frightening god a hero than to craft him in such a way as to make him hopelessly devoted to his heroine’s comfort and safety? Couple that with a virginal naiveté and, to me at least, the nightmarish monster on the mountain morphed into a sweet, vulnerable figure who needs as much care as any of us.
It would only be later, in the depths of the editing process, that much as I tried to keep the collective trauma of the COVID-19 pandemic at bay, I was incapable of doing so. The exposition for Diana, Zerne’s heroine, was inspired by a story I read in The Washington Post about a woman who owned her own software company walking away from it because after three days of managing their children’s educational progress at school, her husband couldn’t do it anymore. Incensed by this, I knew I needed to craft a story about a woman accepting a hero’s care for her, both body and soul.
Why, then, in the wake of the pandemic, did many readers and writers find comfort, joy, and excitement in exploring monster romance? Through the lens of Jentch’s and Freud’s exploration of the uncanny, monsters represent the familiar combined with the novel, personifying our fears mixed with our fascinations. When grappling with a terror that cannot be seen and its end not known, it stands to reason we would seek a romantic character who could threaten us yet chooses to not do so. Instead of running away in fright, the characters run toward each other, finding solace in one another’s arms (or tentacles, and perhaps a tail or two).
Go on, then. Put on some creepy music (might I suggest Danse Macabre) and give monster romance a try. The monsters won’t bite too terribly hard…I promise.
Ill-Fated Mate: A Steamy Monster Romance is available from Amazon.
Read an excerpt from Ill-Fated Mate here.