Monster Hunting: Monsters Bite Back by Ian Mark
Ian Mark is the author of two books featuring Jack, Nancy and Stoop. They are monster hunters and a funny trio that are sure to make readers laugh as they encounter various monsters and situations. Ian has written a superb blog for us about his stories.
Folk tales can be read purely for pleasure. They can be studied as historical curiosities.
The best thing about them for authors, of course, is that they can also be mined endlessly as material for stories.
I don’t even know if the series which began with Monster Hunting For Beginners, and now continues with Monster Hunting: Monsters Bite Back, would exist at all if it hadn’t been for a particular collection of such tales and legends that I had as a child.
That was Katherine Briggs’ A Dictionary Of Fairies, first published in 1976, when I was around the same age as the children for whom my own books are now written.
I don’t know how I got hold of a copy. I don’t remember being given or buying it. It was just always there. All I know is that it was an A-Z of strange creatures and legends, and it sat on my bedside table for years. I dipped in and out of it constantly, and one day all those fragments of folklore and arcana and monsterology just came together and suddenly there was Jack and Stoop and Nancy, the trio of monster hunters whose adventures the series tells. (Or rather Jack, the narrator, does).
In the latest book, Monster Hunting: Monsters Bite Back, Jack is summoned to mysterious Muckle Abbey in Scotland to deal with an outbreak of Lubbers. These mischievous little creatures happen to be the very first entry in A Dictionary Of Fairies, where they are described as the spirits of monks who have given themselves up to “drunkenness, gluttony and lasciviousness”.
As you do.
Whilst in Scotland, Jack also has an encounter with a Noggle.
Noggle is the name given in the Shetland Islands to the kelpie, or fairy horse, who carries unsuspecting travellers who climb onto its back into the sea to drown and devour them. I learned about Noggles in the very same book.
Plenty of other creatures in the book are completely made up, such as Fog Goblins, Malarkeys and Collywobbles; but even the most outlandish creatures which I think I’ve invented are ultimately just constructed from bits and pieces of legends picked up along the way.
Sometimes all it takes to spark off the process of invention is an intriguing name.
Katherine Briggs writes about a creature called “The Boneless”, which is described as a sort of shapeless monster also known as a Frittening whose chief function was to scare children. A policeman in Somerset once encountered such a creature whilst cycling along the road between Minehead and Bridgewater. It rolled over him and his bicycle “like a cloud or a wet sheep” which “was terrible cold and smelled stale”.
He had to be moved to a new district because he was too frightened to go back.
In my book, the Boneless becomes a creature that can take on the shape of any other living being, so it’s impossible to tell what you’re dealing with. But the original spark is right there in A Dictionary Of Fairies.
Nobody would now remember such incidents if folklorists hadn’t taken the trouble to collect and write them down. In a way, writing new stories is another way of keeping those traditions alive, because it would be a shame if they died out under a tide of boring rationalism. Who wants children to live in a world where the only “real” things are cars and shops and 9 to 5 jobs, and ogres and giants and ghosts and Crusted Hairy Snot Nibblers are considered superfluous to requirements?
How I write the stories is another matter altogether. I genuinely don’t know. If I knew where stories came from, I’d write more of them. I just try to get Jack’s voice in my head, then let him ramble on whilst I type it all down, adding in a few extra jokes that I can think of along the way. It always surprises me that a book somehow appears at the end of it all.
That’s why it’s important not to take yourself too seriously as an author. Stories are just down there, buried deep in the collective consciousness, waiting to be found. The best we can hope for is to dig the odd (the odder the better!) jewel out of the mine now and then.
Both books are published by FarShore and are available now.
Views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the Federation.