1. THE CREATURE FROM THE PRIMORDIAL OOZE... What exactly is 'Primordial Ooze'? It cetainly works well as a suspended animation device! Why should a creature that is sixty million years old be any scary than one that is only ten thousand years old or even born yesterday? Is a Velociraptor scary than a saber-tooth tiger or rabid grizzly? My favorite PO (Primordial Ooze) creature has to be C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne's "Lizard". This "inchoate" (great PO word that always turns up) thing is so primitive it has stumps for legs and weird tentacles on its head. It was supposed to be a dinosaur! Check it out.

2. SOME THINGS MANKIND WAS NOT SUPPOSED TO KNOW...AND THE PRICE WE PAY... Like how to revive the dead. Or make gigantic bugs, rats, etc. We shouldn't know this because it'll turn out badly. And we'll have to pay the price, which is always the monster's creator is destroyed by the monster itself. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley is one of the earliest versions of this, though it goes back further to Tieck and even into folklore. Promethius may have been the very first. Man should not know about fire. Look what he'll do with it. Invent hot dogs and marshmallows! The horror!

3. IT WAS ONLY A DREAM...The ultimate cop-out! If the writer has enough imagination to come up wth a great monster, why ruin it with a cheap out at the end? My favorite is Jules Verne's Ape Gigans in Journey to the Center of the Earth. Verne finally does something interesting after boring us to death with a 10 page description of an electric flashlight, he gives us a killer ape creature -- then (you know). Guy de Maupassant was clever enough to turn this stinker around on its head in "Was It a Dream?" He does this by making the important part of the story not whether the ghosts in the graveyard are real or not, but what is written on his dead lover's gravestone.

4. THE MONSTER OF MANY PARTS or THE EDGAR RICE BURROUGHS SPECIAL...Why should any creature look like a bear with a lion's head? (The Kalidahs of Oz) Or like a man with extra arms and tusks? (Barsoomian Thark) This predilection is rife throughout the Science Fiction of the Pulp era. A new alien creature! Gee, it looks like an Alsatian with the legs of a cockroach! Why would aliens look like any Earthly creatures?

5. THE UNNAMEABLE...this one is the opposite of #4, the monster is completely indescribable. Only, nothing is indescribable. It looks like a worm or a lizard. We are unfortunately right back at #4 now, why should aliens look like Terran creatures? The truly skilled monster writer can give a sense of a thing while not resorting to absurd a comparison. A great example is the worms of Dune by Frank Herbert. We all know what earthworms look like but his sandworms are more than mere giant worms.

6. I WAS LOOKING IN A MIRROR!... The narrator turns out to be a monster. Lovecraft pulled this one off in "The Outsider" but it needs not be re-done ad nauseum by pastichers.

7. HE HAD BEEN PAINTING FROM LIFE!... Ditto on "Pickman's Model". We get it. The monsters were not imaginary. No need to repeat this one either.

8. IT WAS ONLY THE TOE OF A MUCH LARGER CREATURE!...The Lilliputian gambit. The investigator find s the monster at last and it only turns out to be Cthulhu's toe...or his eye lash...or God help us!...his privates. This idea dates back to the granddaddy of them all, Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto with its gigantic helmet. Brian Lumley tried a similar thing by making the monster a parasite of Cthulhu, just the merest flea...

9. THE NARRATOR WHO KEEPS WRITING AS HE IS PULLED OUT THE WINDOW..."The Diary of Alonzo Typer" by Lovecraft and William Lumley is probably the worst. Tolkien knew better in the famous Mines of Moria scene when Gandalf is reading about the invading orcs. He leaves it at: "They are coming." That enough. But in some Mythos epics the narrator writes the Ohh, Oww, Ouch as the monster chews his ass.

10. THE WORST MONSTER CLICHE EVER...mostly from movies but I've seen it in stories too: "The End -- (dramatic pause) Or is it?" The story doesn't end because the plot is so poor it hasn't offered anything and just keeps going. Also a poor way to engender more sequels. The first one wasn't even good enough. Why a sequel?
 
 

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