I truly didn’t know I was jumping on a bandwagon about monster erotica when I wrote The Summer Door. I’d introduced the attractive but twisted Fae character Hoodwink in my Chaos Roads trilogy as one of the villains who’s messing things up in the town of Llithfaen, and when I was developing the further adventures of archivist Stephanie Packham after she moves into town, he was the perfect vehicle to get draw her into a horror scenario.
Then I became aware of the larger subgenre I’d unintentionally joined, now thrust into the spotlight with the movie Wicker that’s taking the film world by storm. Suddenly monster romance has become the hottest literary topic around.
The beastie in Wicker is played by Alexander Skarsgård, who has a history of playing creatures ever since he showed up as the sexy, menacing vampire leader Eric Northman in the series True Blood. He’s known for his immersion into his characters, such as going to great lengths to transform himself physically into Tarzan/John Clayton, so while I haven’t seen Wicker yet, I’ve no doubt he carries off the role of Olivia Colman’s artificially-created lover with aplomb.
In the movie, Olivia Colman plays a lonely, single fisherwoman in an early 19th-century coastal village with a rigid society where people are expected to pair off in traditional marriages. She asks a local basket-maker to weave a husband for her (I’m not sure why, but it will no doubt be made clear in the movie), and he produces a sentient wicker-man who can fix things around her house, dotes on her and is surprisingly passionate. Their resulting happiness spurs suspicion and envy among the repressed townspeople.
‘Monster romance’ explores relationships typically between human women and non-human lovers that could be anything from gargoyles to werewolves to completely alien creatures and beyond. Why are they so popular?
I suppose there’s the element of the ‘forbidden pleasure’. The monsters can have all kinds of … um, attributes that may play heavily into the erotic scenes. In most of this genre, there’s lots of sex going on, much of it far more graphic than my novel. It’s often labelled as “smut”, which has become a positive term these days, for readers who want that dimension added to their romance.
(Just to clarify – because I’ve been asked this question – my book is more about the twisted relationship and the horror, with sex used as a way to draw Stephanie deeper and deeper downward. The sex isn’t the core of the story, whereas I’d classify smut novels as being primarily about the sex.)
There’s the idea of thumbing our noses at the chains of tradition, as Wicker does. For hundreds of years women have been placed into role-boxes we don’t want to be, and we’re ready to design our own lives.
I also see the monster-romance/erotica genre as a partner to ‘Fem Rage’ novels. Women are so heartily tired of being viewed as prey in our world – there are very few places I feel safe going for a walk in nature by myself even in our smaller community, for example – that there’s appeal in a monster who may be different genetically but doesn’t have a mean and sick personality.
But where does the concept even come from?
I thought it might have originated with the Beauty and the Beast story, written in France in the early 1700s by a French novelist, Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve. But it actually goes back much further, to ancient legends.
In Celtic lore, for example, the selkies were ocean-dwelling shape-shifters who could assume human form for a time by slipping out of their seal skins. There were stories of men capturing female selkies on land and forcing them into marriage, or, male selkies who were handsome and very seductive, luring unhappy human wives away into the sea.
The story of Beauty and the Beast, though, somehow captured the imaginations of readers through the centuries. Even the Brothers Grimm had a version, titled The Summer and Winter Garden. When the youngest daughter asks for a rose in the winter, her father finds only one, in a garden that’s half-eternal winter and half-eternal summer. He makes a bargain to give it to her, in return for her going to live with the Beast thereafter.
Generally the stories result in the redemption of the Beast through the love of Beauty, who learns to see past the monster’s facade to the man within. And the reverse is also true, as the Beast is transformed by Beauty from a jerk into someone worthy of her.
The Beast has been depicted in all kinds of different forms, from a grumpy (but handsome) man closed off from affection (romance movies) to the animalistic creature with horns in the Disney movies.
One of my favourite takes is the book The Fire Rose by Mercedes Lackey. It was the first book in her Elemental Masters series, and by far the best, following medieval scholar Rosalind Hawkins in early 1900s Chicago. She’s left penniless when her spendthrift father dies, and when she receives a mysterious offer of employment from a rail baron out in San Francisco, she has few options. Accepting with some trepidation, it’s her understanding that she’ll be governess to her employer’s two children. When she arrives, however, she discovers that there are no children, and she must read ancient texts to the owner through a speaking tube. And there’s something very odd about the magnificent mansion she’s now calling home.
Starling House, by Alix E. Harrow, translates the theme to a scruffy former mining town in Kentucky. Neither Opal, the heroine living hand-by-mouth, or the Beast, an odd fellow named Arthur who lives in a creepy mansion on the outskirts, are traditionally attractive, but his house is calling to her in dreams, and although he hires her out of kindness to clean it, they find that they need each other, only partially to survive the horrors conceived in the town’s past.
My favourite movie version moves the tale to modern New York City and a fashionable high school, Buckeston Academy. In Beastly, Kyle Kingston is handsome and privileged, but a consummate asshole who gathers hangers-on willing to help him manipulate everyone around him. Unfortunately, he pisses off a classmate who’s a powerful witch, and she turns him into a person as ‘beastly’ on the outside as he is on the inside. His father, the tree the apple didn’t fall far from, hides him away in a townhouse so he doesn’t have to look at him. Kyle becomes obsessed with a fellow classmate, Lindy, and manipulates her life so that she’ll have to live with him and hopefully break the witch’s curse.
In not every case does the Beast transform physically. In the Shrek movies, adapted from a picture book by William Steig, it’s Beauty who changes. The Beast is a grumpy ogre who rescues a princess, and (spoiler) her curse is broken by becoming the form of her true love.
The current trend for monster romances takes the relationship to very sexual levels, in ways early writers likely couldn’t have imagined. Perhaps they express the freedom of our imaginations, to ‘boldly go’, as it were. All bets are off in beastly romances, which can run from sweet to wet-dream expressions to very dark indeed. There’s definitely a strong market for ‘kink’ since E.L. James’ Fifty Shades series broke new ground.
But vampire lovers have been around since Victorian times, so the idea of a dangerously attractive nonhuman paramour really isn’t anything new or revolutionary. Christopher Lee (e.g. Dracula 1958 and numerous sequels) became the most famous vampire lover in film history by Hammer Films capitalizing on his ability to look menacingly attractive.
In my novel The Summer Door, the monster looks mostly human, but the relationship he develops with our heroine Stephanie, while intensely sexy, is far from the romance she thinks. The Fae world is very dark indeed, and she must fight tooth and nail to survive it. You’ll find Celtic mythology, dark witchcraft, a haunted house, an ancient artifact, twisted nightmares that might be real, and more.
Should you wish to go exploring in the kinkier aspects of monster romance/erotica, check out this article by the Lawrence Public Library, Monster Romance 101, for a few recommendations 😉 Happy lusting!