I have been thinking about scenes of something entirely monstrous.
There are many, e.g. Lovecraft. But I come back to the Southern Reach series, perhaps because I have re-read it so many times.
There are two scenes from the series that fit the bill.
The first is the video from the first expedition in Authority and the second when the transformed biologist attacks our crew in the lighthouse on the island in Acceptance.
Video from the First Expedition
This is from Authority Chapter 016: Terroirs.
Our protagonist “Control” watches a disjoint film of snippets taken on the first expedition into Area X. It makes him sick. It makes anyone who watches it for too long sick.
So cool.
The build.
Finally, though, Control could no longer fool himself. The famous twenty-second clip had come up, which the file indicated had been shot by Lowry, who had served as both the team’s anthropologist and its military expert.
And:
In the foreground, a woman, the expedition leader, was shouting, “Get her to stop! […] a woman, the expedition leader, shouted, “Get her to stop! Please stop! Please stop!”
What is happening…
And:
A lurk and spin of the camera and then the camera steadied, presumably with Lowry still holding it. Lowry began to hyperventilate, and Control recognized that the sound he had heard before was a kind of whispered breathing with a shallow rattle threading through it. Not the wind at all. He could also just hear urgent, sharp voices from off-camera, but he couldn’t make out what they were saying. The woman on the left of the screen then stopped shouting and stared into the camera. The woman on the right also stopped shouting, stared into the camera.
My god.
Stopped shouting and stared at the camera. Stared at Lowry? At the record of the event? They’re broken and are just staring some place?
Then, sitting bolt upright, even knowing what was to come, Control realized it was not dusk that had robbed the setting behind them of any hint of color. It was more as if something had interceded on the landscape, something so incredibly large that its edges were well beyond the camera’s lens.
Jesus.
What? A monster? The environment changing? What?
Then a quick cut, that makes it so much worse.
In the last second of the videotape, the two women still frozen and staring, the background seemed to shift and keep shifting… followed by a clip even more chilling to Control: Lowry in front of the camera this time, goofing off on the beach the next morning, and whoever was behind the camera laughing. No mention of the expedition leader. No sign of her on any of the subsequent video footage, he knew. No explanation from Lowry. It was as if she had been erased from their memories, or as if they had all suffered some vast, unimaginable trauma while off-camera that night.
No explanation.
It broke Control for a while.
Carnage followed him from the video screening, when he finally left, escorted by Grace back into the light, or a different kind of light. Carnage might follow him for a while.
Carnage.
And, the damage goes on afterward, Control mentions bits and pieces later:
The screaming had gone on and on toward the end. The one holding the camera hadn’t seemed human.
Vandermeer is so very good. Or I am addicted.
Reminds me of “no answers, only choices” from Solaris.
I love Authority. It might be my favourite from the series. Controversial, I know.
The “Biologist”
Now the “biologist”.
This is from Acceptance in Part III: Occulting Light, Chapter 0011: Ghost Bird.
We don’t really know what she looks like. A rock pool maybe.
But she is enormous.
And it’s terrifying.
That sound. Louder now. The snapping of tree branches, of tree trunks. The biologist was coming down the hillside. In all her glory and monstrosity.
It was there but also not there.
How the biologist coalesced out of the night, her body flickering and stitching its way into existence, in the midst of a shimmering wave that imposed itself on the reality of forested hillside.
And:
The great slope of its wideness was spread out before Ghost Bird, the edges wavery, blurred, sliding off into some other place.
Then some description, then end I like the most, the suggestion of others:
…The green-and-white stars of barnacles on its back in the hundreds of miniature craters, of tidal pools from time spent motionless in deep water, time lost inside that enormous brain. The scars of conflict with other monsters pale and dull against the biologist’s skin.
It makes a deep moaning sound.
It is covered in eyes.
It had many, many glowing eyes that were also like flowers or sea anemones spread open, the blossoming of many eyes—normal, parietal, and simple—all across its body, a living constellation ripped from the night sky. Her eyes. Ghost Bird’s eyes. Staring up at her in a vast and unblinking array.
So creepy.
An animal, an organism that had never existed before or that might belong to an alien ecology. That could transition not just from land to water but from one remote place to another, with no need for a door in a border. Staring up at her with her own eyes. Seeing her.
I love it.
Both scenes about something truly monstrous.