Beasts

Three Creature Features

• The Mouth of the Ness

• Operation: Severn

• Labyrinth

Big monster creatures fascinate me.

Some of that fascination stems from early film viewing. I remember being taken to the cinema to see The Blob. I couldn't have been more than seven or eight, and it scared the bejeesus out of me. The original incarnation of Kong has been with me since around the same time. Also around then my local fleapit was showing a variety of things that stayed with me, from Mechakong to Godzilla, from the Valley of the Gwangi to One Million Years B.C., from Jason and the Argonauts to the Golden Voyage of Sinbad that have left me with a lifelong passion for dinosaurs, stop-motion monsters, and indeed, everything Harryhausen related.

Similarly, not long after that period, somewhere around the late 60's, early '70s. I remember the BBC showing re-runs of classic creature features late on Friday nights, and THEM! in particular left a mark on my psyche.

I've also got a Biological Sciences degree, and even while watching said movies, I'm usually trying to figure out how the creature would actually work in nature -- what would it eat? How would it procreate? What effect would it have on the environment around it?

On top of that, I have an interest in cryptozoology, of creatures that live just out of sight of humankind, and of the myriad possibilities that nature, and man's dabbling with it, can throw up.

All of this means I can't avoid writing about big creatures, from the various operations of THE S-SQUAD, Giant Crabs in CRUSTACEANS, to Yeti in BERSERKER and ABOMINABLE, man-eating seaweed in THE CREEPING KELP, another big blob in THE PLASM, killer shrooms in FUNGOID and Giant Ants in GENERATIONS.

And there's now this, three short encounters varying from the mythological to the palaeontological.

But it's always mostly about the creatures.

Mostly.