Since Spooky Season is Upon Us
Perplexity-Generated Image of Monstro
The skeletons have sprouted from my neighbors’ lawn like ghouls emerging from their summer graves, watermelons have lost their long-fought battle for grocery store real estate to orange bumpy pumpkin armies, and I can already taste the candy corn - spooky season is upon us.
Like many, I like to submerge myself in movies, shows and books that tie into the current season - Stephen King’s IT being a long-running project for myself.
But in case you don’t have that kind of time, I submit for your consideration a favorite scary short story: Monstro, written by Junot Diaz and published in the May 28, 2012 issue of The New Yorker (read for free at this link: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/06/04/monstro).
I won’t bore you with a full story review - but a few things I like about it are its original voice (Diaz is Dominican American and brings a Caribbean flavor to his writings), its terrifying imagery of an apocalyptic situation on an isolated island (through which it also explores preconceptions of wealth and island racism), and the fact that while Diaz wrote the story as a jump-off point into a full novel, he struggled to write long form Sci-Fi/Horror and abandoned the effort more than a decade ago (as a new and struggling wanna-be writer myself, I identify strongly with not always finishing what I start).
So if you want to read this story, just know that this is all there is. It leaves you wondering what happens next in the terrifying universe of giant fungal monsters - and forces you to use your imagination to fill in the gap.
Which is probably my favorite thing about it.