The forbear of all literary monsters
Andrew Pyper revisits 19th-century classics to plumb the depths of human darkness
Andrew Pyper always keeps his office door shut while he’s at home writing. Subconsciously, he assumed it was to keep his kids from coming in and destroying the space, but after his wife asked why he keeps his office closed off, Pyper realized that perhaps he was experiencing a deeper need to keep his monsters contained within.
Dubbed “Canada’s scariest writer,” Pyper spends a lot of time in that room plotting horrific situations and creatures intended to keep readers up late at night. “Closing that door was a symbolic containment of the dark stuff I was imagining,” he says.
“It was some small concession. Going into these dark worlds every day may not cost me psychically or personally, but they should be treated with respect and kept out of reach.”
Pyper’s new novel, and his ninth book, The Only Child — following the bestsellers The Damned and The Demonologist, which established the Toronto author as international horror royalty (often compared to the crowned ruler, Stephen King) — came from observing the evils in the current cultural and political world. He was distressed by the number of people, mostly in positions of power, who seemingly lack the capacity to respond and feel in human ways, which got him thinking: “Where do monsters come from?”
Pyper began his research with Mary Shelley’s 19th-century Gothic horror novel Frankenstein, which he hadn’t read since he was an English student at McGill University. That led to Dracula by Bram Stroker and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson. Then came the “Aha!” moment, when Pyper realized that every modern mon- ster — from Hannibal Lecter to Freddy Krueger — can be traced back to those three literary characters.
“Specifically, some version of the reanimated dead, or the parasite or vampire, or the psychotic or possessed, the demon within,” he says.
And so Pyper attempted to create the most evil entity of them all.
The Only Child imagines a figure, a nameless 200-year-old man, who not only contains the sinister attributes of all three monsters, he actually inspired the creation of the famous literary figures.
The monster targets Dr. Lily Dominick, a forensic psychiatrist in New York who, as a child, witnessed the mauling death of her mother by an unidentified creature thought to be a bear.
Following a violent incident involving a colleague, Lily is lured by him on a journey that traverses not only continents, but time and history.
Lily is a character that Pyper had been playing around with, like “a job applicant,” but he hadn’t found the right story for her until now.
“She’s been knocking at the door for awhile, but now it was her time to come in,” he says. Lily, who is an expert in a field traditionally not open to women, is physically diminutive, but she is also tough and emotionally contained to a fault.
“Even though she deals with other people’s psychologies and transgressions for a living, she’s underestimated her own capacity for those very same things,” says Pyper, who believes that intimate connection and familiarity is why these popular monsters have stood the test of time, and still give us the chills.
“We share some of those characteristics with the monsters. That’s why I think for me, monsters like Godzilla or some of the other outer-space monsters like the Xenomorph in Alien are terrifying, but they are outsiders,” Pyper says.
“I think the monsters that Shelley, Stoker and Stevenson conjured — hybrids of the disfigured with the recognizably human — we see ourselves in the creatures just as we are horrified by them. They act as bridges between ourselves and aspects of ourselves we’d rather not look at.” Sue Carter is the editor of Quill and Quire. Read the review of The Only Child on E12