Monster Blog – Kieran Walsh

Illustrating Fox Spirit Books of Monsters

By Kieran Walsh

Self Portrait

When I was approached at the beginning to illustrate a series about monsters from all over the globe, the first thing I thought was “Wow – what an opportunity!”. As a child, my visits to the local library in the Irish small town of Kells in County Meath, were always a chance to scour the shelves for any kind of monster or folklore-related books I could get my hands on. These books often contained stories translated from other languages and depicted tales of creatures that were both thrilling and horrifying in equal measures. The illustrations were sometimes few and far between but the ones that were there were definitely something I’d never forget.

Growing up, my tastes moved more towards comics and graphic novels, particularly the likes of 2000AD and other British and American publications. I was always drawn to the darker sides of these comics and in particular the work of some incredible artists who have since gone on to achieve worldwide recognition. While I could never aspire to their level, I always felt that some of these artists influenced my own creative style and certainly provided inspiration for a lot of the darker elements of my own artwork. Around this time, I also became interested in adventure game publications such as D&D-themed Fighting Fantasy books, and the now-forgotten Proteus magazine, which also contained amazing illustrations of ghosts, demons and monsters that were beautifully rendered in ink and pencil. These creatures are often depicted in amazing 3D detail in modern video games but in the mid 1980’s, comics and board games were really pushing the boundaries of what could be achieved in fantasy art.

Being asked to illustrate the Monster series felt like I had come full circle – here was my opportunity to actually be involved in producing something that I loved as a child, while also collaborating with other amazing artists and authors. There was no way I could say no. I’m proud to say that my illustrations featured in all of the books in the series, and in the process I discovered new creatures and tales that I had never even imagined. My young self would have definitely approved…

***

Kieran Walsh is an Irish artist living and working in the UK. Based in Leicester, he has worked for over fifteen years delivering community-based arts programmes in disadvantaged areas. Kieran works in a broad range of media, from digital art to sculpture, as well as more traditional crafts including knifemaking. Kieran has illustrated stories in all the seven monster volumes from Fox Spirit Books.

 

Monster Blog – Shawn Basey

A question on nationality

by Shawn Basey

It is an odd trend to only see regression in today’s world. We look at the last 18 centuries as a reversal of some sort, as though the pagan era were an idyllic time of matriarchy and peace, when neither were remotely true. Perhaps triggering this mindset was Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael, but here he’s referring to a time even before that, a pre-agricultural revolution time. But always this looking back to a mythical yesteryear, of better times – it is persistent throughout modern Western culture, whether looking only a few years back or millennia. This looking back is a political tool, of course, to inspire revanchism, to pass the blame game around and build up an active base of support. It is part of saying it’s their fault when the fault is not in everyone else, but in ourselves.

It is a point I bring up in my latest short story for the Fox Spirit Eurasian Monsters anthology, “Lysa Hora”, which takes place in Tbilisi, Georgia, my home. In Georgia, currently, they have long been undergoing a process of national identification. Ever since the latest unification of the country – the liberating of each half from the Ottoman and Persian yokes – there has been an ongoing struggle of the definition of “Georgian”. So much so, that the most respected writer of the time, Ilya Chavchavadze, concerned himself with the question of “Georgianness” throughout his years. The question was delayed by the Russian and Soviet occupations, only to be reignited after the fall of the latter.

It seems a settled question now: Georgian Language, Georgian Orthodoxy, and Georgian citizenship. But in a historically multicultural society – and one that remains so to a large extent – these are flailing definitions at best. Among native Georgian speakers, we find Orthodox and Catholic Christians (among others), Jews, and Muslims. There are four distinct languages within the Kartvelian (Georgian) language family, and one of those exists only outside of Georgia’s borders in Turkey. Among Georgian citizens and those who have lived here for centuries, we find not just Georgians, but Azeris, Armenians, Os, Abkhaz, Russians, and so on – a larger percent of minorities than all the other countries in the Caucasus region combined. Finally, there’s an ever-growing Georgian diaspora, many of whom have broken many of their ties with Georgia fearing it’s not civilized, wealthy, or modern enough for them.

Be that as it may, Orthodox Christianity is what many latched onto as the defining agency of “Georgianness” after the fall of the Soviet Union. And now many are looking towards Europe and identifying it with some brand of secular, even atheism, which casts a growing doubt in their Church. This sentiment, not shared throughout the population, is creating a growing unease about their role with the European West.

And though I don’t disagree with the direction they are looking, I do disagree that the Church – and the Christian Churches of Western Europe – are necessarily the catalysts of all that is evil in history. In fact, it is this viewpoint that is being driven by many in Europe and here, that’s being picked up and waved about as a sword by Russian propagandists. But let’s not go further with that. Let’s go further on why I don’t think Christianity was such a bad influence. Namely in regards to one single story: the Georgian creation myth.

Not much is known about the religion before Christianity. We know some of the primary figures of the pantheon, we know that both Zoroastrianism and the Greek pantheon were big here, and some of the larger myths, and that it has many influences from the Hittites. Most of the myths we know, like those of Amirani and others, have passed along into Christian stories, with the tales of Christian saints often having been transferred from pagan deities before them. The pagan myths held the strongest in the mountain regions, which were the last to Christianize and to this day still hold a great slew of pagan beliefs and practices, from mass sheep sacrifices to a loosely Christianized shrine practice.

In the ancient days, the world was split up into three planes: Zeskneli, Shuaskneli, and Kveskneli. Zeskneli being the home of the gods and the upper plane, Shuaskneli being our plane, and Kveskneli the home of demonic creatures. Shuaskneli is in mythology more of the battlefield between the two planes.

It is from the mountain people, the Khevsurs, that we get what is left of the story of Morige Ghmerti, the chief god, and his sister. Morige Ghmerti so hated his sister that he banished her from Zeskneli, and she was bent on revenge ever since. For every good creation he made, she made an equal, opposite evil creation. He made gods, she made demons; he made men, she made women. Inhabiting as they all did Shuaskneli at that time, it’s said that the gods finally got tired of battling the demons and left for Zeskneli, leaving behind men. Demigods persisted in banishing the demons from Shuaskneli, leaving behind women.

The situation being, all the bad in the world remaining was from women. The beings of Morige Ghmerti were civilized, social, divine. Those of his sister: wild, chaotic, demonic.

It is perhaps the only religious system in the world that has such a bizarre differentiation between men and women. We do get ideas of the subservience of women to men from other cornerse, but never the idea that women are inferior in such an absolute moral sense from the moment of Creation itself.

We have now in fashion this kind of pagan revivalism, which is made ironic in that it’s coming from the left. In the 19th century Europe, we had such a neo-folk movement, but that from the right, molding into the pseudo-mythology of the Nazi elite. Indeed, the right wing volkists still hold such beliefs today. You can find White Nationalists sprinkled all throughout the folk metal and other folklore communities. You find a rise of pagan symbolism as well, with the Slavic sun wheel, Nordic runes, Georgian Borjgali, and others being coopted by nativist/volkist groups.

The interesting trend in Georgia though – and indeed in many circles throughout the collapsed Soviet Union – is that instead of the neo-pagan revival, we see a neo-Christian revival. Looking back to a Christian utopia that never was.

What I’ve attempted to do in “Lysa Hora” is to turn these ideas around. We have the main character, Otar, a simple-minded taxi driver who is drawn in by the poisonous narrative “Georgia for Georgians”. He’s a hard-core Orthodox believer because that is the definition of Georgia that’s given to him. He rejects all things Western, and sees only the “gayropa” that’s being sold down the propaganda mills. Then there’s his sister, Tinatin, who he assumes is “perverted” by her Westernism. But actually, all that he sees in her as evil is innately Georgian, and the actual old Georgian mythos, with its heart devouring kudiani, is much more horrific than the liberal West. Indeed, Christianity itself is an alien religion, brought from the outside.

But it also echoes that question of national identity. “What is Georgian?” Is it Orthodox Christianity? Is it the paganism before it? Is it something current, something new? And I think we can replace this question of national identity with any nationality, not just Georgian. This period of globalization is a huge stress on identities. National, individual, and so on. It is of course, too hard to cast all those off and be the “New Human”, or a “globalist”. We as humans, need positive definitions by others, so we fall back into these accepted classifications. We find safety and reassurance, and that’s what we really need in this changing world.

***

Shawn Basey is originally from Tulsa, Oklahoma, USA, and he first came to Georgia in 2009 as a volunteer with the Peace Corps. It was then he fell in love with the country and decided to stay. He is now married and has a son named after the founder of Tbilisi, the city which they call home. He works freelance as a writer, teacher, and editor and enjoys traveling the world with his half-Georgian family. He keeps up a regular blog at www.saintfacetious.com and has published the novel How It Ends and the short story collection Hunger, both available on Amazon. He’s currently working on a novel about Georgia during World War II with strong Georgian, Azeri, and Kazakh folklore elements.

 

Monster Blog : Daryna Stremetska

Lost Adults of the 90s and Their Children

by Daryna Stremetska

I often feel that as a writer of speculative fiction I need to devote most of my attention to the future. But now that it’s been over 20 years since my childhood, it’s the past I’m inclined to examine closer, in the hope of revealing some patterns I wasn’t paying attention to or didn’t understand as a child.

A year after I was born, the Soviet Union collapsed. Ukraine finally got its independence but the socio-economical changes of those first years hit my parents’ generation hard. Entrepreneurship used to be illegal in Soviet Union, so when the factories and plants shut down and thousands of people lost their jobs, nobody knew what to do since there were no jobs available.

Before that, if you lived and worked in a city, you’d usually have some money — but there was nothing to spend it on because the economy was mainly geared towards flexing the Soviet Union’s muscles in the Cold War, not creating consumer goods. After 1991 everything turned upside down: more and more products became available as they were imported into the country. Yet most Ukrainian families didn’t even have the money to buy enough food, due to unemployment and the loss of their life’s savings after the Gosbank liquidation.

Those who had some plot of land to grow their own food, held on to it for dear life. A single vegetable garden often fed two to three families, and working on land was a common family activity, even if most of the adults still had their jobs.

For a long time affordable food stayed scarce. Can you imagine a crowded Black Friday line but with people waiting to buy something as basic as milk? I still remember the particular yellow color of the milk truck we would queue up to when I was about five — probably because everything else around it seemed to be various shades of grey, brown and dark green. People in the line looked tired, sad and — more often than not — angry.

Everyone blamed the government, both the new and the old one. Many felt that their politicians tricked them into poverty, so it was okay to trick the government back and do whatever was necessary to survive — even if it meant breaking the law. Barter economy, black markets and organized crime groups developed in the blink of an eye. As a child, I heard enough horror stories about human trafficking and illegal organ trade to last me a lifetime.

The overall situation seemed to be improving in 1997, when I first went to school. But I quickly started noticing that some of my schoolmates were much better off than me and children from my neighborhood. They all owned exciting and fancy stuff: colorful Polish notebooks, pencil cases with cartoon characters, rubbers that looked like flowers or fruit and had a sweet smell to them. They talked about their VHS tapes with Disney movies and their plans to visit Disneyland someday. I wasn’t even sure what Disneyland was.

But it wasn’t all as bright as my schoolmates made it look. While some of their parents managed to develop shaky small businesses or preserve some of their savings, others actually spent a lot of their time abroad, in Poland, Italy and other places, working hard at manual labor jobs. Some of them had PhDs, yet they worked as janitors or construction laborers, simply because those jobs paid good money compared to the few skilled jobs they could find in Ukraine. Later I learned that some of them had worked illegally, without obtaining any work permits or even visas, and each of their journeys to and from Ukraine was a life-threatening experience.

My Mom used to say, ‘Do you want me to be around or do you want shiny toys?’ I of course wanted her around, and so I never questioned her and my Dad’s choice to stay and work the jobs they could get in Ukraine. But I can’t blame those parents who went for it, even if it didn’t always work out well for them and their children.

So what could possibly go wrong for illegal workers apart from them being arrested and deported? Sometimes they never returned at all, either because somebody learned that they were coming back from “zarobitky” (their work abroad), and robbed, killed or enslaved them. It could also be that they met someone in a foreign country, decided to start a new family and never return to their Ukrainian family.

I also heard of stories where one of the parents managed to obtain a legal status and tried to convince his or her spouse and their children to reunite with them abroad. But the other spouse refused and so the child stayed separated forever from the one parent abroad, or at least until they came of age. Those tales of separation sounded most dreadful to me, because everybody did what they thought was best for their child, and yet the child still suffered.

And so when Margret, the editor of the anthology, asked me to choose a Ukrainian monster I wanted to write about, I remembered all those adults trying to provide for their families the best they could and yet failing to keep them together. But I was still looking for a fantasy creature who could fit into this kind of story. In our mythology, the nyavkas (or mavkas) appear as characters in tales about tragic love, and to me it always felt too limiting. That’s why I gave the Nyavka in my story “The Whitest Linen” a more complex background and her own revenge quest, so you could feel how scary and angry their kind could be.

Daryna Stremetska is a sci-fi and fantasy writer from Ukraine. Her debut short story “The Animals of Ure” appeared in Three Crows Magazine #1 and was also featured in Three Crows: Year One: Anthology of Weird Science Fiction and Fantasy. Being born in the 90s, Daryna’s childhood was mostly free of technology and full of uncertainties of the times when Ukraine was navigating the first years of its independence. Nowadays she divides her time between working in digital media for developers, running a booktube channel Beauty and Gloom, and writing short stories focused on how technology, pride and prejudices affect our lives.

 

Eurasian Monsters is Live

Which internet law is it that says, as soon as you apologise to everyone for something being delayed, it will resolve and all will be well? 

Timing is Nelson in this image.

Anyway, as I was posting the previous blog, I was emailed by the POD supplier to say they are happy with the files, so I have just approved Eurasian Monsters for publication and sale. It may take a few days to appear on all the amazons, but it is a go and I will be ordering author and artist copies tomorrow, after doing the numbers. 

Congratulations and thank you to everyone involved in this book specifically, and more widely the Monsters project. Margret was quite wonderfully recognised with the Starburst Brave New Words awards on Pacific Monsters, but it acknowledged, in my opinion, her dedication through out this series in bringing new, and own voices to the fore. Putting not only the monsters and myths of different continents in front of us as readers, but also as much as possible, the writers and artists. This series has taken a massive amount of work, dedication and perseverance from Margret, it’s an incredible feat. 

Eurasian Monsters is the last book in a seven year project, it has followed tradition by running to the 11th hour and beyond and not being straight forward, and I couldn’t be more proud of this book and the people involved in it.

As collections they barely scratch the surface of what each continent has to offer, but they have changed me as a reader. I more actively seek out the less familiar now in my reading. I have a new appreciation for how narrow our reading can become with no malice or intent, just through habit, and comfort and availability. I hope, that this series and all these stories will bring you something new and unexpected and for some of you maybe be the gateway to new worlds to explore.

 

Eurasian Monsters Cover reveal

So here we are at the seventh and final volume in a huge project. You’ve travelled the world with us dipping a toe into many local tales and mythologies, seeing the continents through their monsters. We end our introduction to the worlds horrors with Eurasian Monsters and another of Daniele Serra’s amazing bleak landscapes on the cover.

A huge thanks to everyone who has been involved with these books, especially our cover artist, editor and typesetter. It’s been a huge project and I am very proud of everything that has been achieved in creating this series. Anyway, enough from me. I’ll run a post of all the covers in a few days, but for now I offer you, Eurasian Monsters.