monsters are our secret weapons, our way to prod the edges of the known. but they’re also our downfall. we love them so much we might smother them with labels, trying to tame what thrives on being wild. the best monsters slip free, unnamed, untamed. let the kraken dive back down, the graboid tunnel away, the trash heap grumble its secrets. they don’t owe us clarity. they just need to keep us curious, a bit spooked, a bit smitten with the strange.en
monsters don’t wait for october’s end. they creep through our tales, our dreams, our half-remembered legends, dodging every attempt to pin them down. they’re the flicker in the dark that makes you pause, the shape you can’t quite name, the unease that lingers when logic fails. what are they, though? not just symbols of fear or guilt, but something wilder, something that laughs at our need to understand. we’re diving into that chaos, not to solve it, but to wrestle with what it means to face the monstrous in a world that craves order.
the idea of monsters has haunted me—not the rubber-suited kind from old b-movies, though i’ll confess a soft spot for those, but the ones that lurk in books, films, and the corners of our collective psyche. they’re not just beasts; they’re ruptures, places where meaning unravels and something alien slips in. let’s call this the not-canny, riffing on the old anglo-saxon “ken”—knowledge, the scaffolding we use to keep the world steady. the canny is what’s known, safe, familiar. monsters, though? they’re the rebuttal, shambling in from beyond our grasp, soaked in strangeness.
the uncanny and its shadows
freud gave us the uncanny, that queasy moment when the familiar twists into something off—like a mirror that reflects you wrong or a heartbeat you can’t place. it’s the heimlich—homey, warm—turning unheimlich, unhomed, unsettling. think of poe’s tell-tale heart, its “low, dull, quick sound” pulsing beneath the floor, a guilt that won’t stay buried. the uncanny is the repressed clawing back, the known you’d rather forget. ghosts, doubles, things that move when they shouldn’t—are they monsters? maybe, if we stretch the term, because they’re impossible yet inevitable, shapes of what we can’t fully hold.
but the uncanny doesn’t cover it all. it’s too human, too tied to our baggage. what about the things that don’t care about your secrets? that’s where the weird kicks in, the tradition lovecraft and his crew turned into a cosmic scream. cthulhu isn’t here to haunt your conscience; it’s an “impossibility in a normal world,” a thing that mocks words themselves. lovecraft’s creations—cthulhu, the colour out of space, the dunwich horror—don’t belong. they’re not buried memories; they’re unknowable, moving to “laws not of our cosmos.” hodgson’s carnacki, muttering “can i make this clear?” knows he’s failing to cage the “outer monstrosities.” that’s the game. these are abcanny, a nod to hodgson’s prefix obsession, marking the shapeless, the nonhuman, the things that shrug off meaning.
the abcanny is the sublime’s rogue sibling. since burke’s day, thinkers have climbed peaks to gape at the “horror mingled with delight” of the vast and unnameable. the weird grabs that awe and makes it feral, in-your-face, apocalyptic. it’s tennyson’s kraken, surfacing only to die in the glare of understanding, flipping off our need to decode. the abcanny thrives in that refusal, in the oozing, formless defiance that says, “you can’t crack this.” forget kristeva’s abjection, that gendered gag reflex—i’m not sold on that psychoanalytic weight. the abcanny is raw otherness, the glitch that crashes your mental software.
the depths, the dirt, and the discarded
monsters don’t stop there. they’re too unruly. let’s plunge into the subcanny, the creatures of the deep. jaws, lurking below, terrifies because it’s a known unknown. we know sharks exist, but their world is alien, a “cosmic chill” as william beebe, the bathyscape trailblazer, called it, marveling at creatures gliding through “terrific pressure.” the subcanny isn’t repressed; it’s the fear you already know waits out there. beatrix potter’s jeremy fisher, eyeing the trout rising beneath him, isn’t shocked—he’s just doomed. the deep is a place we can glimpse but never own, and its monsters feed on that divide.
then there’s the katacanny, the beasts that chew through the earth. think tremors—graboids tearing up the ground, making every step a gamble. sandworms, burrowing horrors, sentient sludge: these are chthonic terrors that turn solid ground into a sieve. it’s not just their depth; it’s their tunneling, their attack on the very idea of stability. the katacanny isn’t about guilt or revelation; it’s the betrayal of your confident stride, the earth itself turning traitor.
don’t sleep on the postcanny—the monsters of trash, the discarded that won’t stay gone. heborah, fraggle rock’s marjory, the milpitas monster: these are things we tossed out, things we thought we knew but don’t anymore. they’re not repressed; they’re back, and they’re not happy. they clog up spaces, defy our neat bins, and laugh at our recycling sermons. postcanny monsters are what’s left when we think we’ve tamed the canny, only to find it’s morphed into something else.
and the sky? the anacanny—call it surcanny if you’re fancy—is the terror above. conan doyle’s air-jungle beasts in “the horror of the heights” or the gremlin screwing with shatner’s flight in the twilight zone—these say the heavens are no sanctuary. up isn’t out; it’s just another trap. then there’s the precanny, the fossil’s middle finger to our knowledge. meillassoux’s arche-fossil, a trilobite glaring from before human thought, reminds us our canny is a late arrival, a cocky newcomer. these monsters are ancient, indifferent to our narratives.
the lure and peril of naming
here’s the rub. i could keep spinning prefixes—paracanny for doppelgangers, supercanny for rogue ai, juxtacanny for surrealist fever dreams like breton’s exquisite corpses. give me a dictionary, and i’ll stitch “canny” to every prefix and hunt for monsters to match. metacanny, ultracanny—why not? but this is where the nerdy thrill of sorting starts to choke. taxonomy is a blast, like organizing your magic: the gathering deck, but it’s not insight. it’s just filing. borges got it with his made-up chinese encyclopedia, splitting animals into “those owned by the emperor” or “those that look like flies from far off.” it’s a show, a joyride, but it’s not truth.
the uncanny and abcanny? i’ll defend those. they’re not just monster piles; they dig into why these things grip us. the uncanny is the past creeping back; the abcanny is the unknowable laughing at our efforts. subcanny, katacanny, postcanny? they’ve got something, maybe, but they’re wobblier. anacanny? i thought it was a lark, but those sky-beasts nag at me. the goal isn’t to box every monster—cthulhu’s ab-, sub-, and precanny all at once, and good luck sorting that mess. the goal is to let these ideas spark, not lock us in a library index.
monsters are our secret weapons, our way to prod the edges of the known. but they’re also our downfall. we love them so much we might smother them with labels, trying to tame what thrives on being wild. the best monsters slip free, unnamed, untamed. let the kraken dive back down, the graboid tunnel away, the trash heap grumble its secrets. they don’t owe us clarity. they just need to keep us curious, a bit spooked, a bit smitten with the strange.
