Monster, 1959: A Novel

By David Maine

From the critically acclaimed author of The Preservationist and The Book of Samson, Monster, 1959 is an extraordinary tale of 1950s America---flawed, conflicted, and poised to enter the most culturally upended decade of the century.

The United States government has been testing the long-term effects of high-level radiation on a few select islands in the South Pacific. Their efforts have produced killer plants, mole people, and a forty-foot creature named K. Covered in fur and feathers, gifted with unusable butterfly wings and the mental capacity of a goldfish, K. is an evolutionary experiment gone very awry. Although he has no real understanding of his world, he knows when he's hungry, and he knows to follow the drumbeats that lead him, every time, to the tree where a woman is offered to him as a sacrifice by the natives. When a group of American hunters stumble across the island, it's bound to get interesting, especially when the natives offer up the guide's beautiful wife to K. Not to be outdone, the Americans manage to capture him. Back in the States, they start a traveling show. The main attraction: K.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Feb 19, 2008
• ISBN: 9781429984515

David Maine

David Maine was born in 1963 and grew up in Farmington, Connecticut. He attended Oberlin College and the University of Arizona and has worked in the mental-health systems of Massachusetts and Arizona. He has taught English in Morocco and Pakistan, and since 1998 has lived in Lahore, Pakistan, with his wife, novelist Uzma Aslam Khan. He is the author of books including Monster, 1959 and The Book of Samson.

Book preview

1. ESTABLISHING SHOT

In his dream, K. flies.

Below him is the island: verdant and vertiginous, lunatic with creation, lush like a scrap of Eden discarded and forgotten in the ocean’s endless tundra. Trees flash by, rainforest-dense, tropical growth shrouding the hills in overstuffed quilted folds. Flocks of birds glitter like refracting jewels, like op art on the wing, Vs and swarms and grand unruly mobs weaving from scarp to treetop to lakeside and up again into open sky. Toward K.

K. has no words for this. In fact K. has no words at all. The language center in his brain looks like a Jackson Pollack painting dropped from a great height. K. is preliterate, prelingual; in fact, pre–just about anything you can think of. His thoughts are the pictures he sees and the feelings they create. Sensation is his vocabulary: flavor, touch, sound, intuition, image. And smell most of all. In his dream, the heels-over-head feelings of floating, swooping, soaring are bereft of words to name them. The closest he can come is to grunt in his sleep, whimper and purr and coo and bleat. Slumbering high in his treetop nest, K. does just this. But in his dream, he flies.

Not all dreams are such. Sometimes he sees faces, figures of others like himself: huge, shambolic forms lurching across the primeval landscape. In ordinary life—though ordinary is a precarious word to use around here—in ordinary life, K. wanders as solitary as John the Baptist, so the feelings stirred up by these misty figures elide into a whirlpool of difficult-to-understand emotions. In his waking life, K. has never seen anything even remotely resembling himself: an oversized, black-furred, butterfly-winged, fish-scaled, hawk-taloned, insect-antennaed primate. Sometimes he wonders, as best he can, why this is so. Such wondering is difficult without words. Ideas like species or even family lie far outside his ken; he is possessed of a rudimentary sense of me and a slightly clearer sense of them, but abstractions of any greater complexity elude him. He cannot know that he is a species of one, the first, last and only of his race: a race that is over before it starts. The merciless demands of natural selection have declared his impossibly overgrown, jumbled-up self to be simply too huge, too ungainly and demanding—of nourishment, of physical space—to evolve further. The other preposterous species of the island, the fish-finned insect-rats and miniature, eight-eyed mole people, are similarly marked, but possessing as they do even less self-awareness than K., they don’t know it either.

In his dream, K. circles high in the air, flirts with the clouds, brushes the firmament, pirouettes like a deformed Nureyev before flipping head-down and plummeting toward a lake. The water approaches with gut-clenching speed, and K.’s heart jolts into double time. Waves glitter and smear across his vision. At the moment of impact, K. jerks himself awake. The tree he is lounging in shudders as if struck, and a multitude of storks takes noisily to the air.

Around K. the island hunkers, observing him. Low morning sun wrestles heavy clouds. Tropical forest, wet-earth smells, plenty of bugs.

K. peers about groggily. His heart beats fast as if he is in danger, but he smells none, hears none. What dangers are there, anyway, for a creature such as himself? The insect-rats are too small to mention, the dens of the mole people lie deep underground. K. flicks his tongue and smells the peaceful air. Already his heart is slowing, the dream is fading, then faded, then gone: river mist that flees the sun. His blood pressure drops. He reaches for a nearby cluster of leaves and stuffs them in his mouth, chewing meditatively. An observer might be forgiven for thinking that K. is lost in thought. He is not. He is simply lost. Or more properly, he is waiting for a stimulus, internal or external, to prod him into motion. Perhaps hunger, or the approach of the flying lizard who occasionally torments him, or the need to relieve his bowels, or a thunderstorm.

K. sits patiently, chewing without thinking. Waiting, like one of Pavlov’s now-famous slobbering dogs, for something to happen.

Later that day, something does.

2. A HELL OF A YEAR

Something always does. 1955 is a hell of a year, but K. doesn’t know that.

It’s the year that audiences shiver to This Island Earth and The Quatermass Experiment, while Clint Eastwood makes his screen debut in Revenge of the Creature. It’s the year James Dean dies and Marilyn Monroe stars in The Seven Year Itch, the year scientists prove the existence of antimatter and use meteorites to place the age of the solar system at four and a half billion years. None of this matters much to a black American fourteen-year-old named Emmett Till, a Chicago native who is found drowned in the Tallahatchie River after being abducted and beaten for the crime of insulting a white woman. His alleged murderers, a pair of white men, admit to the kidnapping but are subsequently acquitted of the murder. Few people, if any, are surprised. Are you?

Lockheed produces the U-2 surveillance plane, one of which will soon crash-land in the Soviet Union. Scientists bombard uranium 238 with nitrogen ions and invent fermium, a synthetic radioactive element named for Enrico Fermi, the man who created history’s first controlled nuclear fission reaction. If controlled is the right word.

Rocky Marciano defends his heavyweight title for the sixth and final time. Marilyn divorces Joltin’ Joe. Fidel Castro gets out of jail. Albert Einstein dies. France abandons its nine-year war in Indochina, but not its colonies in Algeria. (That won’t come for a few years yet.) Ceylon, Nepal and Jordan join the United Nations; West Germany is admitted into NATO. President Juan Perón is exiled from Argentina by the military, with the help and support of the United States. A Korean general named Choi Hong Hi creates a hybrid of Japanese karate and Korean foot fighting, naming his new mutation tae kwon do.

K. knows nothing of all this. Would it help? Would a little tae kwon do come in useful, these next few years? Would knowledge of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) be of any benefit? Or the Baghdad Pact (1955: Iraq, Turkey, Britain, Iran, Pakistan)? Hard to say, really. Or maybe not so hard: after all, look at the thousands of people who know all about these things, but who aren’t being helped one jot. Not one iota, not one atom—of fermium, or anything else.

K. descends from the tree and stands upon the earth, upright but slouched onto his knuckles, browsing for breakfast among the succulent shoots that choke a small pond. When he notices the distant drums, his body pivots toward the sound, a murmurous droning like the beating of surf. But it is not surf. K. opens his mouth and his tongue detects faint wood smoke. K. does not panic. His primordial cortex recognizes forest fire smells and this is not that. This is the odor that comes just often enough for him to recall it, always from the same place at the far end of the island, the place filled with small swarming creatures. The place he never goes to, unless. Unless.

Unless summoned.

K. looks away from the sound, bends to the pond, cups water in his claw and drinks. Most of the water sloshes away before it reaches his lipless mouth. If he had a thumb he would lose less but he has no thumb. His tongue—forked, snakelike—flickers in-out as he raises his head and notices the drumming sound again, the sound he’d almost forgotten but not quite. The sound is a tick under his fur, or maybe a Volkswagen Beetle. Impossible to ignore for long. K. shifts his steps away from the river, away from the thicket where he has been enjoying his breakfast, insofar as a creature such as himself enjoys anything. Now his steps make their way toward the sound without his realizing it. (K. does nearly everything without realizing it.) His path is a rambling meandering indirect one to be sure, but inarguably in the right direction, toward the drums and the wood smoke and whatever else is to be found there. That thing which K. hazily remembers, from the last time, and the time before that.

Something has happened. Something always does.

Something happened a couple years ago, when the United States tested its first H-bomb not far from here. It was called Mike. No kidding: Mike. Somebody’s idea of a joke. (But what do you expect? The test site for the very first atomic explosion, in 1945 in New Mexico, was code-named Trinity. For Christ’s sake, what sick bastard dreamed that one up?) Mike fell on an island somewhere in the South Pacific, vaporized the whole place. In fact it was spitting distance from K.’s island, geographically speaking, though K. knows nothing of it.

The detonation was considerably more ferocious than expected. Supposedly when they told Eisenhower what happened—the whole island gone—he turned pale and had to sit down.

At least Joe McCarthy is safely consigned to history’s wastebasket, discredited and disgraced after accusing the army of treason last year. So he’s off the scene, a positive development by any measure. But there will be plenty more where he came from. There’s always somebody eager to clarify the border between us and them, to build walls (China 400 B.C., Berlin 1962, Palestine 2003), or drop bombs (not enough time to list, sorry).

McCarthy’s gone all right but the Shah’s been reinstated in Tehran. He’d been sidelined back in ’51 by a nationalist prime minister named Mossadegh, who then had the nerve to nationalize Iran’s oil—keeping it within the country for the country’s own use. That hadn’t gone down well with U.S. oilmen or the government they paid for, so the CIA promptly engineered Mossadegh’s arrest and trial by military tribunal. Once the Shah got settled back in, he obligingly denationalized oil wells and went back to selling lots of cheap crude to white people.

Mossadegh got three years’ solitary confinement. He came out looking shaky and gave up politics for good.

The Americans—and the Brits, don’t forget the Brits—sighed in relief. For a while it looked tricky: gasoline might’ve cost more! But the niggers had fallen into line, predictably enough, and all they had to do was sacrifice any notion of representative government. And if anyone wondered how the States had gotten into the business of subsidizing Middle Eastern monarchs in exchange for cheap oil, well, he could keep those thoughts to himself. Democracy was all well and good, but some people just weren’t ready for it. It’s not like that crowd posed any kind of serious threat, anyway. What were they going to do—stage a revolution? Throw out the Yankees? Build H-bombs of their own?

3. ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES

To the human eye, K. is an evolutionary absurdity. A bad joke with a garbled punch line: something to cause Darwin to burn his notebooks and run shrieking to the nearest monastery. Nature couldn’t make up her mind what to do with him—K., not Darwin—so she tried a little of everything, breaking her own boundaries, leaking from reptile to mammal, arthropod to vertebrate, insect to bird. The result is a Dali-esque construct of unexpected leaps and alarming juxtapositions.

It’s a good thing Crick and Watson never set eyes on him, they’d have had to start all over again. Double helix? Not even close!

K. stands roughly upright, bipedal, forty feet tall from crown to toe. Claws instead of fingers, earholes like a lizard’s, residual butterfly wings far too flimsy to support his mass, the suggestion of a dorsal fin halfway down his back. His bosom is dressed with an unlikely speckling of crimson feathers. Matted black fur covers the rest of him except for those wings—black-veined yellow, not unlike the delicate Papilio machaon, in K.’s case shoulder-width like a Renaissance cherub’s—and the scaly forearms, patterned like an Amazon constrictor. Arms longer than the comfortable human proportion, nearly dragging on the ground even when K. stands erect.

Like enormous pistons, like nineteenth-century factory machines, K.’s legs carry his bulk over the earth. They are sheathed in fur right to the nails of the seven—why seven?—toes on each foot. His gait is slightly knock-kneed; two little bald patches have been worn away on the insides of his thighs. Sheathed between them, his penis remains unseen except for the very tip.

And how to describe the face? Imagine a block of granite, squarish and rough-hewn, with great round flat shark’s eyes set forward. No nose, no apparent way to breathe except through the mouth, perpetually open. That mouth lipless but possessed of a family of teeth, an extended clan of teeth, spinster aunts and distant inbred cousins, old and young together, sharp and dull and chipped off, slashing incisors and rounded grinding molars jammed awkwardly together as if for a group portrait. The mouth defines the head and the teeth define the mouth.

There is something unfinished about K.’s face, as if nature gave up halfway through. Quitting an obviously hopeless job in favor of something more fruitful: flamingos, maybe, or eels. The fur peters out around his temples, leaving the crown exposed and bumpy, raw pinkish brown skin peeling and spotted. There is no neck: flesh and fur conspire to anchor the bottom of the head directly to the torso. Dangling before those serving-tray eyes (unblinking, narcotic) flop a pair of antennae. Slender green tendrils, they bracket K.’s field of vision, swaying in front of him like the bangs of a fashionable London

Reviews for Monster, 1959

[jlparent · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I picked it up because I liked the cover and I thought it might be a tongue-in-cheek ode to B-movies. Which it is, sort of. It's a mix of history, pop culture (of the 1950s), B-movie references, radiation testing, and King Kong. I found it to be unusual and interesting and I enjoyed it.

[sanddancer_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

 The other books I've read by David Maine have taken well-known Bible stories as their starting point. This book takes its inspiration from the King Kong story, mixed with 1950s B-Movies about monsters. K is the monster (a massive weird amalgamation of other creatures) who lives on an island where the locals make regular sacrifices to him. Then along come a group of Americans and instead of sacrificing one of their own people, the locals sacrifice a blonde American woman instead. The monster is then captured and taken to the USA where he is put in a circus. The book is structured as if it was a movie, but the story is fleshed out so that we see the motivation of characters, the details you wouldn't see in a film, but interestingly it goes in the other opposite direction from the films it parodies regarding the monster as it doesn't try to humanise him and assign human thoughts to him. Whilst the setting of the book is the 1950s, there are also references to political events from around the world from various periods. Some reviews I've read found Maine's political comments too much, but to me it seemed entirely appropriate as 1950s films were so entrenched in idelogy and particularly the monster movies which were usually very thinly disguised references to communism.

[rumhud · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I wanted to like this book, and by and large I did. I think this novel tries to be equal parts homage, parody and social commentary, and it's in that last capacity that it stumbles. This miscalculation weakens what is otherwise a very entertaining and original sendup of the monster movie genre.

[elisep_10 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I only bought this book because of the cover, I admit it. Plus I have a weird fascination with the darker side of the 1950s era. It was interesting but once the monster escaped from the theater, I was bored. "Please go ahead and smoosh all these characters as soon as possible," I kept telling the monster. Eventually he pretty much did. The continuing leitmotif of 1950s racism I also found rather annoying. I get it already. You don't have to keep reminding me constantly.