October Country - The October Creature Feature

October Country - The October Creature Feature

Christopher Breu & Nathan Schmidt,

Contributing Editors

The days grow shorter. The shadows grow longer. The wind picks up. The dead leaves rustle across the pavement and everything seems a bit askew. People you trust suddenly seem strange. Everyday places are suddenly unnerving. A trip to the basement or across the street at night somehow seems ominous. You keep feeling like you catch something strange out of the corner of your eye, but when you look, it is gone.

We have entered what the golden-era science fiction writer Ray Bradbury called the October Country.

It is a country where even “rational” adults find themselves experiencing anew the primal fears of childhood. What’s more, given the present pandemic, climate change, and the rise of global fascism, we have all kinds of rational, grown-up reasons to be afraid. Our monsters in the present are too real, too deadly. We have all sorts of reasons to fear them and little reason to complicate that fear.

Or maybe we lean into it. Not the pandemic, the climate change, and the fascism, of course, but the October Country. Maybe there’s something fiendishly delicious about indulging the fear of the supernatural, the paranormal, and the uncanny for a change, in the face of all these normal, natural, close-to-home fears. I’m not sure you really need an excuse to play Castlevania or Left4Dead, or to watch Creepshow for the hundredth time, but you know what? You have one now. Travel with us to the world of monsters. A journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of your screen resolution and graphics card. 

This month we will be featuring a series of essays on our favorite monsters in video games. Taken together, the pieces suggest that the best way to engage monsters is to understand them. The most interesting monsters are the ones that haunt us because there is something we are attracted to in them. We find aspects of ourselves in their stories. The more we understand their stories, the less they seem to be monsters and the more we may find that we hold that title ourselves. This is the promise of monsters. The October Country invites us to dwell with monsters, dress up as them, tell stories of them, and play games featuring them. Right now, we probably all feel a bit like Frankenstein’s monster: “cut off from all the world.” By taking a little time to lean into the fear together, perhaps (as the monster also says) “on that account we shall be more attached to one another.”

So, fix a warm drink, light the Jack-o’-Lantern, and get ready to join us on a spine-tingling tour from horror staples like the Resident Evil franchise to the “reverse horror” of Carrion, from phytogenic monsters like Halo’s Flood to the melancholic bosses of the Soulsborne games—like in Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, they’re all coming to get you this month from GwG (even if you’re not Barbara).

 
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Read the first essay in our Creature Feature series: Christopher Breu on Lisa Trevor in Resident Evil.

Resident Evil's Lisa Trevor: The Monster is Me

Resident Evil's Lisa Trevor: The Monster is Me

Console Wars, Crunch, Cyberpunk 2077,  and Consumerism

Console Wars, Crunch, Cyberpunk 2077, and Consumerism