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…and werewolves, vampires, ghosts, fairy folk, monsters and alien beings of every ilk. When a new story idea comes into my head, it usually has a twist which takes it off on some tangent of what if: What if the protagonist meets her true love and he turns out to be a werewolf? What if the heroine falls asleep in a fairycircle and wakes up in the arms of an archfay? What if, once upon a time, Red Riding Hood was a handsome young man and the wolf was female shape shifter?

More often than not the monsters in my stories turn out to be the heroine or hero or both. Why does my mind work this way? I blame it all on Boris Karloff.

I must have been all of six or seven when I first saw “Frankenstein” with Boris Karloff. My father, a big fan of horror films, asked me if I wanted to stay up with him and watch “a real classic” about the best monster ever imagined. Although I don’t remember exactly, my reaction probably went something like, “Wow! Can I really?” I do recall my mother’s words to my dad: “Okay, but if she wakes up in the middle of the night with bad dreams, you’re the one who’s going to sit with her until she falls asleep again.” Understandable considering I’d not yet been able to watch “The Wizard of Oz” in its entirety. Even with my mom’s assurances that Dorothy and her friends lived happily ever after, I couldn’t get past the part with the haunted woods outside the wicked witch’s castle.

My dad must been wondering how he and I would fare, but he set the stage well for my first monster flick turning off all the lights and made a big bowl of popcorn. We watched it all the way through while the flicker of the TV sent eerie shadows across the room. I crept closer to the screen as the action rose toward the end, so when the credits started rolling dad couldn’t see my face as he asked, “What did you think, little one?” For a minute I was silent and he must have thought he’d get an “I told you so” from my mom in the morning. But tears, not fear, had sabotaged my voice. “The poor monster!” I finally choked out. My father shook his head and, with a grin on his face, pulled me into a hug as I continued to mourn for the monster.  “It wasn’t his fault he got the wrong brain. He didn’t know his own strength. And no one tried to help him! They were all so mean just ’cause he looked different. And then they killed him!”

I cried till my father assured me the monster didn’t really die because he came back in the next movie. Since then, I’ve always looked for the good in any monster, wanting irrefutable proof that he or she or it is evil and not just a misfit, deemed unworthy by society. Years later I read Mary Shelley’s novel and found my instincts confirmed, that the real horrors were perpetrated by man’s arrogance and prejudice, not the creature Dr. Frankenstein created — not until he began to play the role of a human all too well. Karloff’s acting, more informed by the novel than the movie script, had gotten the message through to me even as a child. Now, like Tom Baker’s Doctor in “Doctor Who,” I’d be much more apt to introduce myself and offer up a hand to shake if a strange creature crossed my path than to shoot it or run away. At least, some of the characters in my stories prove brave enough for that!

Is it any wonder my first published story contains “monsters” both good and bad?  Rise of the Wolf, an erotic romance, will be out August 7th as an eBook published by Eternal Press. In it you’ll meet Hilary Samuels, a city girl, who moves to Chicago’s far south suburbs to open a new restaurant. She’ll be meeting a not-so-nice vampire and an heroic werewolf. Will the werewolf turn out to be a delectable hunk? You betcha. Will Hilary do more than introduce herself and shake his hand? It’s all there in the book, so please buy a copy and find out. I and kind hearted monsters everywhere will thank you for it.

Watch for Rise of the Wolf at http://www.eternalpress.ca/index.html