The Monster We Haven't Invented Yet

Perhaps it is the radio professional in me, but I have ALWAYS loved a full-cast production of an audiobook. Harkening back to War of the Worlds or other radio shows, there is something about sound that can pull me right into a story.

Audible released a full-cast recording of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which is spectacular. Full disclosure: I was mowing the lawn while listening and jumped out of my skin at something in the book. Neighbors must have assumed I was attacked by a cobra.

I have read Dracula a handful of times, in a handful of versions. There is a very cool annotated version I read last year that looks much more like the letters and newspaper articles of the original text and is a great primer to reading Stephen Graham Jones’ The Buffalo Hunter Hunter.

The reason I come back to this book again and again is the idea that this is the first of its kind in the new world. They don’t really have a word for this creature haunting them, at least until Van Helsing arrives. The lack of a culture around vampires as a backdrop for this story is the scariest part of the book.

That part of your brain that itches when you are in the woods at night or walking down an alley after a particularly fun dinner. Imagine that part drawing for you the image of a man eating your neighbors, but you have no words to describe what you have heard or seen.

That is horror to me.

Ancient Mesopotamia had the Lilitu and Lamashtu, but they are more spirit-like, just one form that Dracula can take. Upir from the Slavic world shows up in 1047, but again, is more ghost than man-bat. So humans had things that were like Dracula in the ancient world, but no way to describe him.

It isn’t until 1725 and the death of Petar Blagojević that you get something like a real-world vampire case. Even then, it takes five years for that word to enter the English language.

In the years between, we start to give this creature a shape. John Polidori publishes The Vampyre in 1819, and Sheridan Le Fanu gives us Carmilla in 1872. These stories start building a vocabulary around the creature, turning something that once lived in superstition and whispered accounts into something we could recognize, imagine, and eventually fear together.

Fast forward to 1897, and eight days before Dracula would be released, Stoker actually produced a play version that I would imagine helped form Nosferatu in 1922. The reason there was a play was to establish copyright, and the theater where he was performing it went belly-up. That was the end of Dracula: The Musical.

I say all this to illustrate the imaginative power of human language and just how much stronger your words might be if you leave room for imagination. Or better yet, invent an idea or a creature that we don’t have a word for yet.

I was talking with a dear friend about AI over coffee and said one of the reasons I am optimistic about humans in this equation is because, as of this moment, AI is not creating as much as mimicking (at incredible speed and with incredible results), which leaves a giant hole in the world for new creation.

That gaping hole excites the shit out of me.