There's so many good monsters out there. Oh, the fun ones I could tell you about from Syfy Channel! I want to introduce you to an ancient creature, though. One that has stuck in my head since recently reading the new YA series by Caitlin Kittredge called the Iron Codex. Loved the books. So very Lovecraftian. At one point, the heroes come across an oozing nightmare. A thing called a shoggoth.
A shoggoth is a monster created by H.P. Lovecraft. It's part of the Cthulhu Mythos. I didn't include a picture here not because I was fearful of an artist getting upset about me using his work, but because I couldn't find an image that fit exactly what I imagined a shoggoth to look like.
Here's what Lovecraft says in At The Mountains of Madness: "It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train—a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter."
I imagine it as a gigantic tar-like blob with several bulbous eyes and mouths with sharp teeth. It has no body shape and seemingly no heart or brain. Yet some might have a keen intellect. It moves faster than you expect for something of its size. It engulfs its victims and slowly digests them.
They say true fear cannot be given a shape. That's because it's a shoggoth.
