BONEYARD by Richard Moore

"Boneyard" is a sweet natured book of gothic humor. Cute and cuddly monsters are caught between the grasping wickedness of normal humans and a darker strain of genuinely satanic evil behind the scenes.

In these books, Abby the vampire, Ralph the werewolf and Michael Paris, the owner of the "boneyard", are more virtuous than the people that hate and fear them. The "good" people of the town sell themselves to the devil for a real estate deal. The creature of the Black Lagoon-- female this time-- is held prisoner, gang raped and sold into prostituion at a carnival by the "good" men of a southern town. Ordinary humans allow themselves to be manipulated into commiting atrocities by a devil that's hard to recognize, as Albert Speer said, when he's standing by their shoulder.

The cute monster genre might have begun with the television and film incarnations of the Addams Family, through the misunderstood monsters of Marvel comics and Japanese films down to Joss Whedon and countless others like "Emily the Strange" and "Hellboy".

I wonder if the popularity of this genre-- and perhaps the goth style by extension-- isn't an unconscious reaction against the very real horror show of consensual reality. There is a growing realization among horror and fantasy fans that it's not the outcast monsters that perpetuated the greatest atrocities of the past hundred years; it was the "normals", the upright citizens of Germany, Cambodia, China, Russia-- and if we keep up the good work, the United States is on a road to surpass its genocides of the 19th century. It's not the supernatural we should be afraid of, it's the peasants with their torches and pitchforks and "morality" campaigns against deviance that we should be afraid of...