In The Slipstream: An FC2 Reader - Excerpt

Here is a good opportunity to reconnoiter the monster's emotional life, without which he would be of little interest to anyone. As we shall see, his emotional life consists entirely of women, more from out of the past than in the present. It was not that in his history he had been unfaithful to the women he loved but that he had tried to love several women at once. A glandular science fiction, one might've conclude. At an early century in his life, before he was really aware of it, he had dissolved serious threads to other males and never invested much vigor in his passage with them, though attempting to know women well was not only difficult and at times futile but exhausting. Even if he now and again had to simplify the differences between women and himself by thinking I feel this, she doesn't, they don't feel it either, he still found that women provided more illustrative experiences. Males, after all, had proven too much like himself. Even so, it's worth nothing that women, Mina for example, tended to die in his proximity, though rarely from natural causes and never, until Mina's case, from old age. Some were burned to death, some rent in the heart by stakes, still others decapitated. But it is also noteworthy that not all the women he has loved are dead - some are merely very ill, others light years distant. What is most important concerning the monster's emotional life is that once he realized he would remain defined and identified largely by his relations with women of numerous ages, races and languages, he felt awesomely responsible for the ideas, remarks and glances that might be exchanged in a room or across a table. Often the anxiety made him dizzy, vulnerable and occasionally even shallow. In the midst of his therefore tenuous existence he required cheering, unfettered pleasure to distract from the inherent morbidity. He loved parties, the bigger the better, and holiday festivities most of all, like others this xmas eve are attending.