#blogoween: Bookish Monster Bender (Anne of Green Gables)

On By ElleyIn Books

I love this prompt for #blogoween! This one is hosted by Camilla @ Reader in the Attic, but I actually stumbled across the post on by Luna @ BookishLuna about Little Women (and zombie Beth) and was inspired to write my own Bookish Monster Bender post, so thanks Luna, Camilla, and the whole #blogoween crew! I love the direction Luna took this, with Beth dying as in the book but instead of staying dead she rises again as a zombie. Sort of like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies! And as Luna says, it may not be exactly what the prompt calls for, but it’s the direction in which I am going to take it… 


Bookish Monster Bender || You’re transported in various books but a bad surprise awaits you. Everything is horror and death, because a monster version has taken over the story. Prompt objective is to do a monster bender version of book characters. You can choose who you want and imagine a dark horror version of their novel (you can add or not your ideas about the horror – re-written blurb or “how things went wrong”) and themselves. But the main thing to do is create a monster out of bookish characters. I suggest you look up on the internet a bit of the videogame Bloodborne for monster aesthetic inspiration. Oh, and don’t hesitate to add yourself to the scenery, survival weapons included. Or die.

The first book that sprang to mind for me (perhaps prompted by Luna’s choice of Little Women) was L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables. 

Only in this Monster-Bent world, Anne is a Hunter (think Dean and Sam from Supernatural). There wasn’t really a mistake with the Cuthbert’s “order” for an orphan boy – it’s just that the boy they’d ordered had turned out to be a werewolf and Anne had to put a silver bullet in his heart. Then as she’d been hearing whispers of a nest of vampires in Avonlea, so decided to take the werewolf boy’s place and set off for Green Gables. 
What Marilla, Matthew, and the people and of Avonlea take as an overactive imagination and flights of fancy are really calculated efforts to root out evil in the PEI. 
That mouse that drowns in the plum pudding sauce? A weremouse. 
Getting Diana drunk on red currant wine? She’d slipped holy water into the wine, making sure Diana wasn’t a vampire. 
It wasn’t croup Diana’s little sister had, but an evil spell that Anne had to find and break. 
The list goes on, but suffice to say that all that time Anne was fighting evil and people thought she was just being whimsical. Of course, even if people believed half of what she said who could ever separate the real from the fantasy from a girl who does things like rename avenues “The White Way of Delight.” (Oh, but the cherry tree outside her window? It truly was the spirit of a Snow Queen trapped inside of a tree, and Anne never did figure out how to free it.)

While I chose to write about Anne of Green Gables, my first thought went to dark/horror versions of fairy tales, of course. I seem to especially see a lot of horror versions of Alice in Wonderland that are done a lot. What do you think of horror versions of well known (or less well known) stories? Would you be up for reading a horror/monster “alternate reality” version of a novel?

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