Monsters?
Fear?
THE TERROR OF BLUE JOHN GAP
In the story The Terror of Blue John Gap, the author manipulates the protagonist’s inner fear and imagination of the unknown monster to induce fear. It is known that we are scare of the monster that are bigger than us and we cannot possibly defeat. A science writer David Quammen once said: “Among the earliest forms of human self-awareness was the awareness of being meat”, simply put, we are scare of being eaten.
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In The Terror of Blue John Gap, the protagonist once said: “For a long time I lay upon the rock, too much horrified to move. I thought of the sound which I had heard coming from the depths of the cave, of Armitage’s fears, of the strange impression in the muc, and now came this final and absolute proof that there was indeed some inconceivable monster, something utterly unearthly and dreadful, which lurked in the hollow of the mountain.” In the novel, it is clear that the monster gives the protagonist an undefeatable image that make the protagonist “laying upon the rock, too much horrified to move.” According to Joseph Campbell, monster refers to the 'imaginary being with a portmanteau morphology combining animal and human traits in frightening ways or mixing up animal categories'.
Another example that shows how human are afraid of the monster could be found in P. of the novel, that saids: “My skin grew cold, and my hair stood on end as I listened to that steady and ponderous footfall.” The word ‘ponderous’ suggests that the monster is big and strong in shape, which creates a fearsome image in the protagonist’s mind. That might be a chance that the protagonist is having hallucination about the monster.