Now Who's Laughing?

When I was a kid I wasn't afraid of monsters. First of all I was skeptical. Things like vampires, werewolves, zombies, etc... as monsters just didn't seem possible to me. I mean they had too much human in them to be monsters. If they were human, why couldn't we just live with them as weird humans? And if they were animals, albeit really violent aggressive animals, why don't we just live away from them or lock them out of our homes like we do polar bears and great white sharks? I guess this was before I had reached my literary menarche and didn't understand that the mythical function of these monsters was to bring the human and animal, the civilized and the violent, together.

Secondly, I didn't believe in all the special ways monsters needed to be killed. I didn't understand why vampires had to be staked and werewolves shot with silver bullets. It seemed too unbelievable if it couldn't be killed with a machine gun or bazooka. To my young mind, if it couldn't easily be destroyed, it couldn't easily exist.

But now... maybe.

I don't know if gargoyles count as monsters but you perhaps should be afraid of them. It turns out they are killing people. Well, at least one has killed one person.