Deadline: Midnight (Central US) Monday April 10th 2023
If you’ve been horrified by images of cities like Hiroshima, Warsaw or Fallujah razed to the ground, you’ve probably also been delighted by the Cloverfield monster rampaging across New York.
There are, culturally and in actuality, their “monsters” and our “monsters.” Our rulers describe whole sections of the working-class and subaltern in terms borrowed from various folk and other horrors. They demonize people by race and caste. They stoke fears of crime, exaggerated and irrational, even as they drive the entire world toward war and climate disaster. As they steal the wealth created by our labor. As they loot entire nations.
“Monsters Are Coming” is both a promise and a threat. Nothing is the same after they arrive. The arrival of monsters opens a new historical chapter, good or bad, obliterating the banalities and mundane horrors of everyday life.
Crowds cheered as soldiers marched off to the trenches of the first world war. A few years later, after millions died in the industrial slaughter, mutinies and general strikes brought the war to an end. The monster of revolution struck fear in the heart of every bourgeois. The bourgeoisie did not fear the monster of war. They feared the soldiers council and strike committee. They feared the machinist, clerk, rank-and-file soldier, the cook, the janitor and trolly engineer.
For our rulers, our monstrousness is the extension of human attributes beyond what they consider bearable, too short, too tall, too loud, too quiet, too calculating, too impulsive etc. Or, that which does not conform to various manufactured “normals.” This doesn’t just apply to people but natural, supernatural and even artificial sources. Robots are monstrous when they spring from the “Uncanny Valley” — as the digital slave (with which they intend to replace us) begins to seem “too human.”
At the same time, there are the other monsters, Trump, DeSantis, Modi, Putin, Zelensky, the jack-booted thug, the gimlet-eyed bureaucrat, the sybaritic billionaire. The militantly acquisitive petit-bourgeois. Like Daumier’s Gargantua they consume all.
Honoré Daumier, Gargantua (1831)
We are in a race against time. More monsters are coming — ours and theirs. But the fascist monsters are already here. In Florida. In Hungary. In India. 21st century fascism grows. A phobic patriotism, racism, and heterosexism spreads across entire countries — with increasingly exterminist implications. We are in solidarity with all those our ruling class considers monstrous — sans culottes, los barbudos,“untouchables,” “superpredators,” imaginary “groomers” conjured by hysterical right-wingers, “white trash,” the wretched of the earth.
We want you to help summon our monsters — through prose, poetry, prose-poetry and art, in Locust Review #10 — to defeat theirs. Bring them all with you.
Please send all submissions to locust.review@gmail.com by 11:59pm CT on Monday, April 10, 2023. Locust Review is a quarterly socialist and irrealist journal of art, literature, and culture.
We are the monsters we’ve been waiting for.
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Submit work to Locust Review by e-mailing us at locust.review@gmail.com.