What We're Teaching Our Sons by Owen Booth

Author:Owen Booth
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2018-08-09T16:00:00+00:00

Monsters

We’re teaching our sons about monsters.

We’re teaching them how to correctly identify zombies, vampires and werewolves, how to avoid or defend themselves against them. How to most effectively kill them, if it comes to that.

We’re hanging around in graveyards and crypts, on lonely moonlit moors, outside the gates of apparently abandoned castles.

Naturally, our sons are arguing amongst themselves about the finer details.

‘Werewolves don’t just kill you – they turn you into werewolves as well. If you get killed by a werewolf, you come back as a werewolf too.’

‘No, that’s vampires. You only turn into a werewolf if you survive a werewolf attack.’

‘Vampires don’t turn you into a vampire. They just drink your blood.’

‘If a vampire drinks nearly all your blood but you don’t die and then they give you some of their own blood then you become one of the living dead like them.’

‘Zombies are the living dead, not vampires. Vampires are the undead.’

‘If a zombie bites you, you die and then you turn into a zombie and come back to life. But as a zombie.’

‘What would happen if a vampire got bitten by a zombie?’

‘A zombie wouldn’t bite a vampire – they only bite people who are alive.’

‘Could you have a zombie werewolf? Or a werewolf vampire?’

‘What’s the difference between a skeleton and a zombie?’

Etc.

We wonder if this is an altogether healthy conversation. It is exactly the kind of thing that we used to discuss with our friends and brothers when we were young, but then, look at us. We’re the sort of men who take their sons wandering through graveyards and across lonely moors and up to the gates of abandoned castles in the middle of the night.

We’re nowhere near being the sort of fine people that we hope our sons will become.

And yet we also know that this is the kind of knowledge that most of the mothers of our sons can’t pass on. Given the situation, would they even know how best to employ a hawthorn stake or silver bullets or a sharpened spade, and which monsters to use them against?

We would. And, surely, that has to count for something.

The media is reporting that a child has disappeared on the way home from school on the edge of a town a hundred miles away. It’s so rare an occurrence, thank God, that the disappearance is the lead story. An entire village has been mobilised to look for the boy. Everyone is holding their breath. Nobody wants to think about how these things end.

At some point, we know, we’ll need to talk to our sons about those kinds of monsters, too.

But not yet. Please, not yet.

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