A Monster Scale

Copyright 2019 by Gary L. Pullman, author of Good with a Gun

One way to energize a genre of fiction is to introduce into it a hierarchy, or some other type of analytical or descriptive scheme, that is commonly used in a different type of narrative literature.

As Don Lincoln, author of Alien Universe: Extraterrestrial Life in Our Minds and in the Cosmos, observes, science fiction employs the scale “popularized” in J. Allen Hynek's “1972 book The UFO Experience,” which identifies three types, or “kinds,” of “close encounters” with extraterrestrial spacecraft or beings:

1st Kind	2nd Kind	3rd Kind
UFO sighting	UFO sighting supported by “physical evidence”	Encounter with alien beings

These original “kinds” of “close encounters” have been extended, says Lincoln, by four other types, although these additional levels “are “not universally accepted”:

4th Kind	5th Kind	6th Kind	7th Kind
“Abduction with retained memory”	“Regular conversations”	“An encounter” resulting in a human's “death or injury”	“Human/extraterrestrial mating that produces an offspring, often called a 'star child'”

Although hybrid horror-science fiction narratives or dramas sometimes include extraterrestrial beings (e. g., Stephen King's Dreamcatcher and such films as Alien, The Thing from Another World, and Invaders from Mars), space aliens are primarily a staple of sci fi fiction. Monsters, on the other hand, are more often antagonists in horror fiction. Hynek's scale, and its extension, provide a means of re-imagining monsters:

1st Kind	2nd Kind	3rd Kind
Monster sighting	Monster sighting supported by “physical evidence”	Encounter with monster(s)

4th Kind	5th Kind	6th Kind	7th Kind
Monster's abduction recalled (or recovered through the discovery of a lost film or video)	Periodic communications with the monster, vocally or otherwise (e. g., through mental telepathy)	“An encounter” with the monster which results in a human's “death or injury”	Human/monster mating resulting in a hybrid progeny

Many of these types of “close encounters” with monsters have already been depicted in horror novels, short stories, or movies. There have been many sightings of monsters, as in Frank Peretti's 2006 novel Monster; encounters with monsters (as in Mary Shelley's 1818 novel Frankenstein), periodic communications with the monster (as in Anne Rice's 1976 novel Interview with a Vampire), encounters with monsters that end in human's deaths (so many there's no need to cite an example), and even matings between women and monsters that result in births of hybrid human-monster children (as in Ira Levine's 1967 novel Rosemary's Baby).

However, an imaginative use of this extended scale of “close encounters” with monsters, rather than with aliens—which, it could be argued, represented simply another type of monster) can still introduce innovations into the horror genre. For example, the scale could be used to structure a novel or, for that matter a heptalogy, or series of seven works, each of which is inspired by one of the seven types of “close encounters” with monsters listed in the “monster scale” adapted from Hynek's hierarchy.