There is a specific and terrifying difference between “never were” monsters and “are not anymore” monsters
“The thing that was not a deer” implies a creature which mimics a deer but imperfectly and the details which are wrong are what makes it terrifying
“The thing that was not a deer anymore” on the other hand implies a thing that USED to be a deer before it was somehow mutated, possessed, parasitically controlled or reanimated improperly and what makes THAT terrifying is the details that are still right and recognizable poking out of all the wrong and horrible malformations.
hey I totally fucked up and forgot the 3rd type, which is “Is Not Anymore And Maybe Never Was” monsters
“The thing which was no longer a deer and maybe never was” implies a creature that, at first glance, completely appears to be a deer, but over time degrades very slowly until you realize (probably too late) that it is not a deer anymore, and had you seen it in this state first, you wouldn’t have recognized it as a deer at all, and there’s a decent chance that it was never actually a deer to begin with but only a very good mimic, and what makes this one scary is the slow change from everything being right to everything being wrong, happening slowly enough that you don’t even notice it until its too late, as well as the fact that something now so clearly not a deer could have fooled you to begin with.
And the fourth type, which is, “I dunno, but it sure ain’t a deer.” Which implies complete confusion about what the creature could be, to the point that even a person as comfortable in this world as someone who would use the word ain’t unironically is uncertain, which should horrify you to the deepest depths of your soul.
one that i particularly enjoyed was the ‘nonesuch’, a beast which when you see it your brain convinces you ‘nope, no way that shit is real’. on some level it becomes less real after having been seen by someone who disbelieves its existence as well
May I propose the additional type of “that’s definitely a deer but deer are much more fucked up than previous realized”, because turning the corner on a trail and having half a dozen deer suddenly turn and look up from eating Thier companion’s remains is a special kind of spooky.
oh that’s not a deer, that’s just Kyle. Mostly he sticks to shapeshifting into inanimate objects but he really wants to totally take out this one neighbour’s fuck off huge ATV, so he just waits on the brush on either side of the frontage road, listening for Bill’s motor. I told him, if he really wants to total the ATV and still be able to walk away after then he shoulda gone for a Canadian moose. But you know how it is; you can’t really reason with Kyle when he’s in one of his big moods.
I submit: “That’s just what deer are like,” in a tone of resignation, no matter what it does. A shambling visual glitch of a creature, looming on your porch with eyes that are blank portals, opens a horrifyingly glistening maw to unravel an unearthly tongue, which inexorably cracks open the bird feeder to consume all that lies within it: “That’s just what deer do,” you say, showing no surprise, as it hovers fifteen feet in the air before vanishing with a tree-flattening sonic wave and annexing the northeastern corner of Latvia.
“Probably a deer,” You sigh, despite the evidence to the contrary, rubbing your chin and looking thoughtfully at the shattered ruins of an aquaponic biodome on the surface of Mars, the splintered shards of which are, not to put too fine a point on it, dripping with vitriolic black ichor and fragments of something terrible. “They’ll do that.”
“Oh, was it the deer?” you ask the vicar sympathetically, patting her hand, her hand that has gone cold with dread where it is fixed around her cross, although she does not respond; her eyes, so wounded by the spiritual wrongness they have seen, are as lost and blank as those of a dead fish on ice.
And, when the horror-stricken citizenry turn to you with blank terror and mute appeal, you feel you must demonstrate leadership:
“We shall hang up an old AOL CD on a piece of string tied to a stick,” you say wearily. “They hate that.”
